Is The Internet Becoming Television? | Cal Newport

Back in October, the journalist Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay on his Substack that was titled, Everything is Television. Now, it created a bit of a stir among those who study technology and the internet for a living. Here's Derek actually in his own words, summarizing the thesis of this article. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. So what did Derek mean by this? This is the question we're going to answer today. I'm going to both unpack and expand on Thompson's arguments and then add my own conclusions, including three predictions about what I think is going to happen next. Hopefully by the end of our discussion, you'll have a brand new way of understanding the sort of vaguely distressing but difficult to define changes that seem to have been happening in internet culture in recent years and have some ideas about what to expect and what to do to best react to the future. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode is the internet becoming television, and what does this mean for you? All right, so I want to start by really diving into the big points from Derek Thompson's articles to see if we can make sense of what he's saying here. Fortunately, on a recent episode of Thompson's podcast, Plain English, which is really good and you should listen to it, especially the episodes where I've been a guest, Thompson read his piece out loud. So we can actually hear passages from his article read in his own voice. All right. So I want to go back and I want to replay that initial clip because this is where Thompson started his article. So Jesse, let's hear that original clip again. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. He then goes on in the article to immediately give three examples of what he meant by that claim. All right, example number one, the death of social media. Thompson references a brief that was filed last August by Meta as part of the antitrust trial that the FTC brought against it. In the brief that is publicly available now, Meta made what Thompson described as a startling claim. which was the fact that their social networks, namely Facebook and Instagram, really aren't that social anymore. Let me give you a couple of statistics from that brief. More than 80% of time spent on Facebook, they revealed, and more than 90% of time spent on Instagram is now dedicated to watching videos, most of them being videos created by people who the users do not directly know. So he's noting social media is now less about socializing and more about Watching content from people you don't know like you would do on television. Over at the Financial Times, John Byrne Murdoch, as you know, he does so well, has some nice data visualizations that capture this shift from social media to video. Let me put one of these graphs up here on the screen. This is for people who are watching. Instead of listening, you can see it and I'll describe it for everyone else. This is a graph from the Financial Times. The title is Time on Social Media Peaked in 2022 with Young People Cutting Back First. And what we see here on the far left is average numbers of hours spent on social media per day seemed to peak in 2022 around two and a half hours. And it's been going down ever since then. The biggest drop when you break it out by ages is young people. Older people are kind of stuck at that peak because, I don't know, I think they're still updating their Friendster profiles. I think the older people aren't necessarily up with it. All right. So it is true. There's data to back this up. There's another. uh chart i can show here from the financial times this is one that derek had in his essay as well this is labeled social media has become less social and what we're seeing is change and share of people reporting each reason for using social media so the reasons to meet new people to keep up with friends and to share my opinion have drastically fallen since 2014 to 2024 while the reasons to follow celebrities and to fill spare time have both increased somewhat notably since 2014. So yeah, Derek is right about that as he supports with that type of data. Social media has become more about watching videos from strangers. All right, his second example he gave to back up his claim is that podcasts are moving towards video. Thompson notes that podcasts used to be the radio for the internet, but now he quotes an analyst who says the consumption of video podcasts is growing twice as fast as audio only. He talked about his own pressure to film his own podcast, which was just on audio. So it's another example of a technology that made sense as not a visual thing, just becoming more visual. His third example was AI videos. Thompson references the Rise of OpenAI Sora and MetaVibes, which are these AI tools that are organized around watching endless videos generated by artificial intelligence. As Thompson concludes, even AI wants to be television. For those of you who haven't seen what this sort of AI, what this actually looks like, this AI video revolution, let me just put a clip up here on the screen. I won't play audio, but you can just watch it. All right, these are examples of Sora videos. So now we see someone having, Bob Ross was painting one of his paintings on his face. Here is the person, this is just like the person who generated the video is now on stage giving an Oscar acceptance speech. Here is an ASMR podcast with characters from famous European paintings from the Renaissance interacting and drinking tea. Here's another bespectacled normal guy who's put themselves into the Braveheart scene. So yeah, this is a cat skateboarding. There we go. This isn't exactly the future that we were promised by Star Trek, but that's what's going on. Even AI is now just producing video content. All right, so that's what Thompson is arguing. That's what he means, his examples of things becoming television. But what does he mean by television, right? I mean, how is watching a cat skateboarding on Sora the same as like in 1997, watching an episode of American Gladiators on your TV? Well, to help make this connection clear, Thompson draws from an interesting book. It was written by Raymond Williams in 1974, which is called Television, Technology, and Cultural Form. It's actually a really good book. If you're someone who's studying the academic study of technology studies, it has a really good upfront explanation of the difference between technological determinist explorations of technology versus social construction-based consumption perspectives. He's much more on the social construction side. Anyways, Thompson draws from Williams' book to make a couple key points. He notes that Williams says in that book, Before TV, entertainment was discreet, like books or plays, something that had a beginning and an end, and when it was done, you could discuss that specific thing you just saw. Television, by contrast, became defined by the fact that it was continuous in streaming and multimedia. Williams called this flow. It's not like a discreet thing. It's just sort of something that flows by. Let me read you. I pulled some passages from Williams' book here. Here's Williams talking about this concept. Here's Williams' words. In all developed broadcasting systems, the characteristic organization and therefore the characteristic experience is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon of planned flow is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting simultaneously as technology and as a cultural form. In a later quote, he emphasizes the nonspecific nature of television versus something like a book or a play as being critical to its operations. I'm going to read a quote here. Yet for all the familiarity of this model, the normal experience of broadcasting, which when we really consider it, is different. And indeed, this is recognized in the ways we speak of watching television, listening to radio, picking on the general rather than the specific experience. This has been true of all broadcasting, but some significant internal developments have greatly reinforced it. All right. So Williams had this model of like the right way to think about why television is unique is that it gives you this flow of sort of nonspecific multimedia visual content. You watch television more than you come to the television to engage with a particular discrete element of whatever you would call it, entertainment or content. And that's really pretty similar to what we're seeing with TikTok or these Sora videos. It's just stuff that's flowing by, that's on, it's interesting. You watch TikTok, you don't talk about going to TikTok to consume a very specific piece of content. All right, so let me go back to Thompson here. Here's Thompson summarizing the move towards this definition of television. When I say everything is turning into television, what I mean is that everything is turning into the continuous flow of episodic video. All right, so where does this leave us? I want to go back to Thompson here, and he's going to elaborate his summary of this entire state of affairs. Whether the starting point is a student directory like Facebook, radio, or an AI image generator, the endpoint seems to be the same, a river of short form video. In mathematics, the term attractor describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. So to take a classic example, drop a marble into a bowl and it will trace several loops around the bowl's curves before settling to rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain. Complex systems often settle into recurring forms if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media. Right. So here's Thompson's overall summary of what he's arguing is that media in general is just inexorably heading back towards this Williams notion of television as a continuously nonspecific stream of video content. This is some sort of attractor state for media, and this is where the internet itself is heading. The past might be methane circuitous, but it's something that attracts it in. Now, I have to do a little bit, Matt, I can't help myself, Jesse. I have to do a little bit of nitpicking on the use of dynamical system theory here. I've done a little bit of publishing on dynamical systems. this is kind of the right use of the word attractor but maybe not quite exactly accurate so in dynamical systems you're often thinking of attractors would be like things like strange attractors which comes out of uh chaos theory a key thing about strange attractors though is in the most visible variable they're not the the recurrence or the the collapse onto like a steady recurrent state it's not visible It's only when you create a more complex state space that includes multiple other sort of related variables that you actually find the structure going on. So it's like a structure that's hiding behind the visible chaos. So that's why I think the marble moving around the toilet bowl, that's probably not a great example of like a strange attractor. That's actually like a physical system that's just what you see, just like the position of that marble, is very predictable because it's obeying laws of physics in a really clear way. A classic dynamical chaotic system might be like a Lorenz system. which measures sort of fluctuations in temperature and sort of climate systems. And there, famously, if you look at the main variable that people care about, which is the temperature variation itself, that seems chaotic. Like, I can't predict this. It's all over the place. And it's very sensitive to initial conditions. You make a little change to the initial conditions. This thing goes off somewhere else. But if you take that one variable of temperature variation, you combine it with two other carefully selected related variables. And I don't know them exactly, but one is like, temperature variations vertically through strata and ones about like a horizontal temperature distance and you plot that as a three-dimensional point in three-dimensional space now suddenly you see a structure that's like spiraling around something and there has structure so not the nitpick but in dynamical systems often attractors are not visible to the naked eye there's something that exists in the mathematical substructure that is only visible when you you uh plot points that are outside of just like the the the main information um i thought that was important jesse that I thought that was great. Yeah, I think it's an important clarification. This is why my articles aren't as popular, because I have the two-page thing about dynamical system theory. But anyways, the idea is good. It's a clear idea. Media is pulled back to the state, so it was inevitable that the internet would be pulled back to the state of the Williams-style definition of television, this continuous, nonspecific flow of visual media. Is this a problem? Do we care about it? It's a natural follow-up question. Thompson gets into this. Let me play a quick clip of him setting up this discussion. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar of television suddenly conquers the entire media landscape. Right. So it's not bad that we have really interesting YouTube videos like this one or that, you know, maybe there's some interesting stuff happening on TikTok. But the idea that all media is going towards this forum he's worried about, he points to two particular consequences. One, That we get worse at thinking as we, quote, move from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. That's a Walter Ung type of idea. A lot of data backs that up. That, yeah, as we use, especially short form video in particular, people have a harder time concentrating and thinking. So we do lose something as if that's what everything becomes. We lose mental abilities that are important. His second issue is we know that classical television made people lonely. As he points out, this was the. At the core of Robert Putnam's famous book, sociologist from Harvard's famous book, Bullying Alone, that traditional television made people more isolated. And as we have television now being delivered through our phones, as the internet becomes television, we get even more isolated. We see this in the data as well. So it's not that video content itself is bad, but if everything becomes short form, distracting video content, Thompson's pointing out, there's real consequences of that. All right. Well, overall, I think Thompson has a really smart idea and a smart take. Like any good article, it gets you thinking and helps explain something you didn't understand before and gives you new things to think about or argue about. I want to get into my reaction. So I agree with most of this, but there's some places where I would want to complicate or caveat his explanation. I also want to make some predictions. I have three predictions about what is going to happen next in the world of media based on these trends that maybe will give you some ideas about what you should do to prepare for that. Before we get to my take in predictions, however, I have to take a quick break so we can hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Are you looking for a gift for your family this holiday season that they'll find meaningful? Let me tell you exactly what you should get. An Aura digital picture frame. 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So order yours now. to get it in time for the holidays and remember to support the show by mentioning our podcast at checkout terms and conditions apply let's also talk about our longtime friends at grammarly grammarly is the essential ai communication assistant that boosts both the productivity and the quality of your writing now i don't think people fully realize how powerful this tool has gotten let me tell you about a particular feature that i've been enjoying the proofreading agent here's a real example i had to write an email that was going out to a large group of people so i typed out a quick draft before sending i had the proofreading agent take a look in addition to finding a few grammatical mistakes i found that i could go much farther right so i clicked for example on sharpen opening point and the grammarly proofreading agent actually suggested ways to rewrite my opening paragraph to be less wishy-washy it actually made the email better I'm not the only one to find Grammarly useful. 93% of professionals report that Grammarly helps them get more work done. They even have a new feature called AI chat that can help you anytime, whether you want to come up with a new idea or just help polish one you already have and are trying to explain. Grammarly helps you produce better writing faster, and that is incredibly valuable. You can sign up for free and experience how Grammarly can elevate your professional writing from start to finish. Visit grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. All right, Jesse, let's get back into our deep dive. All right, let's go on with my take and my predictions here. Look, I love this article. We had original ideas that helps us make sense of a phenomenon we're all living through. Let me add on a few additional thoughts. All right, here's thought number one. Not everything became television. There's actually a lot of media. That did not become television. Now, I'll explain in a moment why I think this is important, but let me just justify this point first. A core idea in Thompson's piece is that this sort of television-style flow of undifferentiated video is an attractor state that eventually draws in all media. That was his words, but that doesn't seem quite right because of the existing legacy media types that have basically stayed the same from the time before television existed to today and are actually doing fine as industries. They don't seem to be in states of collapse. Consider, for example, the global book market. In 2025, that market reached $151 billion, and that market's been growing steadily, so it's not showing signs of collapse. That's a big market. It's roughly, it's a little smaller than the combined market of Meta and TikTok, but it's kind of in the same ballpark. So books are still books, and they're doing fine. They continue to grow. Movies are still around as well. The total domestic box office in 2024 was $8.7 billion. So we're at a lower order of magnitude in things like books and social media, but that's non-trivial. In 1974, when Raymond Williams wrote his book, Television, the total domestic box office was $1.14 billion. If you adjust that for inflation, today's dollars is about $7.5 billion. So, you know, it's like we can think of the global box office since like... the rise of television as we know it today i mean the domestic box office and today it's like kind of the same or it's grown modestly so like movies are still around now of course to be fair in the 90s movies got way bigger than that and have kind of shrunk back down again but they're they're not below adjusted for inflation where they where they were back when television began taking its move but these are media that exist in the same form as they did before television and they're doing more than holding their own so it's not really the case that all media becomes television i think The real way to state this headline would be internet-based media is becoming television. Okay, but this is still really interesting. So why is this particular type of media so attracted to the television form? This brings me to my second thought. To understand why the internet in particular is becoming television, we have to remember the relationship that we used to have with television. A lot of people, I think the younger members of my audience, when they think of television, they're probably thinking about growing up in the brief golden age where there was appointment viewing. And on Sunday night, you would watch The Sopranos on HBO. But back in the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s, when television became this massive market, the time when Raymond Williams was writing his book, Television, our relationship with screens was different than a lot of people actually remember. I want to load up an article here. I'll put it on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. This comes from the Christian Science Monitor. It was published in June of 1985, and it's looking at television back in the 80s. So let me just read to you from the beginning here. The figures are staggering. In 1984, 84.9 million American households, 98% of them, had television sets. They kept them in use seven hours and eight minutes a day, making television watching far and away the most popular leisure time activity ever. Even if those households had only one person watching for those seven plus hours, which is a very conservative estimate, the American public would have invested 217 billion hours before it sets last year. That's more than double the number of hours spent by the American armed forces fighting in World War II for a full year. All right, so this is what television was in the 80s, in the 90s, in the 70s. It was just on all the time. Everyone had television on average. That television was on in your household over seven hours a day. I think we forget how staggering those numbers are. Now, here's what's interesting. If you dig deeper, so this article is really cool because what it does is they say, where did that number come from? How do we know that the average American household has a TV on 7.8 hours a day? It actually came from the Nielsen Company using a tool called an audiometer. And so it was actually like a tool with a microphone that they would put in a random sampling of houses. So it could listen to hear if the television was on or not, because people lie when you ask them to write it down. And the audiometers were the ones that were measuring this average of 7.8 hours a day. At least one television was on in these houses. Now, they make a key point in this article. That doesn't mean that for seven hours and eight minutes a day, there was someone sitting in front of that television watching intently. The audiometer doesn't know who's there or not, just whether or not the television is on. a truth we forget about how television was used you would put it on in the background in your house while you did other things and sometimes you'd be sitting there watching a show all the way through if it was one of your favorites but also you would just have it on if you were doing other things like housework and during like boring moments you would just kind of hey what's going on over here or if like oprah had on a particularly good guest you might stop for a little bit to watch that interview so if you think about it the way we were using television in the 1980s was exactly the way we use something like TikTok today. It was a tool we used to banish or eliminate any moments of downtime or boredom, at least in the household context. So I could just have it on. And when I didn't have something interesting in front of me that I was dealing with, like I was on the phone or trying to figure out something difficult, I could just immediately turn my attention to whatever it was showing. Because it was in that flow that Williams talked about. You just had it on. You weren't watching a particular show. It was just there. to fill in the moments that turned out to be um that's a very lucrative business model i want to try to look up these numbers the global television video market today remember uh books the 150 billion meta plus tick tock is a little shy of 200 billion the global television video market is over 730 billion dollars in 2025. this is a massive highly lucrative market right so what i think happened here's my argument is that as the internet infrastructure grew out in the 90s to include uh broadband and then the smartphone infrastructure built out in the late 2000s early 2010s this made possible the creation of an upgraded version of exactly what people were doing in televisions and within 1980s and 90s it made upgraded television possible upgraded in three ways it was now more portable so you had access to it not just in your house or wherever you went because it was on a smartphone upgraded because it had algorithmic curation so now its ability to satisfy your your distraction needs was better because before you just go through a few channels and now of course we have algorithmically curated content so it's just like a it's a more pure distraction environment and because the ads are now targeted much better than you could get on a broadcast medium like television so they become you know much more lucrative But I think what happens is we had this massive market that was built on. It was the TikTok of the 1980s. We had this massive market that was built on. You don't have to be alone with your own thoughts or bored. There'll be something to kind of take the edge off of the ennui of just like, I'm here sweeping and it's kind of boring. And it was this massive market. And once we built this infrastructure for other purposes, right? We built the internet infrastructure thinking about the web. and expression and connection and being able to get information from anyone around the world, all distributed. That was our vision for building that infrastructure. We built smartphones because Steve Jobs said we shouldn't have to carry a separate iPod and a separate Motorola Razr phone. Let's put them in the same device so that you can make your calls and listen to music on the same device. That was the point of smartphones. But these two things came along and other entrepreneurs were like, well, the money's in TV. Let's do that. So in this particular technology, it was possible to build upgraded television. And when you see the size of the television market and how dominant that was, of course, you're going to pursue that. That has become the biggest economic engine, the biggest economic activity opportunity in the internet age has been building a better version of television. So let me refine my take even further here. I would say the existing, this is my headline, instead of everything is becoming television. The existing television industry is so large and lucrative that it's not surprising that when a new technology came along that enabled the creation of an upgraded television experience, a lot of investment energy went towards these goals. So to me, this is not a tale of technological determinism, which is a tale of like all technology is going to come back to this form, but instead a tale of economic determinism. There is a lucrative market over here and this particular technology made it possible to compete. So of course, people would use it to compete. so it's not an argument about all media is going to become television so much as it is the internet plus smartphone infrastructure revolutions have been co-opted by media entrepreneurs that said now we can take a run at competing with television so it's sort of specific to these particular technologies those are just the details thompson's big point still stands which is a lot of internet based media is converging towards this other model that's kind of the interesting observation regardless of why that's happening So our question is, what is that going to do to us in the future? So what I want to end with here is three predictions for the future of internet-based media as it continues this convergence towards a television model. All right, prediction number one. If you participate in internet-based media, then you have to be aware of this shift because it's going to be consequential. Major podcasts are going to have to have video to be a serious player. I think even other types of internet media that we don't think about as being multimedia at all, like newsletters, are going to eventually need to have some sort of video content if they want to be a part of the full entertainment ecosystem. To be a little bit more specific, here's a couple things. Here's something I think you're going to see. The move of podcasts on the streaming video services is going to be a big thing in 2026. This is already starting to happen. The Ringer just did a deal, I believe, with Netflix where they're going to have more of their podcasts show up on there. We're going to see a lot more of this. The economics just makes sense. Podcasts have loyal audiences. And if you can just raise the production values a little bit, which is not that big of an investment. I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars per episode, which is nothing if you are producing television for something like Netflix. They have loyal audiences and they produce a lot of content. So if I'm a big fan of a, you know, you're a big fan of my show. and it's on twice a week on Netflix with good production value. Not that the HQ is not good production, but even better production values than the HQ. And you're going back and forth between YouTube and other sorts of things in your TV anyways. That might be a reason that you stay subscribed to Netflix. That's incredibly valuable to them. And it's much cheaper to build an upgraded version of the HQ and pay me some whatever fee. That's still going to be much cheaper than... doing eight episodes of Nobody Wants This, which is only going to give you eight episodes of content. And you're going to have to spend $20 million on that or $10 million. I don't know what it costs, but it costs a lot of money to get Kristen Bell. She doesn't get out of bed for less than $4 million and a cut of the merchandising. That's what I hear. The same with Jesse. He makes those same demands. Yeah. Every day he comes in and says, I'm not going to get out of bed for less than $4 million and a cut of merchandising. So that's my prediction. made this prediction not to pat myself on the back but back in 2020 jesse you'll remember this when you first started working for me i insisted on video for the podcast i said i can't tell you exactly why it's not like i have a plan for in 2021 like why are youtube channels going to be important i just said video is going to be the future of internet media because of the the power of we've seen that video has over people and the way that television just ate the lunch of radio and didn't even look back video is going to be so i made that prediction that's why we've been on youtube uh since the beginning it's like we just i was like we have to be conversant in that that idiom all right prediction number two i think this convergence of internet media towards television is bad news for the existing social media giants now this is an argument that i made in that 2022 article in the new yorker that i talk about all the time tick tock in the fall of social media giants i reference it all the time because i think it's like the most important article i've written that no one's read but it actually like was getting at some really core idea so i keep coming back at it to push The big point there is that the competitive advantage that the social media giants had, that the Facebooks and the Metas and the Twitters of the world had, was their social graphs. The fact that people painstakingly as first adopters put in the effort to click on people they wanted to follow or they knew. And as long as those services were built around using those social graphs to produce interesting content, they had a moat that other competitors couldn't cross. early Facebook excitement was gone, the early Twitter excitement was gone, no one was going to bother to go through all that work of following people and building their friends on another platform. When internet media moves towards television, you got to throw out those social graphs. It's not really that relevant anymore. And this is exactly what we see Instagram doing. It's exactly what we see Twitter trying to move towards. They want to be like TikTok. What was the numbers we had before? It was something like only 7% of time spent on Instagram is looking at content. produced by a friend or keep it up with a friend. Everything else is just watching videos created by other people. Yes, that moves you more towards television, which is very lucrative. But now you're a television network without a competitive advantage that other people can't replicate. You're competing now with all other sources of short-form video content, all the podcasts that are producing short-form video content, all the streamers, like actual television that are putting hundreds of millions in the short-form video content, upstarts, like TikTok was an upstart because they didn't need a social graph. They had a peer experience and a better algorithm. We have Sora now. We have MetaVibes trying to compete with Sora. It is an incredibly competitive world. It's a world where you don't have competitive advantages anymore when you move away from your social graph, but you have to in the television world. Legacy giant monopoly social platforms, their time is cooked in a world where the internet media moves more towards television. It's going to be a much more aggressive competitive landscape with winners and losers shifting. much more tumultuously uh third prediction is i think there's a silver lining here for us as individuals i believe that abstention from a lot of this becomes a lot easier as the internet-based media moves towards television why because this is what happened with television like we know what television is And it became very culturally normal. Yeah, maybe on average, people have your TV on seven hours a day, but if you were talking to Noam Chomsky, he'd be like, yeah, I don't watch a lot of TV. We'd be like, yeah, of course you don't. You have other things you're doing that are more intellectually demanding and you read more books or whatever. It was very normal to be like, I don't watch a lot of TV. No one questioned it. And in fact, by the generation of our kids, things had shifted and parents think a lot about screen time and like, I don't want you to watch too much TV. Like, that's not good for you. We were very used to this idea that like, it's not that TV is poison, but like you probably don't want to do a ton of it. And it's completely normative to be like, I self-define by not watching a lot of TV. For a while, internet-based media had grabbed this sort of cultural high ground where they would basically argue this is necessary to function in civic society. Somehow these services, these social media services, what you were doing on your phone was just part of being an informed citizen. It's how politicians were elected and news was spread. It's the new digital town square. It's where people are being expressed, where people could find other groups, where activism happened. There's this moment where it was like you have to use all these services, or it's somehow weird or disengaged or eccentric not to. But as the internet-based media moves more towards TV, it'll be so much easier not to use it or use less of it. No one is like, what do you mean you don't listen to Bravo? Like no one would say that in 1996. Like you don't watch the Real Housewives. What's wrong with you? No one would say that. Whereas today they're like, oh, you don't use TikTok. It still seems a little bit weird. I think that will change. Once things are TV, we know how to deal with TV. We know it is not vital and we're completely okay with the idea of not being big TV watchers. So for people who listen and watch this show, this is good news. It's going to make it easier for you to live a deeper life because what you're moving away from is going to be more clearly coded as, uh, just distraction. It's, it's, uh, Maury Povich. It's I'm trying to remember all those shows, the fight shows, the talk shows, Gary Springer. Yeah. Maury Povich is a deep dive. Gary Springer, Phil Donahue. You're like, yeah, it's, it's light and actually good for you for not watching it. All right. So there we go, Jesse, uh, no separate takeaways this week. Cause I think my whole thing was a takeaway, but yeah. um that's it i think it was a cool article and that's how i would but that's how i would evolve it do you watch any podcasts personally on video um no i'm trying to think about this yeah uh but i don't i would never consider i mean i know it's important but personally i would never do it i mean i'm just thinking it through um i've seen clips the clips of podcasts, I'll watch the video. If it's like an interesting clip, I'll watch the video. You put it on when you're working out or something? Well, no, more if like I'm researching something or like I'm at my computer and I'm, you know, writing about whatever. Like if there was an interview, like a clip from a podcast interview about the thing I'm researching, I would prefer to watch it. Like if I had the choice, I'd prefer to watch it than listen. I don't watch a lot of TV in general, but I think part of the thing that's happening is that people that like actually, which, A lot of people do spend more time in front of a TV like normal people. More of what they're doing is they're loading up the YouTube app and watching. I'm going to watch a podcast episode instead of a show on Netflix. I think that's one way that's being consumed. I do think the video podcast numbers are somewhat inflated because generationally, Gen Z will often use YouTube as their podcast player. In theory, in their pocket, the video is playing just like it does on Spotify, but they're not watching it. Like they're, they're, they're listening while they do other things. Um, but I, it is, I mean, I've looked at our numbers, the watched on TV numbers is growing because they can tell what device the podcast is downloaded to. It's not as high as I've seen for other people I've talked to, but like we're on our way out. It's like number three and it's like computer phones and TV and TV is like in the mix. So I think I don't, but I don't watch me. The main things I watch is movies to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. It's got a new TV actually. a lot of people did black friday last week yeah well ours got broken and by got broken i mean one of my son's friends broke it but it was an excuse to get the latest led technology and plus the new tvs aren't that that expensive right yeah i mean unless you go if you want like a really good movie if you start to care about filmmaking if you use the term uh filmmaker content uh intent and are looking at the color correction options it starts to get more not crazy but expensive more 2x than it needs to be i would say it's probably 2x than what but it's worth it we got a nice blu-ray player so i can really get the highest you know good hdr 10 perfect contrast color resolution like just what the filmmaker wanted happy about that all right so anyways let's uh move on some questions sounds good all right who we got first first question is from js As a software engineer, I have a web browser open constantly. This distracts me a lot. I started using clod.app instead of my browser. This has basically eliminated my distractions. What do you think about this? All right, so I have a specific answer for you and then a larger, more general answer for people thinking about their work in general. My specific answer is, look, I think that's great, right? If you had your browser open, because I'm assuming you had it open because you were looking up, just to give some context for non-computer developers. to look up things that were relevant to the coding you were doing this used to be the standard rhythm of doing computer coding is that you would often have a site like stack overflow open and you would search for um what's the function call here how do i do this and and so now you had a browser open you could look at other things if you're using cloud.app you could do things like uh tab complete etc where it will give you these answers like directly in the thing where you're writing the code you don't have to go over to a web browser and look things up Ironically, it was language models tuned in part on these humor interactions that kind of just sucked it all in and replicating it to some degree. So I think that's good. If you start using code agents, you're going to have a separate problem. So just to quickly differentiate this, there's kind of two ways that AI is intersecting development. One is what I think of as like the autocomplete, tab complete type of tools, which is where you're writing computer code. and you can say like hey finish this function for me or can you fill in this function header and it you like press tab and it like does it for you behind the scenes that's all implemented by a single call to a language model so the thing you're typing in like makes a prompt to a language model hey here's the existing code can you finish this like with a function that does whatever language models are good at that you get the answer back and then the the editing environment puts that right in there right agents on the other hand coding agents are going to do many steps on your behalf so this is where you say like uh i need to build like this sort of prototype a simple application to do something internally is going to be useful and you're going to actually have a program that goes in a loop and it's going to ask the language model like okay give me a plan like a multi-step plan for doing this and then the program takes that plan and it's like great we're now going to do step one and so then i'll tell the language model okay here's the first step we want to do Maybe it's produce code for whatever. Give me the code for doing that. Language model sends it back. And you go in this loop where you continually prompt the language model step by step. What do you want to do next? What do you want to do next? Until it thinks it's done. So coding agents allow you to sort of have AI automate longer, more complicated steps than you can get with just asking it one time to do something. I've heard from a lot of developers who use those for producing prototypes or more complicated code is that there's downtime. It takes a while. There's a lot of back and forth with the language model and your language models aren't fast in returning their answers. And so they have downtime while they're waiting for their agents to finish things. So you need a good deep distraction for those downtimes. If you use a coding agent, something that's not going to be emotionally arousing and something whose context is very different than your work. That's usually my advice about deep distraction. Don't look at your email because that context is very similar to the work you're doing. That's going to confuse your brain. MLB trade rumors is probably fine because it's a completely different context. It's not going to have as much interference. But here's the bigger point, and this applies to everybody. Why were you so distracted by having your web browser open? Why not just say, I don't look at other things on my web browser when I'm working on this? And the reason is because you're not time blocking. The bigger point I want to make here is if you're time blocking, so you're like, this is what I'm working on, and these are the minutes I'm working on it during. Like from 1 to 2.30, I'm working on code. When you time block, when you have a particular, you know what you're doing and for how long, it's much easier to say, here's my rule about time blocks. If it's like a deep work time block, I don't look at other things other than the work I'm doing. The only commitment you have to make now is, do I follow my time block rule, my single rule? And so if you go off and you go to email or go to YouTube or something like that. It's very clear you're violating the rule and you have to kind of live with that mentally. Like, I guess I'm not able to, you know, obey my own simple rules. If you don't time block, you'd be like, let me just kind of like work on stuff. The problem is that it's very reasonable that at some points you need to take breaks. At some points you need to check email. At some point it makes sense. You might want to go look at some YouTube. You can't just work like a robot all day long. But if you don't have a structure for your time, you have to figure out when those breaks or context switch happens on the fly. And now your brain is going to have a continuous argument with yourself. What about now? What about now? What about now? What about now? Any minute is a possible minute. You could be taking a break, and that's not that unreasonable. And so now you're going to lose that argument every six or seven minutes, and you get a much more distracted flow because there's no simple rule you're violating. Your brain's like, we're going to take a break. We have to check our email at some point, and we checked it now. What did we do that was wrong? But if you time block, you say, no, I have an email checking block at 2.30. and I'm in a deep work block, and I don't check email during deep work block. It is clear as day if you go and check your email anyways that you're violating the rule that you set up to make your own working experience better. So if you have that problem more generally, whether you're a computer programmer or not, time block. That's one of the hidden advantages of time blocking is it makes it much easier to stay on task. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Bert. I work as an automation engineer at a major technology company. I split my time between hands-on mechanical work and debugging code. In my world, something like a single broken bolt could add hours to a task and urgent breakdowns regularly interrupt any planned time block scheduled work. How do I adjust? Well, first of all, I want to make clear that in your position as you describe it, this idea of you deal with unpredictable but urgent interruptions and then do your best to get other stuff done in between, that's your job. That's what they expect you to do. It's not as it feels like for a lot of knowledge workers. that their job is x but this other thing which is like really not that important keeps coming in and interrupting them from doing their job and that's really frustrating because you're like i'm measured on producing x but you keep throwing like zoom invites at me for nonsense and i can't do x but you're never gonna know it's your fault you know you're just like why aren't you doing more x where in your job it's like no this is like bert's job handle physical breakdowns and there's these other things he works on as he can so like there's there's nothing to be frustrated about here this is like what you signed up for So your goal is not to eliminate the disruptions because that's part of your job. Your goal is not to resent the interruptions because it's part of your job. It is to do the best you can with the time you happen to have in between interruptions, which some days could be very little and some weeks could be like a ton. And the key there is intention. All right, I build a time block plan at the beginning of the day so I have intention for my time that I can control. Then a bolt breaks and I have to go spend three hours fixing it. When I'm done, I come back and say, what's the best plan I can make for the time that remains? It'll look very different than your initial plan, but you have intention for what you're going to do with the time that remains in the day. That's the name of the game here. Intention, not completion. Your goal is not to create a plan you're able to stick with. It's that you keep coming back and saying, what can I do with the time I have that's going to be most useful? Now, if you multiply that over many weeks and many months, what you get is someone who's handling the urgent stuff. And it's doing as well as anyone could possibly do, making the most of the time that they have outside of it. So you want to return to intention, but don't have any qualms about, I have to fix my time block schedule three times a day because I'm constantly being interrupted by this other part of my job. The only exception would be if your bosses expect you to be doing more with that other time than is possible, like you're being very intentional, like why didn't you do these other optional projects? Well, now you have a record. Like, oh, I time block. I keep track of my time. Let me show you what's going on here. On average, I'm getting like two interruptions on the scale of like three to four hours per day, which is leaving about like this many hours that is fractured between a few different stretches. I'm very organized with my time. I time block my time after every interruption. This is about how much progress I'm able. I'm able to put about like 10 hours per week on one of these projects. These projects really take about 30. This is like a three-week project. Like, oh, okay. Well, you have the receipts. We get it. we get what you're saying. So if that's the case, bring the receipts. But probably people are just, if you're doing this, you're time blocking the time you have left, you're doing much better than everyone else there who's in a similar automation engineering position. And they're probably already very impressed. So again, your goal is to keep having intention. How do I make the most out of my time? Not to satisfy some sort of plan that you created earlier when you had a different understanding of what your day was going to be. All right. Let's do another question here. Next up is Scott. How should I develop and manage my lists of what to read, listen, and watch? I get overwhelmed and don't have a good system for execution and review. I mean, you really should only be reading my books and articles and watching this podcast. Let's be honest. And I don't want to be hyperbolic, but if you don't, if you watch and read other things, there's like a 14 to 15% increased chance that you die this month. My new marketing technique, just written people with death if they don't watch our podcast. uh i'll tell you what scott those type of lists stress me out some people love them they stress me out the way i see it is like look do i always have something interesting to read yes do i have no shortage of like interesting things to watch when the time comes around yes do i have no shortage of podcasts to listen to when i have downtime yes then i'm happy because the problem is i make lists of all this stuff then i feel lost for not doing the stuff on my list that i haven't gotten to but the list are technically speaking could be unending i mean there's no shortage of books you could be reading there's no shortage of like visual content you could be watching so why create loss right i i'm just like what am i excited about let me do that now i i with my books i definitely do this it's like what am i in the mood for right now as i get to this new book or movies like okay i have some time like what am i excited about now because as long as i'm filling those things with stuff i'm happy with and it's interesting I don't want to feel bad about missing out on stuff on a list. So if it's stressing you out, Scott, just get rid of the list, you know, or you can write down ideas, but don't stress about like crossing them all off. It's just like having, as long as you're not just sitting there, like if I had, I don't know what to do. If only I had a list, but I don't. So now I'm just going to sit here and stare at the wall. Like if you're not in that situation, I would just not sweat it. All right. We have some more good questions coming up. We also have a case study. We're going to talk, someone's going to talk about their experience with a deep life pitfall. Now we're going to learn a lesson from that. We also have, speaking of books and lists, I will talk about the five books I read last month because it's our first podcast of December. But first, we need to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. All right, Jesse, we have to talk about Cozy Earth. As listeners know, I'm a huge fan of their bamboo sheets. I absolutely love them. We own three sets. But I also recently got a pair of their bamboo pajamas and have really been enjoying these as well, especially as the holidays are upon us and it's like officially pajama season in our household. It's cold. The fire's going. It's thriller December. So we all want to sit in the living room and read. So I'm loving my bamboo PJs. They have a soft stretch knit that's really a game changer. Not only are they super comfortable, but if you sleep warm, these are going to feel a few degrees colder than cotton when you're in bed. So it's like a more comfortable sleep experience. They also have a 100 night sleep trial. So if you try out their sheets and you don't love them, you can return them hassle free. But trust me, you won't. They're awesome. They also have a 10-year warranty because once you feel this level of comfort, you'll want it to last a decade. So why don't you give the gift of everyday luxury this holiday season? Head to CozyEarth.com and use my code DEEP for up to 40% off. Just be sure to place your order by December 12th to get guaranteed Christmas delivery. So order by December 12th to get that guaranteed Christmas delivery. Now, if you're listening to this episode after the 12th, don't worry, my code DEEP will still work year-round to give you 20% off. And if you get a post-purchase survey, be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. Give the gift of comfort that lasts beyond the holidays and carries into a cozy new year. Head over to CozyEarth.com. All right, I also want to talk about our friends at Indeed. Here's something I've learned as we've grown this plucky little media company over here. Hiring is hard. Finding the right people with the right skills is like trying to find a needle in the haystack if that needle also had to be good at Adobe Premiere. Indeed makes this all easier. Here's why it's useful. 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This works. according to indeed data sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed are 90 more likely to report a higher than non-sponsored jobs because you reach a bigger pool of quality candidates this is why more than 1.6 million companies that sponsor their jobs with indeed you need the higher indeed really is all you need so spend more time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes get less stress less time more results now when you use indeed sponsored jobs here's the good news listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit to help get your job to premium status it deserves if you go to indeed.com slash deep just go to indeed.com slash deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about it on this podcast that's indeed.com slash deep terms and conditions apply hiring do it the right way with indeed all right jesse let's get back to some questions Next question is from Buttersket. As I become more aware of the attention economy and more intentional with how I spend my time, it's hard to see family and friends scrolling on TikTok as their main hobby and not feel judgment towards them. It's especially hard during the holiday season when I spend lots of time with them. What should I do? Usually my recommendation, and do this as many times as you can, is when you see that, like a young relative or something that's on their phone kind of stuck in TikTok, come up quietly. knock the phone out of their hand, yell deep work, and then sprint out of the room. And just do that again. It'll be kind of like a fun thing you'll be beloved for. It's a lot of knocking the phone out of people's hands, yelling deep work, and running out of the room. That's what I do. I'm not invited to a lot of parties anymore, but that's what I do. Now, look, it is hard because you care about these people, and you're like, this is not great. I have this feeling when I see my students or whatever, or friends of my son, just like, looking into this phone all the time like this is just not great for you like you're missing out on the world like this is just abusing your brain it's like i don't know like you see a baby smoking a cigarette it's funny don't get me wrong i've given my share of babies cigarettes for the fun but you know like long term this is probably not good for you that's the way i feel about it however uh like with substance abuse or whatever you can't force someone to change and lecturing them is not going to work demonstrate life without it so they see it going on and you have gratitude for all that you are able to enjoy because you're not on your phone all the time. And then in like a, another occasion, so not in response to seeing them using their phone, you can mention like one of my books or send them one of my podcast episodes and kind of get them exposed to the world of deep living in a distracted world, but not as a luxury sort of haranguing, like, Hey, you're on your phone right now, you know, listen to Cal Newport, like that doesn't work well, but you can bring it up with them later. But again, it's hard to make people change. So be the change you want to see in the world. All right, who else do we got? Next up is Josh. Have you come across anything saying that endless scrolling makes people less motivated to be physically active as well as adversely affecting their attention span? Yeah, there's data for both. We've talked about both on the show, mainly the attention span one. There's some good John Murdoch data in the Financial Times. We did some podcasts about this earlier in the fall where as we get to the smartphone era, you see trouble with concentrating, trouble with attention just goes up. there's some new research out in september a big meta study looking at short form video in particular like you get on tiktok or instagram reels and they found a definite impact on attention so your attention goes down the more that you use these this uh those particular types of content so we know that's out there john height talks about the connection between more phone usage and spending more time indoors so we spend less time outdoors as we spend more time on our phone scott galloway in his new book notes on being a man talks about this idea that The phone offers for like digital simulations of other types of stuff we would normally do, including stuff outside. That's often where you get things like peace and challenge. It's relaxing, but also I'm building something, I'm racing, I'm running, I'm working on, you know, a project or whatever. Meanwhile, we'll just simulate this by like, I got to the next level of my video game. So definitely there's a connection between the screens being more attractive, keeping us away from activities like being outside. So that's one of many reasons. why a life spent increasingly on screens really isn't a good one. All right, we also have a case study this week. This is where people write in to talk about their own personal experience, grappling with the type of ideas and advice we discuss on this show. It's also our excuse to play the case study theme music. Now, Jesse, I think I cut the name off of this case study. Do you remember who this was? Let me check. It was Jeff. Jeff. All right, so Jeff wrote in. to talk about his struggles with trying to create a deep life. All right, here we go. Jeff says, five years ago, I sold part of my company when I was just 27 and effectively achieved financial freedom. However, unsure what to do with my life, I kept vaguely striving for more, and by doing so, I fell into one of the pitfalls that Cal talks about. After a year-long break, I knew I wanted to do something ambitious. Applying the grand goal strategy, I pondered working in biotech or producing movies and eventually got a prestigious job in finance. I just wanted something big and was convinced an impressive enough job would make my life all around better. Over the following year, it became clear that this wasn't the case. While the role was prestigious, I didn't care for the work. During this time, the company I still own spun off a brand new brand in the rock climbing industry. I was a passionate rock climber, so I thought that's what my real calling was. and I should walk away from prestige and instead work on something I was passionate about. The first months were exhilarating, but then reality quickly set in, and my day-to-day life consisted of the same company-related admin I had successfully gotten out of years prior. I then stepped out of that business last year and took the question what to do with my life seriously. I was able to focus on what my day-to-day should look like. First, I got disciplined and organized. I was able to tackle a bunch of home admin stuff that was bothering me. Now I'm studying philosophy and literature basically full-time. This is sitting in cafes, reading or attending lectures, and meeting with my study groups. I host short story dinners. I run every morning and play tennis several times a week. I'm spending more quality time with my kids. I only check my email on Wednesdays and Fridays. I leave my phone in the car after 5 p.m. I'm only reachable via backup phone. I've also reduced my total travel time. Overall, I'm calm and without haste most of the time. All right, this is a great example of lifestyle-centric planning. So what we see in Jeff is actually two different philosophies. He ends up with lifestyle-centric planning, but he begins with what he called the grand goal strategy. In my new book, I think of this sometimes as the phase shift model to deep life. This idea of like one big radical change will make your life all the way better. Oh, I'm now in a very prestigious job. That will fix everything. And we often think the radicalness of the change correlates to the radicalness of the improvement it will give. The problem is your life is built up of many different parts. And what matters to how you feel is your daily subjective experience with these different parts of your life so making a single radical change of producing it or chasing a single radical goal it might take one area of your life and like make it better or maybe temporarily make it better but it might make a lot of other areas of your life worse like we see this classically with like very prestigious jobs this idea of like i have respect for what i do or what i do has like big financial impact that goes up and that's good but it might step on every other part of your life Your time with your kids, your physical health, your ability to enjoy the world, other types of interests you have, all of those are made worse. And so you add these things up, negative, negative, negative, negative, this one positive, and you end up net negative. So the single change fixing everything doesn't really make sense. Lifestyle-centric planning says, why don't I just actually survey my entire life and say, what do I want my daily experience to be like? So think about all these different buckets. What types of things do I want on a regular basis? Great. How do I engineer my life to have those things? And that's what Jeff ended up doing. Finally, the details don't matter. What matters is he was thinking about, I want to be intellectually engaged. I want to spend time with my kids. I want to be on top of things. I want to exercise. He has this vision for life. And he's like, oh, I could make that happen because of my current financial resources or this or that. And that is making him much happier than pursuing a single thing that was very prestigious. So lifestyle planning can lead you to all sorts of different places. There is no template for what a deep life looks like, but there is a template for how to get there, which is imagining the reality of your daily lifestyle across many different areas of your life and engineering towards what you want that daily lifestyle to be like. Making progress in the book, by the way, Jesse, I'm in the most epic chapter of the book, which is you've figured out what resonates, what doesn't resonate. You've translated this into an ideal lifestyle vision. You've formatted, you know now what your plan, how to format your plan, like what it should, the different elements your plan for moving close to that vision should include. You figured out how to connect your plan into your life. Like, okay, how am I going to keep checking in with this plan and making sure I execute it? Now you got to fill in the details of what that plan is. And I'm in the middle of this like epic 15,000 word chapter where it's just idea after idea based on all sorts of different stories and examples and science about different tools and techniques. or building plans that work or moving closer to your ideal vision so it's like we're all it's like where all the fun stuff happens so like where's your last book there was three rules per se yeah this one there's it's linear the book is linear it's like do this now we're gonna do this now we're gonna do this and now we're gonna do this and then at the end like okay and here's a couple things that not some complications but really it's like okay um Let me explain to you why lifestyle strength planning is better than phase shift model. How do you figure out what you care about? Great. That's what we're doing in this chapter. We're going to get these journals. We're going to walk around. We're going to keep these notes. We're going to process them. All right. How do we translate that into a vision of your lifestyle? Because again, we want to work towards a vision of your complete lifestyle, not just pursue a single goal. Well, let's get into it. That's what we're doing next. Here's how you format it. Here's how you do it. Here's a bunch of examples. Here's a bunch of listeners sent theirs in. Okay. Now you filled your notebook. Now you have the plan. I mean, not the plan, the vision. All right. Well, how do we now move closer to that vision? Well, first, let's work through just like how we format the plan. Here's what's going to be in it. Here's literally where you write it. It's going to be written right under your vision. How do we connect this to your life? Okay, well, you're going to start doing these sort of daily metric tracking grids and these weekly check-ins to put stuff onto your calendar. Great. Now, how do we figure out what actually goes in here? Ah, huge chapter of like now we're lots of ideas for how to actually fill that stuff in there. all right how do we now like execute this and not get overwhelmed okay let's break it down let's go area by area so it's really like moving through linearly uh do this do this do this do that um and then a few things at the end where it's like this might not apply to everyone or like a lot of the what we would have thought of is like the lower layers of the deep life stack i have coming towards the end like but what if after all you now you have the step by step what if you don't feel at all capable like i can't do anything just like i i'm my life's a mess i'm not disciplined like i'm not i'm never gonna be able to execute these steps all right let's do a crash course becoming more capable so like that's sort of at the end now um like let's just get the idea like what is lifestyle planning how does it work let's walk you through it and now you're fired up that's the right time i realized to be like oh and if you're feeling like your life's a mess but you really want to do this all right now we'll talk about you know becoming more capable getting your discipline up managing your time stuff like that Have you contemplated writing a book on AI ever? Yeah, I have an idea for my next book. It would be in reaction to AI. It wouldn't be like, this is just about AI or a theory of AI, but it would be in reaction to AI. Yeah, I got that idea. Actually, I can't give any details about anything, but there's a potentially major article I'm writing in the new year for a big publication that would introduce a lot of those ideas I want to tackle in that next book. So we'll see how that goes. Always something, Jesse. Always writing. All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this. Hey, Kyle. My name is Jennifer. I'm probably one of your younger, long-time listeners and readers. I graduated college last spring, and this fall, I moved across the country to D.C. to start grad school. Go Nats! My grad program is very demanding, and I find myself engaged in a lot more deep work or focus time than I did in undergrad. Because of this, I decided to ditch Instagram, which was my only form of social media. I have been much more time efficient and focused since removing it from my life. This brings me to my question. Since my friends are still very active on Instagram and post pictures wherever we go, I often wind up in photos. But now I don't have a way to see, comment on, or moderate the photos of me that are shared online. I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to deal with this? Thanks a bunch. Well, welcome to DC. Hopefully you're joining Nat fandom on an upswing. We could do a whole episode on the youth movement over at the Nats, but we won't for now. A couple points. Good for you for leaving Instagram as a grad student, right? Your job is to use your brain. That gets in the way of using your brain. It's smoking to a professional athlete. The grad program who brought you on is expecting you to use your brain. Don't do things to make you worse at doing that. So I think it's a really good idea for anyone. in one of these sort of time-limited elite intellectual types of positions like being a grad student to be like, I really don't get near any type of algorithmically curated short form content. Like that's cigarettes to an athlete and I'm trying to make the major league squad. I can't deal with that. So good decision. I'm not surprised that you're seeing advantages. All right, so what do you do about your concerns of not being able to comment on or curate photos of you online? That's all fine. Don't comment on or curate photos of you online. Your friends will quickly learn. Oh, she's not on Instagram right now because she stopped using it while she's at grad school. And they move on. That's it. Part of the issue that I would say, part of what makes social media clever is maybe the better way of saying it. Part of what makes it clever was it sort of sold us on this idea that, I don't want to sound dismissive, but that we're more important than we are. And what I mean by that is it creates a sense of that you have an audience. whether it's people you know even, right? Not necessarily like a broad audience, but that like you're part of this as part of what made it so compelling early on. You have this audience, you're part of this great conversation and they want to see what you're posting and they're commenting on and you're commenting on other people's stuff. And it's like, you're part of this great conversation and you'll be missed if you leave. But that's never really been the case. It's why in my 2016 book, Deep Work, I had a chapter that said quit social media. And what it really meant, if you read the chapter, it said, leave it for 30 days without telling anyone and see if anyone notices. Because what would happen is people in their mind, they imagine all these like friends and people who are commenting are essentially in like the seats of a theater, like really eagerly waiting for you to come out on stage and be like, look around really solemnly and then say photo of my dinner. And they're all like, yeah, there it is. We've been, we've been waiting for that. And they're all like high-fiving each other and like, you know, whatever. But that's not really what happens. It's actually a collectivist attention model where the Facebook. was the one to innovate back in 2004, 2005. It's just like, I will comment on things you comment. If you comment on things I comment on, that's just the game. And then we all feel like people are commenting. And when people would do this experiment from deep work, like, oh, God, no one noticed I was gone. I wasn't at the center of this grand conversation. I wasn't this producer on stage that everyone was waiting for. It was all just sort of a game of showing fake attention to each other. No one cared. Great. I'm not going to go back. And I think you'll have a similar experience, right? um it make these these services want to make you feel like you're it's very important what you're doing but for the most part it really isn't you will be fine the few friends that notice will learn pretty quickly like oh you don't use instagram anymore good for you and that'll be that so stay with the course that type of stuff is not as important as it wants you to think these are all the things that are going to hurt these companies as they move towards becoming television to go back to our deep dive because as you move towards television those type of hooks disappear You discourage people from creating their own content or participating as you move towards television. You get higher minutes used per day because honestly, algorithmically curated short form video is more interesting than your friend's photos. But you don't get that deep social hook. Like the thing that you're worried about, like my God, my friends are going to wonder where I am. That goes away with a service like TikTok. No one knows you're on there or cares. And they lose their hooks. That's why I think it's going to become such an ungrounded competitive marketplace. It's hard to dominate. internet-based television in a way you could dominate friend-based Instagram. So I think it's a good case study in that dynamic that I'm worried about. All right, let's go on now to our final segment. All right, the first podcast of every month, I like to talk about the books I read the previous month. I usually aim to read five books per month. I've grouped them this month, Jesse, by topic. Kind of like two major topics here, just kind of randomly, but that's the way I grouped them. All right, my first two. These are both Disney-related because I guess that's how I deal with my stress these days. That's my hard drinking is Disney-related topics. I read David Cohen's book, Reality Land. It's a book about just the business history of the Florida resort as opposed to the California resort because I read that other book. about Disneyland because we went to Disneyland. And so this was a book about Disney World. And it was about how they got the land and how they acquired it and the growth strategy. And that stuff is my... It's so different than anything I do in life. It's very non-stressful. It was very good. It was a very well-researched book. I guess it's one of the big ones. Then I read the other Disney-ish book. It was really about the Sherman Brothers, but it was called Becoming Mary Poppins. A new book just came out, Todd James Pierce. it's about the making of that movie in the early 1960s but it's also a lot about the songwriting duo the sherman brothers who really helped innovate the cinema form of the family musical as a thing that became big again in the 1960s and so it's interesting hearing about what the world of professional songwriting was like in mid-century or prior to mid-century their their dad was like a early 20th century songwriter that was really interesting Some of the Disney stuff was interesting too. They really were kind of betting the farm on this movie succeeding. It was interesting to hear also how the Disney live action film studio was very small compared to the big major studio. They couldn't really do these epics on the scale that a Paramount or Universal could do. That stuff was interesting. Then I moved on to a pair of religious books. One, it was like they couldn't be more opposite. One is very Very popular audience. The other is an academic audience. So the popular audience one I read was Rob Bell's book, What is the Bible? So I've been reading these books about how to understand and interpret the Bible. Who wrote it? How did they wrote it? What about the writing is so interesting and profound? Because if you just kind of read it through a modern context, like these are weird stories, you don't get a great experience. I read that book a couple months ago. I like popular book. Rob Bell wrote a book on it. Bell's an interesting guy. I think he's a Christian pastor. I don't know if he's evangelical or not, or with one of the mainline Protestant denominations. He's super well-educated. I think he speaks Greek. He speaks Hebrew. He's really studied this stuff, but he writes definitely for a super mass audience. It's incredibly conversational with a lot of single-line paragraphs and bolding, and it's really... really simplified style, but some really good points captured in it. So it was a quick read, but I found it kind of interesting. Then I went and read Jonathan Sachs' book, Tradition in an Untraditional Age. So I'm a big fan of Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, his public-facing books that connect religion with other schools of thought in the broader world, like science and religion, morality, culture. These are fantastic books. He's a fantastic, fantastic writer. i wanted to get more acquainted with his more academic style writing so god help me jesse i went back and found this book which is a collection of uh more like academic essays he wrote really these essays were dealing with like orthodoxy and its collision with modernity and grappling with a bunch of sort of like big thinkers in that field 450 page beast of a book but even his academic writing i was like this is i learned a lot it was really interesting to learn about i I learned about this, like the collision of modernity with other types of traditional thought worlds itself. I felt like was really useful even for like the techno criticism I do. So it's a more academic book. You know, you're going to hear about like these like very specific thinkers. And so it's, if you're not used to academic writing, I don't know, it's not like a fun read like Rob Bell's, but I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. The final book I read was Scott Galloway's new book, Notes on Being a Man. I like Scott. I like, you know, I've been on his podcast. I think he's a great broadcaster, interesting character. This book, you know, the book captures like the stuff he talks about in book form is exactly what you would want. It's like he writes in the style that he talks. If you like his podcast, you're going to like the book. It's not a super bogged down in numbers. So he has statistics and it's not bogged down in stories of other people. It's really like him talking a lot about his own life and his own thoughts and kind of riffing. which is probably the right format for Scott. I also think the book has been killing it because he's everywhere. His podcasts are super popular, but he's very good on TV. So he does like every remaining legacy TV show with an audience. An author can go on. He did all of them. The morning shows, The View, Bill Maher, The Morning Joe, because he's very good on TV. So there you go. There's all of them. So that was good. There you go. So that's what I read. Thriller December is underway. I was going to start with the Dan Brown book. You got me, but I got intimidated at 600 something pages. And I was like, I need to get more momentum going into through. I can't start thriller December on a book that I need to get a few under my belt quick. So I went back and I'm starting with, uh, Michael Crichton's 1990 something classic airframe. Is that a reread? Uh, yeah, that's all, all rereads, but it's been a while since I've read that one. Um, so I'm excited about that. Michael Crichton's your favorite author, right? Just for thrillers. Oh, okay. Yeah. For thrillers. Yeah. The 90s stuff began to get kind of weird and reactionary, but like right in through, in 90s, I liked Prey, Timeline, and Airframe. But like Next and the Climate Change one, like Disclosure, I don't know, Rising Sun is like, some of those are a little, like you'd recognize it today as like someone red-pilled back before that was a thing. Red-pilled is the Matrix? Yeah, but it means like you get, exposed to like conservative ideas and realize like, wait, I think all the media is like has a left-leaning tilt. And so like, I am going to, I'm going to like, I've been revealed that we've been like kind of had. And so he kind of got, which is fine, but it's not what I want in a thriller. So it kind of petered out a little bit, but yeah, I've read, I'm a completist, a Crichton completist. I've read all of his posthumous ones. And of course, you know what the masterpiece is from his canon. The book is maybe one of the finest books of the last century. Eruption. Co-authored with James Patterson at the volcano. One of the worst books I've ever read. I should be nice, though, because the Crichton Family Foundation sent me a nice note after I wrote an article about him last year. Outside of that, I do like a lot of Crichton stuff. So I'm going to do Airframe. I have a couple other books I'm going to read. I got a used version of the Raymond Williams book television we talked about. I want to really read that carefully, so I'm going to read that. um i'm probably going to read uh geraldine brooks's book about the aftermath of her husband dying so i have some non-thrillery stuff in there oh she wrote that book horse right yeah that was good yes i'm reading her book after that yeah um so i have some non-thriller stuff in there but i am going to read the dan brown a couple other thrillers in mind will be good i like thriller thriller december but airframe is like perfect that's like my sweet so from the 90s i read it as a kid it's like he brings you into like a world of like air traffic control and incident reporting after plane crashes and all this technical stuff is happening and there's a mystery and great but like the stakes are low i like it i think there's a dinosaur in there or is that a different one i don't know i mix it up twist ending little known fact after 1994 almost every michael creighton book involved at some point and usually like very incongruous ways dinosaurs rising sun is like a lot about like financial tensions with japan and like the cover-up of a murder Um, but also it's a Tyrannosaur that does the murder. So like he did a lot of that. Disclosure was about gender power dynamics with sexual harassment. Um, and also she was a velociraptor. So like, you know, he was really kind of pulling on what worked. You gotta, you gotta play the hits. All right. That's enough nonsense for now. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. If you like today's discussion about how the internet is becoming television, you might also like episode 372 in which I decode how TikTok's algorithm works. It's a great companion to what we talked about today. Check it out. I think you'll like it. The big news in the world of social media recently is the announcement made last week that U.S. interest would be taking over operation of TikTok in America.

Cal Newport discusses whether the internet is becoming television in episode 382 of the Deep Questions podcast.

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

Last month, Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay that made waves in technology criticism circles. It was titled: “Everything is Television.” In today’s episode, Cal takes a closer look at this essay, unpacking and expanding Thompson’s arguments, and ultimately concluding with a series of predictions about what to expect next from the internet. He then answers listener questions and discusses the five books he read in November, 2025.

Download my FREE Deep Life Guide HERE: https://bit.ly/3QBIcug

Listen to Episode Here:  https://www.thedeeplife.com/listen/

Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo

November Books:

Realityland (David Koening)
Becoming Mary Poppins (Todd James Pierce)
Tradition in an Untraditional Age (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)
What is the Bible? (Rob Bell)
Notes on Being a Man (Scott Galloway)

Links:
Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ 
Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?
https://flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-maybe/
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-television
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaiecWzeHFM 
https://www.csmonitor.com/1985/0610/z2vid1.html

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0:00 Is the Internet Becoming Television 
38:33 Can AI *reduce* distractions for developers?
44:05 How do I timeblock in a job with heavy interruptions?
47:33 How should I manage what I read, watch and listen to for books, magazines, shows, and podcasts?
52:51 How should I cope with family and friends always scrolling TikTok during the holiday season?
54:49 Does endless scrolling make people less motivated to be physically active?
56:25 Developing a Deep Life after selling a company
1:04:25 Eliminating Instagram in graduate school
1:09:08 The 5 Books Cal Read in November, 2025

Connect with Cal Newport:

🔴Visit Cal's BLOG and website:             https://calnewport.com/blog/
🔴Check out Cal's books:                         https://calnewport.com/writing/
🔴Check out The Deep Life:                     https://thedeeplife.com

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.

The videos are considered to be used under the "Fair Use Doctrine" of United States Copyright Law, Title 17 U.S. Code Sections 107-118. Videos are used for editorial and educational purposes only and I do not claim ownership of any original video content. I don't use said video clips in advertisements, marketing or for direct financial gain. All video content in each clip is considered owned by the individual broadcast companies.

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