Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television?

28:26So 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.

29:04To 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 this is 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 values not that the hq is not good production but even better production values than the hq and you're you're going back and forth between youtube and other sorts of things in your tv anyways like that might be a reason that you stay subscribed to netflix that's incredibly valuable to them and it's much cheaper to build like an upgraded version of the hq and uh you know pay me some whatever fee that's still going to be much cheaper than doing eight episodes of nobody wants this, which is only going to give you eight episodes of content.

30:20And you know, you're going to have to spend$20 million on that or$10 million. I don't know what it costs, but yeah, it costs a lot of money to get Kristen Bell. She doesn't get out of bed for less than$4 million 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 you know note i i made this prediction not to pat myself on the back but back in 2020 jesse you'll remember this when you first started working for me i insisted on video for the podcast i said i can't tell you exactly why it's not like i have a plan for in 2021 like why 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.

31:11That's why we've been on YouTube since the beginning. It's like, we just, I was like, we have to be conversant in that, that idiom. All right. Prediction number two, I think this convergence of internet media towards television is bad news for the existing social media giants. Now, this is an argument that I made in that 2022 article in the New Yorker that I talk about all the time, TikTok 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 ideas 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 the facebook's 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.

32:06Once the early Facebook excitement was gone, the early Twitter excitement was gone, no one was going to bother to like go through all that work of following people and building their friends on another platform. When internet media moves towards television, you got to throw out those social graphs. It's not really that relevant anymore. And this is exactly what we see Instagram doing. It's exactly what we see, you know, Twitter trying to move towards. They want to be like TikTok. What was the numbers we had before? Or it was something like only 7 % of time spent on Instagram is looking at content produced by a friend or keeping up with a friend.

32:39Everything 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.

33:10We have Sora now. We have MetaVibes. They're trying to compete with Sora. Like it is an incredibly competitive world. It's a world where you don't have competitive advantages anymore when you move away from your social graph, but you have to in the television world. So legacy giant monopoly social platforms, their time is cooked. In a world where the internet media moves more towards television, it's going to be a much more aggressive sort of competitive landscape with winners and losers shifting much more tumultuously. Third prediction is I think there's a silver lining here for us as individuals.

33:45I 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 but yeah it's maybe on average people have your tv on seven seven hours a day but like if you were talking to you know noam chomsky he'd be like yeah i don't watch a lot of tv we're like yeah of course you don't like that's that's you you have other things you're doing that are more like a intellectually demanding and you read more books or whatever it was very normal to be like i don't watch a lot of tv no one questioned it and in fact by the generation of like our kids things had shifted and parents think a lot about screen time and like i don't want you to watch too much tv like that's not good for you we 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 that somehow these services these social media services what you were doing on your phone was just part of being an informed citizen it's how politicians were elected and news was spread it's the new digital town square it's where people are being expressed where people could find other groups which were activism happened there's this moment where it was like you have to use all these services right uh or it's somehow weird or disengaged or eccentric not to but as the internet-based media moves more towards tv it'll be so much easier not to use it or use less of it no one is like what do you mean you don't listen to bravo like no one would say that in 1996 like you don't watch surreal housewives what's wrong with you no one would say that whereas today they're like oh you don't use tiktok it still seems a little bit weird i think that will change once things to tv we know how to deal with tv we know it is not vital and we're completely uh okay with the idea of not being big tv watchers so for people who listen and watch this show, this is good news.

35:49It's going to make it easier for you to live a deeper life because what you're moving away from is going to be more clearly coded as just distraction. It's Maury Povich. I'm trying to remember all those shows, the fight shows, the talk shows. Jerry Springer. Maury Povich is a deep dive. Jerry Springer, Phil Donahue. You're like, yeah, it's light and actually good for you for not watching it. There we go, Jesse. No separate takeaways this week because i think my whole thing was a takeaway but yeah um that's it i think it was a cool article and that's how i would but that's how i would evolve it do you watch any 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 or you 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 um like a clip from a podcast interview about the thing i'm researching i would prefer to watch it than like if i had the choice i'd prefer to watch it 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 like front of a tv like normal people uh more of what they're doing is like they're loading up the youtube app and watching like i'm going to watch a podcast episode instead of like a show on netflix yeah so i think that's one way one way that's being consumed i do think the video podcast numbers are somewhat inflated because of generationally gen z will often use youtube as their podcast player so in theory in their pocket the video is playing just like it does on spotify but they're not watching it like they're 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 the main 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 got first first question is from j s as a sophomore engineer i have a web browser open constantly this distracts me a lot i started using claude.app instead of my browser this has basically eliminated my distractions what do you think about this all right so i have a specific answer for you and then a larger more general answer for people thinking about their work in general my specific answer is like look i think that's great right uh 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 tab complete, et cetera, where it will give you these answers like directly in the thing where you're writing the code.

39:59You don't have to go over to a web browser and look things up. Ironically, it was language models tuned in part on these humor interactions that kind of just sucked it all in and replicating it to some degree. So I think that's good. If you start using code agents, you're going to have a separate problem. So not to just like 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 a 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.

41:14And then the program takes that plan and it's like, great, we're now going to do step one. And so then I'll tell the language model, okay, here's the first step we want to do. Give me the, maybe it's produce code for whatever. Give me the code for doing that. Language model sends it back. And then it, and you go in this loop where you continually prompt the language model step by step. What do you want to do next? What do you want to do next? Until it thinks it's done. So, 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.

41:43I'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 distractions. Don't look at your email because that context is very similar to the work you're doing.

42:13That's going to confuse your brain. MLB trade rumors is probably fine because it's like a completely different context. It's not going to have as much interference. But here's the bigger point, and this applies to everybody. Why were you so distracted by having your web browser open? 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 so the 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 uh you know what you're doing for how long it's much easier to say here is my rule about time blocks if it's like a deep work time block i don't look at other things other than the work I'm doing.

43:06The 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're 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 like any minute is a possible minute you could be taking a break and that's not that unreasonable and so now you're going to lose that argument like every six or seven minutes and you get a much more distracted flow because there's no simple rule you're violating.

44:02Your brain's like, we're going to take a break. We have to check our email at some point and we checked it now. Like, what did we do that was wrong? But if you time block, you say, no, I have an email checking block at 2.30 and I'm in a deep work block and I don't check emails 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.

44:31All 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 like you deal with unpredictable but urgent interruptions and then do your best to get other stuff done in between. That's your job. Like that's what they expect you to do.

45:08It'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.

45:46It 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.

46:18That's the name of the game here. Intention, not completion. Your goal is not to create a plan you're able to stick with. It's that you keep coming back to saying, what can I do with the time I have that's going to be most useful? Now, if you multiply that over many weeks and many months, what you get is someone who's handling the urgent stuff and is doing as well as anyone could possibly do, making the most of the time that they have outside of it. so you want to return to intention but don't have any qualms about i have to fix my time block schedule three times a day because i'm constantly being interrupted by this other part of my job the only exception would be if your bosses expect you to be doing more with that other time than is possible like you're being very intentional like why didn't you do these other optional projects well now you have a record like oh i time block i keep track of my time let me show you what's going on here on average i'm getting like two interruptions on the scale of like three to four hours per day which is leaving about like this many hours that is fractured between a few different stretches i'm very organized with my time i time block my time after every interruption this is about how much progress i'm able i'm able to put about like 10 hours per week on one of these projects these projects really take about 30 this is like a three-week project like oh okay well you You have the receipts.

47:33We 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.

48:03how should I develop and manage my lists of what to read, listen, and watch? I get overwhelmed and don't have a good system for execution and review. I mean, you really should only be reading my books and articles and watching this podcast. Let's be honest. And I don't want to be hyperbolic, but if you don't, if you watch and read other things, there's like a 14 to 15 % increased chance that you die this month. My new marketing technique, Jesse and people with death. If they don't watch our podcast, I'll tell you what, Scott, those type of lists stress me out. Some people love them. They stress me out.

48:37The 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?

49:10I 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 is 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.

49:40If 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 our first podcast of December. But first we need to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands for the super athletic stuff, like running gear for cruising up the trail.

50:18Woo! And the super athletic-ish stuff, like fishing gear for chilling by the creek nice cast fitness apparel to push for higher reps you got this and golf balls priced so you can afford to lose one or a few head to sierra or sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all from athletic to athletic sierra's got it 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.

50:57It'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.

51:31So 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, all right? 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.

52:11Head 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. You can give your job the best chance to be seen with Indeed's sponsored jobs feature. This will help you stand out and hire quality candidates who can drive the results you need. The sponsored jobs will also boost your posts for quality candidates so you can reach the exact people you want faster.

52:49This 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 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 the premium status it deserves if you go to Indeed.com slash deep.

53:32Just 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've 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?

54:08Usually 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. And you know, it'll be like kind of like a fun thing. You'll be beloved for it. It's a lot of like knocking the phone out of people's hands, yelling deep work and running out of the room. That's what I do. I'm not invited to a lot of parties, but that's what I do. No, look, it is hard because you care about these people and you're like, this is not great.

54:41Like I have this feeling when I see like my students or whatever, or friends of my son, just like looking into this phone all the time. Like this is just not great for you. Like you're missing out on the world. Like this is just abusing your brain. It's like, I don't know, like you see a baby smoking a cigarette. It's funny. Don't get me wrong. I've given my share of 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, like with substance abuse or whatever, you can't force someone to change and lecturing them is not going to work.

55:14Demonstrate life without it so they see it going on and you have gratitude for all that you are able to enjoy because you're not on your phone all the time. And then in like another occasion, so not in response to seeing them using their phone, you can mention like one of my books or send them one of my podcast episodes and kind of get them exposed to the world of deep living in a distracted world, but not as a luxury sort of haranguing like, hey, you're on your phone right now. You know, listen to Cal Newport. Like that doesn't work well, but you can bring it up with them later. But again, it's hard to make people change.

55:43So 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 murd murdoch data in the financial times we did some uh 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 um meanwhile to 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.

57:16All right. We also have a case study this week. This is where people write in to talk about their own personal experience. We're out there with the type of ideas and advice we discuss on this show. It's also our excuse to play the case study theme music.

57:38Jesse, I think I cut the name off of this case study. Do you remember who this was? let me check it was Jeff Jeff alright so Jeff wrote in to talk about his struggles with trying to create a deep life alright here we go Jeff says but 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.

58:18I 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.

58:53I then stepped out of that business last year and took the question, what to do with my life seriously. I was able to focus on what my day-to-day should look like. First, I got disciplined and organized. I was able to tackle a bunch of home admin stuff that was bothering me. Now I'm studying philosophy and literature basically full-time, sitting in cafes, reading or attending lectures, and meeting with my study groups. I host short story dinners. I run every morning and play tennis several times a week. I'm spending more quality time with my kids. I only check my email on Wednesdays and Fridays.

59:20I leave my phone in the car after 5 p.m. and I'm only reachable via backup phone. I've also reduced my total travel time. Overall, I'm calm and without haste most of the time. All right, this is a great example of lifestyle-centric planning. So what we see in Jeff is actually two different philosophies. He ends up with lifestyle-centric planning, but he begins with what he called the grand goal strategy. In my new book, I think of this sometimes as the phase shift model of the deep life. This idea of like one big radical change will make your life all the way better. Oh, I'm now in a very prestigious job.

59:53That 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 a 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 your physical health you know your ability to like enjoy the world other types of interest you have all of those are made worse and so you add these things up negative negative negative negative this one positive and you end up not negative so like 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.

1:00:59What types of things do I want on a regular basis? Great. How do I engineer my life to have those things? And that's what Jeff ended up doing. Finally, the details don't matter. What matters is he was thinking about, I want to be intellectually engaged. I want to spend time with my kids. I want to be on top of things. I want to, you know, exercise. He like has this vision for a life. And he'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 like a single thing that was very prestigious. So lifestyle planning can lead you to all sorts of different places.

1:01:31There 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 at, 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.

1:02:07You 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 for 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 is your last book? There was three rules per se. Yeah.

1:02:41This one there's. It's linear. The book is linear. It's like, do this. Now we're going to do this. now we're 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 we want to work towards a vision of your complete lifestyle not just pursue a single goal well let's get into it.

1:03:16That's what we're doing next. Here's how you format it. Here's how you do it. Here's a bunch of examples. Here's a bunch of like listeners sent theirs in. Okay. Now you're, you have, you filled your notebook. Now you have the plan. I mean, not the plan, the vision. All right. Well, how do we now move closer to that vision? Well, first let's work through just like how we format the plan. Here's what's going to be in it. Here's literally where you write it. It's going to be written right under your vision. How do we connect 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 um 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 that's like 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 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 that would like be in reaction to ai it wouldn't be a like this is just about ai or a theory of ai but it would be in reaction to ai yeah i got that idea i actually uh i can't give any details details about anything but there's a potentially major article I'm writing in the new year that would, for a big publication, that would kind of introduce a lot of those ideas I want to tackle in that next book.

1:05:15So 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.

1:05:54This 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 of 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.

1:06:33it'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?

1:07:06That'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. And even whether it's people you know even, right, not necessarily like a broad audience, but that like you're part of this is part of what made it so compelling early on.

1:07:47You 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 is like it's just like i will comment on things you comment if you comment on things i comment on that's just the game and then we all 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 i wasn't at the center of this like grand conversation i wasn't this producer on stage that everyone was waiting for.

1:08:53It was all just sort of a game of like showing fake attention to each other. No one cared. Great, I'm not going to go back. And I think you'll have a similar experience, right? These services want to make you feel like 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. Like 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.

1:09:24Because 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.

1:09:55It'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.

1:10:30That's my hard drinking is Disney-related topics. I read David Cohen's book, Reality Land. And 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 like 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.

1:11:07It was really about the Sherman brothers, but it was called becoming Mary Poppins. 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 dad was like an early 20th century songwriter. That was really interesting. Some of the Disney stuff was interesting too.

1:11:42They 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 like a Paramount or Universal could do. And so like that stuff was interesting. Then I moved on to a pair of religious books. one, it was like they couldn't be more opposite. One is very, very popular audience. The other is an academic audience. So the popular audience one I read was Rob Bell's book, What is the Bible? So I've been reading these books about like how to understand and interpret the Bible, like what, who wrote it, how do they wrote it, like what about it is, you know, what about the writing is so interesting and profound?

1:12:28Because 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, right? Like I think he speaks Greek. He speaks Hebrew. He's really studied this stuff. But he writes definitely for a super mass audience. I mean it's like incredibly conversational with a lot of single-line paragraphs and bolding.

1:13:01and it's like really, really like simplified style, but some really good points captured in it. So it was a quick read, but I found it kind of interesting. Then I went and read Jonathan Sachs' book, Tradition in an Untraditional Age. So, you know, 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 more like academic essays he wrote.

1:13:41Really, 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. So 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 technocriticism I do. So it's a more academic book. You know, you're going to hear about like these like very specific thinkers. And so if you're not used to academic writing, I don't know, it's not like a fun read like Rob Bell's.

1:14:21But 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 um this book you know the book captures like the stuff he talks about in book form um it's 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.

1:14:58I 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. uh thriller december is underway i was going to start with the dan brown book you got me but i got intimidated it's 600 something pages and i was like i need to get more momentum going into i can't start thriller december on a book that i need to get a few under my belt quick so i went back i'm starting with uh michael crichton's 1990 something classic airframe is that a reread uh yeah that's all they're all rereads but it's been a while since i've read that one um so i'm excited about that.

1:15:50BioCriton'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. He was kind of, so which is fine. Red pills 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.

1:16:31And so like, I am going to, I'm going to like, I've been revealed that we've been like kind of had. 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 read an article about him last year.

1:17:10So I should. 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'm reading, I got a used version of the Raymond Williams book television we talked about. I want to really read that carefully. So I'm going to read that. I'm probably going to read Geraldine Brooks's book about the aftermath of her husband dying. So I have some non-thrillery stuff in there. Oh, she wrote that book, Horse, right? Yeah. That was good. Yes, I'm reading her book after that. Yeah. So I have some non-thriller stuff in there, but I am going to read the Dan Brown, a couple other thrillers in mind.

1:17:40It'll be good. I like Thriller December. But Airframe is like perfect. That's like my sweet, it's 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 crichton book involved at some point and usually like very incongruous ways dinosaurs rising sun is like a lot about like financial tensions with Japan and like the cover-up of her murder 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 and also she was a Velociraptor so like you know he was really kind of pulling on what worked you gotta play the hits alright that's enough nonsense for now we'll be back next week with another episode and until then as always stay deep

1:18:47Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:19:43Thank you.

1:20:13For more information, visit www.pans Mari wir PFAB.com Ashap