Ep 387: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone

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31:56You should consider joining the over 100 ,000 companies already using PipeDrive. And right now when you use my link, you'll get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com slash deep to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash deep, and you can be up and running in just minutes. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show. But what we care about is where this is going. This is all kind of new. So what we need is a good estimate of where we think the industry is going to go in terms of these numbers. And to get an optimistic estimate that we're not just making up, we found this article here.

32:36This is an interview. you, this comes from a New Zealand newspaper because I guess Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is from New Zealand. So they did an article about him. This is from two months ago. This is from November. And they're talking about him and he's giving a lot of information and thoughts about how Substack is doing. But here's the key thing I want to pull out. They sort of ask him at the end, how big can this grow? What's your goal here? And here's his line. I don't see anything in the laws of physics that should prevent Substack from getting to more than 50 million paid subscribers.

33:10So they're at 5 million now. He thinks the internet and the environment, based on their data, their goals are we should be able to 10x that. We should be able to, if we grow this right, to have about 50 million people who are paid subscribers on Substack. So let's use that as our index for the best case future for Substack. And here's what we get. We now say, okay, what is their circulation? Well, they have 5 million paid subscribers now, but that would go up to 50 million in this scenario. Revenue, they have 450 million now. If we just 10x that, that goes up to 4.5 billion and 500 people making a living.

33:47Again, we'll just straight up 10x that to something more like 5 ,000. Now this is getting interesting because what we are seeing is newsletters now or in this sort of best case scenario of where they're hoping they'll go, don't compare and don't really compare to newspapers at their peak. The exception here will be in circulation because newspapers had a circulation of 60 million at their peak versus 50 million paid Substack subscribers in this feature scenario. When we look at revenue, newspapers were bringing in 50 billion versus more like 5 billion in the optimistic scenario for Substack. And they had 56 ,000 people working as compared to 5 ,000 in Substack.

34:32But if we compare that future scenario for Substack to where newspapers are kind of right now, it's comparable. So we could kind of imagine a split. Like Substack has many more paid subscribers and there's current newspaper circulators. It's bringing in comparable revenue to what newspapers are. It's an order of magnitude off in terms of number of people working full-time, but it's in the realm of what we have right now, full time in newspapers. And if we look at these numbers with an even more optimistic hat on, we can actually inflate. There's a case to inflate some of these. So let's put this back up on the screen here for a second, Jesse.

35:11We can inflate this revenue number. So yeah, right now they're making 450 million. So if you 10 X as subscribers, you can imagine 4.5 billion. There are other ways to make revenue. Once you have a successful sub stack, which, you know, newspapers that's going into their revenue numbers. we could also factor that in here. Like for example, you have to factor in something like paid ads, right? So you could have ads on your free version of your newsletters. This is something, I did some numbers. Let's see if we can find these. I have some numbers on this from our own ad agency. So right now, for example, you can get a, if you have, it's possible to get a$35 CPM on just a display ad that you put on your newsletter.

35:54So that means you get$35 for every thousand people that read your newsletter. So you could use this to convert unpaid subscribers into a revenue source. So if you have for even numbers here, a hundred thousand subscribers and you have a 50 % open rate. So you have each email generates 50 ,000 people read them. They use that 50 ,000 reading. That's what the CPM is calculated on. that works out to be about$1 ,750 a newsletter. So for each newsletter you send out, that ad, if 50 ,000 people actually read it, will generate about$1 ,700. If you're publishing like Nate Silver recommends, three newsletters a week that are getting those open rates, that's a quarter million dollars a year.

36:44So there's more revenue that's latent here. There's also events. There's also speaking. There's also higher tiers. So I think this is the right way to answer this question. can Substack become comparable to print media or maybe we should say paid newsletters more generally and the answer is like yeah it can be comparable to sort of where maybe not in all ways the peak but sort of where that industry is now as it's like two-thirds of its way down it's the cent so we can imagine the two charts of their successes newspapers come down paid newsletters can meet it relatively soon and maybe go a little bit and then go beyond it as those fall off so there is a sense of a little bit of a replacement being possible all right question number five is sub stack media newsletter media more generally better or worse than the newspaper media that it's replacing so let's say it does do this are we better or worse i think we can make a couple arguments for each there's certain ways in which paid email newsletters are worse than newspapers newspapers have fact checking copy editing and content editing they also have large liability exposure so they're very careful about you know traditionally what they print remember like the Washington Post you know was quick to print something that would have been completely it was what was being echoed all over social media we talked about this before on the show this was the Covington kids at the mall and there was like a picture taken of one of the kids and a Native American they're looking at each other real closely and social media was like yeah like these kids are terrible and they're just like being you know arbitrarily mean to indigenous people and the Washington Post was like great we'll publish that they're kind of feeling the vibe of social media and the student the kids family's like that's not what happened you defamed us and we're going to sue you and it was somewhere between 20 or 50 million dollars some huge like victory they had on that because there's huge liability exposure but because of that as a reader of print newspapers it's different than looking at social media or really looking at a newsletter where the exposure is smaller you realize like they have to be kind of careful right like if they're saying something it's been fact checked it's been copy edited There might be biases in how they say it, but they also have large liability exposure.

38:51So we can sort of – there's a trust there that when you get rid of that infrastructure, you lose that. All right. Newspapers can also send experts to locations to report on the scene and have special expertise. So there's something going on in Venezuela. The New York Times is going to have someone in Central America who has been stationed there who can walk around and see what's going on. So you lose like boots on the ground reporting when you move away from centralized journalism. in the age of this is not as true now but in the age of advertising being the main revenue for newspapers you had to appeal to as many people as possible so you didn't have as many biases in newspapers and so they were like a pretty good sort of consistent descriptor of reality because when you make a living by department store ads you don't want to alienate any possible audience if you're a major city newspaper now this is different today in an age of paywalls where It's better to delight and thrill your paid subscribers than it is to try to reach the broadest possible audience.

39:46And so now we have a lot more, I think, biases in reporting. But at least in its classic form, newspapers could give a pretty consistent view of reality to a nation. And just because of their fixed format, they would expose you to ideas and information that you otherwise might not have sought out on your own. But because it's right there on the same page as something you are reading, you would learn a lot of things. Here are the ways in which newsletters, however, could be better than newspapers. As mentioned, in an age of social media and paywalls, media has moved away from its neutral observer status.

40:16It's more important that you delight your paid subscribers, and that's what really matters. Because of this, though, that means that you have much more partisanship in newspapers. But they still talk about it as if they don't, as if it's still back in like the 1990s days of department store ads pay the bills where these really were trying to be down the line. Because of that mismatch, we now have plummeting trust in news media. We see this on both sides of the political spectrum. No one trusts the traditional media. So that's kind of crumbling. I think you're actually better off from a biased perspective with an individual writer because what happens is when you're engaging with a writer like Paul Krugman as opposed to an institution like the New York Times, we are very used to as social beings of assessing and understanding individuals, their perspective, their social cultural context, and where they're coming from.

41:03We can place humans very easily into different categories and adjust what we're hearing accordingly. So like if you read Paul Krugman, he's classically left, and that's going to be the angle he's going to take on everything. But it's really easy to understand that with him. You know that from him. He's not tricking you, and he's not trying to be otherwise, and you just filter it through it. If you're someone who's far on the right, you're like, I'm probably not going to subscribe at all because that will annoy me. But if you're like a centrist, you're center left, center right, you're like, yeah, I can just adjust for what I'm hearing from Krugman.

41:33I'm not mad at him. That's just who he is. And he has a lot of interesting information. He's a good economist. He has a Nobel Prize. And I can kind of filter out like where, you know, he's being off the rails and where there's like really good insight. So actually trust and comfort with news sources when you're dealing with individuals with a known profile, we as humans actually can deal much better with that than large centralized news sources that are just claiming this is just like a neutral observation of reality. and you're kind of noticing all the ways in which it's not. The newsletter economy also has a really good star-making system.

42:08If a newsletter is popular, if it has a lot of subscriptions, it probably has gone through a pretty competitive process of earning every one of those eyeballs, which means the writers are good at what they do. You don't necessarily have that in newspapers. You have a lot more people working their way up the chain, and they might be okay. They might not, you know, hey, you're here, you're a fact checker, and now you're a cub reporter, and now we're putting you on this desk. Like, you do fine. You have a lot more just sort of like okay writers. But in a competitive, infinitely scalable marketplace like digital paid newsletters, the winners are going to be really good.

42:39So you're actually going to get really good writing. Remember like Nate Silver was being paid millions and millions of dollars for the Times and then again by ABC ESPN because of like the skill he has and whatever his audience being excited about what he's doing. you also have a resistance to corporate advertisers or political pressure on these individual newsletters in a way that if you're a really large centralized corporation you might not be able to free yourself from so the answer to this question is i think it depends newsletters are different than newspapers but it's not necessarily worse than like the current age of print newspapers now so i have some optimism there all right final question how might this vision most go awry right we're being pretty optimistic here but we should consider the the possibility that email newsletters sputter and fail to deliver anything like this traditional media replacement that we are discussing.

43:28I found an article that I think presents some good critiques. This is from John Gruber's Daring Fireball newsletter and blog. He wrote this back in 2024, and it was called Regarding and, well, Against Substack. And he goes through some things that he is upset about. But among others, and I'm going to let me find the right thing to read here. He is upset with people talking about Substack like it is a publication as opposed to a delivery mechanism. So the quote he has at the top here that's upsetting him is I'll read it here. we constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons imagine the author of a book telling people to quote read my amazon end quote a great director trying to promote their film by saying click on my max that's how much they picked your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden there is no such thing as my substack there is only your writing any forever fight against a world of pure in shitification.

44:39And so he's upset about this move that Substack is making. He'd be like, no, Substack is the thing, like Netflix or Twitter. It's a platform that serves you information. And writers are just serving Substack. But you as a consumer are consuming Substack, not the writings of Paul Krugman and the writings of Heather Cox Richardson and the writings of Nate Silver. And there's this sort of creeping fear that what Substack is going to try to do is say it's not our goal to have 5 ,000 really good writers making a living with newsletters and offering like a sort of competitive media ecosystem that can push back against the sort of incentivized digital attention tools.

45:23They might say that's not our problem. Our problem is trying to become a$100 billion valued company. And the way we get there is we got to have our 50 million users using this thing constantly. And so what we need to do is take and mix and remix content and everyone's just providing us text and we're going to create, you know, AI enabled, customized newsletter snippets of stuff that's popular and selected by algorithms pulled from everyone else. And that's what we want is like we want to enter that world of like a sort of stream of distraction. Just our stream happens to be text based. There's a real fear that that's what they're trying to do.

45:55And that's why you hear this terminology of like my sub stack, I sub stack, what's going on in sub stack in a way that as Gruber points out, you would not hear about other neutral delivery platforms. I do not say, you know, like, Hey Jesse, I don't know if you, um, I don't know if you read my WordPress, but like I WordPress and on my WordPress, I talk about, you know, whatever. No, like WordPress is the software on which I run my blog. I don't call it my WordPress. I don't say like, Hey, I don't know if you've listened to my simple cast. That's the hosting company that hosts our podcast. Like, no, if you listen to my podcast, right?

46:26So this is the biggest danger. And it is probably, for me, a major – my number one concern about this optimistic scenario is that I have a hard time imagining Substack cares about trying to create an alternative to print media. They don't want 1 ,000 or 5 ,000 journalists to have a good living. They want 50 million users that use it constantly. They want to incentivize it into something like a stream-based TikTok, Twitter, Instagram-style distraction machine because those companies have huge valuations. And that's where they might push it. So what is our final answer here? I think we're going to pull all these threads together.

47:06We have a chance at actually having the internet, the same internet that was destroying collective truth and reality and sort of serious journalism, give us an alternative that's not that bad. We did all the numbers. We see that's possible. But if we hitch our wagon to this one company sub stack, I worry about it. What we need is something like I mentioned WordPress. That's an open source project. We need like an open source equivalence, ways that you can have email newsletters that can be easily discovered, subscribed to, and take payments that is not tied to like a company that wants a huge valuation.

47:47You can do this all from scratch. Jesse and I, we do this from scratch. Our newsletter, we pay for a hoster. We do everything on our own, but it's expensive and complicated. We have someone that it's like half of their job just to wrangle our newsletter software. And we don't do paid subscriptions, but if we did, that would be a whole other level of complexity to try to do that on our own. It costs a lot of money. I mean, I don't know how much we – newsletters cost money. Like Substack is eating a lot of money to host it. I don't know exactly what ours is, but it is at least$1 ,000 a month plus just to host and send emails to like that many people.

48:24Because you have a lot of emails. Yeah, we have like, we send out whatever it is, 125 ,000 emails, you know, each time we send out a newsletter. And it's expensive. And people, that's friction that's going to stop people from getting there. So we need a low enough friction alternatives, either like indie sub-stacks or open source sub-stacks, that make the friction low to start and take money. and who aren't interested in becoming a$100 billion unicorn. If that ecosystem can emerge, then I have faith in all this. If we hitch our wagon, the substack, I just think their investors want the big return.

48:57And again, having 5 ,000 Paul Krugmans informing people making a good living, I just don't think that's going to do it. All right, so there we go. I don't know if we fully answered our question, Jesse, but I think those numbers gave us a better look into what was going on. can substack save journalism maybe something like paid newsletters might there we go also we should just be writing email all the time I want to make 4 million dollars a year with big banners yeah yeah that's what I want to do I mean it helps that Paul Krugman has like 20 years of being a very famous columnist how old is he um good question I would guess 64 and he won the nobel prize 10 years ago no he would have won the nobel prize in like 2000 early 2000s oh that long ago yeah so he's a professor or was a professor at princeton economist he didn't want to he's young yeah well he started writing for the times when he in 2000 because he was like a consistent voice against judith miller's push for invading Iraq.

50:10And then I think he won the Nobel after that, like in 2005 or 2008 or something like that. But that was probably for work he did before he joined the Times. But there you go. I like when writers are making money or writing words. That's all it is is words. His words and his mind. I mean, that's hard. Seven days a week. But I think silver is right. That's a normal job. Yeah. 40-hour a week job done with flexibility and then you're making all that much money. You're also really cognizant with your newsletter about not spamming your audience and making sure they get high quality content and yeah like you're really good about that yeah i've been doing it forever i mean i think of my newsletter is like dispatches from the front lines of this battle of like depth against distraction so it's like hey let me explain what's going on here's this new technology you should know about here's someone who's like done a really good job of finding depth in a way that's inspiring here's like a new idea about like how this economy works the digital economy works so it's like people who care about that tension between depth and distraction.

51:07I just want to be sending them useful dispatches. I like doing it. I've been doing it forever. All right. Now we're going to move on to a new segment. If that was our idea segment, we're now going to tackle practices. So this is a segment where we try to actually look at specific practices, whether they're good or bad. We'll assess them that might help you in your personal battle for depth in an increasingly distracted world. What we're going to do here is we're going to actually, we're going to load something from YouTube. And here's the, here's the background, right? I did an interview with Andrew Huberman, I guess, two years ago, a year and a half ago, whenever my book Slow Productivity came out.

51:44And that was a popular interview, and he cut up a bunch of clips. One of the clips from that interview was called something like how to – what's the exact word, Jesse? How to successfully delete social media. How to successfully delete social media. It's a five-minute clip from the interview. It went viral. so something about the particular advice i gave in that clip hit a chord in a way that you know i've done a lot of stuff about phones there's a lot of stuff online about phones and how to spend less time but whatever i said in this clip seemed to touch a chord because i think it's been viewed more than a million times now um since he's he's released it so here's what i want to do because i know it's the new year and a lot of people are thinking about resolutions and one of the big resolutions a lot of people are thinking about these days is i want to use my phone less there's no shortage of advice this clip whatever i said in this clip and i'm going to be honest i haven't re-listened to it in a long time i don't know what's in it this clip seemed to be hitting a nerve so we're going to go through this clip bit by bit and i'm going to comment on and elaborate on the things i said and we're going to try to extract from it the most useful big ideas for anyone who's thinking about less phone use as a new year's resolution all right so we're gonna do this like an odd audio style right all right so we'll just start it and then jesse i'll tell you one to pause it and I'll jump in.

52:57Recently, my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first. And then coming back to social media has actually turned out to be more challenging. You really experience the friction coming back the other way and then let's pause it there for a second all right so uh this clip starts now this is coming back to me jesse remember it's a nice day nice part of la um huberman there can you tell his like raspy masculine voice from mine he's jacked god's a big guy he's a strong he's a strong gentleman he's in good shape um between us Huberman and I can combine bench press like 300 pounds between the two of us.

53:52So there's a good point he's making there, right? He's saying, hey, let me give you a testimony. We went for an extended period without social media. And yes, it was hard to make the transition. But what was even harder was when we came back and I started using social media again because I had gotten what he's saying here, but essentially is he had gotten used to life without it. And when he added it back, it immediately created a lot of sort of bad feelings. And so you don't know how much negativity being on your phone all your time is injected into your life until you actually spend time away from it.

54:25We just kind of get used to what it feels like to constantly be looking at that slop and distraction on this little piece of screen. And it's not until you get away from it that you realize like, wow, it's like going from black and white to technicolor when I take that out of my life. All right, let's keep going here, Jesse. What comes next? experiences, the lack of friction, and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt, the friction leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because I think, of course, many people listening have work that they really need to focus on.

55:01They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, et cetera. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life. You know, it provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects. But I guess through the lens of the, let's just call it the Cal Newportian lens, one might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped. Let's pause it there. Okay. So here's the second big point that's coming out of this clip. So Huberman started by setting up the idea that you don't realize how much drag there is on your life from your phone until you get away from it.

55:34Then he gets the second point, which now I'm remembering this conversation, I think this is the point that is beginning to separate this discussion from so much other advice about your phone that you're going to find online. He immediately points out there's a psychological dimension to this phone over you beyond just like you have a bad habit. It is, and I'm paraphrasing to him for a lot of people, it's filling a void that they otherwise have in their life. So right off the bat, he's acknowledging why we're using our phone so much. And his answer is not weakness, dumbness, or not caring. He's like, this is actually solving a problem for a lot of people.

56:15All right, let's keep going, Jesse. Resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere. Yeah. I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void, you have this void in your life because there's a unmet potential, uh, unmet interest, um, living in misalignment with the things you care about. Right. I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life. Right. Let's pause for a second there. A quick aside. I don't have the video up on the screen, but Jesse will attest because he's seen it right now. Um, as we were talking, I was arm wrestling at Huberman and just destroying them just like, boom.

56:56And then Huberman does like a little like bow thing to me. And then he like points to his bicep and points to me and gives a thumbs up. And yeah, so that's going on. You just don't see that. But I was I was physically dominating him. OK, so I then pick up that thread, right? I'm picking up the thread there and so like, yes, this is what I've seen. There's a lot of papering over the void. That void is very will a very real because of the catastrophe of living life. There's a lot of hardship, things that go wrong, things you have to deal with, things that aren't unfolding the way you want. And that creates a void.

57:29And I said papering over the void, but you can also think about like the brightness of your phone screen hits your eyes in such a way that you lose your night vision. You don't see it beyond you. It sort of hides it from you. You know, it's there, but you don't actually have to see it. All right, let's hear some more. Social media. And there's before this, it was other things, right? There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that, like gaping void and it's like just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life and so it is true if you just rip it out you see the void that's really difficult right i mean because i did this experiment for one of my books here before we get to the experiment all right so uh again what's going on behind the scenes here and jesse will attest to this is like actually during that clip when i was talking huberman leaves the camera comes back in a full brazilian jujitsu gi with his black belt on points to me i get a quick submission on him he gets up takes off his black belt hands it to me all right but anyways let's get back to the actual words that are happening here uh there's a lot of now i'm really unpacking why this went what about this was resonating again there's a lot of uh if we don't recognize the psychological realities in which phone use happens it really becomes a very sort of sterile conversation and one of the points I made in there, which I want to make again right now, is that we've seen similar sort of addictions rise in other past difficult times.

58:54They were just different substances. It was like during the hard, if you were in the 19th century or early 20th century living in one of the newly industrialized urban environment, you were all at taverns all the time. You were drinking all the time because life was really hard, right? You were living, you had very little control and autonomy, and you were barely making enough money to support yourself, and you're all crammed into like a tenement or whatever. And this was like the environment where it got so bad that like we had the prohibition movement, right? So we – it's not the first time we've seen this.

59:24But in hard times, we look for ways to avoid it and the phones have been offering us a way to do it. All right. I teased at the end of that last segment there that I had run an experiment that gave us some more insight into that. So let's hear about that. I ran an experiment with 1 ,600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days. 30 days. 30 days, right? These are young people, old people? A whole mix. A whole mix, right? Not just university students. I recruited them from my newsletter readership. So they weren't university students. And it wasn't formal research. It was, you know, I put out the call, right?

59:55So this is not randomly sampled, right? But I put out the call and I said, here, I'm going to walk you through this. And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went. And this was like the number one thing I heard was it's really hard at first, right? And so who were the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who didn't? The ones who didn't succeed tended to just try to white knuckle it. Just be like, I don't like how much I'm using social media. I'm just going to stop because it's bad and I don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to like, you know, hold on to the table with white knuckles.

1:00:24They want to make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days. So it's like go learn new hobbies, join things right away. Get like really strong. All right. So again, we really haven't yet said anything about how to change what's on your phone, how to change your settings, what to do with your notifications, whether or not you should put your phone in the grayscale, if you should have some sort of brick device to make your phone harder to use, what type of rules you'd have about your phone. We're almost done with the clip.

1:00:55Like how much time is left? Two minutes. Two minutes left, right? So we're more halfway through the clip. We haven't talked anything about strategies for putting your phone away. What are we talking about here? I said, look, when I studied 1 ,500 people who spent 30 days without using their phone, the people who succeeded were the people who aggressively were exploring through reflection experimentation what they actually enjoyed they were finding new activities they were going out and trying new things they were trying to uh fill in their life in interesting ways they had a much easier time not having their phone the other people just white knuckled and said i don't want to use this just like i don't want to smoke and i'm just going to sit here staring at me like you're not going to get me today eventually their willpower buckled and they ended up using it again more often than not.

1:01:39This goes back to the void explanation that we gave before. By aggressively trying to fill in things in their life that were meaningful, what they were doing is filling in the void. When you fill in that void through actual activity, through actual connection, through actual self-reflection and growth, you don't need to hide yourself from it anymore. The importance of saying, I need to keep my eyes from focusing on or have to paper over so I don't see it that goes away when the void is much smaller and that's the kind that's the point i want to pull out of it so i'll stop playing the clip from here because i think that gets to the key point we just riff on that for a little bit while longer if i remember correctly but the best advice about using your phone less as we see here in this viral clip really has nothing to do with your phone or your habits around your phone or how you use your phone it's about everything else in your life i think it's an important practice to think about right now in this sort of new year part of the calendar.

1:02:36The more you have things that are meaningful, the more that you are making sense of your life, of the challenges and the positive things and building them into a narrative, a heroic narrative that's meaningful and values-based, the more that you're connecting with other people, the more that you're sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of other people, the more that you're putting yourself in the situations for appreciation or awe, the more you're out there doing hard things and you can see the reward your intentions made manifest concretely in the world, the more, in other words, you activate your deeply human brain to all the possibilities of human life, the more stupid that little rectangle is going to seem.

1:03:11And the easier it's going to seem to say, why would I look at like an AI generated short form video on a small rectangle when I got a life to live? And so I think this is like a numerical experiment. there are a lot of clips about using your phone less that aren't doing as well as this one and the difference is this one says very little about your phone in fact there's a there's an ab comparison you can find on huberman's channel himself uh six months ago he he also posted a very similar titled clip uh with annie limpke who wrote dopamine nation it's also like how to use your phone less or whatever and it's very good science and he's a great scientist on this but it really gets into like here's why you're addicted and here's what's going on in your brain and here's like things you might do to reduce it.

1:03:57You might spend less time with your phone. You might do take breaks on a regular basis, like just like addiction science type of stuff. And that clip, you know, same feed, same title is like a 20th of the views because I think we're hitting on something real. It's like an experiment. We get to the psychology in which phone use happens. And so that's what I'm going to leave you with in our practice segment today. If you're worried about your phone, start worrying about making the rest of your life better. Then return to the phone in your habits. Don't white knuckle it. Don't say this is bad. I just want to do something less bad.

1:04:28Make your life good. And the shallower alternative is not going to be as appealing. I think in the final two minutes, you've seen the clip. I think in the final two minutes of the clip, me and human get to a full out fist fight, duck the punch, block the other, come in, pick them up, drop them. he stands up barely like clutching it and he applauds and points to him and then he hands me a trophy off of his wall because you are the king now he's going to just come beat me up at some point anyways there we go I think that's useful a little bit of practical advice to help you in your own quest to fight for death in a distracted world alright well we still want to hear from you so we got a couple questions that you have sent in that we will hear from now

1:05:22okay first question is from victoria i'm reading through some classics i keep my phone close to use chat gpt to enhance my understanding is this okay i mean it's not terrible the good news is you're reading classics and i think trying to have a secondary information to help you make it through a harder book is great and if you want to have chat gpt give you like a summary of the chapter you about the read that's fine or themes or why is this important like that's fine i think it's better if you follow the links from chat gpt and maybe actually read some of the articles it's pulling from because it kind of tends to make things up or it mixes and matches or it kind of figures out what you want to hear so it's it's better to get to the the primary secondary source this was a complicated way of saying it but the primary source of chat gpt is using that source itself being a secondary source about the classic book that you're reading the key thing is not to interrupt mid-reading right it takes a while for your brain to fire up all the networks needed to make sense of written words and turn it into sort of an internal cognitive understanding You don't want to be interrupting every few pages to go look something up.

1:06:19You want to queue up understanding by reading an article or a chat GPT summary, then do an entire chapter more in a row before you then interrupt your focus again. But I am all about bringing in other sources. Whatever makes that book more approachable and interesting to you, to me, the better. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Jason. I often feel like whatever I'm writing down in my notebooks isn't quite right or good enough. How do you decide what's worth writing down? So Jason probably heard our recent episode from over the break that was on using single-purpose notebooks, where I recommend having a notebook when you're working on a particular challenge or idea, that you have a dedicated small notebook where you can capture all your thoughts.

1:07:03So Jason, here's the key thing about these notebooks. the the value happens after you filter like the notebooks collect novel brain reconfigurations in a way that you're not going to forget them most aren't good the magic then happens when whatever you're going to do with these you read over all these the good ones you then pull out so it's writing down whatever comes to your mind relevant to a topic in the notebook that's step one of two of getting to really good ideas. Like what I'll often notice in my idea notebooks is I'll look for, you know, most of the things like when I go back to them, it's not so great.

1:07:42I'll look for things that either stand out or more frequently what happens is I come back to them again and again. So, you know, in my lifestyle-centric planning notebooks, I'm just capturing notes about things that resonate and don't. Yeah, there's a lot of nonsense in there. It's just like in the moment, I think it's exciting. Like I had an example in the book I'm writing on The Deep Life where I talk about exactly this, by the way, like writing down insights about your life in a notebook. I talk about how like most of them aren't going to be in retrospect that useful. And I had an example, I'm trying to remember it.

1:08:11I think it was like, you could imagine you were going to your first like NASCAR race or IndyCar race. And maybe in the moment it's like super exciting and it's like visually very novel and there's a hundred thousand people in these cars. And you're like, whoa, I'm having a reaction here. I'm going to write something down. Like, this is really interesting. I'm having a strong reaction. It's really cool. Later, you might look back at that and be like, I was just reacting to the novelty of the moment, but there's not really a deep insight here that's relevant to my life. So there's a lot of stuff you write down that would be important.

1:08:38I tend to find if it's lifestyle observations, what I'm looking for is, oh, I've written this down five different times in the last six months. I keep finding other examples of this thing and writing it down. This is sticking around. That means something to me. Or I'll just be going back through and it'll just stand out to me like, oh, that still seems really good. whereas other things in retrospect don't seem really good. And so it's in the filtering of what you write down that ultimately you get the value. So don't worry. Get it down. Get out of your head so you're not stressed about it. Get out of your head so it's on paper.

1:09:09You'll see it. You don't know what that's going to influence in the future. That idea might be terrible, but it might set up some other ideas that are good down the line. So don't fret. Your notebook is not precious. No one's going to publish it. No one's going to pour over it. It doesn't have to be good handwriting. It doesn't have to be beautifully written, and it doesn't have to be brilliant ideas. Just get the stuff down. That's the nice thing. They're cheap. Paper. It's yours. Personal. Just right. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands for the super athletic stuff. Like running gear for cruising up the trail.

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1:10:55A couple minutes later, I'm eating something that's going to taste good and that I know is healthy. So if you want to make healthy eating easier this year, consider using factor. I use it and you should too. Head to factormeals.com slash deep50off and use code deep50off, the word deep, the number 50, the word off, to get 50 % off your first Factor box plus free breakfast for one year. Offer is only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. I also want to talk about our friends at Monarch. One of my big goals for the new year is to try to get our finances back under control after the season of holidays and birthdays and trips that we just got through.

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1:13:00All right, next up is Dirk. With organic search getting worse or replaced by AI powered chat bots, social media broken and mainstream media paying less and less, it's hard to build an audience and make money writing without using a tool like Substack. The IndieWeb is a beautiful idea, but it seems it only works for writers who built their audience long ago. For professional writers trying to succeed today, isn't Substack the platform of the moment? Yeah. So let's look at this question through the filter of our idea segment. There's two ways of seeing it. You could say like, hey, for writers, as the traditional media goes away, the only real option is something like paid email newsletters and that seems really limited it isn't too bad that like all these other more indie web tools can't support making a living like we hope they might one day do but on the other hand uh we never expected that there is more indie web stuff like blogs came along before and just personal websites like those didn't monetize very well for various reasons, but we shouldn't expect them to.

1:14:05It's actually like very hard to find an economic niche where you can actually efficiently match money to talent in a way that's a non-trivial market size. And when you find those niches, they tend to get really big and be very important, but they're way more narrow than you think. Like most types of media doesn't work. And then the niches that work blow up. Print the newspaper that works. Books work. Blogs didn't work. You know, pamphlets didn't work. Or novellas haven't really worked, but paid newsletters do. So certain things work. Most things don't. So I don't think that's really necessarily a problem.

1:14:42What I do think is a problem is if the medium is dominated by a single company. That's our main – I mean I got into the idea segment. That's the main issue with Substack is not the model. I think a paid newsletter model, we went through the numbers. That could be a fair replacement for like newspapers. in terms of size and market and diversity. What I worry about is one company offered it. That's when we have problems. If it's just Substack, because they can then shitify this and just make it into some sort of like digital soylent green type of nonsense slot. So what we need is not like the old IndieWeb stuff to be successful.

1:15:20Like won't people just pay for my microblog or my WordPress? We need more IndieWeb copies of Substack. We need more independent Substacks. We need more platforms run by more people where the friction is low for me to put out content and to make money from it. The other thing you really have to keep in mind when you think about these new type of paid media is in the history of media, when you get new media, it does open up different ways of reaching people. But when money is involved, the truth remains. It is very, very hard to make money doing something in media. That it has always been a very narrow peak of a very large mountain.

1:15:56And this is something that we often get wrong. When a new technology comes along that is opening up more access to an audience, we think that should mean it should greatly increase the number of people who can make a living or make a lot of money doing something. But it doesn't, right? Like the internet meant anyone could publish text now and anyone could read it. That's a major breakthrough. Before, you had to actually have physical machines to put ink on paper and you had to distribute that paper by putting them in the back of trucks and driving them places. Most people could not put text in a place where other people could reach it.

1:16:24The internet meant everyone could. But did that mean we then had hundreds of millions of people making a living like writers? No, because it still has to be good. And so whenever we get these new media forms, it doesn't actually lead to a huge explosion in the number of people who can make a living to a medium. It just changes the way they can do it or the parameters around what they do. And that's something to keep in mind. The email newsletter economy might replace newspapers. It's not going to mean 100 ,000 people now can make Krugman money. It's really hard to be Paul Krugman. but now Paul Krugman has an alternative to the New York times to reach people.

1:16:58That's what we're talking about here. So don't be disappointed when you're like, I don't know, man, everyone I knew tried to start a newsletter and didn't make any money off of it. Like, yeah, that's, that's most media, most television pilots never get picked up. And that's like at the end of a very large pyramid of professional writers and performers. And a lot of money was put into this and everyone to make it work. And most of those fail. So of course, like your random thing you did is probably not going to succeed. That's okay. broadening access to information doesn't go hand in hand with broadening massively the number of people who can make a living off information so we should keep that in mind as well so my main concern is not having just new media form replacing old one i think that's fine it's having only one player in town we need more indie or open source or smaller more niche uh alternatives to substack which i think we're going to get jesse because they're good if they didn't shitify you know like oh it's all streams and we just want to show you all sorts of stuff and get you like to look at your app more and more there's a market for someone else to be like okay we'll just do like old sub stack it's not that hard of a technological problem i think there's a lot of writers like yeah i'll just take my email list and i'll move it over this new platform that has a better interface my subscribers don't care because they're getting this they can get through email they don't have to get through the app so that's my my my hopeful prediction is that if sub stack moves towards the sort of slop attention distraction mode then the good writers will just shift the new alternatives it'll it'll pop up can you define it in shitify you use that a few times yeah i think we did a podcast episode on this a while ago this is cory doctor's notion of what happens is with a lot of these attention economy digital tools is that they do things that makes them useful that grows an audience and then they shift their focus to trying to make as much money as possible off that audience and it makes the tool much worse.

1:18:41Then the tool gets kind of terrible. This is like Facebook. It was very useful. Like, oh, everyone I know is on here and they can post updates about what they're up to and I can see what people I know are up to. Like, what's their relationship status? Let me see pictures of their kids. But to make the most money off of their users, Facebook moved their model more and more away from that and towards like algorithmically curated crap full of ads that fills up your thing because it's like more addictive for the people who use it. They'll use it more often. They have more ads to sell them. But it's a way worse experience and people are fleeing in drones.

1:19:12But Cory Doctorow's theory, and he coined this term a long time ago, but he has a new book out about this. His theory is that this is like an inevitable cycle when you have broadly funded digital attention economy tools. And so Substack will probably fall prey to that, but maybe it won't. So we'll see. All right. Finally, I want to end each episode talking quickly about what I've been reading. And well, we just came out of December, Jesse, and I read my five books in December. But more importantly, December is my time for reading thrillers. so I thought I would briefly mention the three thrillers I read in December, and then I'm going to rank order them.

1:19:44All right. Number one I read was Airframe by Michael Crichton. There's a lesser known thriller of his, but he wrote it like at the height of his post Jurassic Park powers in the 1990s. No high concept plot. There is no dinosaurs or time travel or aliens. It is really just, there's an accident on an airplane and they're investigating it and trying to figure out what it is. and the company has a big pending deal with the Chinese and they don't want that to be jeopardized and they're trying to cover up some of the issues and there's some labor unrest. That's it. But it's like classic thriller where you get into the details of airplane safety and how it works and good pacing.

1:20:27Then I read another Crichton book that I hadn't read in a very long time, The Great Train Robbery. He wrote that way back in the 60s or 70s, like pretty early in his career, where he took an actual event, a Victorian England train robbery did a lot of research on it and then kind of dramatized it in a novel it kind of walks through the steps of it it's sort of a sting style and in fact I'm interested in the connection between sting the sting and this I think this came first very much like the con is coming together but you don't know all the information how it's all going to work in the end until it all kind of comes together and then I read Fantastic Voyage your adventure book it was a movie that was a short story that got made into a movie.

1:21:10I think Raquel Welch was in it. And then Isaac Asimov turned a movie into a novel and the novel is what I read. It's about people being shrunk down in a submarine and put inside someone's body. And it's like their journey through like the human body. These were all three really good classic adventure novel thrillers. I think if I had to rank them, I'm going to put Airframe number one. It had the least high concept plot, but it was just perfectly executed. It is a really well-executed thriller as someone at the height of his powers. You get really interested in the mechanics of airplane function, airplane safety.

1:21:44There's a ticking clock element to it, which keeps it moving. And the plot just rolls. You're from this to this to this. It takes place times over just like a small number of days. And this whole thing kind of unfolds. You really care what's going on, even though like you don't actually care about the subject matter at all. It shows how good Crichton had become at writing techno thrillers. and he didn't need the high concept for it to actually roll forward. It's also the beginning of his reactionary crankiness. You start to see that in this book. He's very anti-labor union. He was starting to become in the 90s when he began to become a little bit more reactionary, but that's fun.

1:22:21Great train robbery was very well researched. It's a little bit annoying because it was written in this Victorian English prose. I didn't really care that much. You knew they robbed it and eventually got caught, so it was more just about I'm interested to see how the robbery works which is interesting so it's a pretty good book Fantastic Voyage is a very uh it's a slight book it's it's a an old school sort of like small paperback of the type what I wrote about in my newsletter a few weeks ago about the rise of like these paperback originals that don't really have an equivalent today they're kind of short and they're entertaining and they're meant to give you like six hours or four hours of entertainment and this thing just moved it was great they're like yeah let's just say we can shrink people.

1:23:01Don't worry about it. We can just do it. We shrink them. And what would happen? And it just like unfolds this adventure as the submarine moves through the body and the science is good. And there's a, it's a well time plot and there's a double agent type cross where someone on this submarine is a turncoat. And there's a giant ticking clock set up because they only have an hour before they re-expand and it kills the person they're in. I like this is just a well constructed. I know Asimov had this club in his back, a well-constructed adventure thriller with a big technical aspect in it as well. I really enjoyed it.

1:23:34It didn't try to do too much. Like they got you to that room quick, it finished, and then they left. And that was the entire book. So I thought that was also really good. So Thriller December, Jesse, was a success. I also read a book about The Simpsons and one other book. I think what else I read. I forgot what the fifth book was. But anyways, I wrote five books. But the thrillers is what I want to check in on because that's what people care about. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Hey, let us know. You can send a note to Jesse at calnewport.com if you like this move towards the two segments, ideas, and practices.

1:24:12We're going to try it for a little while. Hope you like it. All right. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.

1:24:23Hi, 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.

1:25:23Thank you.