Ep. 365: What Technology Wants  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 365: What Technology Wants - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/5301b657-db9c-469e-9117-93bcc9cca7ae ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Additive Vs Extractive Technologies** - Some technologies purely add value, like an old landline that makes talking easier. - Others are extractive, designed to capture attention and monetize your time and data. Transcript: Cal Newport So Jesse, I don't know if you noticed this, but several people sent us this same Substack post recently. It had an arresting photo. I'm going to put this up on the screen for people who are watching instead of just listening. You see in this photo something you don't normally see. The young kid laying on the couch talking on an old-fashioned hardwired landline, the whole curly wire and everything. Here's what the author of this essay, Priscilla Harvey, wrote. I bought my kids an old-fashioned phone to keep smartphones out of their hands while still letting them chat with friends. But it has turned into the sweetest, most unexpected surprise, my son's new daily conversation with his grandmother's. This is how I keep finding him stretched out on the couch, phone pressed to his ear, intently focused and listening to the matriarchs of our family. I hear laughter and sense a deeper connection blossoming in these conversations. There's no scrolling, distractions, no comparisons, no dopamine hits the chase. Instead, he is just listening to stories, asking questions, and having the comfort of knowing someone who loves him is listening on the other end of the line. Somehow what was once ordinary in my childhood feels sacred today. But clearly Harvey wrote this article to make a point about kids and phones. That's an important point I want to talk about often on this show. But embedded in here is an even deeper idea, an idea that I think is fundamental to our broken relationship with technology. I want you to think about the two phones that are referenced in this article. The telephone in that original hard plastic curly wired form is an example of what we might call an additive technology because its goal is to take something you value like talking to People you know and make this activity easier and more accessible in your life. You want to talk to your grandmother? Type in some numbers. There's her voice clear in your ear as if you were right next door. So the phone in its original form seeks strictly to add value to your life. Now let's compare this to something modern like the Instagram app you might be using on a smartphone. Now here the value proposition becomes suddenly more muddled. I mean there might be aspects of this app you enjoy. It can be distracting or occasionally you find out something interesting going on with your friend, but those joys come with endless sorrows as well. The scrolling can become addictive. The content can devolve into one of those digital slurries, equal parts mind-nummy and anxiety-producing. So unlike the straightforward benefits of something like an old-fashioned landline, become clear that a tool like Instagram on a new smartphone doesn't have your best interest as Its primary goal. It's using you. It's making itself just compelling enough that you'll pick it up, at which point it can monetize every last ounce of your time and your data. Because of this, I would call the modern smartphone with Instagram an extractive technology as it seeks to extract value from you instead of trying to provide it. ([Time 0:00:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/44b91d44-4706-4645-8af5-f56291a94e88)) - **When Useful Products Chase Attention** - Facebook began as a useful connection tool but gradually optimized for time on platform instead of user value. - That engagement-first shift prioritized attention capture over the original social utility. Transcript: Cal Newport We can get some good insight by reading a few excerpts from a recent court appearance by Mark Zuckerberg. So Mark Zuckerberg had to go under oath back in April for an antitrust suit. And while under oath, they asked him questions about the evolution of Facebook. And if we hear some key quotes about this testimony, we begin to get an idea about what happened to Facebook. Why do people no longer feel delighted by it? So I want to read here. This is a quote from an article that appeared in Yahoo News. As time change, so do mission statements, especially in the fast and loose world of tech. In recent months, we've seen Google walk back its pledge to do no evil and OpenAI quietly delete a policy prohibiting its software use for military technology. Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is no exception. Its 2008 motto, Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life, is now a distant memory. According to Zuckerberg himself, who testified this week that Facebook's main purpose, quote, wasn't really to connect with friends anymore, end quote. The friend part has gone down quite a bit, Zuckerberg said. All right, here's another quote about this trial. This comes from a recent Vanity Fair article, which reported Zuckerberg testified that just 20% of the content people consume on Facebook and 10% of the content they see on Instagram Is from their friends. Now, this is very different. Original Facebook, the whole point, as was in that model from 2008, was to see what was going on with people you knew or your friends to be connected to their life or to sort of in a mild, Mild sort of amusing way, cyber stock someone you used to know and see what they're up to. That was what they offered. Fast forward to today when Mark Zuckerberg is testifying and he said 20% of the stuff you see is from friends. Everything else is something else selected by algorithms, stuff that you may or may not like, stuff that might be interesting or stuff that might push your buttons. There's a very simple reason why they made this shift. One way to get there is to jump back a decade and hear when a former Facebook founder, Sean Parker, famously played in the social network by Justin Timberlake, that's how probably people Know him, gave a talk at Stanford, and he said something I want to play right now. Thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them to really understand it, that thought process was all about how do we consume as much of Your time and conscious attention as possible. That was a shift from how Facebook started. When Jesse and I were first encountering thefacebook.com in our senior year of college, its entire goal was to get as many users as possible, and it did that by being as useful as possible. That's why most people I know in my generation signed up for Facebook, because it was useful. By 2017, when Parker was giving that speech, they had shifted towards another strategy, which was how do we get people to use this as much as possible? How do we get as much as possible of their time and their data? The switch here is an obvious one. They needed to start making money. And this is when the experience of Facebook shifted. Why we want to show you algorithmic content? Because you're going to stay on the app more, more people are going to produce content for it to make money off of you, we can get more data from you, we can put more ads into it, we can make More money off of you. ([Time 0:06:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d0488219-6a7d-4b54-b225-217b816c28ed)) - **Users As The Creative Labor Force** - Platforms turn users into unpaid creative labor whose posts generate the engagement companies monetize. - That structural role lets firms extract increasing value as they scale and consolidate power. Transcript: Cal Newport I'll load it on the screen here for people who are watching. It came from Cory Doctrow, the novelist, nonfiction writer, the essayist, the critical thinker. On his blog, Pluralistic, back in 2022, he put out this now-famous essay that's titled, How Monopoly In Shittified Amazon. Issues that happened with Amazon, about how Amazon made a shift to make the experience sort of worse for users with ads and worse for sellers by adding all these extra fees on top of them And making the whole experience more expensive. He was talking about a similar sort of shift that we saw with Facebook. It started as a sort of utopian place for users who could get books sent right to their door and for sellers who could sell to anyone at low cost. And then it became worse for everyone except for the shareholders of Amazon, where it started making them more money. So he called this process cleverly in shitification. And he said, this is something that's somewhat inevitable in the internet digital economy. You bring in the users, then you make it worse to extract money from them. I want to read you a quote from this article where he's sort of summarizing this idea. He says, entertainment and tech companies all want to be the only game in town for their creative labor force because that lets them turn the screws on those workers, moving value from Labor to shareholders. Now, here's the important part. For a lot of new consumer-facing digital technology, like the Instagram example we just talked about, you are the creative labor force. You are who they're talking about. You are who create for free all the content that they use to get other people to look at it and to make money off of them as well as make money off of you. You are the target that is having the screws turned into by these companies once they already have you hooked in to their services. ([Time 0:10:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/23fd3d5a-ec31-4918-88a2-8995d9bc4009)) - **Slowness As A Hooking Strategy** - Companies degrade products slowly, adding features like likes to increase habitual use. - Gradual shifts keep users engaged while the platform replaces friend content with algorithmic fillers. Transcript: Cal Newport As I've been looking closer at this question of the transition from additive to extractive technologies in the digital technology space, two strategies emerged as being relatively Primary for the creators of these technologies to use to make the shift succeed. In other words, to minimize the people who leave when their product gets more extractive. The first and obvious one is slowness. There wasn't some point where Facebook was all friends and relationship statuses, and the next day was 80% Fox News articles that was being sent you by an algorithm. That happened way more slowly. I went back at some point and looked through this whole timeline. There's a bunch of things that were added. Actually, the first step towards extractive technology was not about adding new content. It was about adding new social indicators to content. Sean Barker talks about that in that 2017 speech. And their first move was to add likes. And now suddenly you could get this reinforced, intermittent reinforcement. Oh, I wonder how many likes the thing I just got, I just posted got. Was it popular? Was it not? Are people upset? And that got people back into the app. So once they moved it to the app, they added likes. And now people were using the app a lot more. This is sort of where they got their first fix. It's like they took those extra opioids after the back surgery and began looking around for fentanyl after they couldn't find any more. They got their fix with the like buttons and people pressing the app button more. And then they started working on the content itself. Then they started realizing, you know what? People, for the most part, the stuff they're posting is not that interesting. So if your feed is mainly the stuff that your friends are posting, that's not a super fascinating feed. You'll still come back to see if they like your stuff, but only so often. So let's put stuff in there that's gonna be more interesting to you so that once you're in here, you go slack-jawed. And the drool begins to pool as you swipe from one thing to the other that's pressing whatever buttons the algorithm learns actually works. And so that's how they ended up where we get today where only 20% of Facebook and 10% of Instagram content even has anything to do with the people you know and follow and actually care about. So they go slow. And then by the time you look up, you don't realize what is happening. ([Time 0:13:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b046cacd-7a25-45d7-ba3e-3ddac8d9e7fa)) - **Consolidation Removes Market Discipline** - Big tech reduces competition by buying rivals and consolidating power to avoid market discipline. - Fewer competitors let services worsen without meaningful product or regulatory checks. Transcript: Cal Newport Well, this one is even more insidious. And I want to go back to Corey Doctrow, who talked about this strategy in a talk he gave earlier this year at CloudFest. I actually have two short clips I want to play with Corey talking about this second strategy for keeping us around as technology to become more extractive. So Jesse, let's play both those clips more or less back to back here....rational. It is a Pareto optimal decision. Markets don't discipline tech companies because tech companies don't compete with their rivals. They buy their rivals. Now, that's a quote from Mark Zuckerberg, who famously said, it is better to buy than to compete, which is why Mark... That's clip one. We got a second clip here. Doing some high wire action. Because a sector with 100 SMEs is a rabble. They are at each other's throat. They can't agree on anything. They can't agree on how to lobby. But when a sector turns into five companies, it is a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position. And they are so insulated from what Peter Thiel calls wasteful competition that they are a slosh in cash. And they mobilize that cash to turn their regulatory priorities into regulations. So what we see here is an even more advanced strategy. They reduce competition. So especially when we're talking about like the big tech companies who are producing the things that are most capturing our attention, particularly on our phones and smart screens, They want the competition to be small. They don't want to be competing. If you are in a large competitive marketplace where there's a hundred different apps trying to help you connect to your friends, you'll just say, hey, this one is, is, is in shitifying. I'll go use this other one. Like, why do I want to use this service that's showing me all these Fox news articles, uh, I didn't ask for? I want to go to the one where I can actually see what my friend is doing. But when there's not competition, you just assume, I guess this is like more or less the best I'm going to get. And these companies were very good at that. As Dr. Rell put in his second clip there, this also allows them to avoid the types of regulations that might actually constrain some of the worst externality. So some of the effects that make them the most money that have the least value to users. This is typically a part where regulation can come in and fight on behalf of the users. But in this monopolistic marketplace, they have tight, tight-focused lobbying targets, and they can prevent that from happening. I have another example of someone talking about exactly these effects. This is a clip that comes from Ed Zitron, who has a fantastic technology criticism podcast called Better Offline. This is an episode where he was talking about Google and why it got worse. It's an episode that he won a Webby Award for. So this is an episode that he just won an award for. Anyways, I want to play you a quick clip from this. That doesn't matter to Google. Google can now say they've got AI in their shit. Google search, they can fix it. I believe that Google, with all of their money and all of the very smart people that work there and have worked there, could fight SEO. They could find a way to rank things properly. I just don't think they care because they're doing 10, 20 billion in profit every quarter. So what he's arguing there is search results have gotten worse on Google, and he gets really into the details in that episode, in part because there's a ton of ads, in part because they Have this sort of terrible AI generated things up front, but in part because SEO or search engine optimization puts a lot of bad results up front that don't really help you. Zitron does the research in this episode and says they could fix that. They could fix that. But why? Having more results and bad results, you have to scroll a few more screens to get to the results you're looking for just to be sure. Strictly more money. And they are the only game in town with search, so why make it better? There's not 16 other big competitors that they have to keep pace with. This is not Mercedes looking over their shoulders to see what Rolls-Royce just did with the radio. And so they can let the service slowly get worse without really worrying that this is gonna be a problem. ([Time 0:16:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e7485cb-a151-4e2b-9b2c-0c6aea85df65)) - **AI Tools Can Follow The Same Path** - Early consumer AI feels additive and delightful but firms need sustainable revenue as usage grows. - Hiring ad and brand executives signals these tools may pivot toward attention-driven monetization. Transcript: Cal Newport We absolutely still need to worry about it. So I want to read to you from an article that appeared recently. I'm an eMarketer. There's been a lot of other articles that said something similar. The opening of this article should give you some pause about the coming shifts to extractive technology we can expect in the future. All right, so let me read this here. OpenAI has hired its first ever chief marketing officer, Kate Rauch, signaling an effort to step up its brand messaging and bring advertising to its products. Rauch has deep ties in the digital advertising industry, having worked at Meta for 11 years, where she eventually served as global head of brand marketing for its suites of apps. All right, here's why we should be worried about it. AI is probably doing the exact same thing that the social media companies did 10 years ago. Think about your relationship right now to a lot of these consumer-facing AI tools like the chat bot interfaces like ChatGPT. Premiere in late 2022 early 2023 they're delightful they're interesting you experiment with them cool stuff is happening suddenly they go to gpt4 the cool stuff you can do explodes It doesn't cost any money or it costs like a relatively small fee if you're using it a lot it's just every week something new hey you can do this or now we can do images or we tuned it to be a Little better at this or that now your code is looking better. It all seems exciting. So you start using it. And they want people to think about it like now they think about Google, or they think about Facebook, that there's parts of your life or your process or your rituals or your business That hook into these tools while it's still delightful and easy and seems really cool. But they just hired a CMO from Meta, someone who understood how Facebook made money. That means they're looking towards that second phase. They are losing a lot of money. Every one of these companies is losing a lot of money. OpenAI is losing a lot of money. Microsoft is losing a lot of money. Google and Meta are losing a lot of money on AI. It's not a super profitable thing right now. The biggest amount of money made right now is that OpenAI has this collection of users that hooked up early to their service and are paying like the nominal, somewhat nominal fee to use The pro version. They have these like 5 million users. The other services don't have anywhere near this many users. And Zitron points this out, which tells you that that's more the result of marketing than necessity. So they're not making a ton of money. They need to make more money. Bringing an advertiser who's an expert on using data, your data, to figure out how to target ads for you. You don't have to have a crystal ball to start to realize, oh, these services, once we're hooked in, mightn't shitify. They might go from something that is quite additive in my life to something that's quite extractive. And it might happen in a way where there's no other real competitors to move to. And it happens slowly enough that I don't realize it's going on. So these type of transitions are happening right now. ([Time 0:20:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d2da07d-1ce9-4f7a-acd6-65e4a9bed1a9)) - **Run A 30-Day Digital Declutter** - Do a 30-day digital declutter to discover which optional technologies actually add value. - Reintroduce apps only if they earn a clear, permanent role and enforce fences that limit harm. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, I have three ideas here about how to tilt the balance of technology in your life towards additive and away from extractive. One, do the periodic digital declutter that I suggest in my book, Digital Minimalism. A digital declutter, and I got to say this three times an episode because otherwise people get it wrong, a digital declutter is not a detox. The goal is not to take a break from technology so that you can hear the birds sing and have great insights and figure out the meaning of life and then tick-tock again until your eyes bleed. That's not the goal of a digital declutter. The goal is to gain insight that you then use to make permanent changes to what technologies retain a role in your life. Now, if you read my book, Digital Minimalism, I go through the details of this. I ran 1,600 people through this process. There's a lot of insights to share, but here's the big idea. 30 days where you're stepping away from optional digital technologies. This will include many of the technologies that right now are additive, but will probably become extractive in the near future. And you then aggressively experiment with new ways to spend your time connecting with people. You don't just sit there and white knuckle. You try to get back in touch with what's important. And then when the declutter is over, you say, which of these technologies I stepped away from do I want to put back? They don't get back by default. They have to earn their way back by having some sort of real value they offer to your life. Then you'll let it back in your life. But now you'll put gates around there, fences around it so that you only use it in the ways that are useful. When you do this on a semi-regular basis, it is a way to sweep away technologies that once were additive, that had become extractive. Because once they become extractive, when you run it through this test, hey, do I really miss using this app? And you say, well, wait a second. I used to use that to keep up with my college girlfriends. That was like six years ago. Now it just makes me upset. No, you don't earn your way back. No, that's not coming back. ([Time 0:23:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df1b3016-cf8a-4c97-b7d2-85fc91072622)) - **Favor Paid Tools Over Free Ones** - Ask 'How much does this cost?' and bias toward products with clear financial prices. - Paying for a tool reduces the pressure for it to become ad-driven and extractive over time. Transcript: Cal Newport And I think one of the key ones for trying to avoid extractive technologies is to say, how much does this cost? If you don't have a number to answer that question, it's probably costing more over time than you want to spend. So what I'm trying to say here is you should be biased towards products that have a clear financial cost. It costs this much money for this product. The value we get from you is having a product that is good enough for you to pay for. You've paid for it. Here you go. You are safe from the shift to extractive technologies in that type of situation. If the answer to this is like, oh, it's free or it's nominal, they got to get paid sometime. And guess what? Who's going to be doing the pain? It's going to be you. And it's going to be in ways that you don't choose and in ways that might be much worse. It's why, for example, I'm thinking about my own life. I use Scrivener for writing articles and books. What I like about Scrivener is you buy a site license. It costs a non-trivial amount of money. Then you have the software. They'll send you updates as it updates, but you've bought it. That's it. You have the site license. You can share it on a couple of machines. It's not a monthly thing. It's not free with ads. Another thing I like is the to-do application, things three, same idea. They're like, yeah, it's 10 bucks for your phone. What do you get? You get the app. You went on your Mac, it's 30 bucks on the map. You buy it. It's like the old days. You get a box and there's a disc in it. You open the disc, that's yours, you own it. So the value they get from you is in convincing you that this application was useful enough for you to buy. They've already have their money from you once you buy it, you're much less likely for that to become extractive. ([Time 0:25:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/930ab62c-66ca-4904-a809-6af9a9dfb4c1)) - **Practice Attention Resistance Tactics** - Use rules, plugins, and indie alternatives to get utility from services without surrendering attention. - Treat platforms as libraries by removing recommendations and searching only for the content you need. Transcript: Cal Newport Again, this is an idea from my book, Digital Minimalism, where I talk about joining the quote, attention resistance. The idea is you take technologies where there's a value you need out of it, but they're also seriously trying to extract value from you. And you use rules and technological solutions to get your value and prevent them from getting theirs. So you transform extractive technologies back to their additive form. There's a lot of ways this could be. There's people who have to use social media, for example, for various business things, who use it on their laptop, and they use it with plugins that scrapes free all the content they Can't see what other people are posting. And they go on there for 20 minutes twice a week to post stuff that they wrote in Google Docs or hire someone to do it on their behalf. It doesn't take that much time. It doesn't cost much money or someone to keep track of their comments for them. They're getting some business value out of social media. Social media is not getting their time or attention. I've seen people do this with YouTube. I want to look up how to fix my car on YouTube. I have a plugin. I do it on my computer. It gets rid of the recommendations. Now it's a library. I search for videos about fixing my car and all that comes up is videos about fixing my car and I find one and I use it. It's a free library. I get value. They don't. ([Time 0:27:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ca991898-6f41-444b-9608-bc12148293cd)) - **Track Tasks, Not Every Action** - Stop tracking ultra-granular work; instead log day-sized tasks and the backlog of needed tasks. - Use short stand-ups to reveal blockers and keep trackers low-friction and actionable. Transcript: Speaker 2 First question is from Erica. I'm a computational biologist. We have systems where project leads have to update a row on a project tractor ahead of meetings. This typically consists of a status and a short description of work completed and what's coming up. We then review this information together at the meeting. This has some positives. However, the trackers really build up and it takes a lot of time. What are your thoughts on these systems? Do you have any alternatives? All right. Cal Newport Do we understand, I want to make sure we fully understand how this system works. Let's try to imagine this, Jesse, like if we were using it. So there's a spreadsheet and there's a project lead. So like if we were working on some project, like adding an animatronic child and a Jesse skeleton, you as the project lead would update a row in a project tracker. So I guess that's like a spreadsheet that would have a status and a short description of the work completed, but also the work coming up. So you would actually probably have to say, like, I worked on this. I worked on the, like the Arduino connections today and tomorrow I'm going to work on whatever. And so you're like kind of updating, not just what you're working on, but like specifically what on that task you did and what's coming up. So here's what I think about if I'm understanding that right, I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Erica, the intent here is great by having project tracking, you're stopping unscheduled communication that might require replies, which of course is the productivity poison That afflicts most of knowledge work, having to respond to unscheduled messages. Now you have to context shift constantly. You run out of energy. It's miserable and nothing gets done. Also, this type of system will succeed in making work and workloads more transparent. Who's working on what and what's going on? So it's not just this sort of informal dance of messaging and you never really know who's doing what until you bother them. The problem is you're tracking too much. I think you're picking this up in your question here. Tracking actual work accomplished, work you want to do. So getting into the granularity about the specific stuff you're doing towards a larger goal, I think that is too much friction. If that friction adds up, it becomes a choke point, and then you stop making progress altogether. I think software developers have found a better middle ground in this. When they're sort of agile systems like Scrum, they think about work in terms of, they call it features. So I guess the equivalent here for a computational biologist might be like a task, right? So a project would be too big, but a task, it might require like multiple steps, but something that you can maybe tackle in a day or so. And what they do in software development is they track who's working on what task and more importantly, what tasks need to be done, but no one's working on yet. This way you can control the workload. Stuff can be tracked without it having to be on people's plates. The way they update the statuses is they have a daily 15-minute stand-up meeting where everyone is like, go. And you're like, here's what I'm working on. Here's where I'm stuck. Here's what I need. Here's how it's going. It's 45 seconds. Go. They call them standing meetings because they're trying to emphasize they're quick. They're not meant to be how's your day, what's going on, what happened with your skeleton. It's like go, go go it turns out that this is a very low friction way of getting people up to speed as well as figuring out who needs what from whom i know it doesn't sound like it should take So much time to write that down but it freezes people talking's easier so they've really kind of honed this in in software development that that granularity of task and that method of Updating, that's the right way to do it. So I would look for something like that. In my book, A World Without Email, which you should get, I talk in there somewhere. You'll have to find what chapter it is. I talk in there somewhere if I get an interesting research report written by a computer scientist at the University of Maryland who talks about adapting that sort of software development Granularity to his research group. And he gets some ideas about why it works or how to adapt that to that world. So check that out. You're on the right track. You got too many frictions. There's too much friction going on there. ([Time 0:34:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad77dea8-32cd-40f7-b732-909297c6c4eb)) - **Keep Hobbies From Becoming Obsessions** - Put boundaries around hobbies so they remain rejuvenating instead of destructive. - Stop if passion harms sleep, relationships, or core responsibilities and schedule hobby time responsibly. Transcript: Speaker 2 Can you talk about the alternative route to a Walt Disney story where folks might get obsessed with something, but it just remains an obsession and never is a catalyst for productive Action? How can folks know if a project will spur something or just indulge a dorky obsession? I mean, dorky is okay. Cal Newport Yeah, don't be obsessed. Like, I don't have a, when it comes to projects you're doing in your leisure time, just a sort of engineer wonder, like we talked about a few episodes ago. Don't be obsessive about it. I know that sounds like a bit of a cop-out or a tautological response, but you know when something is becoming obsessive. All I'm doing, it's getting in the way of other things. I'm staying up all night, reposing my skeletons. I mean, that one's okay. That one's okay. But if you're taking those skeletons on dates, then things are getting a little bit more obsessive. Then you got to be careful. So, you know, have schedules like, yeah, it's what I'm working on. I put aside some time when I need it. I'm really happy when I get to work on it, but you know, I'm not disappointed when I don't, life happens. It's like this thing you have to look forward to and you make some time to work on it when you can. It's kind of the way I think about myself with movies. I really like movies. I only have so many occasions to watch them. And there's certain times of life or year where it's like, oh, this is great. Like I have a light day coming up, you know, block off the afternoon. I'm working from home and I'm going to watch, you know, like whatever movie I've been waiting to watch. And it's like fun. Or my, my friends and I get in a rhythm of seeing some, some of the new movies at night. And then like a month will go by where I just really don't see anything. It's, it's the summer. We're doing stuff with the kids. It's, you know, it's light out late. People are around and we don't see as many movies or whatever, but it's something I always enjoy. And when I get a chance to read about them, I do. And when I get a chance to watch them, I'm very happy. And occasionally there's parts of my life where I am putting aside time to like, I'm going to go read this textbook or I'm going to make a point of going to see this movie in this particular Format. And sometimes I'm not. And that's great. That's really where things just sort of be. You know, I love this thing. I do it when I can. Sometimes I put aside time. It's okay if I can't get to it. Sometimes it's been more than others. Once it starts to get obsessive, like if it's causing problems, it's defeating the purpose. And that's actually what happened with Disney and his railroad. He was still working. He was still running Disney Studios. All that stuff was still going on. And there'd be points where he spent a lot of time on these projects. And then other points where a lot of time would go on. He couldn't really work on it. He'd hire people to work on it. And they'd check in with them. And it'd give them a little bit of a reprieve of an otherwise stressful day. He loved the project. It gave him back wonder. But it wasn't like it was taking over his life. It wasn't like he stopped his job. It wasn't like he stopped spending time with his daughters. So I don't know. I guess my answer is be cool. Just be cool. ([Time 0:39:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4ee70113-f6f8-48b1-bd85-942df8071de2)) - **Cultivate A Diverse, Supportive Circle** - Keep some friends who share your depth and ambition, but don't make your whole circle a monoculture. - Choose people who make your life better or help you become better across different roles. Transcript: Speaker 2 Up is Dominic. I'm interested in your thoughts on how people should concern themselves with the folks they interact with. How should we think about the influence of our partner or housemates on our ability to pursue depth? Cal Newport I mean, it helps to have some people in your life, friends, for example, who are on your same wavelength in terms of how you think about like depth and ambition and pursuing projects or Whatever, right? It's good to be around some people like that. You don't need everyone in your life to be that way. And probably it's good if everyone in your life is not that way because you also need people to fulfill other roles in your life. If you're in a monotype, things get weird. If everyone is the same way around you, things get weird. If no one around you is like you, things get lonely or frustrating. If everyone's like you, things get weird. My case in point is, I mean, hang out with people who've been in Silicon Valley too long. They seem innocent, like, oh, it's like a cool gingham shirt you have on. And the next thing you know, they're talking about how they're, you know, only on soylent green to prepare for having the chip implanted in their head so that they can have their like Messianic AI fuel singularity moment that is like coming next week for sure. Like people go weird when everyone is the same way. So you want some people to be around. Like I have a bunch of author friends. We talk all the time. We deal with the same issues. We have the same job. We have the same ambitions, but I don't want everyone being like that. I'd become unbearable or weird or unusual, or God knows what would happen if I hung out with writers. It's not great. Not great. So have other people in your life to fill other roles, to bring other things out about you. So then what becomes the filter you're looking for about whether someone should be in your life or not? If they make your life better, if they make you better, they're good to be in your life. If they make your life worse or make you unhappy, they're not. And there's a lot of different ways that people can make your life better and make you better because there's all sorts of parts of life. So you need a lot of people around you. Make sure you have some people on your wavelength, but not too many. ([Time 0:43:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9d4bdd8b-3efa-4c99-b103-489bbb6103da)) - **Match Content Formats To Platform Strengths** - Match each platform to its strengths: podcasts for narrative depth, newsletters for concise ideas, and video to reach broader audiences. - Design content and cadence to fit the medium and audience habits. Transcript: Speaker 2 How do you think about the differences in relationships between your podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter? I'm considering starting a similar offering in my niche, but I want to feel absolutely clear on what I'm trying to achieve with each platform. Cal Newport Ryan's forgetting one of my platforms, which is my TikTok, where I give Halloween decoration advice in the form of K-pop dances. So that one, believe it or not, I have 175 million followers. I do it without pants on too. So I don't know. I think that's a TikTok thing. That's what they told me. I don't know. I don't know if that's unusual or not, but different platforms play different roles. Okay, so how do I think about these? Podcast, I think about as a combination of more story focus because I have time, right? You have a longer engagement with someone in their ears. They're in the middle of driving to work or something like this. And you have time to lay out a story. And because I have time, I can get more detailed with advice. So we do questions or in the final parts of my deep dives, we can take time to like walk through particular advice. So it's a format that breathes and it's a format that it's narrative. So story works well. Newsletter is much shorter, right? It's a much shorter format. I mean, some people write very long newsletters, but that's not my style. I usually have like one big idea, maybe one example. So I have one thing to deliver to you in this newsletter. That's my style. Oh, that's an interesting story. What's the takeaway? Oh, I see how that connects. This takeaway is something that's useful to me or it's like an idea that's useful to me. So it's much more shorter and focused. I'm also more likely to be technical. I'll do more technical stuff in the newsletter. I'll do more like let's get in the weeds AI. That's fine in the written format in a way that I think maybe plays less good. There's only so much you want to hear me talk about, you know, reinforcement learning and tuning of chain of thought type patterns of inferences. That doesn't play as well in audio. So I think about that a little bit differently. YouTube is just my podcast, or stuff that comes out of my podcast for the most part. So like, I think about YouTube as there's a whole potential audience for my podcast who doesn't use podcast players, they use YouTube, that's where they listen to their podcast on the YouTube app. They find out about content and people that they like, like authors on YouTube. So we really just, we move my podcast over there. And like we're trying to do is like clip out the podcast and allow what we're talking about here to find people who are a little bit younger usually who don't necessarily consume content Through the podcast app so i don't think about it's the same there's no content there that's not my on youtube for the most part that's not on my podcast right now so that's just like to Me that goes together with podcasting it's broadcasting and i think video is important that's where video goes these days that might change in the future but i see those as being very Similar does that match how you think about it? Yeah. It's kind of what we do, right? Do you think there'll ever be another medium? I just think there's going to be, I think the future of video is not going to be YouTube. Or it's not going to be YouTube in its current form. I think this is an extractive technology. Let's go back to the original deep dive discussion. YouTube executes now in a way that's sort of an extractive technology. The additive part was like, hey, it's easy to upload video. It's free. It's free to watch. And there's like a lot of really interesting stuff here, a lot of innovation. The extractive part is now it's algorithms are pushing you. They want you to get stuck in these rabbit holes of just following content that just like vaguely keeps you engaged. That makes them more money, but that doesn't necessarily make the experience better. So I think video dominates audio historically. We love visual input. We like it more than audio input. Radio is awesome. TV ate its lunch, even though it's more expensive, less convenient. And when it first came out, it was like a really small black and white screen you could barely see. Didn't matter. That's what we want. I'd rather do that than listen. We want to see people. So this is why, you know, one of the reasons why we've always committed to video, even if there's parts about YouTube we don't like. Video has got to be the future. And I don't know what it's going to be. Some sort of diversification of streaming so that like in addition to you have like indie streaming, that might be it. Like a Netflix type experience that you curate. It's episodes and carousels, pretty high production quality, and you're curating, and it's stuff you really, really like and is made from independent creators. And so instead of it's Netflix spending $8 million to produce a show, it might be someone who spent $100,000 to produce a show, but the economics work out, and it's not a recommendation-based Environment. ([Time 0:45:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/81a07369-6759-4ec1-8f42-04e409582232)) - **Transition To A PhD Without Overworking** - Expect a PhD to feel easier than residency and avoid inventing needless extra work. - Focus on research, pick a strong advisor, and use new free time for fitness and hobbies. Transcript: Cal Newport Hi, Cal. Speaker 2 My name's Jonathan. I'm a cardiology resident based in London, and I'm about to start a PhD, which I think will mark a significant shift in the way that I go about my work on a day-to basis. I've followed your work for many years, and I wondered if you had any advice for someone who was going from a very reactive, busy environment to an academic setting, how I could develop Systems to better manage my time, and how I could shift my mode of thinking from the hospital into academia. Cal Newport Thank you. All right, here's what I think is going to happen. I don't know what subject you're studying as a doctoral student, but almost certainly what you're going to find is that being a cardiology resident is so much harder than being a doctoral Student, that you're going to worry that something is wrong and you're going to invent work to try to make your life worse. That is the number one thing I am afraid of for you. It is not hard to be a doctoral student in the same way that it's hard to be a resident. It's hard in other ways, right? It's hard in the sense of you have to produce like original thought and if you can't, you're out of luck. It's hard in the sense that you can't just hard work your way to success. It's hard in the sense that it might not go well or you might turn out you don't like it. It's a very rarefied, weird, specific, eccentric type of thing to do. And for some people, it just doesn't fit. And for some people, they love the idea, but it's just not the way their brain works. So they don't have the right preparation for it. It can be very hit or miss, but it's not hard in the sense of I'm on like hour 16 of a shift doing really difficult life and death work. And I have an eight hour shift coming up next. It's going to seem easy and you're going to feel like you should be doing more work and that's okay. Take a breather. What you were just doing was more physically demanding, was probably more mentally exhausting. That's okay. Do your courses, do well, they're easy. They want you to do well in the doctoral program. Focus on research. Work with the best advisor you can. Work backwards always from the question of how do I get from here to producing stuff that matters that people cite. That's all that matters. Get into the process of research. Love it. Master topics. Be around people doing research. Be around really good researchers. Build up your affinity for it. And also just enjoy your free time. Like you better get in pretty good shape. You have a lot of time. I got in good shape as a doctoral student. You better have a hobby you get really good at. You have a lot of time. Don't waste that opportunity. So don't, I mean, that's my main worry. Don't fear if it feels too easy compared to what you were just doing. That's how it's supposed to feel. If you came from doing something like being a resident, you'll be okay and enjoy it. ([Time 0:50:42](https://share.snipd.com/snip/19fcd639-7b85-4b17-9127-dfbe67c54346)) - **Cal's Monthly Five-Book Habit** - Cal sets a personal goal to read five books a month to stay sharp and curious. - His July mix included LA Story, Disney's Land, Ingenious, Original Sin, and Wool. Transcript: Cal Newport My goal is always to read five books. Helps keep me on track with keeping my mind sharp in this increasingly distracted world. Talked about before, my strategy is just to mix in books. You just sound fascinating, go random, go weird, hard books, easy books, cool books, weird books. I don't care. Reading's good. All right. Here are the books I read in July, 2025. These were essentially all read during my trip up North. The first book, and I don't know, you know, what Joker gave this one to me, but the first book I read was LA Story by Bill Plunkett. I don't know where I got that book, Jesse. That was a birthday gift from Jesse. I knew very little about Shoyotani. I think I'd basically been blacklisting the Dodgers ever since they beat us in the NLDS, whenever that was, like 2014. So I didn't know the story. I did not know the details. Turns out, and this is a spoiler alert, Shoyotane is good at baseball. This is one of the things I learned from that book. The next book I read, I talked about this in one of my newsletters. So you may have heard it, heard me talk about it, was Disney's Land by Richard Snow. And it's a book just about Disneyland because I went to Disneyland in June. I was like, oh, I want to read about it. Then I read Ingenious, the new biography of Benjamin Franklin written by Richard Munson. It focuses more on his science. That's kind of interesting that we often the scientific achievements of Franklin get short shrift, but it's actually pretty interesting. I like that book. Then I listened to an audio, Original Sin. I think that was Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote that. This is about Joe Biden and his cognitive decline and what people did or did not know. Not like a happy, fun book. That's the way I'd review it. But interesting. Things did not go well. Again, spoiler alert. That story did not end up well for Joe Biden. Finally read the book Wool by hugh howey my one of my sons was reading it and he read it and liked it and he recommended it to me i liked it it's a originally i would say self-published book But that's not even right it was he was just like um i guess it was he was publishing parts of it on kindle direct but not all at once and it's just a dystopian book in the future and there's People living in a giant silo in the ground after some sort of disaster and they have all these weird sort of like rules and rituals and you don't know much about it and then sort of mysteries Unveil and you learn more about what's really going on it's like a great i think it's like a fantastic kind of like andy weir a little bit turned down hard sci-fi they don't get that much Into the details of science like he would have, but that sort of sense of, um, like a neorealistic dystopian sci-fi, very plot driven, very plot focused, which makes sense because he's Writing this in, in dispatches and it, the plot just rolls and you're like, I want to know what happens next. This world is interesting. I want to know about it. And it's a great story. I heard the Hugh Howey story originally wasn't quite accurate. I heard it as this was like this project he had. That's how he became a writer. All right. It turns out he had published many books. He had written a bunch of novels and was self-publishing pieces of this as just like a project to help mourn the death of his dog. It just was in that mood, but it was, it just hit a, hit a vein. Like something about this is right. And the series, you know, random house bought it. Is it related to the Apple show? Silo is based off of it. Okay. Speaker 2 Yeah. Cal Newport So Silo is based off of these books. So it became a big, you know, premium TV show on, on Apple and the books sold all the copies. And so it became very successful. But he was, I didn't know that piece. He'd written a bunch of books before then. Speaker 2 Did you watch the Apple show? Cal Newport I'm going to. I'm going to watch with my son who read it. It was my, my 12 year old doesn't like these books. He likes World War II nonfiction. Who knows why? But my 10 year old loves sci-fi. So I'm going to watch with him. But I figure he read the whole series. I only read the first one, but I should probably check out the show. I guess if he read the book, I guess I shouldn't be too worried about the show, but I'll check it out just to be a lot of like beheadings in the first opening or something like that. So I'll, I'll check that out. There you go. Whoa. I'm going to read the second one shift. I haven't got to it, but I'm going to, I'm going to get to it. It's on my list. It's all plot. It's just good plot. Just, hey, that's a cool world. The plot moves. You want to know what happens? Characters are fine. You like care about the plot. Sometimes when you're on vacation, that's the type of book you need. ([Time 0:57:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fa61dc72-707e-426e-9bd5-254e8e31b6c0))