Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/4060ec8c-4bdb-4150-bc81-bac38eea5104 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Everything Turning Into A Video Flow** - Derek Thompson argues media is converging into a continuous flow of episodic video, i.e., 'television'. - This frames many internet trends (social video, video podcasts, AI video) as part of a single cultural shift. Transcript: Cal Newport A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. So what did Derek mean by this? This is the question we're going to answer today. I'm going to both unpack and expand on Thompson's arguments and then add my own conclusions, including three predictions about what I think is going to happen next. Hopefully by the end of our discussion, you'll have a brand new way of understanding the sort of vaguely distressing but difficult to define changes that seem to have been happening In internet culture in recent years and have some ideas about what to expect and what to do to best react to the future. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode is the internet becoming television. And what does this mean for you? All right, so I want to start by really diving into the big points from Derek Thompson's articles to see if we can make sense of what he's saying here. Fortunately, on a recent episode of Thompson's podcast, Playing English, which is really good and you should listen to it, especially the episodes where I've been a guest, Thompson Read his piece out loud. So we can actually hear passages from his article read in his own voice. All right. So I want to go back and I want to replay that initial clip because this is where Thompson started his article. So Jesse, let's hear that original clip again. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. ([Time 0:00:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/95b4823d-0126-4499-92e5-0cab1e85c4c1)) - **Social Media Is Less Social, More Television** - Meta reported over 80% of Facebook time and 90% of Instagram time is video from strangers, not social interaction. - Cal Newport uses this to show social networks are shifting from social graphs to passive video consumption. Transcript: Cal Newport More than 80% of time spent on Facebook, they revealed, and more than 90% of time spent on Instagram is now dedicated to watching videos, most of them being videos created by people who The users do not directly know. So he's noting social media is now less about socializing and more about watching content from people you don't know like you would do on television. Over at the Financial Times, John Byrne Murdoch, as you know, he does so well, has some nice data visualizations that capture this shift from social media to video. Let me put one of these graphs up here on the screen. This is for people who are watching. Instead of listening, you can see it and I'll describe it for everyone else. This is a graph from the Financial Times. The title is Time on Social Media Peaked in 2022 with Young People Cutting Back First. And what we see here on the far left is average numbers of hours spent on social media per day seem to peak in 2022 around two and a half hours, and it's been going down ever since then. The biggest drop when you break it out by ages is young people. Older people are kind of stuck at that peak because, I don't know, I think they're still updating their Friendster profiles. I think the older people aren't necessarily up with it. All right. So it is true. There's data to back this up. There's another chart I can show here from the Financial Times. This is one that Derek had in his essay as well. This is labeled social media has become less social. And what we're seeing is change and share of people reporting each reason for using social media. So the reasons to meet new people, to keep up with friends and to share my opinion have drastically fallen since 2014 to 2024, while the reasons to follow celebrities and to fill spare Time have both increased somewhat notably since 2014. So yeah, Derek is right about that as he supports with that type of data. Social media has become more about watching videos from strangers. ([Time 0:02:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2498b6f1-b005-4b59-9ef7-1f7848df6eff)) - **Television's 'Flow' Explains TikTok** - Raymond Williams' concept of 'flow' distinguishes television from discrete media like books. - Newport uses this to link modern short-form feeds to a continuous, nonspecific experience. Transcript: Cal Newport He notes that Williams says in that book, Before TV, entertainment was discreet, like books or plays, something that had a beginning and an end, and when it was done, you could discuss That specific thing you just saw. Television, by contrast, became defined by the fact that it was continuous and streaming and multimedia. Williams called this flow. It's not like a discrete thing. It's just sort of something that flows by. ([Time 0:07:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1585e375-7aa3-48d1-9868-6689e7cf9d61)) - **Television As An Economic Attractor** - Thompson calls television an 'attractor' for media, meaning media systems tend toward continuous short-form video. - Newport agrees in spirit but reframes the cause as economic, not pure technological determinism. Transcript: Cal Newport Television seems to be the attractor of all media. Right. So here's Thompson's overall summary of what he's arguing is that media in general is just inexorably heading back towards this Williams notion of television as a continuously like Nonspecific stream of video content. This is some sort of attractor state for media. And this is where the internet itself is heading. ([Time 0:10:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/94150782-7663-4717-a32d-a0d3f1a25829)) - **Internet Media, Not All Media, Shifts To TV** - Not all media became television: books and movies persist and grow, showing resilience of non-internet legacy media. - Newport narrows the claim: internet-based media, not all media, is converging to television. Transcript: Cal Newport There's actually a lot of media that did not become television. Now, I'll explain in a moment why I think this is important, but let me just justify this point first. A core idea in Thompson's piece is that the sort of television-style flow of undifferentiated video is an attractor state that eventually draws in all media that was his words but that Doesn't seem quite right because of the existing legacy media types that have basically stayed the same from the time before television existed to today and are actually doing fine As industries they don't seem to be in states of collapse consider for example the global book market. In 2025, that market reached $151 billion, and that market's been growing steadily. So it's not showing signs of collapse. That's a big market. It's roughly, it's a little smaller than the combined market of Meta and TikTok, but it's kind of in the same ballpark. So books are still books, and they're doing fine. They continue to grow. Movies are still around as well. The total domestic box office in 2024 was $8.7 billion, so we're at a lower order of magnitude in things like books and social media, but that's non-trivial. In 1974, when Raymond Williams wrote his book, Television, the total domestic box office was $1.14 billion. If you adjust that for inflation to today's dollars, it's about $7.5 billion. So, you know, it's like we can think of the global box office since like the rise of television as we know it today. I mean, the domestic box office and today it's like kind of the same or it's grown modestly. So like movies are still around. And of course, to be fair, in the 90s, movies got way bigger than that. It's kind of shrunk back down again, but they're not below adjusted for inflation where they were back when television began taking its move. But these are media that exist in the same form as they did before television, and they're doing more than holding their own. So it's not really the case that all media becomes television. I think the real way to state this headline would be internet-based media is becoming television. ([Time 0:18:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f05644cf-395d-448c-ba4c-0e9625881267)) - **Tech + Economics Upgraded TV For The Internet** - Smartphones, broadband, and algorithms made an upgraded, portable, highly targeted version of TV possible. - Economic incentives drove entrepreneurs to build a superior distraction product, so attention migrated there. Transcript: Cal Newport It was now more portable. So you had access to it, not just in your house or wherever you went because it was on a smartphone upgraded because it had algorithmic curation. So now it's to satisfy your distraction needs was better because before you would just go through a few channels. And now, of course, we have algorithmically curated content. So it's just like a, it's a more pure distraction environment. And because the ads are now targeted much better than you could get on a broadcast medium like television. So they've become, you know, much more lucrative. But I think what happens is we had this massive market that was built on. It was the TikTok of the 1980s. We had this massive market that was built on. You don't have to be alone with your own thoughts or bored. There'll be something to kind of take the edge off of the ennui of just like I'm here sweeping and it's kind of boring. And it was this massive market. And once we built this infrastructure for other purposes, right, that we built the internet infrastructure, thinking about the web and expression and connection and being able to Get information from anyone around the world, all just like distributed, you know, that was our vision for building that infrastructure. We built smartphones because Steve Jobs said we shouldn't have to carry a separate iPod and a separate Motorola Razr phone. Let's put them in the same device so that you can make your calls and listen to music on the same device, right? That was the point of smartphones. But these two things came along, and other entrepreneurs were like, well, the money's in TV. Let's do that. So in this particular technology, it was possible to build upgraded television. And when you see the size of the television market and how dominant that was, of course, you're going to pursue that. That has become the biggest economic engine, the biggest economic activity opportunity in the Internet age has been building a better version of television. ([Time 0:25:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75b18cab-1541-4fd8-bbbd-ae69d70b0823)) - **Prepare Existing Media For Video** - If you produce internet media, prepare for video; podcasts and newsletters will need video components to compete. - Cal Newport recommends creators adopt video to remain serious players in the entertainment ecosystem. Transcript: Cal Newport If you participate in internet-based media, then you have to be aware of this shift because it's going to be consequential. Major podcasts are going to have to have video to be a serious player. I think even other types of internet media that we don't think about as being multimedia at all, like newsletters, are going to eventually need to have some sort of video content if they Want to be a part of the full entertainment ecosystem. Be a little bit more specific, here's a couple of things. Here's something I think you're going to see. The move of podcast on the streaming video services is going to be a big thing in 2026. This is already starting to happen. The Ringer just did a deal, I believe with Netflix where they're going to have more of their podcast show up on there. We're going to see a lot more of this. The economics just makes sense. Podcasts have loyal audiences. And if you can just raise the production values a little bit, which is not that big of an investment. I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars per episode, which is nothing if you are producing television for something like Netflix. They have loyal audiences and they produce a lot of content. So if I'm a big fan of a, you know, you're a big fan of my show and it's on twice a week on Netflix with good production value, not that the HQ is not good production, but even better production Values than the HQ. And you're, you're going back and forth between YouTube and other sorts of things in your TV. ([Time 0:28:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fdc62d3f-1ea7-43e4-a2dc-b2c7e60b56ce)) - **TV Model Erodes Social Platforms' Moats** - Moving to a television model strips social platforms of social-graph moats and makes their content easier to replicate. - Newport warns this intensifies competition and undermines incumbent social giants' advantages. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, this is an argument that I made in that 2022 article in the New Yorker that I talk about all the time, TikTok and the fall of social media giants. I reference it all the time because I think it's like the most important article I've written that no one's read, but it actually like was getting at some really core ideas. So I keep coming back at it to push. The big point there is that the competitive advantage that the social media giants had, that the Facebooks and the Metas and the Twitters of the world had, was their social graphs. The fact that people painstakingly as first adopters put in the effort to click on people they wanted to follow or they knew. And as long as those services were built around using those social graphs to produce interesting content, they had a moat that other competitors couldn't cross. Once the early Facebook excitement was gone, the early Twitter excitement was gone, no one was going to bother to go through all that work of following people and building their friends On another platform. When Internet media moves towards television, you've got to throw out those social graphs. It's not really that relevant anymore. And this is exactly what we see Instagram doing. It's exactly what we see, you know, Twitter trying to move towards. They want to be like TikTok. What was the numbers we had before? It was something like only 7% of time spent on Instagram is looking at content produced by a friend or keeping up with a friend. Everything else is just watching videos created by other people. Yes, that moves you more towards television, which is very lucrative. But now you're a television network without a competitive advantage that other people can't replicate. ([Time 0:30:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed839a45-700c-4e43-87f6-bc8d17a82d59)) - **TVization Makes Abstention Easier** - As internet media becomes recognizably 'TV', cultural norms will make abstention easier and socially acceptable. - Newport thinks this shift helps those seeking deep, focused lives by recoding feeds as distraction. Transcript: Cal Newport I believe that abstention from a lot of this becomes a lot easier as the internet-based media moves towards television. Why? Because this is what happened with television. Like we know what television is, and it very culturally normal but yeah it's maybe on average people have your tv on 77 hours a day but like if you were talking to you know noam chomsky he'd Be like yeah i don't watch a lot of tv we're like yeah of course you don't like that's that's you you have other things you're doing that are more like a intellectually demanding and you Read more books or whatever uh it was very normal to be like, I don't watch a lot of TV. No one questioned it. And in fact, by the generation of like our kids, things had shifted and parents think a lot about screen time and like, I don't want you to watch too much TV. Like that's not good for you. We were very used to this idea that like, it's not that TV is poison, but like you probably don't want to do a ton of it. And it's completely normative to be like, I self-define by not watching a lot of TV. For a while, internet-based media had grabbed this sort of cultural high ground where they would basically argue this is necessary to function in civic society. That somehow these services, these social media services, what you were doing on your phone was just part of being an informed citizen. It's how politicians were elected and news was spread. It's the new digital town square. It's where people are being expressed, where people could find other groups, which is where activism happened. There's this moment where it was like, you have to use all these services, right? Or it's somehow weird or disengaged or eccentric not to. But as the internet-based media moves more towards TV, it'll be so much easier not to use it or use less of it. No one is like, what do you mean you don't listen to Bravo? Like no one would say that in 1996, like you don't watch the Real Housewives. What's wrong with you? No one would say that. Whereas today they're like, oh, you don't use TikTok. It still seems a little bit weird. I think that will change. Once things are TV, we know how to deal with TV. We know it is not vital and we're completely okay with the idea of not being big TV watchers. ([Time 0:33:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/554605a2-e968-4dbb-b6d1-1139628855f2)) - **Use AI And Time Blocks To Cut Dev Distractions** - Use coding assistants (autocomplete/agents) to reduce browser-based searching and distractions while coding. - Time block deep work and set explicit rules to avoid browsing temptations during coding sessions. Transcript: Speaker 2 As a software engineer, I have a web browser open constantly. This distracts me a lot. I started using Claude.app instead of my browser. This has basically eliminated my distractions. What do you think about this? Cal Newport All right, so I have a specific answer for you and then a larger, more general answer for people thinking about their work in general. My specific answer is, look, think that's great right uh if you had your browser open because i'm assuming you had it open because you were looking up just to give some context for non-computer Developers to look up things that were relevant to the coding you were doing this used to be the standard rhythm of doing computer coding is that you would often have a site like stack Overflow open and you would search for what's the function call here, how do I do this? And so now you had a browser open, you could look at other things. If you're using cloud.app, you could do things like tab complete, etc., where it will give you these answers, like directly in the thing where you're writing the code. You don't have to go over to a web browser and look things up. Ironically, it was language models tuned in part on these humor interactions that kind of just sucked it all in and replicating it to some degree so i think that's good if you start using Code agents you're going to have a separate problem so not to just like quickly differentiate this there's kind of two ways that ai is intersecting development one is what i think of As like the autocomplete tab complete type of tools which is where you're writing computer code and you can say like hey finish this function for me or can you fill in this function header And it you like press tab and it like does it for you behind the scenes that's all implemented by a single call to a language model so the thing you're typing in like makes a prompt to a language Model hey here's the existing code can you finish this like with a function that does whatever a language models are good at that you get the answer back and then the the editing environment Puts that right in there right agents on the other hand coding agents are going to do many steps on your behalf so this is where you say like uh i need to build like this sort of prototype A simple application to do something internally is going to be useful. And you're going to actually have a program that goes in a loop and it's going to ask the language model, like, okay, give me a plan, like a multi-step plan for doing this. And then the program takes that plan and it's like, great, we're now going to do step one. And so then I'll tell the language model, okay, here's the first step we want to do. Give me the, maybe it's produce code for whatever. Give me the code for doing that. The language model sends it back. And you go in this loop where you continually prompt the language model step by step. What do you want to do next? What do you want to do next? Until it thinks it's done. So coding agents allow you to sort of have AI automate longer, more complicated steps than you can get with just asking it one time to do something. I've heard from a lot of developers who use those for producing prototypes or more complicated code is that there's downtime. It takes a while. There's a lot of back and forth with the language model and your language models aren't fast in returning their answers. And so they have downtime in while they're waiting for their agents to finish things. So you need a good deep distraction for those downtimes. If you use a coding agent, something that's not going to be emotionally arousing and something whose context is very different than your work. That's usually my advice about deep distraction. Don't look at your email because that context is very similar to the work you're doing. That's going to confuse your brain. MLB trade rumors is probably fine because it's like a completely different context. It's not going to have as much interference. All right, but here's the bigger point, and this applies to everybody. Why were you so distracted by having your web browser open? Like, why not just say, I don't look at other things on my web browser when I'm working on this? And the reason is because you're not time blocking. So the bigger point I want to make here is if you're time blocking, so you're like, this is what I'm working on And these are the minutes I'm working on it during, like from one to two 30, I'm working on code. When you time block, when you have a particular, you know what you're doing for how long, it's much easier to say, here's my rule about time blocks. If it's like a deep work time block, I don't look at other things other than the work I'm doing. The only commitment you have to make now is do I follow my time block rule, my single rule? And so if you go off and you go to email or go to YouTube or something like that, it's very clear you're violating the rule. And you have to kind of live with that mentally. Like, I guess I'm not able to, you know, obey my own simple rules. If you don't time block, you're like, let me just kind of like work on stuff. The problem is that it's very reasonable that at some points you need to take breaks. At some points you need to check email. At some point it makes sense. You might want to go look at some YouTube. You can't just work like a robot all day long. But if you don't have a structure for your time, you have to figure out when those breaks or context switch happens on the fly. And now your brain is going to have a continuous argument with yourself. What about now? What about now? What about now? What about now? Like any minute is a possible minute. You could be taking a break and that's not that unreasonable. And so now you're going to lose that argument like every six or seven minutes and you get a much more distracted flow because there's no simple rule you're violating. Your brain's like, we're going to take a break. We have to check our email at some point. And we checked it now. Like, what did we do that was wrong? But if you time block, you say, no, I have an email checking block at 2.30. And I'm in a deep work block. And I don't check email during deep work block. It is clear as day if you go and check your email anyways that you're violating a rule that you set up to make your own working experience better. So if you have that problem more generally, whether you're a computer programmer or not, time block. ([Time 0:38:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0f5719f4-6cd5-4bb5-a739-5d24dd45ae6d)) - **Pick Low-Interference Breaks During AI Downtime** - When using coding agents, plan for downtime while models respond and prepare low-interference 'deep distractions'. - Avoid context-overlapping breaks like email; choose unrelated activities to reduce cognitive interference. Transcript: Cal Newport And you're going to actually have a program that goes in a loop and it's going to ask the language model, like, okay, give me a plan, like a multi-step plan for doing this. And then the program takes that plan and it's like, great, we're now going to do step one. And so then I'll tell the language model, okay, here's the first step we want to do. Give me the, maybe it's produce code for whatever. Give me the code for doing that. The language model sends it back. And you go in this loop where you continually prompt the language model step by step. What do you want to do next? What do you want to do next? Until it thinks it's done. So coding agents allow you to sort of have AI automate longer, more complicated steps than you can get with just asking it one time to do something. I've heard from a lot of developers who use those for producing prototypes or more complicated code is that there's downtime. It takes a while. There's a lot of back and forth with the language model and your language models aren't fast in returning their answers. And so they have downtime in while they're waiting for their agents to finish things. So you need a good deep distraction for those downtimes. ([Time 0:40:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/16a87758-f71f-470a-aaed-fe15308965d0)) - **Time Block Around Interruptions, Track Time** - For jobs with frequent unpredictable interruptions, make intention your metric: re-time-block after each interruption. - Track and present 'receipts' if managers expect more uninterrupted work than your role allows. Transcript: Cal Newport Work. How do I adjust? Well, first of all, I want to make clear that in your position as you describe it, this idea of like you deal with unpredictable but urgent interruptions and then do your best to get other Stuff done in between, that's your job. Like that's what they expect you to do. It's not as it feels like for a lot of knowledge workers that their job is X. But this other thing, which is like really not that important, keeps coming in and interrupting them from doing their job. And that's really frustrating because you're like, I'm measured on producing X, but you keep throwing like Zoom invites at me for nonsense and i can't do x but you're never gonna know It's your fault you know you're just like why aren't you doing more x where in your job is like no this is like bert's job handle physical breakdowns and there's these other things he works On as he can so like there's there's nothing to be frustrated about here this is like what you signed up for but your goal is not to eliminate the disruptions because that's part of your Job. Your goal is not to resent the interruptions because it's part of your job. It is to do the best you can with the time you happen to have in between interruptions, which some days could be very little and some weeks could be like a ton. And the key there is intention. All right, I build a time block plan at the beginning of the day. So I have intention for my time that I can control. Then a bolt breaks and I have to go spend three hours fixing it. When I'm done, I come back and say, what's the best plan I can make for the time that remains? It'll look very different than your initial plan, but you have intention for what you're going to do with the time that remains in the day. That's the name of the game here. Intention, not completion. Your goal is not to create a plan you're able to stick with. It's that you keep coming back to saying, what can I do with the time I have that's going to be most useful? Now, if you multiply that over many weeks and many months, what you get is someone who's handling the urgent stuff and is doing as well as anyone could possibly do, making the most of the Time that they have outside of it. You want to return to intention but don't have any qualms about i have to fix my time block schedule three times a day because i'm constantly being interrupted by this other part of my Job the only exception would be if your bosses expect you to be doing more with that other time than is possible like you're being very intentional like why didn't you do these other optional Projects? Well, now you have a record like, Oh, I time block. I keep track of my time. Let me show you what's going on here. On average, I'm getting like two interruptions on the scale of like three to four hours per day, which is leaving about like this many hours that is fractured between a few different, Um, stretches. I'm very organized with my time. I, I time block my time after every interruption. This is about how much progress I'm able. I'm able to put about like 10 hours per week on one of these projects. These projects really take about 30. This is like a three week project. Like, oh, okay. Well you have the receipts. We get it. We get what you're saying. So if that's the case, bring the receipts, but probably people are just, you're, if you're doing this, you're time blocking the time you have left, you're doing much better than everyone Else there who's in a similar automation engineering position. And they're probably already very impressed. So again, your goal is to keep having intention. ([Time 0:44:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2e1a2864-d8b5-410c-ab64-0881e4673dff)) - **Ditch Stressful Media To-Do Lists** - Avoid maintaining exhaustive 'to-read/watch' lists that cause stress and fear of missing out. - Instead, pick what excites you in the moment and consume that without guilt. Transcript: Cal Newport Review. I mean, you really should only be reading my books and articles and watching this podcast. Let's be honest. And I don't want to be hyperbolic, but if you don't, if you watch and read other things, there's like a 14 to 15% increased chance that you die this month. My new marketing technique, Jesse. And people with death if they don't watch our podcast. I'll tell you what, Scott, those type of lists stress me out. Some people love them. They stress me out. The way I see it is like, look, do I always have something interesting to read? Yes. Do I have no shortage of like interesting things to watch when the time comes around? Yes. Do I have no shortage of podcasts to listen to when I have downtime? Yes. Then I'm happy because the problem is I make lists of all this stuff. Then I feel lost for not doing the stuff on my list that I haven't gotten to, but the list are technically speaking could be unending. I mean, there's no shortage of books you could be reading. There's no shortage of like visual content you could be watching. So why create loss, right? I'm just like, what am I excited about? Let me do that now. I, with my books, I definitely do this. It's like, what am I in the mood for right now as I get to this new book or movies? Like, okay, I have some time. Like, what am I excited about now? ([Time 0:47:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0b032e01-b6d8-4efe-9246-06d4d15d2c71)) - **Model Abstention; Avoid Holiday Lectures** - Avoid lecturing family about phone habits; model abstention and gently share resources later. - Use gratitude and example to influence friends rather than public confrontation during holidays. Transcript: Speaker 2 As I become more aware of the attention economy and more intentional with how I spend my time, it's hard to see family and friends scrolling on TikTok as their main hobby and not feel judgment Towards them. It's especially hard during the holiday season when I spend lots of time with them. What should I do? Cal Newport Usually my recommendation, and do this as many times as you can, is when you see that, like a young relative or something that's on their phone kind of stuck in TikTok, come up quietly, Knock the phone out of their hand, yell deep work, and then sprint out of the room. And just do that again. And, you know, it'll be kind of like a fun thing you'll be beloved for. It's a lot of like knocking the phone out of people's hands, yelling deep work, and running out of the room. That's what I do. I'm not invited to a lot of parties. That's what I do. No, look, it is hard because you care about these people and you're like, this is not great. I have this feeling when I see my students or whatever or friends of my son just looking into this phone all the time. This is just not great for you. You're missing out on the world. This is just abusing your brain. It's like, I don't know, like you see a baby smoking a cigarette. It's funny. Don't get me wrong. I've given my share of babies cigarettes for the fun. But you know, like long-term, this is probably not good for you. That's the way I feel about it. However, like with substance abuse or whatever, you can't force someone to change and lecturing them is not going to work. Life without it. So they see it going on and you have gratitude for all that you are able to enjoy because you're not on your phone all the time. ([Time 0:52:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4faea53-0603-44ca-aeae-4fc6857ebe54)) - **Short-Form Video Correlates With Lower Attention** - Research links short-form video use to reduced attention and more indoor, sedentary time. - Newport cites meta-studies and John Haidt on phone use correlating with less outdoor activity. Transcript: Speaker 2 Have you come across anything saying that endless scrolling makes people less motivated to be physically active as well as adversely affecting their attention span? Cal Newport Yeah, there's data for both. We've talked about both on the show, mainly the attention span one. There's some good John Murdoch data in the Financial Times. We did some podcasts about this earlier in the fall where as we get to the smartphone era, you see trouble with concentrating, trouble with attention just goes up. There's some new research out in September, a big meta study looking at short form video in particular, like you get on TikTok or Instagram Reels, and they found a definite impact on Attention. So your attention goes down the more that you use those particular types of content. So we know that's out there. John Haidt talks about the connection between more phone usage and spending more time indoors. So we spend less time outdoors as we spend more time on our phone. Scott Galloway in his new book, Notes on Being a Man, talks about this idea that the phone offers for like digital simulations of other types of stuff we would normally do, including Stuff outside. That's often where you get things like peace and challenge. ([Time 0:54:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/808ba073-729c-4b2b-b52d-f94fd8460367)) - **From Exit To Lifestyle-Centered Deep Life** - Jeff sold part of his company at 27, chased prestige, failed to find satisfaction, then rebuilt a calm, study-focused lifestyle. - He engineered daily routines (study groups, exercise, limited email, phone boundaries) that improved his happiness. Transcript: Cal Newport However, unsure what to do with my life, I kept vaguely striving for more. And by doing so, I fell into one of the pitfalls that cal talks about after a year-long break i knew i wanted to do something ambitious applying the grand goal strategy i pondered working In biotech or producing movies and eventually got a prestigious job in finance i just wanted something big and was convinced an impressive enough job would make my life all around better. Over the following year, it became clear that this wasn't the case. While the role was prestigious, I didn't care for the work. During this time, the company I still own spun off a brand new brand in the rock climbing industry. I was a passionate rock climber, so I thought that's what my real calling was. And I should walk away from prestige and instead work on something I was passionate about. The first months were exhilarating but then reality quickly set in and my day-to life consisted of the same company-related admin I had successfully gotten out of years prior. I then stepped out of that business last year and took the question what to do with my life seriously. I was able to focus on what my day-to should look like. First I got disciplined and organized. I was able to tackle a bunch of home admin stuff that was bothering me. Now I'm studying philosophy and literature basically full-time, sitting in cafes, reading or attending lectures, and meeting with my study groups. I host short story dinners. I run every morning and play tennis several times a week. I'm spending more quality time with my kids. I only check my email on Wednesdays and Fridays. I leave my phone in the car after 5pm. I'm only reachable via backup phone. I've also reduced my total travel time. Overall, I'm calm and without haste most of the time. All right, this is a great example of lifestyle-centric planning. So what we see in Jeff is actually two different philosophies. He ends up with lifestyle-centric planning, but he begins with what he called the grand goal strategy. In my new book, I think of this sometimes as the phase shift model of the deep life. This idea of like one big radical change will make your life all the way better. Oh, I'm now in a very prestigious job. That will fix everything. And we often think the radicalness of the change correlates to the radicalness of the improvement it will give. The problem is your life is built up of many different parts. And what matters to how you feel is your daily subjective experience with these different parts of your life. So making a single radical change or producing or chasing a single radical goal, it might take one area of your life and like make it better or maybe temporarily make it better, but it Might make a lot of other areas of your life worse. Like we see this classically with like very prestigious jobs. This idea of like, I have respect for what I do or what I do has like big financial impact that goes up and that's good, but it might step on every other part of your life. Your time with your kids, your, your physical health, you know, your ability to like enjoy the world, other types of interest you have, all of those are made worse. And so you add these things up negative, negative, negative, negative, this one positive, and you end up net negative. So like the single change fixing everything doesn't really make sense. Lifestyle-centric planning says, why don't I just actually survey my entire life and say, what do I want my daily experience to be like? So think about all these different buckets. What types of things do I want on a regular basis? Great. How do I engineer my life to have those things? And that's what Jeff ended up doing. Finally, the details don't matter. What matters is he was thinking about, I want to be intellectually engaged. I want to spend time with my kids. I want to be on top of things. I want to, you know, exercise. He like has this vision for a life. And he was like, oh, I could make that happen because of my current financial resources, this or that. And that is making him much happier than pursuing like a single thing that was very prestigious. ([Time 0:56:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68907b92-6934-4cf4-b019-ca5f5455f568)) - **Design Daily Life, Not One Grand Goal** - Lifestyle-centric planning focuses on designing the daily experience across many life areas rather than one grand goal. - Newport argues this approach yields more durable wellbeing than chasing a single prestigious change. Transcript: Cal Newport So what we see in Jeff is actually two different philosophies. He ends up with lifestyle-centric planning, but he begins with what he called the grand goal strategy. In my new book, I think of this sometimes as the phase shift model of the deep life. This idea of like one big radical change will make your life all the way better. Oh, I'm now in a very prestigious job. That will fix everything. And we often think the radicalness of the change correlates to the radicalness of the improvement it will give. The problem is your life is built up of many different parts. And what matters to how you feel is your daily subjective experience with these different parts of your life. So making a single radical change or producing or chasing a single radical goal, it might take one area of your life and like make it better or maybe temporarily make it better, but it Might make a lot of other areas of your life worse. Like we see this classically with like very prestigious jobs. This idea of like, I have respect for what I do or what I do has like big financial impact that goes up and that's good, but it might step on every other part of your life. Your time with your kids, your, your physical health, you know, your ability to like enjoy the world, other types of interest you have, all of those are made worse. And so you add these things up negative, negative, negative, negative, this one positive, and you end up net negative. So like the single change fixing everything doesn't really make sense. ([Time 0:58:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/904afa0b-8548-4311-a692-37f2653dd0dd)) - **Quit Social Media Quietly And Keep Focus** - If quitting social media helps focused study or work, stay firm; most people won't notice your absence. - Treat social apps like optional entertainment, not civic essentials, and continue with your grad-school priorities. Transcript: Cal Newport Go Nats. My grad program is very demanding, and I find myself engaged in a lot more deep work or focus time than I did in undergrad. Because of this, I decided to ditch Instagram, which was my only form of social media. I have been much more time efficient and focused since removing it from my life. This brings me to my question. Since my friends are still very active on Instagram and post pictures wherever we go, I often wind up in photos. But now I don't have a way to see, comment on, or moderate the photos of me that are shared online. I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to deal with this. Thanks a bunch. Well, welcome to DC. Hopefully you're joining Nat fandom on an upswing. We could do a whole episode on the youth movement over at the Nats, but we won't for now. A couple of points. Good for you for leaving Instagram as a grad student, right? Your job is to use your brain that gets in the way of using your brain. It's smoking to a professional athlete. The grad program who brought you on is expecting you to use your brain. Don't do things to make you worse at doing that. So I think it's a really good idea for anyone in one of these sort of time-limited elite intellectual types of positions like being a grad student to be like, I really don't get near any Type of algorithmically curated short-form content. Like that's cigarettes to an athlete and I'm trying to make the major league squad. I can't deal with that. So good decision. I'm not surprised that you're seeing advantages. All right. So what do you do about your concerns of not being able to comment on or curate photos of you online? That's all fine. Don't comment on or curate photos of you online. Your friends will quickly learn, oh, she's not on Instagram right now because she stopped using it while she's at grad school. And they move on. That's it. Part of the issue that I would say, part of what makes social media clever is maybe the better way of saying it. Part of what makes it clever was it sort of sold us on this idea that I don't want to sound dismissive, but that we're more important than we are. And what I mean by that is it creates a sense of that you have an audience. And even whether it's people you know even right not so like a broad audience but that like you're part of this is part of what made it so compelling early on uh you have your you have this Audience you're part of this great conversation they want to see what you're posting and they're commenting on and you're commenting on other people's stuff and it's like you're part Of this great conversation and you'll be missed if you leave but that's never really been the case it's why in my 2016 book deep work i had a chapter that said quit social media and what It really meant if you read the chapter, it said, leave it for 30 days without telling anyone and see if anyone notices. Because what would happen is people in their mind, they imagine all these like friends and people who are commenting are essentially in like the seats of a theater, like really eagerly Waiting for you to come out on stage and be like, look around really solemnly and then say, photo of my dinner. And they're all like, oh, there it is. We've been, we've been waiting for that. And they're all like high-fiving each other and like, you know, whatever, but that's not really what happens. It's actually a collectivist attention model where the Facebook was the one to innovate back in 2004, 2005 is like, it's just like, I will comment on things. You comment. If you comment on things I comment on, that's just the game. And then we all feel like people are commenting. And when people would do this experiment from deep work like oh god no one noticed I was gone I wasn't at the center of this like grand conversation I wasn't this this uh this uh producer On stage everyone was waiting for it was all just sort of a game of like showing fake attention to each other no one cared great I'm not going to go back and I think you'll have a similar experience Right um it make these these services want to make you feel like you are it's very important what you're doing, but for the most part, it really isn't. You will be fine. The few friends that notice will learn pretty quickly like, oh, you don't use Instagram anymore. Good for you. And that'll be that. So stay with the course. ([Time 1:04:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6ee7ace1-d303-4e15-8c7c-75c3fe9a4d4d)) - **Cal's November Reading Mix** - Cal shares the five books he read in November 2025, ranging from Disney histories to religious studies and Scott Galloway. - He uses these reads to illustrate varied intellectual interests and restorative reading habits. Transcript: Cal Newport I usually aim to read five books per month. I've grouped them this month, Jesse, by topic. Kind of like two major topics here, just kind of randomly, but that's the way I grouped them. All right. My first two, these are both Disney-related because I guess that's how I deal with my stress these days. That's my hard drinking is Disney-related topics. I read David Cohen's book, Reality Land. It's a book about just the business history of the florida resort as opposed to the california result because i read that other book about disneyland because we went to disneyland and So this was a book about disney world and it was about like how they got the land and how they acquired it and the growth strategy and like that stuff is my it's so different than anything I do in life it's very non-stressful it was very good it was a very well researched book i guess it's one of the big ones. Then I read the other Disney-ish book. It was really about the Sherman Brothers, but it was called Becoming Mary Poppins. A new book just came out, Todd James Pierce. It's about the making of that movie in the early 1960s, but it's also a lot about the songwriting duo, the Sherman Brothers, who really helped innovate the cinema form of the family musical As a thing that became big again in the 1960s and so it's interesting hearing about what the world of professional songwriting was like in mid-century or prior to mid-century their Their dad was like a early 20th century songwriter that was really interesting uh some of the the disney stuff was interesting too like they really were kind of betting the farm on this Movie succeeding it was it was interesting to hear also how the disney live action film studio was very small compared to the big major studio like they couldn't they couldn't really Do these epics on the scale that like a paramount or universal could do and so like that stuff was interesting then I moved on to a pair of religious books. One, it was like, they couldn't be more opposite. One is very, very popular audience. The other is an academic audience. So the popular audience when I read was Rob Bell's book, what is the Bible? So I've been reading these books about like how to understand and interpret the Bible. Like what, who wrote it? How do they wrote it? Like why, what about it is, you know, what about the writing is so interesting and profound? Because if you just kind of read it through a modern context, like these are weird stories, uh, you don't get a great experience. I read that book a couple months ago. I like popular book. Rob Bell wrote a book on it. Bell's an interesting guy. I think he's, he's a, he's a Christian pastor. I don't know if he's evangelical or not or with one of the mainline Protestant denominations. He's super well-educated, right? Like I think he speaks Greek. He speaks Hebrew. He's really studied this stuff. But he writes definitely for a super mass audience. Conversational with a lot of single line paragraphs and bolding. And it's like really, really like simplified style, but some really good points captured in it. So it was a quick read, but I found it kind of interesting. Then I went and read Jonathan Sachs' book, Tradition in an Untraditional Age. So, you know, I'm a big fan of Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, his public facing books that connect religion with other schools of thought in the broader world, like science and religion, morality, Culture, these are fantastic books. He's a fantastic, fantastic writer. I wanted to get more acquainted with his more academic-style writing. So God help me, Jesse, I went back and found this book, which is a collection of more, like, academic essays he wrote. Really, these essays were dealing with like orthodoxy and its collision with modernity and grappling with a bunch of sort of like big thinkers in that field. 450-page beast of a book. But even his academic writing, I was like, this is I learned a lot. It was really interesting to learn about. I learned about this, like the collision of modernity with other types of uh traditional thought worlds itself i felt like was really useful even for like the techno criticism i do uh So it's a more academic book you know you're going to hear about like these like very specific thinkers and so it's if you're not used to academic writing i don't know it's not like a fun Read like rob bell's but i really enjoyed it I learned a lot. The final book I read was Scott Galloway's new book, Notes on Being a Man. I like Scott. I like, you know, I've been on his podcast. I think he's a great broadcaster, interesting character. This book, you know, the book captures like the stuff he talks about in book form. It's exactly what you would want. It's like he writes in the style that he talks. If you like his podcast, you're going to like the book. It's not a super bogged down in numbers. So he has statistics and it's not bogged down in stories of other people. It's really like him talking a lot about his own life and his own thoughts and kind of riffing, which is probably the right format for Scott. I also think the book has been killing it because he's everywhere. His podcasts are super popular, but he's very good on TV. So he does like every remaining legacy TV show with an audience. An author can go on. He did all of them. The morning shows, the view, Bill Maher, the morning Joe, because he's very good on TV. So there you go. There's all of them. So that was good. ([Time 1:09:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ff4744d2-743b-49b3-8710-1810e9479cbd))