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

Last year, when columnist Paul Krugman left the NYT, it seemed like yet another example of the traditional media crumbling. But Krugman, as it turns out, is doing great. His popular substack now reaches massive audiences and earns him a seven-figure salary. Inspired by this story, in the ideas segment of today’s episode, we take a closer look at key numbers relevant to whether paid newsletters can replace traditional print media. Then, in the practices segment, we study some viral advice for spending less time on your phone. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia DEEP DIVE: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone [0:02] PRACTICES SEGMENT: How to successfully delete social media [50:40] Is it ok to use ChatGPT to try to better understand some classics? [1:04:51] How do I decide what to write down when I use the notebook method? [1:06:10] For professional writers trying to succeed today, isn’t Substack the platform of the moment? [1:12:00] CAL’S READING UPDATE: Cal gives his weekly reading update [1:18:28] Airframe (Michael Crichton)The Great Train Robbery (Michael Crichton) Fantastic Voyage (Isaac Asimov) Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?cjr.org/analysis/paul-krugman-leaving-new-york-times-heavy-hand-editing-less-frequent-columns-newsletter.phpsubstack.com/@paulkrugmannatesilver.net/p/always-be-bloggingreallygoodbusinessideas.com/p/most-popular-substackspewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/rnz.co.nz/life/culture/any-attempt-to-simplify-elon-musk-is-futile-the-nz-cofounder-of-substackdaringfireball.net/2024/11/regarding_and_well_against_substackyoutube.com/watch?v=eUSBKj5ZQpo Thanks to our Sponsors: meetfabric.com/deeppipedrive.com/deepfactormeals.com/deep50offmonarch.com (Use code “DEEP”) Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Cal Newport?

  Right around this time last year, one of the big stories in the world of media was the announcement that the economist and columnist Paul Krugman was leaving the New York Times. I'm going to load here on the screen for people who are watching, one of the articles from around this period. You can see the headline was Paul Krugman on leaving the New York Times and the subhead says, "The paper wanted to take away his newsletter or make him write less frequently", he says. It goes on to summarize that Krugman was fed up with that. He felt like he was being pushed out and he left. Now, at the time when this all went down last year, I took it as yet another example

• 0:41Cal Newport?

  of this sort of slow motion dismantling of traditional media that we have been seeing during the entire era of the internet's rise. I mean, in an age of digital distraction, the business model for traditional media is really struggling to compete, right? Because on your phone, information is free and distraction is powerful. And if you want to know about your, about the news, your phone can deliver you dozens of algorithmically curated takes that are reduced down to pithy tweets or compelling short-term videos to make you feel like you're in the middle of all sorts of action. It's just more interesting and more accessible than a lot of traditional media. So it feels like the age in which experts like Paul Krugman attempt to make careful

• 1:22Cal Newport?

  sense of events in the pages of print publications is rapidly disappearing and that in its place is emerging a world in which all truth and expertise are vanishing, all information is becoming entertainment, all realities are becoming equally valid. But then, more recently, I came across something interesting. I was having coffee with someone who knows Krugman. And he told me, like, "Look, after the, after the Times, after he left the Times, Krugman started up a Substack", which, you know, you might think of like, "Oh, that's kind of sad. It's like the once famous TV personality now has the sort of low-rated podcast or whatever." But here's what my source told me. "No, no, you don't understand. Paul is killing it.

• 2:04Cal Newport?

  His subscriber count rivals the Times' Sunday print circulation. He's really impacting the conversation. And according to my source, his earnings have leaped comfortably into the seven-figure range." This is interesting to me because so often our narratives about the battle for depth in a distracted world are pessimistic, but in Krugman's tale, I see the glimmer of a perhaps more optimistic storyline. Is it possible that paid email newsletter subscriptions might be the foundation on which we can build a new type of professional journalism? Can a distributed network of respected and expert thinkers delivering thoughts in

• 2:46Cal Newport?

  long form essays offer competition to the nonsense and slop being delivered through attention economy apps? Or is Krugman just an outlier, one last hurrah of old media expertise being turned into money and the slide media towards TikTok is all but inevitable? These are the questions that we are going to tackle today in our ideas segment, and we are going to do so by looking carefully at the underlying numbers behind this story. It will help explain both what's going on in this new type of media and how it compares to what is going on or what's going on in the old. We spent a lot of time tracking down these numbers, so I think you're going to find some pretty interesting insights hidden in there. And then after we're done with that, we're going to try something a

• 3:31Cal Newport?

  little bit new. I'm experimenting with adding a practices segment to the show in which we explore practical ideas that you can consider in your own personal fight for depth in an increasingly distracted world. So in today's practices segment, we will look closer at some advice for ignoring your phone that has recently gone viral online. We'll try to figure out what's going on there. All right. So we've got a lot to cover. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about the fight for depth in an increasingly distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music.

• 4:17Cal Newport?

  All right. So what I've done here to try to structure our exploration of these questions is I've broken them out into a series of questions that we think of like sub questions on my own. So let's start with sub question. Number one, what actually is Paul Krugman doing? Let's take a closer look at that. But what I want to do here is load up on the screen for people who are watching, so just listening. This is Paul Krugman's Substack. I've loaded it up in the Substack app where we can see what he's up to. There's a couple of key numbers in here that I want to point out. One, the subscriber count, 505,000. Two, his ranking on here is number six in US politics. And three, if we look at this, we see the post frequency is quite regular. So his latest post was from seven hours ago as recording

• 5:02Cal Newport?

  this. The post before that was from a day ago. The post before that was from two days ago. The post before that was three days ago. So he's posting every day. Let's look at a sample quote post. I'm loading up his post from the day we're recording this. It's called Day of Infamy. Unfortunately, this isn't a bad dream. So this, this came out on January 6. So it's about January 6. And if we look at it, it's very short, right? Two paragraphs and a sentence. He's just making some quick observations. Now, he says at the beginning here, traveled yesterday, so no time for a full scale post, but I want to acknowledge this anniversary. All right, let's look at another one. Here's from the day before. This one is titled, The Real Don Ro, The Real Don Ro Doctrine, Seeking Cash

• 5:45Cal Newport?

  and an Ego Boost, Not Regime Change. This is about the Trump administration's assault on Venezuela. This just, you can see, this is a longer post, right? And it's not super long, but this is like a good 1,000, 1,200 word post. There's a musical coda at the end, which is fun. He has a table in here where you can see some numbers and a bunch of links to relevant information. So he's just trying to make sense of what was happening in the news. What is his subscription setup? Well, I'm going to click on, are you already subscribed? I'm a follower, I'm not subscribed. Let's click on upgrade to see the answer. Okay, so here we go. So here are the options. If you want to subscribe, it's $7 a month or $7 a year.

• 6:26Cal Newport?

  All right, so what you get, and here it says the free gives you occasional public post. And if you go to $7 a month, you get subscriber only post and the full archive, and you can post comments. I looked at this earlier. It looks like at the moment, he's posting every day and only one post a week is subscriber only. You get a lot of content, even if you're not subscribed. But for $7 a month, you will get all of the posts and you can participate in the comments. All right, so here's the question that we want to ask. Let's start with, how much money is he actually making? So how do we figure that out? We want, if we want to understand the Substack economy, the newsletter economy, let's use this example first. Is it true that he's making seven figures?

• 7:11Cal Newport?

  Well, we need to dive into the numbers here. So I'm going to start with what Substack itself, the formula that Substack itself says to use. We looked this up and Substack says for, you know, a standard newsletter with a free tier and a paid tier, you can expect somewhere between 5 to 10% of your subscribers to pay for the paid tier. The low end of that would be more like 3%. All right, so I'm going to load up here a table that we put together. And what we have here in the far left column is we have a row for different percents, right? So different percents of the, so maybe that, different percents of the subscribers that might have converted to pay, right? We don't know the answer for Krugman, but we'll, we'll look at three different scenarios.

• 7:54Cal Newport?

  Okay, 10% of his total subscribers paying, 5% and 3%. Then for each, we can calculate how many paid subscribers would that percent give us? How much monthly income that would then translate to? And then what does that shake out to per year? The simplify things here, I'm not taking out Substack's cut, but we could just, you know, reduce it by 10% if you wanted to do that. All right, so let's look at the, the really optimistic scenario for Krugman, which is that 10% of his 500,000 subscribers are paying for the tier. That would mean 10, he would have 50,000 paid subscribers in that case, 10% of 500,000, which would work out, good work if you can get it, Jesse, $350,000 a month?

• 8:36Cal Newport?

  Of subscription fees, which is a little over $4 million a year. All right, so let's look at the lower end of the range that Substack said to expect, which would be 5% of your subscribers pay. That would work out to be about 25,000 paid subscribers, which is $175,000 a month and a little over $2 million a year of income. Even if we jump down to the pessimistic scenario where only 3% of subscribers pay, that's still going to be 15,000 paid subscribers, which is $105,000 per month of subscriber fees,

• 9:14Cal Newport?

  which is about $1.26 million of average revenue. All right, so the answer to our first question, what has Paul Krugman been doing is we can say, look, in every reasonable scenario, his seven-day-a-week Substack has him doing much better financially than he could have been doing at the New York Times. And if he's in the best-case scenario, he is actually building up real wealth. He's making many millions of dollars a year. All right, second question in our investigation. How much does a newsletter like this actually require to run? Is this easy? Is it hard? They get some insight here.

• 9:59Cal Newport?

  We don't have Krugman himself talking in too much detail about his habits, but we have a similar blogger, not blogger, I guess newsletter writer they would say, who did write about the process. There's this article, I'll load it on the screen here for people who are watching. Nate Silver, who I think, when I looked it up, was ranked number 12 on the Substack Politics leaderboard as compared to number 7 for Krugman. So they're very similar-sized Substackers. Silver wrote this article, "Always Be Blogging: My Seven Tips for a Successful Substack." So we can look at Silver's article to get a sense of like, what actually goes into being someone who has a lot of subscribers, like him or Paul Krugman on Substack.

• 10:43Cal Newport?

  So he has seven pieces of advice. Number one, we'll go through them real quick. Always be blogging. He says, "I have to tell you that producing Silver Bolton is really hard work. It's often creatively fulfilling and enjoyable. And this year it was financially rewarding, but professionally, I'm the happiest I've been in years. But it's a lot of work." And if you scroll down here a little bit more, he says he keeps in mind, he has a picture here of Alec Baldwin from Glenn Ross with the always be closing chalkboard. And he's changed the last C to a B. So it now reads always be blogging. Like you gotta be writing a lot, right? That's what if you want to have a large subscriber base and a good conversion to pay it.

• 11:24Cal Newport?

  He's saying you have to write a lot at a minimum, three articles a week. How long does that take? Well, he says, if you ask me to chart out how I spent my time in the way that the American Time You Survey does, you'll find that I'm not actually working all that often. Sure, 40 or 50 hours a week, but I take most nights off from work. I travel a lot, both for work and for fun. I play a lot of poker, a wonderful but time intensive habit, and I have my share of weekday leisurely lunches. I do tend to put in some working hours on the weekend mornings afternoon. Still, it's not a crazy schedule. First of all, Jesse, it kind of put a little aside here about like the elite class of knowledge workers.

• 12:06Cal Newport?

  In his mind, he's like, look, I know this isn't really a hard job. I'm just working 50 hours a week because you know, he came out of, you know, he was running, he was at the New York Times, then ESPN put all this money into him building out this giant vertical that did sports and election predictions. When you're in those situations, you're just working all the time. So he's like, oh, I know it doesn't look like I'm working all the time because I'm not working at night. I think for people in that class, that's like, oh, I'm lazy. But I think the key number in here is 40 to 50 hours of work a week. So it takes about like a normal full-time job, a normal person full-time job. The other tips I'll go through quickly, they're a little bit less important, but they're kind of interesting. All right.

• 12:47Cal Newport?

  His second advice, if you want to succeed at Substack is to stretch singles into doubles. So you gotta know how you have like a good idea, how to make it a great idea, make the headline better, a better lead, like a better image, like that matters. Three, he says home runs come from timely differentiated content. I definitely have seen that on Substack. So you need the article, if it's timely to something that's actually happening in the world, like if you're a sports writer, there's a big thing that just happened like that day in sports and you get it out fast. But you also have a take that's different. If all you're doing is like summarizing what's going on. Then who cares? But if it's timely but unique, that's where the real numbers pop up. So he gives a kind of a cool example about this. He says, "The most popular post in Silver

• 13:31Cal Newport?

  Bulletin history is the one on Ann Seltzer's Iowa poll." So this was back from the presidential election last year. Dubiously and wrongly, so this poll, dubiously and wrongly, had Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, right? So I don't know if you remember this, Jesse, but like this one poll came out that was like, "Wait, Kamala Harris is doing unexpectedly well in Iowa." And people are like, "Oh, maybe that's a harbinger that she's actually doing better than we think because Ann Seltzer is a good pollster, but she just got it really wrong." But he wrote a post on this that he claims gave him a different angle. So if we look at what he actually wrote, "A shocking Iowa poll means somebody is going to be wrong." All right. So it was timely and he came at it with an angle of like, "Wait, someone could

• 14:12Cal Newport?

  be really wrong here." All right. What other advice? Measure twice and cut once. Yeah, you know, be prepared. Five, take a nose to tail approach to the newsletter. That's just him saying like, "Maybe you end up cutting something because it wasn't working in your post. You might be able to use that in another post, like a Q and A or roundup. So don't waste stuff that you already wrote." Six, writing well quickly is essential. I've got that skill, Jesse. I think you would, you would admit. Yes. Over the years, I have learned how to write. You would be surprised. Some of my email newsletters that seem kind of detailed take me like 45 minutes to write. It's just, I've been doing it for a long time. I mean, then seven, play the long game. So take time. All right. So how much work does a newsletter like this require? The answer we learned from Nate Silver, who has a comparable sized newsletter to Krugman, is that it's more or less comparable

• 14:57Cal Newport?

  to like a full-time journalism job. Not like a really high-end, I'm the publisher of the whole paper, but just like, yeah, this is similar to a job like in the 90s if you commuted to the Houston Chronicle and you worked and you were a journalist and you kind of commuted home in the evening. It's like, it's not less, but it's not a lot more. And it's flexible. As Silver says, you can go play poker, do other things because you're, you are your own boss. All right. We're making progress here. We're picking apart the numbers, what's going on with the newsletter economy. Question number three I want to tackle. How many other people are making a good living on Substack? All right, this is a tricky question and a critical question. Krugman's killing it. We crunched the numbers.

• 15:42Cal Newport?

  Silver's also killing it. He's a little bit smaller than Krugman, but he's doing very well. Are they the only two? Are there a huge number of people? This is a number that's hard to get. Substack doesn't like to break this out because it's like with influencers on Instagram. They want everyone to think that you never know, like you could be rich tomorrow, or you're only one viral video. So they don't really talk about these numbers. So we're going to have to try to pick this apart. How many people are actually making this type of making a good living? So let's start with the narrower question. How many people are making like a Krugman style living? Million dollar plus income from Substack? I found a reasonable source on this. Let me load this on the page now.

• 16:25Cal Newport?

  It's from a website called Really Good Business Ideas, but they took these numbers from from other sources. They had a key number in here that I am going to scroll down to. Okay. They went through all of the top categories in Substack. And Substack has leaderboards where they order by subscriber. Now, the different newsletters. And they went by categories and counted how many newsletters in each category had 500,000 or more subscribers. So that is exactly where Paul Krugman is. And remember, we did the math that said if you have 500,000 unpaid subscribers

• 17:07Cal Newport?

  or total subscribers on Substack, you're probably, under almost any scenario, doing million, if not multi-million dollars a year. All right, so here's what they found. I'll zoom in this. This is from just last year, like not long ago.

• 17:19Cal Newport?

  U.S. Politics had 15 newsletters with that many subscribers or more. Business had four. Technology had three. Food, drink and finance both had two. And then the other categories they looked with all had just one newsletter with 500,000 more subscribers, which works out to be 34 total newsletters they found that were at the Krugman level. All right, so how many Substack millionaires are there? It's like 34. It might be more because if you're a little bit below that and you have a good conversion, but like the number of newsletters that are in Paul Krugman's category, that's pretty small. It's going to be on, we could think of it in the order of like 50 or so newsletter subscribers. It's not very many people.

• 18:04Cal Newport?

  But let's refine this question a little bit more and let's ask instead, not how many people are making a million dollars plus, but let's instead ask, how many people are making a reasonable living on Substack?

• 18:21Cal Newport?

  And there's a lot of ways we could, we could try to figure this out, like what we mean by reasonable living, but let's just try to get a broader understanding here of how much money are people making when you're below that sort of very top of the heap type of newsletter. So here's the way we went after doing the research for this. We decided we would take five main categories. We looked at politics, culture, technology, business and finance. So some of the major categories and some of the smaller categories. And for each, what we looked at was the number 20 biggest newsletter on the leaderboard. So we wanted to drop down to that 20 spot. Like when you go down 20 spots in these categories,

• 19:03Cal Newport?

  how many subscribers do they have? And how much does that work out in terms of annual money? Because everyone above that spot would be making more. And then you can kind of imagine if we're doing some sort of distribution that the money will fall off from there as you head down the list, but maybe with some sort of gradualness. Okay. So that's given us a sense. If we zoom out now to the top 20 in each of these categories, where are we? So let me load this on the screen here for people who are watching. Politics is by far the most popular of the categories. The number 20 in the politics category, the number 20 most popular newsletters, actually Andrew Sullivan's, a DC native. I like Sullivan

• 19:43Cal Newport?

  a lot. He has right around 200,000 subscribers. If we use the same numbers from Krugman, I didn't want to look up the individual subscription fees for each. So let's just use $7 a month because that's like roughly what a lot of Substackers do. And let's use the moderate prediction with the lower end of Substack's expectation and what we would think of as the moderate prediction of a 5% conversion. That would lead to, in Andrew Sullivan's case, $840,000 a year. Now, I think that's probably accurate because I heard him multiple years ago, talk about his shift over to Substack. And when he first, he was saying something like, at the time, "I'm making $600,000 a year or more. This is great. Why would I ever go back to magazine journalism?"

• 20:27Cal Newport?

  So probably like 840 now, that makes sense. I would guess he's probably actually over a million because he has a high conversion rate. All right, the culture category. Now, this is slightly less popular. The 20th biggest newsletter had 130,000 subscribers. That works out to about $550,000 a year. With our assumptions, when we get to technology, now the 20th biggest only has 95,000 subscribers, but with our assumptions, that still works out to around $400,000 a year.

• 20:57Cal Newport?

  In business, interestingly, you think this would be bigger. There's 21,000 subscribers at the number 20 position. With our assumptions, this works out to $88,000 a year. And then if we look at finance, the number 20 was 16,000. And with our assumptions of $7 a month, that works out to about $67,000 a year. We've got to be a little bit careful with business and finance because from what I understand with those categories, it's not about having massive subscriber basis. It's about having a high-end subscriber basis that will pay a lot for your insights. If you're a finance newsletter, you don't need 500,000 subscribers, right? What you need is 1,000 people that are going to pay $500 a year because it's really valuable information for them.

• 21:39Cal Newport?

  So almost certainly, those number 20 ranked newsletters in business and finance are making a lot more than that. But we'll just stick with our assumptions for all categories to try to keep things fair. All right. So if we're going to answer this question of how many people are making a living, if we use something like $150,000 a year as like a cutoff of like, oh, a really good living you're making off of Substack, we see that in politics, culture, and technology, the top 20 newsletters are well above that.

• 22:11Cal Newport?

  And then if we get to business and finance, the top 20 are a little bit below it, but they're actually probably there because they're charging a little bit more. If we count up the total number of categories that we're being conservative, the number we came up with is you're going to end up with somewhere 500 plus, somewhere between 500 to 1,000, let's just say 500 to be conservative. You probably have like 500 plus people at this moment making a really good living, like $150,000 a year or more off of their Substack that they publish gross revenue. All right, so now we have numbers. I want to move on to try to figure out what does this mean in terms of Substack's

• 22:53Cal Newport?

  attempt to replace the failing print media? So question number four I want to ask, can this newsletter market grow to a comparable scale to print newspapers? Let's look at some numbers about the print market and say, can this, are we going to get close to being comparable or will this always be much smaller than whatever newspapers actually were? It's kind of hard to find numbers, but we, we looked into it and we, we've, we found various stats and statistics about the newspaper industry. I got to point out a couple here and then we're going to put them into a chart and compare them to what we know about Substack. All right, so this, there's this great 2023 fact sheet from Pew, the newspaper fact sheet.

• 23:38Cal Newport?

  I have this on the screen for people who were watching. It has a lot of numbers, but there's a couple I want to focus on. Here is the total estimated circulation of US daily newspapers. You can see that this kind of plateaus and peaks in this 1980, 1990s and it's around 60, 60 million is its estimated, that's weekday circulation. And then it falls. So if we look back at this, it falls off a cliff and by the time it gets to 2022, it's they estimate us down to about 20 million. So at its peak, you had 60 million daily newspapers. That was the circulation like printed and it's down to like 20 million.

• 24:19Cal Newport?

  So we can think of it like there are 60 million subscribers to newspapers and it's peak and now we're down to about 20 million. All right, how much money were they generating? There's another table in here. Estimated revenue, we got to scroll down a few and then we'll find in economics. Estimated advertising and circulation revenue of the newspaper industry. So, you know, they make money off subscriptions and advertisements. We add those two things.

• 24:46Cal Newport?

  We'll look at advertising primarily because the circulation money is small. Advertisings for the money is, again, we see a peak. Interestingly, came later. It's over here, right around like 2005, 2006. You peak around $50 billion of the total newspaper industry was how much they were making off their advertising. This really drops as we get down to these estimates for 2020 and 2022. This gets down to like nine, around nine or 10, nine, 10 to 11 billion, just depending on how you look at it. All right, so newspapers were pulling in as much as $50 billion and they have, it's sort of declined now quite precipitously.

• 25:26Cal Newport?

  And it's more like nine to 11 billion dollars in the sort of post pandemic era. There's one other number. I don't have it to show you, but I just, we found it from another source. How many people were working in this industry? Well, we got to narrow it down because that includes like the people who, the janitors and the buildings and the people who run the printers and the trucks. But if we, if we narrow it down to how many editors and reporters were employed by the newspaper industry? We found a source that said the peak happened in 1990. There's around 56,000 reporters and editors. By 2011, that had fallen to around 41,600. I'm going to guess today, that's probably more into like 20 to 30,000 range is how many like reporters and editors are employed by newspaper print media.

• 26:11Cal Newport?

  Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump back to our tables and let's put that, let's put these numbers all into our table here to try to make some sense of them. All right. But just as a reminder, we are going to look at newspapers and we'll look at both their peak and the more recent numbers because we have to see how they fell. Right? So if we look at circulation. We had 60 million subscribers at newspapers peak, down to something more like 20 million today. If we look at revenue, they've gone from like 50 billion at their peak in 2005 to now, if we're being generous, somewhere around $11 billion a year, sort of where the industry is now. In terms of writers and editors employed, it's gone from 56,000 at their peak,

• 26:53Cal Newport?

  and we estimate now it's probably around 25,000 people are employed. All right, let's now compare that to the numbers we found about, we want to compare that to the numbers we can find about newsletters. Are they anywhere near that now? Is there a reasonable scenario where newsletters could get to comparable numbers? Well, let's remember what we already established. We already established that there's somewhere between 500 and 500 and 1,000 to 1,000 writers making a full-time living on Substack. Let's look at my numbers here.

• 27:33Cal Newport?

  We found another source that said that Substack brought in $450 million in revenue in 2025 total. 10% of that went, you know.

• 27:46Cal Newport?

  Do I have that backwards? I think that's right. I think that's what we found, $450 million in revenue, and that it had 5 million paid subscribers. So let's add those numbers to our table. So like what we've added now is our equivalent of circulation for newsletters is the 5 million paid subscribers. So I'm not counting free newsletter subscribers. If you're not paying, I'm not counting you as equivalent to someone who was paying for a newspaper. We have 5 million paid subscribers, that's the circulation. Revenue is around $450 million. And the journalists are, I'm going to say 500, right? Because we calculated there was like 500 to 1,000 people making a living, a good living. And so I think that's the apples-to-apples comparison to journalists and editors in newspapers. All right.

• 28:32Cal Newport?

  And so if we look back up this table, we'll say, okay, these are much different, right? So right now, the newsletter economy is much smaller than the newspaper economy. You know, 5 million circulation versus even right now, newspapers are at 20 million. $450 million in newsletters versus right now, newspapers at 11 billion, most notably 500 kind of professional or full-time writers compared to something more like 25,000 right now.

• 29:03Speaker 01

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• 29:32Cal Newport?

  All right, let's take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors.

• 29:37Cal Newport?

  It's the new year, which means it's time to finally make progress on all those goals that you've been procrastinating on. Now, for many, this list includes making sure that you have enough life insurance to take care of the people that you love. Now, why do we put this particular chore off? Because it seems ambiguous and confusing. So let me tell you how you can solve this problem this new year.

• 30:00Cal Newport?

  Fabric by Gerber Life. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. It's made for busy parents like you. It's all online on your schedule and you can do it right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exams required. Even if you have life insurance for your employer, it may not be enough for protection that you and your family need. That's why you need Fabric. It has flexible, high-quality policies that fit your family and your budget, including things like $1 million in coverage for less than $1 a day. So join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes at meetfabric.com/deep. That's meetfabric.com/deep.

• 30:42Cal Newport?

  M-E-E-T fabric.com/deep. Policies issued by Western Southern Life Insurance Company, not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Now, I also want to talk about our friends at Pipe Drive. When it comes to sales, efficiency is everything. Too much time manually entering data and chasing documents means less time closing deals. That's where today's sponsor, Pipe Drive, comes in. It's a top-rated sales CRM tool for small and medium businesses. Now, here's why I love Pipe Drive. It's all about one of my favorite productivity strategies. Automation. With Pipe Drive, you can automate just about any step of your sales process for your entire team, from scheduling sales calls to email

• 31:26Cal Newport?

  marketing. It allows you to dedicate more of your precious attention to high priority tasks. And this matters. Teams using automation are working 40% faster and closing three times more deals per month. Jesse and I are already talking about how we might use Pipe Drive to try to automate some of our interaction with listeners with their questions for the show. But here's the thing, Pipe Drive is a powerful, simple CRM that is built by salespeople for salespeople. You should consider joining the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. And right now, when you use my link, you'll get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/deep to get

• 32:09Cal Newport?

  started. That's pipedrive.com/deep, and you can be up and running in just minutes. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show. But what we care about is where this is going. This is all kind of new. So what we need is a good estimate of where we think the industry is going to go in terms of these numbers. And to get a optimistic estimate that we're not just making up, we found this article here. This is an interview. This comes from a New Zealand newspaper, because I guess Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is from New Zealand. So they did a article about him. This is from two months ago. This is from November. And they're just, they're talking about him,

• 32:52Cal Newport?

  and he's given a lot of information and thoughts about how Substack is doing. But here's the key thing I want to pull out. They sort of ask him at the end, "How big can this grow? What's your goal here?" And here's his line, "I don't see anything in the laws of physics that should prevent Substack from getting to more than 50 million paid subscribers." So they're at 5 million now. He thinks the internet and the environment, based on their data, their goals are, we should be able to 10x that. We should be able to, if we grow this right, to have about 50 million people who are paid subscribers on Substack. So let's use that as our index for the best-case future for Substack. And here's what we get. We now say, okay, what is their circulation? Well, they have 5 million paid subscribers now, but that would go up to 50 million in this scenario.

• 33:37Cal Newport?

  Revenue, they have 450 million now. If we just 10x that, that goes up to 4.5 billion and 500 people making a living, again, was straight up 10x that to something more like 5,000. Now, this is getting interesting because what we are seeing is newsletters now, or in this sort of best case scenario of where they're hoping they'll go, don't compare and don't really compare to newspapers at their peak. The exception here will be in circulation because newspapers had a circulation of 60 million at their peak versus 50 million paid Substack subscribers in this future scenario.

• 34:20Cal Newport?

  When we look at revenue, newspapers were bringing in 50 billion versus more like 5 billion in the optimistic scenario for Substack, and they had 56,000 people working as compared to 5,000 in Substack. But if we compare that future scenario for Substack to where newspapers are kind of right now, it's comparable. So we could kind of imagine a split. Like Substack has many more paid subscribers than there's current newspaper circulators. It's bringing in comparable revenue to what newspapers are. It's an order of magnitude off in terms of number of people working full time, but it's in the realm of what we have right now, full time in newspapers. And if we look at these numbers with an even more optimistic hat on,

• 35:05Cal Newport?

  we can actually inflate, there's a case to inflate some of these. So let's put this back up on the screen here for a second, Jesse. We can inflate this revenue number. So yeah, right now they're making 450 million. So if you 10x the subscribers, you can imagine 4.5 billion. There are other ways to make revenue. Once you have a successful Substack, which newspapers, that's going into their revenue numbers. We could also factor that in here. Like for example, You have to factor in something like paid ads, right? So you could, you could have ads on your free version of your newsletters. This is something, I did some numbers, let's see if I can find these. I have some numbers on this from our own ad agency.

• 35:42Cal Newport?

  So right now, for example, you can get a, if you have, it's possible to get a $35 CPM on just a display ad that you put on your newsletter. That means you get $35 for every thousand people that read your newsletter. So you could use this to convert unpaid subscribers into a revenue source. So if you have for even numbers here, 100,000 subscribers and you have a 50% open rate. So you have, each email generates 50,000 people read them. You use that 50,000 reading, that's what the CPM is calculated on.

• 36:24Cal Newport?

  That works out to be about $1,750 newsletter. So for each newsletter you send out, that ad, if 50,000 people actually read it, will generate 15, about $1,700. If you're publishing, like Nate Silver recommends, three newsletters a week that are getting those open rates, that's quarter million dollars a year. So there's more revenue that's latent here. There's also events, there's also speaking, there's also higher tiers. So, you know, I think this is the right way to answer this question. Can Substack become comparable to print media? Or maybe we should say paid newsletters more generally? And the answer is like, yeah, it could be comparable to sort of where, maybe not in always the peak, but sort of where that industry is now as it's like two thirds of its way down, it's the scent.

• 37:08Cal Newport?

  So we can imagine the two charts of their successes, newspapers come down, paid newsletters can meet it relatively soon and maybe go a little bit and then go beyond that as those fall offs. There is a sense of a little bit of a replacement being possible. All right, question number five.

• 37:23Cal Newport?

  Is Substack Media, Newsletter Media more generally, better or worse than the newspaper media that it's replacing? So, let's say it does do this. Are we better or worse? I think we can make a couple of arguments for each. There are certain ways in which paid email newsletters are worse than newspapers. Newspapers have fact checking, copy editing, and content editing. They also have large liability exposure, but they're very careful about, you know, traditionally what they print. Remember like the Washington Post, you know, was quick to print something that would have been completely, it was what was being echoed all over social media. We talked about this before on the show. This was the Covington kids at the mall, and there was like a picture taken of one

• 38:05Cal Newport?

  of the kids and a Native American, they're looking at each other real closely. And social media was like, yeah, like, these kids are terrible, and they're just like being, you know, arbitrarily mean to indigenous people. And the Washington Post was like, great, we'll publish that. They're kind of feeling the vibe of social media. And the student, the kid's family's like, that's not what happened, and you defamed us. And we're going to sue you. And it was somewhere between 20 or 50 million dollars, some huge, like, victory they had on that, because there's huge liability exposure. But because of that, as a reader of print newspapers, it's different than looking at social media, or really looking at a newsletter where the exposure is smaller, you realize, like, they have to be kind of careful, right? Like, if they're saying something, it's been fact checked, it's been copy edited, there

• 38:47Cal Newport?

  might be biases in how they say it, but they also have large liability exposure, so we can sort of, there's a trust there that you, when you take, get rid of that infrastructure, you lose that. All right, newspapers can also send experts to locations to report on the scene and have special expertise, so, you know, there's something going on, you know, in Venezuela. The New York Times is going to have someone in Central America who's been stationed there, who can walk around and see what's going on, right? So you lose, like, boots-on-the-ground reporting when you move away from centralized journalism. In the age of, this is not as true now, but in the age of advertising being the main revenue for newspapers, you had to appeal to as many people as possible, but you didn't have as many biases in newspapers. And so they were like a pretty good sort of consistent descriptor

• 39:30Cal Newport?

  of reality. Because when you make a living by department store ads, you don't want to alienate any possible audience if you're a major city newspaper. Now, this is different today in an age of paywalls where it's better to delight and thrill your paid subscribers than it is to try to reach the broadest possible audience. And so now we have a lot more, I think biases in reporting, but at least in its classic form, newspapers could give a pretty consistent view of reality to a nation. And just because of their fixed format, they would expose you to ideas and information that you otherwise might not have sought out on your own. But because it's right there on the same page as something you are reading, you would learn a lot of things. Here are the ways in which newsletters, however, could be better than newspapers. As mentioned, in an age of social media and paywalls, media

• 40:13Cal Newport?

  has moved away from its neutral observer status. It's more important that you delight your paid subscribers. And that's what really matters. Because of this, though, that means that you have much more partisanship in newspapers. But they still talk about it as if they don't, as if it's still back in like the 1990s days of department store ads pay the bills, where these really were trying to be down the line. Because of that mismatch, we now have plummeting trust in news media. We see this on both sides of the political spectrum. No one trusts the traditional media. So that's kind of crumbling. I think you're actually better off from a biased perspective with an individual writer, because what happens is when you're engaging with a writer like Paul Krugman, as opposed to an institution like the New

• 40:54Cal Newport?

  York Times, we are very used to as social beings of assessing and understanding individuals, their perspective, their social cultural context, and where they're coming from. We can place humans very easily into different categories and adjust what we're hearing accordingly. So like, if you read Paul Krugman, he's a class, he's classically left, and that's going to be the angle he's going to take on everything. But it's really easy to understand that with him. You know that from him. He's not tricking you, and he's not trying to be otherwise. And you just filter it through it. If you're someone who's far on the right, you're like, I'm probably not going to subscribe at all, because that'll annoy me. But if you're like a centrist, Your center left, center right, you're like, yeah, I could just adjust for what I'm hearing from crew. I'm not mad at him. That's just who he is. And he has a lot of interesting

• 41:37Cal Newport?

  information. He's a good economist, he has a Nobel Prize, and I could kind of filter out like where, you know, he's being off the rails and where there's like really good insight. So actually, trust and comfort with new sources, when you're dealing with individuals with a known profile, we as humans actually can deal much better with that than large centralized news sources that are just claiming this is just like a neutral observation of reality. And you're kind of noticing all the ways in which it's not. The newsletter economy also has a really good star making system. If a newsletter is popular for it has a lot of subscriptions, it probably has gone through a pretty competitive process of earning every one of those eyeballs, which means the writers are good at what they do. You don't necessarily have that in newspapers. You have a lot more people working their

• 42:19Cal Newport?

  way up the up the chain. And they might be okay. They might not, you know, hey, you're here, you're a fact checker, and now you're a cub reporter, and now we're putting you on this desk like you do fine. You have a lot more just sort of like, okay, writers. But in a competitive, infinitely scalable marketplace like digital paid newsletters, the winners are going to be really good. So you're actually going to get really good writing. Remember, like Nate Silver was being paid millions and millions of dollars for the Times, and then again by ABC ESPN because of like, the skill he has and whatever his audience being excited about what he's doing. You also have a resistance to corporate advertisers or political pressure on these individual newsletters in a way that if you're a really large centralized corporation, you might not be able to free yourself from. So the

• 43:04Cal Newport?

  answer to this question is, I think it depends. Newsletters are different than newspapers, but it's not necessarily worse than like, the current age of print newspapers now. So I have some optimism there. All right. Final question. How might this vision most go awry? Right? We're being pretty optimistic here, but we should consider the possibility that email newsletters sputter and fail to deliver anything like this traditional media replacement that we are discussing. I found an article that I think presents some good critiques. This from John Gruber's Daring Fireball newsletter and blog. He wrote this back in 2024. And it was called regarding and well, against Substack. And he goes through some

• 43:44Cal Newport?

  things that he is upset about. But among others, and I'm gonna let me find the right thing to read here.

• 43:55Cal Newport?

  Here, he is upset with people talking about Substack like it is a publication as opposed to a delivery mechanism. So, the quote he has at the top here that's upsetting him is, I'll read it here. "We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to quote, 'read my Amazon,' end quote. A great director trying to promote their film by saying, 'click on my Macs.' That's how much they picked your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as my Substack. There is only your writing

• 44:34Cal Newport?

  and a forever fight against a world of pure insipidification." And so, he's upset about this move that Substack is making. It'd be like, no, Substack is the thing, like Netflix or Twitter. It's a platform that serves you information. And writers are just serving Substack, but you as a consumer are consuming Substack, not the writings of Paul Krugman and the writings of Heather Richard Cox Richardson and the writings of Nate Silver. And there's this sort of creeping fear that what Substack is going to try to do is say, "It's not our goal to have 5,000 really good writers making a living with newsletters and offering like a sort of competitive media

• 45:19Cal Newport?

  ecosystem that can push back against the sort of insipidified digital attention tools." They might say, "That's not our problem. Our problem is trying to become a $100 billion valued company. And the way we get there is we gotta have, you know, our 50 million users using this thing constantly. And so, what we need to do is take and mix and remix content. And everyone's just providing us text. And we're going to create, you know, AI-enabled customized newsletter snippets of stuff that's popular and selected by algorithms pulled from everyone else. And that's what we want, is like, we want to enter that world of like a sort of stream of distraction. Just our stream happens to be text-based." There's a real fear that that's what they're trying to do. And that's why you hear this terminology of like, "my Substack, I Substack, what's going on on Substack," in a way that, as Gruber points out, you would not hear about other neutral delivery platforms.

• 46:05Cal Newport?

  I do not say, you know, like, hey, Jesse, I don't know if you, I don't know if you read my WordPress, but like I WordPress and on my WordPress, I talk about, you know, whatever, not like WordPress is the software on which I run my blog. I don't call it my WordPress. I don't say like, hey, I don't know if you've listened to my simple cast. That's the, the hosting company that hosts our podcast. Like, no, have you listened to my podcast, right? So this is the biggest danger and it is probably for me a major, my number one concern about this optimistic scenario is that I have a hard time imagining Substack cares about trying to create an alternative to print media. They don't want a thousand or 5,000 journalists to have a good living. They want 50 million users that use it constantly.

• 46:50Cal Newport?

  They want to enshitify it into something like a stream based Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram style distraction machine, because those companies have huge valuations. And that's where they might push it. So what is our final answer here? I think I'm going to pull all these threads together. We have a chance at actually having the internet, the same internet that was destroying collective truth and reality and sort of serious journalism. Give us an alternative that's not that bad. We did all the numbers. We see that's possible. But if we hitch our wagon to this one company, Substack, I worry about it. What we need is something like, I mentioned WordPress, that's an open source project.

• 47:32Cal Newport?

  We need like an open source equivalents ways that you can have email newsletters that can be easily discovered, subscribed to and take payments. That is not tied to like a company that wants a huge valuation. You can do this all from scratch. Jesse and I, we do this from scratch. Our newsletter, we, you know, we, we, we pay for our hoster, we do everything on our own, but it's expensive and complicated. You know, we have someone that it's like half of their job just to wrangle our newsletter software and we don't do paid subscriptions, but if we did, that would be a whole other level of like complexity to try to do that on our own. It costs a lot of money. I mean, I don't know how much we it costs newsletters cost money like Substack's eating a lot of

• 48:13Cal Newport?

  money to host it. I don't know exactly what ours is, but it's at least a thousand dollars a month plus just to host and send emails to like that many people. Cause you have a lot of emails. Yeah, we have like, we send out whatever it is, 125,000 emails, you know, each time we send out a newsletter and it's expensive and people that's friction that's going to stop people from getting this. We need a low enough friction alternatives, either like indie Substacks or open source Substacks that make the friction low to start and take money and who aren't interested in becoming a hundred billion, a hundred billion dollar unicorn. If that ecosystem can emerge, then I have faith in all this. If we, if we hitch our wagon to Substack, I just think their investors want the big return. And again,

• 48:57Cal Newport?

  having 5,000 Paul Krugmans informing people, making a good living. I just don't think that's going to do it. All right. So there we go. I don't know if we fully answered our question, Jesse, but I think those numbers gave us a better look into what was going on. Can Substack save journalism? Maybe something like paid newsletters might. There we go. Also, we should just be writing email all the time. I want to make $4 million a year. With big banners. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I want to do. I mean, it helps that Paul Krugman has like 20 years of being a very famous columnist. How old is he?

• 49:36Cal Newport?

  Um, good question. I would guess 64. And he won the Nobel Prize 10 years ago? No, he would have won the Nobel Prize in like 2000, early 2000s. Oh, that long ago? Yeah. So he's a professor or was a professor at Princeton, econo- economist. He wanted, when he was young. Yeah. Well, he started writing for the Times when he, in 2000, because he was like a consistent voice against Judith Miller's push for invading Iraq. And then I think he won the Nobel after that, like in 2005 or 2008 or something like that. But that was probably for work he did before he joined the Times. But there you go. I like when writers are making money or writing words.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:21Cal Newport?

  That's all it is is words. Like he's just his words and his mind. I mean, that's hard. Seven days a week. But I think Silver's right. That's a, that's a normal job.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:30Cal Newport?

  Forty hour a week job done with flexibility and then you're making all that much money.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  You're also like really cognizant with your newsletter about not spamming your audience and making sure they get high quality content and

• 50:41Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Like you're really good about that.

• 50:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I've been doing it forever. I mean, I think of my newsletter as like dispatches from the front lines of this battle of like depth against distraction. So it's like, hey, let me explain what's going on. Here's this new technology you should know about. Here's someone who's like done a really good job of finding depth in a way that's inspiring. Here is like a new idea about like how this economy works, the digital economy works. So it's like people who care about that tension between depth and distraction. I just want to be sitting in them useful dispatches. I like doing it. I've been doing it forever. All right. Now we're going to move on to a new segment. If that was our idea segment, we're now going to tackle practices. So this is a segment where we try to actually look at specific practices, whether they're good or bad. We'll assess them that might help you in your personal battle for depth in increasingly distracted world.

• 51:29Cal Newport?

  What we're going to do here is we're going to actually, we're going to load something from YouTube. And here's the, here's the background, right? I did an interview with Andrew Huberman, I guess, two years ago, year and a half ago, whenever my, my book, Slow Productivity came out and that was a popular interview and he cut, he cut up a bunch of clips.

• 51:49Cal Newport?

  One of the clips from that interview was called something like how to, what's the exact wording, Jesse?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  How to successfully delete social media?

• 51:59Cal Newport?

  How to successfully delete social media. A five minute clip from the interview. It went viral. So something about the particular advice I gave in that clip hit a chord in a way that, you know, I've done a lot of stuff about phones. There's a lot of stuff online about phones and how to spend less time, but whatever I said in this clip seemed to touch a chord because I think it's been viewed more than a million times now. Since he's, he's released it. So here's what I want to do because I know it's the new year. A lot of people are thinking about resolutions and one of the big resolutions, a lot of people are thinking about these days is I want to use my phone less. There's no shortage of advice. This clip, whatever I said in this clip, and I'm going to be honest, I haven't re listened to it in a long time. I don't know what's in it. This clip seemed to be hitting a nerve. So we're going to go through this clip bit by bit. And I'm going to comment on and elaborate on the things I said, and we're going to try to extract

• 52:44Cal Newport?

  from it. The most useful big ideas for anyone who's thinking about less phone use as a new year's resolution. All right. So we're going to do this like an odd audio style. Right? All right. So we'll just start it. And then Jesse, I'll tell you when to pause it and I'll jump in.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Recently, my podcast team was in Australia and my producer and close friend here, Rob Moore, instructed all of us to get rid of social media on our phones, except one guy who would post our weekly episodes announcements. And it was pretty brutal at first. And then coming back to social media has actually turned out to be more challenging. You really experienced the friction coming back the other way. And then

• 53:24Cal Newport?

  Pause it there for a second. All right. So this clip starts now. This is coming back to me, Jesse. Remember, it's a nice day. Nice part of LA. Huberman there. Can you tell his like raspy, masculine voice from mine? He's jacked. God, it's a big guy. He's a strong, he's a strong gentleman. He's in good shape. Between us, Huberman and I can combine bench press like 300 pounds. The two of us. So there's a good point he's making there, right? He's saying, Hey, let me give you a testimony. We went for an extended period without social media. And yes, it was hard to make the transition. But what was even harder was when we came back and I started using social media again, because I had

• 54:07Cal Newport?

  gotten, what he's saying here, but essentially is he had gotten used to life without it. And when he added it back, it immediately created a lot of sort of bad feelings. And so you don't know how much negativity being on your phone all your time is injected into your life until you actually spend time away from it. We just kind of get used to what it feels like to constantly be looking at that slop and distraction on this little piece of screen. And it's not until you get away from it that you realize like, wow, it's like going from black and white to technicolor when I take that out of my life. All right, let's keep going here, Jesse. What comes next?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  I'm experiencing the, the lack of friction. And that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt. The friction leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because I think Of course, many people listening are, you know, have work that they really need to focus on. They may be having issues with productivity and burnout, et cetera. I think a lot of people use the phone and social media because it fills their life. You know, it provides some enrichment and they aren't necessarily committed to specific projects. But I guess through the lens of the, let's just call it the Cal Newportian lens. One might argue that those people almost certainly have untapped creativity, untapped.

• 55:23Cal Newport?

  No, let's pause it there. Okay. So here's the second big point that's coming out of this clip. So Huberman started by setting up the idea that you don't realize how much drag there is on your life from your phone until you get away from it. Then he gets the second point, which now I'm remembering this conversation. I think this is the point that is beginning to separate this discussion from so much other advice about your phone that you're going to find online. He immediately points out, there's a psychological dimension to this phone over you beyond just like you have a bad habit. It is, and I'm paraphrasing of him for a lot of people, it's filling a void that they otherwise have in their life. So right off the bat, he's acknowledging why we're using our phone so much.

• 56:04Cal Newport?

  And his answer is not weakness, dumbness, or not caring. He's like, this is actually solving a problem for a lot of people. All right, let's keep going, Jesse.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.

• 56:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void. But you have this void in your life because there's unmet potential, unmet interest, living in misalignment with the things you care about, right? I mean, a lot of people, this is the classic sort of catastrophe of life, right? Let's pause it for a second there. A quick aside, I don't have the video up on the screen, but Jesse will attest because he's seen it right now. As we were talking. I was arm wrestling at Huberman and just destroying him. Just like boom. And then Huberman does like a little like bow thing to me. And then he like points to his bicep and points to me and gives a thumbs up and um yeah. So that's going on and you just don't see that, but I was I was physically dominating him.

• 57:09Cal Newport?

  Um, okay. So I then pick up that thread, right? I'm picking up the thread there and said, like, yes, this is what I've seen. There's a lot of papering over the void. That void is very well, uh, very real because of the catastrophe of living life. There's a lot of hardship, things that go wrong, things you have to deal with, things that aren't unfolding the way you want. And that creates a void. And I said, papering over the void, but you can also think about like the brightness of your phone screen. Hits your eyes in such a way that you lose your night vision. You don't see it beyond you. It sort of hides it from you. You know, it's there, but you don't actually have to see it. All right, let's hear some more. Social media and there's before this, it was other things, right? There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions.

• 57:50Cal Newport?

  It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that like gaping void. And it's like, just makes it bearable enough that you can kind of go on with life. And so it is true. If you just rip it out, you see the void. And that's really difficult, right? I mean, cause I did this experiment for one of my books. Pause here before we get to the experiment. All right. So uh, again, what's going on behind the scenes here? And Jesse will attest to this is like, actually during that clip, when I was talking, Huberman leaves the camera, comes back in a full Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gi with his black belt on, points to me. I get a quick submission on him. He gets up, takes off his black belt, hands it to me. All right. But anyways, let's get back to the actual words that are happening here.

• 58:32Cal Newport?

  There's a lot of, now I'm really unpacking why this went, what about this was resonating? Again, there's a lot of, uh, if we don't recognize the psychological realities in which phone use happens, it really becomes a very sort of sterile conversation. And one of the points I made in there, which I want to make again right now is that we've seen similar sort of addictions rise in other past difficult times. They were just different substances. It was like during the hard, if you were in the like the 19th century or early 20th century, living in one of the you newly industrialized urban environment, you're all at taverns all the time. You're drinking all the time because life was really hard, right? You were living, you had very little control and autonomy and you were barely making enough money to support yourself and you're all crammed into like a tenement or whatever.

• 59:17Cal Newport?

  And this was like the environment where it got so bad that like we had the prohibition movement, right? So we, it's not the first time we've seen this, but in hard times, we look for ways to avoid it and the phones have been offering us a way to do it. All right. I teased at the end of that last segment there that I had run an experiment that gave us some more insight into that. So let's hear about that. I ran an experiment with 1,600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  30 days?

• 59:44Cal Newport?

  30 days, right?

• 59:45Speaker 03

  These are young people, old people?

• 59:46Cal Newport?

  A whole mix, a whole mix.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  So not just university students?

• 59:48Cal Newport?

  I recruited them from my newsletter readership. So they weren't university students and it wasn't formal research. It was, you know, I put out the call, right? So this is not randomly sampled, right? But I put out the call and I said, here, I'm going to walk you, walk you through this. And then I got a lot of information back. So people reported back how it went. And this was like the number one thing I heard was it's really hard at first, right? And so who are the people that succeeded for 30 days versus those who didn't? The ones who didn't succeed tended to just try to white knuckle it, just be like, I don't like how much I'm using social media. I'm just going to stop because it's bad and I don't want to do a bad thing. I'm just going to like, you know, hold on to the table with white knuckles. They want to make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days.

• 1:00:33Cal Newport?

  So it's like, go learn new hobbies, join things right away, get like really. All right. So again, we really haven't yet said anything about how to change what's on your phone, how to change your settings, what to do with your notifications, whether or not you should put your phone into grayscale, if you should have some sort of brick device, make your phone harder to use, what type of rules you'd have about your phone. We're almost done with the clip. Like how much time is left? Two minutes. Two minutes left, right? So we're more than halfway through the clip. We haven't talked anything about strategies for putting your phone away. What are we talking about here? I said, look, when I studied 1,500 people who spent 30 days without using their phone.

• 1:01:10Cal Newport?

  The people who succeeded were the people who aggressively were exploring through reflection, experimentation, what they actually enjoyed. They were finding new activities. They were going out and trying new things. They were trying to fill in their life in interesting ways. They had a much easier time not having their phone. The other people just white knuckled and said, I don't want to use this, just like I don't want to smoke and I'm just gonna sit here staring at you like you're not gonna get me today. Eventually their willpower buckled and they ended up using it again more often than not. This goes back to the void explanation that we gave before. By aggressively trying to fill in things in their life that were meaningful, what they were doing is filling in the void. When you fill in that void through actual activity,

• 1:01:55Cal Newport?

  through actual connection, through actual self-reflection and growth, you don't need to hide yourself from it anymore. The importance of saying, I need to keep my eyes from focusing on or after paper over so I don't see it, that goes away when the void is much smaller.

• 1:02:10Cal Newport?

  And that's the point I want to pull out of it. So I'll stop playing the clip from here because I think that gets to the key point. We just riff on that for a little bit while longer if I remember correctly. But the best advice about using your phone less, as we see here in this viral clip, really has nothing to do with your phone or your habits around your phone or how you use your phone. It's about everything else in your life. And it's an important practice to think about right now in this sort of new year part of the calendar. The more you have things that are meaningful, the more that you are making sense of your life, of the challenges and the positive things and building them into a narrative, a heroic narrative that's meaningful and values based, the more that you're connecting with other people, the more that you're sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of other people, the more that you're putting yourself in

• 1:02:53Cal Newport?

  the situations for appreciation or awe, the more you're out there doing hard things and you can see the reward, your intentions made manifest concretely in the world, the more, in other words, you activate your deeply human brain to all the possibilities of human life, the more stupid that little rectangle is going to seem. And the easier it's going to seem to say, why would I look at like an AI-generated short-form video on a small rectangle when I got a life to live? And so I think this is like a numerical experiment. There are a lot of clips about using your phone less. That aren't doing as well as this one. And the difference is this one says very little about your phone. In fact, there's a, there's an A B comparison you can find on Huberman's channel himself.

• 1:03:38Cal Newport?

  Uh, six months ago, he, he also posted a very similar titled clip, uh, with Annie Limkey. He wrote Dopamine Nation is also like, how to use your phone less or whatever. And it's very good science and he's a great scientist on this, but it really gets into like, here's why you're addicted and here's what's going on in your brain. And here's like things you might do to reduce it. You might spend less time with your phone. You might do, take breaks on a regular basis, like just like addiction science type of stuff. And that clip, you know, same feed, same title is like a 20th of the views. Because I think we're hitting on something real. It's like an experiment. We get to the psychology in which phone use happens. And so that's what I'm going to leave you with in our practice segment today. If you're worried about your phone, start worrying about making the rest of your life better.

• 1:04:22Cal Newport?

  Then return to the phone and your habits. Don't white knuckle it. Don't say this is bad. I just want to do something less bad. Make your life good. And the, the shallower alternative is not going to be as appealing. Um, I think in the final two minutes, you've seen the clip. I think in the final two minutes of the clip, uh, me and Huberman get to a, a full out fistfight. Duck the punch, block the other, come in, pick them up, drop them. He stands up barely like clutching it and he applauds and points to him. And then he hands me a trophy off of his wall. Cause you are the king now. We're gonna, he's gonna just come beat me up at some point. Uh, anyways, there we go. So anyways, I think that's useful.

• 1:05:05Cal Newport?

  A little bit of practical advice to help you in your own quest. The fight for death in a distracted world. All right, well, we still want to hear from you. So we got a couple of questions that you have sent in that we will hear from now.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Okay. First question is from Victoria. I'm reading through some classics. I keep my phone close to use chat GPT to enhance my understanding. Is this okay?

• 1:05:31Cal Newport?

  It's not terrible. The good news is you're reading classics and I think trying to have a secondary information to help you make it through a harder book is great. If you want to have chat GPT give you like a summary of the chapter you're about to read, that's fine, or themes, or why is this important? Like, that's fine. I think it's better if you follow the links from chat GPT and maybe actually read some of the articles it's pulling from, because it kind of tends to make things up, or it mixes and matches, or it kind of figures out what you want to hear. So it's better to get to the the primary secondary source. This was a complicated way of saying it, but the primary source of chat GPT is using that source itself being a secondary source about the classic book that you're reading. The key thing is not to interrupt mid reading, right? It takes a while for your brain to fire up all the networks needed to make sense of written words and turn it

• 1:06:13Cal Newport?

  into sort of an internal cognitive understanding. You don't want to be interrupting every few pages to go look something up. You want to queue up understanding by reading an article or a chat GPT summary, then do an entire chapter more in a row before you then interrupt your focus again. But I am all about bringing in other sources. Whatever makes that book more approachable and interesting to you, to me, the better. All right, who do we got next?

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Next up is Jason. I often feel like whatever I'm writing down in my notebooks isn't quite right or good enough. How do you decide what's worth writing down?

• 1:06:49Cal Newport?

  So Jason probably heard our recent episode from over the break that was on using single purpose notebooks, where I recommend having a notebook when you're working on a particular challenge or idea, that you have a dedicated small notebook where you can capture all your thoughts. So Jason, here's the key thing about these notebooks.

• 1:07:06Cal Newport?

  The the value happens after you filter. Like, the notebooks collect novel brain reconfigurations in a way that you're not going to forget them. Most aren't good. The magic then happens when whatever you're going to do with these, you read over all these, the good ones you then pull out. So it's writing down whatever comes to your mind relevant to a topic in the notebook. That's step one of two of getting to really good ideas. Like, what I'll often notice in my idea notebooks is I'll look for, you know, most of the things like when I go back to like, it's not so great. I'll look for things that either stand out, or more frequently what happens is I come back to them again and again.

• 1:07:48Cal Newport?

  So, you know, in my, my lifestyle centric planning notebooks, I'm just capturing notes about things that resonate and don't. Yeah, there's a lot of nonsense in there. It's just like in the moment. I think it's exciting. Like I had an example in the book I'm writing on the deep life where, where I talk about exactly this, by the way, like writing down insights about your life in a notebook. I talk about how like most of them aren't going to be in retrospect that useful. And I had an example, I'm trying to remember it. I think it was like you could imagine you were going to your first like NASCAR race or Indy car race. And maybe in the moment, it's like super exciting and it's like visually very novel. And there's a hundred thousand people in these cars and you're like, whoa, I'm having a reaction here. I'm going to write something down like this is really interesting. I'm having a strong reaction. It's really cool. Later, you might look back at that and be

• 1:08:28Cal Newport?

  like, you know, there's, I was just reacting to like the novelty of the moment, but there's not really a deep insight here that's relevant to my life. So there's a lot of stuff you write down will be important. I tend to find if it's like lifestyle observations, what I'm looking for is, oh, I've written this down like five different times in the last six months. Like I keep finding other examples of this thing and writing it down. This is sticking around. That means something to me. Or I'll just be going back through and it'll just stand out to me like, oh, that is still seems really good. Whereas other things in retrospect don't seem really good.

• 1:09:01Cal Newport?

  And so it's in the filtering of what you write down that ultimately you get the value. So don't worry. Get it down. Get out of your head. You're not stressed about it. Get out of your head. So it's on paper. You'll see it. You don't know what that's going to influence in the future. That idea might be terrible, but it might set up some other ideas that are good down the line. So don't fret. Your notebook is not precious. No one's going to publish it. No one's going to pore over it. It doesn't have to be good handwriting. It doesn't have to be beautifully written and it doesn't have to be brilliant ideas. Just get the stuff down. That's the nice thing. They're cheap, paper, it's yours, personal, just write.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

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• 1:10:02Cal Newport?

  All right, let's take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. Let me tell you about a product I've been actively using recently and really enjoying. Factor. If you're not familiar, Factor is a meal delivery service that delivers fresh, never frozen, chef crafted, and dietitian approved meals, straight to your doorstep, ready to eat in just two minutes. You just pop them in the microwave. They have over 100 rotating weekly options for meals that's made from real food with real ingredients, no refined sea oils, no refined sugars, no artificial colors, and the food tastes great. Now, here's why I've become a Factor enthusiast. It allows me to automate healthy eating. I like to use Factor for lunch because I don't always have the energy to prepare something healthy from scratch and takeout

• 1:10:47Cal Newport?

  is always lurking as an option right there on the periphery. And with Factor, I can just automate all that. No, I'm just going to grab a Factor meal right in the microwave. A couple of minutes later, I'm eating something that's going to taste good and that I know is healthy. So if you want to make healthy eating easier this year, consider using Factor. I use it and you should too. Head to factormeals.com/deep50off and use code DEEP50OFF, the word DEEP, the number 50, the word OFF, to get 50% off your first Factor box plus free breakfast for one year. Offer is only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make

• 1:11:29Cal Newport?

  healthier eating easy with Factor. I also want to talk about our friends at Monarch. One of my big goals for the new year is to try to get our finances back under control after the season of holidays and birthdays and trips that we just got through. Fortunately, I have a secret weapon to help me accomplish this vision: Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts, investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard, accessible on your laptop or phone. Managing your money doesn't have to be a struggle this year. And if you start your new year on the right foot financially, you will get 50% off your Monarch subscription if you use the code DEEP.

• 1:12:13Cal Newport?

  Now here's two things I like about Monarch. One, it's a beautiful interface. It just looks great, especially on the phone app. It makes you actually want to use the product, which is great. And they keep adding new features and tools. For example, an AI assistant, you can ask questions about your own finances. Like, how is my shopping spend trended in the last two months? It's like having a financial coach. You can call 24 hours a day. This new year, achieve your financial goals for good. Monarch is the all in one tool that makes proactive money management simple all year long. Remember to use code DEEP at monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with the code DEEP. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  All right, next up is Dirk. With organic search getting worse or replaced by AI powered chatbots, social media broken and mainstream media paying less and less. It's hard to build an audience and make money writing without using a tool like Substack. The indie web is a beautiful idea, but it seems it only works for writers who built their audience long ago. For professional writers trying to succeed today, isn't Substack the platform of the moment?

• 1:13:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah, so let's, let's look at this question through the filter of our idea segment. There's two ways of seeing it. You could say like, hey, for writers, as the traditional media goes away, the only real option is something like paid email newsletters. And that seems really limited. It isn't too bad that like all these other more indie web tools can't support making a living like we hope they might one day do.

• 1:13:50Cal Newport?

  But on the other hand, we never expected that there is more indie web stuff like blogs came along before and just personal websites, like those didn't monetize very well for various reasons. But we shouldn't expect them to. It's actually like very hard to find an economic niche where you can actually efficiently match money to talent in a way that's a non trivial market size. And when you find those niches, they tend to get really big and be very important, but they're, they're way more narrow than you think. Like most types of media doesn't work. And then the niches that work blow up. Print a newspaper that works, books work. Blogs didn't work. You know, pamphlets didn't work. Novellas haven't really worked, but paid newsletters do.

• 1:14:35Cal Newport?

  Right? So certain things work, most things don't. So I don't think that's, I don't think that's really necessarily a problem. What I do think is a problem is if the medium is dominated by a single company. That's our main, I mean, I got into that, the idea segment. That's the main issue with Substack is not the model. I think a paid newsletter model, we went through the numbers. That could be a fair replacement for like newspapers. Terms of size and market and diversity. What I worry about is one company offered it. That's when we have problems. If it's just Substack because they can shitify this and just make it into some sort of like digital soylent green type of nonsense slot. So what we need is not like the old indie web stuff to be successful.

• 1:15:19Cal Newport?

  Like, won't people just pay for my microblog or my WordPress? We need more indie webs copies of Substack. We need more independent Substacks. We need more platforms run by more people where the friction is low for me to put out content and to make money from it. The other thing you really have to keep in mind when you think about these new type of paid media is in the history of media, when you get new media, it does open up different ways of reaching people. But when money's involved, the truth remains, it is very, very hard to make money doing something in media. That has always been a very narrow peak of a very large mountain. And this is something that we often get wrong. When a new technology comes along that is opening up more access to an audience, we

• 1:16:02Cal Newport?

  think that should mean it should greatly increase the number of people who can make a living or make a lot of money doing something. But it doesn't, right? Like, the internet meant anyone could publish text now and anyone could read it. That's a major breakthrough. Before, you had to actually have physical machines to put ink on paper and you had to distribute that paper by putting it in the back of trucks and driving them places. Most people could not put text in a place where other people could reach it. The internet meant everyone could. But did that mean we then had hundreds of millions of like people making a living like writers? No, because... It still has to be good. And so whenever we get these new media forums, it doesn't actually lead to a huge explosion in the number of people who can make a living doing media. It just changes the way they can do it or the parameters around what they do. And that's something to keep in mind. The email newsletter economy might replace newspapers.

• 1:16:47Cal Newport?

  It's not going to mean 100,000 people now can make Krugman money. It's really hard to be Paul Krugman. But now Paul Krugman has an alternative to the New York Times to reach people. That's what we're talking about here. So don't be disappointed when you're like, I don't know, man. Everyone I knew tried to start a newsletter and didn't make any money off of it. Like, yeah, that's, that's most media. Most television pilots never get picked up. And that's like at the end of a very large pyramid of professional writers and performers. And a lot of money was put into this and everyone to make it work. And most of those fail. So of course, like your random thing you did is probably not going to succeed. That's okay. Broadening access to information doesn't go hand in hand with broadening massively the number of people who can make a living off information. So we should keep that in mind as well.

• 1:17:28Cal Newport?

  So my main concern is not having just new media forum replacing old one. I think that's fine. It's having only one player in town. We need more indie or open source or smaller, more niche alternatives to Substack, which I think we're going to get, Jesse, because they're good. If they in shitify, you know, like, oh, it's all streams and we just want to show you all sorts of stuff and get you like to look at your app more and more. There's a market for someone else to be like, okay, well, let's do like old Substack. It's not that hard of a technological problem. I think there's a lot of writers like, yeah, I'll just take my email list and I'll move it over to this new platform that has a better interface. My subscribers don't care because they're getting this. They can get through email. They don't have to get through the app. So that's my, my, my hopeful prediction is that if Substack moves towards the sort

• 1:18:12Cal Newport?

  of slop attention distraction mode, then the good writers will just shift the new alternatives that'll, that'll pop up. Can you define in shitify? You use that a few times. Yeah, I think we did a podcast episode on this a while ago. This is Cory Doctorow's notion of what happens is with a lot of these attention economy digital tools is that they do things that makes them useful, that grows an audience. And then they shift their focus to trying to make as much money as possible off that audience and it makes the tool much worse. Then the tool gets kind of terrible. This is like Facebook. It was very useful. Like, oh, everyone I know is on here and they can post updates about what they're up to and I can see what people I know are up to. Like what's their relationship status? Let me see pictures of their kids. But they make the most money off of their users.

• 1:18:57Cal Newport?

  Facebook have moved their model more and more away from that and towards like algorithmically curated crap full of ads that fills up your thing because it's like more addictive for the people who use it. They'll use it more often and they have more ads to sell them. But it's a way worse experience and people are fleeing drones. But Corey Doctorow's theory, and he coined this term a long time ago, but he has a new book out about this. His theory is that like this is like an inevitable cycle when you have broadly funded digital attention economy tools. And so like Substack will probably fall prey to that, but maybe it won't. But we'll see. All right. Finally, I want to end each episode talking quickly about what I've been reading. And while we just came out of December, Jesse, and I read my five books in December, but more importantly, December is my time for reading thrillers.

• 1:19:39Cal Newport?

  So I thought I would briefly mention the three thrillers I read in December and then I'm going to rank order them. All right. Number one I read was Airframe by Michael Crichton. It's a lesser known thriller of his, but he wrote it like at the height of his post Jurassic Park powers in the 1990s. No high concept plot. There is no dinosaurs or time travel or aliens. It is really just there's an accident on an airplane and they're investigating it and trying to figure out what it is. And the company has a big pending deal with the Chinese and they don't want that to be jeopardized. And they're trying to cover up some of the issues and there's some labor unrest. That's it.

• 1:20:19Cal Newport?

  But it's like classic thriller where you get into the details of airplane safety and how it works and good pacing. Then I read another Crichton book that I hadn't read in a very long time. The Great Train Robbery. He wrote that way back in the 60s or 70s, like pretty early in his career where it was like, he took an actual event, Victorian England train robbery, did a lot of research on it and then kind of dramatized it in a novel. It kind of walks through the steps of it. It's a sort of a Sting style.

• 1:20:49Cal Newport?

  And in fact, I'm interested in the connection between Sting, The Sting and this. I think this came first, very much like the con is coming together, but you don't know all the, how it's all going to work in the end until it all kind of comes together. And then I read Fantastic Voyage, your adventure book.

• 1:21:05Cal Newport?

  It was a movie that was a short story that got made into a movie. I think Raquel Welch was in it. And then Isaac Asimov turned a movie into a novel and the novel is what I read. It's about people being shrunk down in a submarine and put inside someone's body. And it's like their journey through like the human body. These were all three really good, classic adventure novel thrillers. I think if I had to rank them, I'm gonna put Airframe number one. It had the, the, the least high concept plot, but it was just perfectly executed. It is a really well executed thriller at someone at the height of his powers. You get really interested in the mechanics of airplane function, airplane safety. There's a ticking clock element to it, which keeps it moving and the plot just rolls.

• 1:21:48Cal Newport?

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

• 1:22:21Cal Newport?

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

• 1:23:04Cal Newport?

  And it just like unfolds this adventure as the submarine moves through the body and the science is good. And there's a, it's a well timed plot and there's a double agent type cross where someone on this submarine is a turncoat. And there's a giant ticking clock set up because they, they only have an hour before they re-expand and it kills the person they're in. I like this. It's just a well constructed. I know Asimov had this club in his back. A well constructed adventure thriller with a big technical. Aspect in as well. I really, I really enjoyed it. It didn't try to do too much. Like they got you to that room quick. It finished and then they left. And that's, that was, that was the entire book. So I thought that was, that was also really good. So Thriller December, Jesse was a success.

• 1:23:47Cal Newport?

  I also read a book about The Simpsons and

• 1:23:52Cal Newport?

  one other book. I think what else I read?

• 1:23:57Cal Newport?

  I forgot what the fifth book was, but anyways, I wrote, I read five books in December. But the thrillers is what I wanted to check in on because that's what people care about. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Hey, let us know. You can send a note to [email protected]. If you like this move towards the two segments, ideas and practices.

• 1:24:12Cal Newport?

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

• 1:24:22Cal Newport?

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