← Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Ep 387: Can Substack Save Journalism? + Viral Advice for Ignoring Your Phone
01:24:51
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.
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:03]
A
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 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 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. His subscriber count rivals the Times, his 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 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 immediate 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 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 practice 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 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. 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. So you can 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. So what I want to do here is load up on the screen for people who are watching stuff, just listening. This is Paul Krugman's substack. I've lined it up in the Substack app or we can see what he's up to. There's a couple 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 U.S. 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 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 came out on January 6th. So it's about January 6th. 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, travel day 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 Row. The Real Don Row Doctrine. Seeking cash 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 1200 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 set up? Well, I'm going to click on. Are you already subscribed?
- [06:17]
B
I'm a follower. I'm not subscribed.
- [06:19]
A
So let's click on upgrade to see the ants. Okay, so here we go. So here are the options if you want to subscribe, it's $7 a month or $7 a year. All right, so what you get on 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 a subscriber. 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 then 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 seven figures? 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 look 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 look at three different scenarios. 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? To simplify things here, I'm not taking out sub stacks. 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 really optimistic scenario for Krugman, which is that 10% of his 500,000 subscribers are paying for the tier. That would mean 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 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 his subscribers pay, that's still going to be 15,000 paid subscribers, which is $105,000 per month of subscriber fees, which is about $1.26 million of average revenue. All right, so the answer to our first question, what is Paul Krugman 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. 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 lit 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 sub Sex Politics leaderboard as compared to number seven for Krugman. So they're very similar size 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. 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 Bulletin is really hard work. It's often creatively fulfilling and enjoyable and this year it was financially rewarding. But professionally I'm the happiest it's 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 Glen 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 paid. 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, can I just put a little aside here about like the elite class of knowledge workers? 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 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. His second advice, if you want to succeed at Substack, is to stretch singles into doubles. So you got to 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. 3. 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 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 anseller 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 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. 6. 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. And 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 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 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. 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. A 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 away. 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, it's from a website called really Good Business Ideas. But they took these numbers 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, count 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 or total subscribers on Substack, you're probably under almost any scenario doing million, if not multimillion dollars a year. All right, so here's what they found. I'll zoom in this. This is from just last year. So, like not long ago, US Politics had 15 newsletters with that many subscribers or more. Business had four, technology had four, 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 or 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 Krugsman, Paul Krugman's category, that's pretty small. It's, you know, it's going to be on the. We could think of it in the order of like 50 or so newsletter subscribers. It's not very many people. 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, let's instead ask how many people are making a reasonable living on Substack. And there's a lot of ways 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. 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 podcast or newsletter on the leaderboard. So we, we wanted to Drop down to that 20 spot. Like when you go down 20 spots in these categories, 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. That's given us a sense. If we zoom out now to the. 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, D.C. native. I like Sullivan a lot. He has right around 200,000 subscribers. If we use the same numbers from Krugman, I don't want to look up the individual subscription fees for each. 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? 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 the technology. Now, the 20th biggest only has 95,000 subscribers, but with our assumptions, that still works out to around $400,000 a year 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 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 high end subscriber bases 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. 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 a substack, we see that in politics, culture and Technology the top 20 newsletters are well above that. 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, 1000, 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 attempt to replace the failing print media. So question number four. I want to ask can this newsletter market grow to a comparable scale the 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'm going 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. I have this on the screen for people who are watching. It has a lot of numbers, but there's a couple I want to focus on. Here is the total estimated circulation of U.S. 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 weekday circulation. And then it falls. So if we look back at this, it falls off a cliff. And by the time we get to 2022, it's. They estimate us down to about 20 million. So at its peak, yet 60 million daily newspapers, that was the circulation like printed, and it's down to 20 million. So we can think of it like there are 60 million subscribers to newspapers and its 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, of the newspaper industry. So you know, they make money off subscriptions and advertisements. We add those two things. 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 of their advertising. This really drops as we get down to these estimates for 20, 20, 2022. This gets down to like 9, around 9 or 10, 9, 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 the climb now quite precipitously, and it's more like 9 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 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 was 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. 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, so 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. 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. 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 550, 5001000 to 1000 riders making a full time living on substacks. Look at my numbers here. We found another source that said that substack brought in $450 million in revenue in 2025 total. 10% of that went, you know, 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 journalist 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, you know, journalists and editors in newspapers. All right, so if we load 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 $20,450,000,000 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. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors. 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 and 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. 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 a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. So join the thousands of parents who trust fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com deep that's meetfabric.com deep M E-EET fabric.com deep Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. Now I also want to talk about our friends at pipedrive. 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 pipedrive comes in. Is a top rated sales CRM tool for small and medium businesses. Now here's why I love pipedrive. It's all about one of my favorite productivity strategies, automation. With pipedrive, you can automate just about any step of your sales process for your entire team. From scheduling sales calls to email 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. Jess and I are already talking about how we might use pipedrive to try to automate some of our interaction with listeners with their questions for the show. But here's the thing. Pipedrive is a powerful, simple CRM that is built by salespeople for salespeople. You should consider joining the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive. And right now when you use my link, you'll get a 30 day, free trial, no credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com deep to get 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 and he's giving a lot of information and thoughts about how Substack is doing. But here's the key thing I want to pull out. They sort of ask him at the end, how big can this grow? What's your goal here? And here's his line. I don't see anything in the laws of physics that should prevent Substack from getting to more than 50 million paid subscribers. 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 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, we'll straight up to next 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 page substack subscribers. In this future scenario. When we look at revenue, newspapers were bringing in 50 billion versus more like 5 billion in the optimistic scenario for Substack. And they had, you know, 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 and there's current newspaper circulators. It's bringing in comparable revenue to what newspapers are. It's an order of magnitude off in terms of number of people working full time. But it's in the realm of what we have right now, full time in newspapers. And if we look at these numbers with an even more optimistic hat on, we can actually inflate. There's a case to inflate some of these. So let's put this back up on the screen here for a second, Jesse. 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, you know, newspapers, that's going into their revenue numbers. We could also factor that in here. Like, for example, you have to factor in something like paid ads, right? So you could, 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. 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. So 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. So use that 50,000 reading. That's what the CPM is calculated on. That works out to be about 1700 $50 a newsletter. For each newsletter you send out, that ad, if 50,000 people actually read it, will generate about $1,700. If you're publishing, like Nate Silver recommends, three newsletters a week that are getting those open rates, that's quarter million dollars a year. So there's more revenue that's late in here. There's also events, there's also speaking. There's also higher tier. 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 can be comparable to sort of where maybe not in all ways the peak, but sort of where that industry is now as it's like two thirds of its way down its descent. 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. 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 arguments for each. There's certain ways in which paid email newsletters are worse than newspapers. Newspapers have fact checking, copy editing and content editing. They also have large liability exposure. So they're very careful about, you know, traditionally what they print. Remember, like the Washington Post, you know, was quick to print something that would have been completely. It was what was being echoed all over social media. We talked about this before on the show. This was the Covington kids at the mall and there was like a picture taken of one of the kids and a Native American. They were looking at each other real closely. And social media was like, yeah, these kids are terrible and they're just being 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 kids 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 victory they had on that because there's huge liability exposure. But because of that, as a reader of print newspapers is different than looking at social media or really looking at a newsletter where the exposure is smaller. You realize they have to be kind of careful, right? If they're saying something, it's been fact checked, it's been copy edited. There might be biases in how they say it, but they also have large liability exposure. So we can sort of. There's a trust there that 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 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 reporting. But at least in its classic form, newspapers could give a pretty consistent view of reality to a nation. And just because of their fixed format, they would expose you to ideas and information that you otherwise might not have sought out on your own. But because it's right there on the same page as something you are reading, you would learn a lot of things. Here are the ways in which newsletters, however, could be better than newspapers. As mentioned, in an age of social media and paywalls, media has moved away from its neutral observer status. 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 bias perspective with an individual writer, because what happens is when you're engaging with a writer like Paul Krugman, as opposed to an institution like the New York Times, we are very used to as social beings of assessing and understanding individuals, their perspective, their social, cultural context and where they're coming from, 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 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, you're center left, center right. You're like, yeah, I can just adjust for what I'm hearing from Kruger. I'm not mad at him. That's just who he is. And he has a lot of interesting information. He's a good economist, he has a Nobel Prize. And I can kind of filter out like where, you know, he's being off the rails and where there's like really good insight. So actually trust and comfort with 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 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 and 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 gonna be really good. So you're actually gonna get really good writing. Remember, like Nate Silver was being paid millions and millions of dollars by the Times and then again by abc, ESPN because of like the skill he has and whatever his audience being excited about what he's doing. You also have a resistance to corporate advertisers or political pressure on these individual newsletters in a way that if you're a really large centralized corporation, you might not be able to free yourself from. So the answer to this question is I think it depends. Newsletters are different than newspapers, but it's not necessarily worse than like the current age of print newspapers now. So I have some optimism there's. 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 Jon Gruber's daring Fireball newsletter and blog. He wrote this back in 2024 and it was called Regarding and well against Substack. And he goes through some things that he is upset about, but among others, and I'm going to let me find the right thing to read here, 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. A great director trying to promote their film by saying click on my max. That's how much they picked your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as my substack. There is only your writing and a forever fight against a world of pure insidification. And so he's, he's upset about this move that Substack is making. 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 ecosystem that can push back against the sort of insertified digital attention tools. They might say, that's not our problem. Our problem is trying to become a hundred billion dollar valued company. And the way we get there is we gotta have our 50 million users using this thing constantly. And so what we need to do is take and mix and remix content and everyone's just providing us text. And we're gonna create 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 we want to enter that world of 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. 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. No, like WordPress is the software on which I run my blog. I don't call it my WordPress. I don't say like, hey, I don't know if you've listened to my simple cast. That's the hosting company that hosts our podcast. Like no, 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 five thousand journalists to have a good living. They want 50 million users that use it constantly. They want to insertify it into something like a stream based TikTok, Twitter, Instagram style distraction machine because those companies have huge valuations and that's where they might push it. So what is our final answer here? I think 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. We need like an open source equivalence ways that you can have email newsletters that can be easily discovered, subscribed to and take payments that is not tied to like a company that wants a huge valuation. 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 a 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 cost 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 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.
- [47:54]
B
Because you have a lot of emails.
- [47:55]
A
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 gonna stop people from getting there. So 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 million, a hundred billion dollar unicorn. If that ecosystem can emerge, then I have faith in all this. If we, if we hitch our wagon, the substack, I just think their investors want the big return. And again, having 5,000. Paul Krugman's 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 ready to email all the time. I want to make $4 million a.
- [48:57]
B
Year with big banners.
- [48:59]
A
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.
- [49:06]
B
How old is he?
- [49:10]
A
Good question. I would guess 64.
- [49:16]
B
And he won the Nobel Prize 10 years ago?
- [49:18]
A
No, he would have won the Nobel Prize in 2000, early 2000s.
- [49:23]
B
Oh, that long ago?
- [49:24]
A
Yeah. So he's a professor or was a professor at Princeton. He did it when I 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. Yeah, 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, I think Silver's right. That's a, that's a normal job. Yeah, 40 hour a week job, done with flexibility. And then you're making all that much money.
- [50:04]
B
You're also, like, really cognizant with your newsletter about not spamming your audience and making sure they get high quality content. And yeah, like, you're really good about that.
- [50:14]
A
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's like, a new idea about, like, how this economy works, the digital economy works. So it's like, people who care about that tension between depth and distraction. I just want to be sending them useful dispatches. I like doing it. I've been doing it forever. All right, now we're gonna move on to a new segment. If that was our idea segment, we're now gonna tackle practices. So this is a segment where we try to actually look at specific practices. Whether they're good or bad. We'll assess them that might help you in your personal battle for depth in an increasingly distracted world. What we're gonna do here is we're gonna actually, we're gonna load something from YouTube. And 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. One of the clips from that interview was called something like how to. What's the exact wording, Jesse?
- [51:27]
B
Like, how to successfully delete social media.
- [51:29]
A
How to successfully delete social media. It's a five minute clip from the interview. It went viral. So something about the particular advice I gave in that clip hit a chord in a way that, you know, I've done a lot of stuff about phones. There's a lot of stuff online about phones and how to spend less time. But whatever I said in this clip seemed to touch a chord because I think it's been viewed more than a million times now since 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 gonna 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 gonna go through this clip bit by bit, and I'm gonna comment on and elaborate on the things I said, and we're gonna try to extract from it the most useful big ideas for anyone who's thinking about less phone use as a New Year's resolution. All right, so we're gonna do this like an audio style, right?
- [52:23]
B
Mm.
- [52:23]
A
All right, so we'll just start it, and then, Jesse, I'll tell you when to pause it, and I'll jump in.
- [52:28]
C
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 when.
- [52:54]
A
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?
- [53:08]
B
He's jacked.
- [53:09]
A
God's a big guy. He is a strong. He's a strong gentleman. He's in good shape. Between us, Huberman and I can combine bench press, like, 300 pounds between 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 gotten. What he's saying here 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.
- [54:08]
C
What comes one experience is the lack of friction, and that's where it gets scary. It's so interesting the way that the brain can adapt the friction leaving something behind, the friction coming back to it. And I think for people listening to this, I raise this because I think, of course, many people listening have work that they really need to focus on. 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, 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.
- [54:54]
B
Yeah.
- [54:54]
A
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 to 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 overuse beyond just like you have a bad habit. It is. And I'm paraphrasing to him, for a lot of people, it's filling a void that they otherwise have in their life. So right off the bat, he's acknowledging why we're using our phone so much. And his answer is not weakness, dumbness, or not caring. He's like, this is actually solving a problem for a lot of people. All right, let's keep going, Jesse.
- [55:47]
C
Resources within them that they don't yet know about because they're essentially using that energy elsewhere.
- [55:55]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think for a lot of people, it's papering over the void. You have this void in your life because there's 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 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. Yeah, so that's going on. And you just don't see that. But I was physically dominating him. Okay, so I then pick up that thread, right? I'm picking up the thread there. And so, like, yes, this is what I've seen. There's a lot of papering over the void. That void is very. Wills. 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 before this, it was other things, right? There was other intoxicants or other sorts of distractions. It's a way for some people of essentially putting a screen over that gaping void. And it 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, because I did this experiment for one of my. Let's pause here before we get to the experiment. All right, so 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. There's a lot of. Now I'm really unpacking why this went wrong. What about. This was resonating again, there's a lot of. 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 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. 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 1600 people and they all turned off all their social media for 30 days.
- [59:13]
C
30 days?
- [59:14]
A
30 days, right.
- [59:15]
C
These are young people, old people.
- [59:16]
A
A whole mix. A whole mix, right.
- [59:18]
C
Not just university students.
- [59:19]
A
I recruited them from my newsletter readership. So they weren't university students. And it wasn't formal research. It was. 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 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 succeeded 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 onto the table with white knuckles. They wouldn't make it 30 days. The people who did succeed followed my advice to incredibly aggressively pursue alternatives in those 30 days. So it's like, go learn new hobbies, join things right away. Get like, really? All right, so again, we really haven't yet said anything about how to change what's on your phone, how to change your settings, what to do with your notifications, whether or not you should put your phone in the grayscale. If you should have some sort of brick device, 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?
- [60:26]
B
Two minutes.
- [60:27]
A
Two minutes left. Right. So we're more halfway through the clip. We haven't talked anything about strategies for putting your phone away. What are we talking about here? I said look, when I studied 30, 1500 people who spent 30 days without using their phone, the people who succeeded were the people who aggressively were exploring through reflection, experimentation, what they actually enjoyed. They were finding new activities, they were going out and trying new things, they were trying to fill in their life in interesting ways. They had a much easier time not having their phone. The other people just white knuckled and said, I don't want to use this, just like I don't want to smoke and I'm just going to sit here staring at being like, you're not going to 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, 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 I have to paper over so I don't see it. That goes away when the void is much smaller. 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. I think 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 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 gonna seem to say, why would I look at like an AI generated short form video on a Small rectangle when I got a life to live. And so I think this is like a numerical experiment. There are a lot of clips about using your phone less that aren't doing as well as this one. And the difference is this one says very little about your phone. In fact, there's a. There's an AB comparison you can find on Huberman's channel himself. Six months ago, he also posted a very similar titled clip with Annie Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation. It's also like how to use your phone less or whatever. And it's very good science and he's a great scientist on this. But it really gets into, like, here's why you're addicted and here's what's going on in your brain. And here's like, things you might do to reduce it. 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 twentieth of the views. Because I think we're hitting on something real. It's like an experiment. We get to the psychology in which phone use happens. And so that's what I'm going to leave you with in our practice segment today. If you're worried about your phone, start worrying about making the rest of your life better. Then return to the phone 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 shallower alternative is not going to be as appealing. I think in the final two minutes you've seen the clip. I think in the final two minutes of the clip, me and human get into a full out fist fight. Duck the punch, block the other, come in, pick him up, drop him. He stands up, barely like clutching it, and he applauds and points to him. And then he hands me a trophy off of his wall. Because you were the king. Now we're gonna. He's gonna just come beat me up at some point. Anyways, there we go. So anyways, I think that's useful. A little bit of practical advice to help you in your own quest to fight for death in a distracted world. All right, well, we still want to hear from you, so we got a couple questions that you have sent in that we will hear from now.
- [64:52]
B
Okay, first question is from Victoria. I'm reading through some classics. I keep my phone close to use ChatGPT to enhance my understanding. Is this okay?
- [65:02]
A
I mean, it's not terrible. The Good news is you're reading classics, and I think trying to have a secondary information to help you make it through a harder book is great. And if you want to have ChatGPT 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 ChatGPT 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 primary secondary source. This was a complicated way of saying it, but the primary source of ChatGPT is using that source itself being a secondary source about the classic book that you're reading. The key thing is not to interrupt mid reading. Right? It takes a while for your brain to fire up all the networks needed to make sense of written words and turn it into sort of an internal cognitive understanding. You don't want to be interrupting every few pages to go look something up. You want to queue up understanding by reading an article or a ChatGPT 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?
- [66:11]
B
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?
- [66:19]
A
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. 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 most of the things. When I go back to them, it's not so great I look for things that either stand out or more frequently, what happens is I come back to them again and again. So in my lifestyle centric planning notebooks, where 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. I had an example in the book I'm writing on the Deep Life, where I talk about exactly this, by the way, writing down insights about your life in a notebook. I talk about how most of them aren't going to be, in retrospect, that. 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 IndyCar race, and maybe in the moment it's like super exciting and it's like visually very novel and there's a hundred thousand people in these cars and you're like, oh, I'm having a reaction here. I'm going to write something down. Like, this is really interesting. I'm having strong reactions, really cool. Later you might look back at that and be 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 would 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. And so it's in the filtering of what you write down that ultimately you get the value. So don't worry, get it down, get out of your head so you're not stressed about it. Get out of your head so it's on paper, 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. Doesn't have to be good handwriting, it doesn't have to be beautifully written and it doesn't have to be brilliant ideas, just get the stuff down. That's the nice thing. They're cheap paper. It's yours. Personal, Just right. 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 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 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 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 factor meals.com deep50 off and use code deep50 off 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 healthy Make Healthier eating easy with Factor I also want to talk about our friends at Monarch. One of my big goals for the new year is to try to get our finances back under control after the season of holidays and birthdays and trips that we just got through. 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 and Deep. 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? 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@monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Deep. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.
- [72:00]
B
All right, next up is Dirk. With organic search getting worse or replaced by AI powered chat bots, social media broken and mainstream media paying less and less, it's hard to build an audience and make money writing without using a tool like Substack. The 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?
- [72:24]
A
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. 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 way more narrow than you think. Like most types of media doesn't work and then the niches that work blow up. Printed newspaper that works, books work, blogs, then it work, you know, pamphlets, then it work. Novellas haven't really worked, but paid newsletters do. 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 this in the idea segment. That's the main issue with Substack is not the model, I think a paid newsletter model. We went through the numbers that could be a fair replacement for like newspapers in terms of size and market and diversity. What I worry about is one company offered it. That's when we have problems. If it's just Substack because they can shuttify this and just make it into some sort of like digital Soylent Green type of nonsense slop. So what we need is not like the old indie web stuff to be successful, like won't people just pay for my micro blog or my, you know, WordPress? We need more indie web 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 it 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 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 in the back of trucks and driving them places. Most people could not put texts 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 forms, it doesn't actually lead to a huge explosion in the number of people who can make a living to a medium. It just changes the way they can do it or the parameters around what they do it. And that's something to keep in mind. The email newsletter economy might replace newspapers. It's not going to mean a hundred thousand 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 most media. Most television pilots never get picked up. And that's like at the end of a very large pyramid of professional writers and performers. And a lot of money was put into this and everyone to make it work. And most of those fail. So of course, like, your random thing you did is probably not going to succeed. That's okay. Broadening access to information doesn't go hand in hand with broadening massively the number of people who can make a living off information. So we should keep that in mind as well. So my main concern is not having just new media form replacing old one. I think that's fine. It's having only one player in town. We need more indie or open source or smaller, more niche alternatives to Substack, which I think we're going to get. Jesse. Because they're. If they initiatify, like, oh, it's all streams and we just want to show you all sorts of stuff and get you to look at your app more and more. There's a market for someone else to be like, okay, we'll just do like old 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 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 hopeful prediction, is that if Substack moves towards the sort of slop, attention, distraction mode, then the good writers will just shift the new alternatives that'll pop up.
- [77:21]
B
Can you define and shutify you use that a few times?
- [77:23]
A
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 then to make the most money off of their users. 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, more often. They have more ads to sell them, but it's a way worse experience and people are fleeing in drones. So Cory Doctor's theory, and he coined this term a long time ago, but he has a new book out about this. His theory is that this is an inevitable cycle when you have broadly funded digital attention economy tools. And so substack will probably fall prey to that, but maybe it won't. So we'll see. All right, finally, I want to end each episode talking quickly about what I've been reading. And well, we just came out of December. Jesse and I read my five books in December. But more importantly, December is my time for reading thrillers. So I thought I would briefly mention the three thrillers I read in December. And then I'm going to rank order them. All right, Number one I read was Airframe by Michael Crichton. There's a lesser known thriller of his, but he wrote it like at the height of his post Jurassic park powers in the 1990s. No high concept plot. There is no dinosaurs or time travel or aliens. It is really just there's an accident on an airplane and they're investigating it and trying to figure out what it is. And the company has a big pending deal with the Chinese and they don't want that to be jeopardized and they're trying to cover up some of the issues and there's some labor unrest. That's it. But it's like classic thriller where you get into the details of airplane safety and how it works and good pacing. 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 an he took an actual event, a Victorian England train robbery, did a lot of research on it, and then kind of dramatized it in a novel. He kind of walks through the steps of it. It's a sort of a Sting style. 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 here, adventure book 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 are all three really good classic adventure novel thrillers. I think if I had to rank him, I'd put Airframe number one. It had the least high concept plot, but it was just perfectly executed. It is a really well executed thriller. As someone at the height of his powers, you get really interested in the mechanics of airplane function, airplane safety. There's a ticking clock element to it which keeps it moving and the plot just rolls. You're from this to this to this. It takes place times over just a small number of days. And this whole thing kind of unfolds. You really care what's going on, even though, like you don't actually care about the subject matter at all. It shows how good Crichton had become at writing techno thrillers. And he didn't need the high concept for it to actually roll forward. It's also the beginning of his 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 90s is when he began to become a little bit more reactionary. But that's fun. 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. So it's 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 in my newsletter a few weeks ago about the rise of like these paperback originals that don't really have an equivalent today. They're kind of short and they're entertaining. And they're meant to give you like six hours or four hours of entertainment. And this thing just moved. It was great. They're like, yeah, let's just say we can shrink people. Don't worry about it. We can just do it. We shrink them and what would happen? And it just like unfolds this adventure as the submarine moves through the body and the science is good and there's a, it's a well 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 only have an hour before they re expand and it kills the person they're in. I think this is just a well constructed. I know Asimov had this club in his bag. A well constructed adventure thriller with a big technical aspect in as well. I really, I really enjoyed it and 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. I also read a book about the Simpsons and one other book. I think what else I read, I forgot what the fifth book was. But anyways, I read five books in December. But the thrillers is what I want to check in on because that's what people care about. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Hey, let us know. You can send a Note to Jesse calnewport.com if you like this move towards the two segments, ideas and practices. 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. 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@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@calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. Sam.