Late last month The Atlantic ran an article titled The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films.
I want to read you an excerpt from early in the article.
This excerpt starts with a quote from a film professor.
I used to think if homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever.
Craig Epperling, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me but students will not do it.
I heard similar observations from 20 film studies professors around the country.
They told me that over the past decade and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature length films.
All right.
So, yeah, that's not great.
But here's the thing.
I think there is both bad news and good news here.
The bad news is, as I'll argue, this phenomenon reveals the impact of digital technology on our basic human ability to pay attention and think is perhaps worse than we originally imagined.
But the good news is that in this problem, we can find its own solution.
So as I'm going to go on to argue...
Getting better at watching movies might just be the right first step toward reclaiming your brain.
So here's the plan.
I'm going to elaborate on those two arguments, right?
That our struggles to watch movie is a side effect of digital technology and that practicing watching movies can help us reverse that damage.
And then assuming that you buy those arguments.
I'm going to get practical.
I'm going to give you specific advice for how to become a better movie watcher, including a list of classic movies that you should start with.
Jesse, I think it'll come as no surprise that my main recommendation is going to be conducting an extensive scene-by-scene analysis of the 2002 Britney Spears movie Crossroads.
No, I like it.
All right.
Too soon.
All right.
Then we'll move on to my news and notes segment where, by popular demand, I'm going to take a close look at last week's viral essay sensation.
This is Matt Schumer's essay.
Something big is happening.
It's one of these AI is about to change everything for real this time type essay.
So we'll get into that.
We have a reader email about the Olympics and we'll talk about my new books.
We have a lot to get to.
As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is 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 to start our investigation here, let's look a little bit closer at this problem of people having a hard time watching entire movies.
It's not just film students, and it's not just the people that The Atlantic talk about.
If you start poking around on the Internet, you can find a lot of evidence of people having the same issue.
I was looking on the Our Movies subreddit and I found a bunch of people on there who are giving similar complaints.
Let me read you a quote here.
This comes from a Reddit post.
This might just be me, but for a while now I'm struggling to decide which movie is worthy of watching than actually sitting and watching it.
I can watch it in the movie theater, but for some reason, I just can't watch it at home.
I end up watching Seinfeld reruns on TV.
I don't know what's wrong with me.
Here's another quote from another post from the movie subreddit.
All right, we have more evidence that this is a problem.
We've been getting reports that the major streaming services have started changing the way that they make original movies.
To better match their audience's reduced ability to pay attention to them.
In a recent podcast interview, Matt Damon, who has a new movie out with Ben Affleck on Netflix that's called The Rip, said that streamers are now pushing filmmakers to avoid the classic three-act structure and to instead – and I'm quoting him here – reiterate the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they're watching.
In another part of this interview Damon says another change is the streamers now say you have to have a major action set piece in the first five minutes, otherwise people will get bored and flip away.
This is very different to the way that we used to make movies, where you save the big action sequence for act three.
People aren't going to last that long anymore.
I couldn't help – when I was thinking about that idea that you have to have the major thing happen in the first five minutes, I couldn't help thinking about the making of The Godfather.
I'm reading another book that talks about this recently.
An interesting tidbit about the making of that movie is that nothing major happens with Al Pacino's character of Michael Corleone until about an hour and 15 minutes into the movie where he shoots Captain McCluskey.
And so Pacino rightly, looking at the full duration of this three-hour movie, said I need to play Corleone, very sort of quiet and meek.
And then that's like a key character transition point.
Well, when Coppola began filming this movie and the first dailies were coming back, the head of Paramount, Robert Evans, was like Pacino's got to go.
They're looking at the sequences from the wedding scene up front.
Like this guy is barely talking.
Like he's barely moving.
Like this is the wrong person.
We got to fire them.
So Coppola had to actually move up the filming of the – restaurant shooting scene way early into the schedule, just so they could show those dailies to robert evans, at which point he's like oh, i see what's going to happen later.
No no, but she knows, gotta stay.
But it just caught my attention.
We used to be okay with an hour and 15 minutes going by before the main character talks above like a quiet whisper.
Not the case anymore.
All right, enough movie geekdom, let's get back on track here.
The next follow-up question is why are we having a hard time paying attention to movies?
Well, if we return to the Atlantic article, there's a lot of quotes in there that point towards digital technology, and particularly smartphones, as being the culprit.
The first piece of evidence is the quote from earlier in this episode.
Notice that that professor said this issue got really bad after the pandemic.
What happened in the pandemic?
Young people began to obsessively use their devices because they were stuck at home at a level they haven't seen before.
So there's a lot of device-related issues that got really bad after the pandemic.
So that is a big piece of correlative evidence right there.
There's also some quotes from the article that make this clear.
I'm going to read you one.
All right, this is from the article.
Mazuda Lippitt, a cinema and media studies professor at the University of Southern California home to perhaps the top film program in the country— said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings.
The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget.
Eventually, they give in.
All right.
So why is this going on?
Here's another quote from the article that I think helps unwind what's happening in these students' brains.
Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll.
I can imagine if your body and or your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long.
USC's Lippitt said
All right, so I mean not a surprise, but these film professors point their finger at the obvious culprit.
Phones have made it hard for people to focus on movies.
Now, I want to get a little bit more technical here.
There's actually a term of art for the capability term.
That phones are degrading.
The term is cognitive patience.
Now, this was coined by the reading researcher Marianne Wolf.
Here's a formal definition of this term, which is reading specific, but we're going to generalize it to movies as well.
Here's the formal definition of cognitive patience.
The ability to read with focused and sustained attention and delay gratification, while refraining from multitasking or skimming over parts of the text.
So we can adapt this idea of cognitive patience.
I can sustain attention on something for a long period of time without switching context or multitasking.
We can really apply that to multiple other activities, including consuming films.
Our cognitive patient seems to have been degraded. by using our phones.
All right.
Well, if we're going to solve this problem, let's try to understand again in more detail.
Why is cognitive patience degraded by looking at our phones all the time?
There's two things going on here that have to do with the reward systems in our brain.
The first has to do with our short-term reward system.
So there is a bundle of neurons in your short-term reward system that that is associated with the stimuli of picking up and looking at your phone.
And because you get this consistent, strong source of reward that has high expected value when you pick up your phone.
Because of the algorithmic curation of the apps that are on there those bundles have learned we will probably get a good reward if we do that.
So what happens and I'm simplifying things here is that bundle of neurons effectively votes For picking up your phone as your next action.
If it sees it nearby, you experience that vote subjectively as an urge to pick up that phone, a distracting urge to pick up that phone.
There's a dopamine cascade that happens through your neuronal motor neurons.
There's a whole thing here.
We're going to get into this more, by the way.
I'm having Anna Olympia is going to come on the show to teach us more about dopamine.
But it feels like an urge to pick up the phone.
So if you have a phone with you and you're trying to watch a movie, there's all of these votes happening.
Those neurons are like reward, reward, reward.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
And you are feeling this like jittery, as that one professor said, nicotine addict style withdrawal symptoms, because your brain is like this is here.
This is reward.
It's the same thing like if you're hungry and there's the – you have the big bowl of popcorn in the movies.
I don't know if you have this problem Jesse, but I often tell myself not until the previews are over.
It's really hard because there's a bundle of neurons.
It's like that's going to be good when we eat that popcorn.
Boom boom boom vote vote, vote.
And you're like sort of sitting there shaking because it's right there and it's hard to overcome your short-term reward system.
So our constant use of the phones builds up a very strong vote from that neuronal bundle which makes it difficult to do anything else when the phone is there.
But the second thing that happens is that because of that, we lose our exposure to the deep, delayed gratification rewards of actually making it through a good movie.
Now, why is that important?
Well, there's a different reward system in our brain, the long-term reward system that can override the short-term reward system.
And it deals with not immediate guesses of if we do this thing, what's the reward.
It predicts the future.
If we do this thing now, it actually might not in the moment be the best feeling thing, but in the future that's going to give us a good reward.
Not a cheap reward like the Sadie that comes from eating popcorn, but like maybe a deep psychological or philosophical type of reward.
That long-term reward system could overwhelm the short-term.
But it has to be trained.
And the way you train that long-term reward system is that time and again you delay gratification.
You get the deep reward in the end, the deep satisfactions.
It strengthens its case in the future for like it's worth sticking with this activity.
So we have this anti-virtuous cycle where the phone makes it harder and harder to watch things when it's there.
So you get less exposure actually making it through good movies.
So your long-term reward system loses its standing.
And now, when you're in a situation where even your phone is not there, you're just like I don't – I'm bored.
Like I don't want to make it through here because there's no motivation left for you to actually make it through the film.
So those two things work together.
And in the end, you can't watch the film.
Now, should we care about it?
What if you don't like movies?
Well, I say yes, because it's a canary in the coal mine.
Movies are just one example from a broader category of activities that are moving and meaningful and can change the way we understand the world and ourselves.
And we're getting pushed away from that because of what's happening on these devices.
So, whether or not you like movies, there's some equivalent of that in your life that that you are probably being pushed away from because of the dominance of your short-term reward system and how that leads to a long-term reward system with these other activities to degrade.
So this is like a bigger trend that's being picked up by this specific issue, this bigger trend that activities that give us deep satisfactions almost always require delayed gratifications and cognitive patience right.
And the more time we spend on our phones – the worse we get at actually sticking with those activities.
How many things like watching movies are leaving our lives that we don't even know?
So I think it is something worth dealing with.
Like the first step towards reclaiming our brain is beginning to rebuild cognitive patience, especially around activities that can give us deeper satisfactions.
And I think movie watching is a great first tool that we can use.
So here's my physical analogy, right?
I mean I think about The ability to make it through a good movie.
We should think about that like, if you're new to running, your ability to actually like complete a 5K race.
It's like that first milestone you want to get to that says I am now starting to reclaim my brain.
I am now starting to actually build up some cognitive fitness.
It's not where you end, but it should be your first step.
So this is my pitch to you today.
Let's make this our exercise relearning how to build up the cognitive patience to make it through a good movie.
And we're doing this not just because movies are cool which they are but because again, we want what I call attentional autonomy, the ability to actually have more control over what we do with our brain and not just what's going to give us the most immediate rewards.
Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.
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All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show.
All right, so this brings us to the practical segment of this discussion.
How do you teach yourself to make it through and enjoy good movies?
Well, I have two general categories of things to suggest.
The first category of things to suggest is when you sit down to try to watch these movies, you have to get the stimuli that is going to trigger the short-term reward system out of the room.
Do not have your phone with you.
You're just setting yourself up for failure, the nicotine addict shaky withdrawal if the phone is right there because it's going to fire those votes again and again and again.
And why combat that?
Why combat that?
Put the phone far enough away that it's not triggering your short-term reward center.
All right?
So that's going to help.
And if you're in a movie theater – for God's sakes, I hate seeing this.
Jesse, I don't know if you see this now.
But because of that reward signal, people are looking at their phones.
They can't help themselves.
So it's almost easier –
To practice this at home because you can put your phone very far away.
In the movie theater, people are just like, you know what?
I'm just going to look at it because, you know, I don't know.
They can't help themselves.
All right.
Number two, that helps the short-term reward system degrade its influence.
Number two, we have to rebuild your association of long-term rewards.
So keep the movies good.
That is, movies with enough sort of art or artifice that you're going to end them with a deep satisfaction.
I was exposed to something new.
It was a moving experience.
It was an inspiring experience.
The craft was really inspiring.
The story was really inspiring because again, the more exposure you get to a moving experience at the end of a movie, the more standing you're giving to your long-term reward system and the easier it will be to do this in the future.
So how do you now make it all the way through a good movie if you're not used to watching movies that aren't every six minutes or some sort of alien that's attacking?
How do you make it through these movies?
Here is my technique that I use.
I'm going to give it to you now for the first time.
I never talked about it before.
I call it the 30-minute rule.
You never go more than 30 minutes without stopping to read something about the movie.
So before you start, you read a review or analysis of the movie.
And if it's a good movie, there's going to be a lot written about it.
So, oh, I kind of understand.
Why do people like this?
What should I be looking for?
Great.
You watch 30 minutes.
Stop.
Give your brain a little bit of a break.
Read another review or analysis.
Start it up again.
Go another 30 minutes.
Stop.
Read another review or analysis.
You're always repriming your brain.
With ideas about why this movie is good, what you should be looking out for, why people liked it.
And this increases its attractiveness or salience to your brain.
It makes it easier to pay attention and it amplifies the reward you get out of it.
I am not a big fan of this movement of like exposure to art.
Just go to the museum and then you'll learn to love art.
It doesn't work that way.
You got to know what you're looking at and why.
Or just say, watch this movie.
It's great.
Like it can work.
Some great movies will get the people.
But a lot of classics, people are like, I'm bored.
So you need to know what makes it great.
And it amplifies the rewards you get from the experience, which gives your long-term reward system more standing.
And now your cognitive patience expands.
Now, here's my extra secret tip.
This is this is what I like because I like both the art of movies, but also the craft of movies.
If I'm watching a classic, I always search to see if there's an article written about it for American Cinematography Magazine.
Magazine for cinematographers, right?
A lot of movies will have these articles where the cinematographer – I guess now they often call these director of photographies as well – write a long essay about how they shot the movie.
What they were thinking about, the techniques they introduced and why they introduced them.
You learn about different lighting choices they make and different lensing choices they make.
I always come away from those articles with this, like, I see the movie through a different light.
I'm like, oh my God, look what they did in this scene.
This is great.
All this amplifies reward.
All right, so that's what I'm going to recommend.
What should you watch?
This, okay, you know this, Jesse.
I can't do...
Top ten list.
I'm like – there's a word for this.
Like I can't rank things.
I can't say what my favorite things are.
So I can't tell you like these are the 20 best movies or the 10 best movies or whatever.
But I just went through and I listed.
I was thinking through.
Like if I was – someone was like wanting to get into watching good movies.
What are some movies I would recommend?
And I just threw a bunch down that these are all movies that are meaningful to me and I think they have like really clear – sources of value if you do my 30 minute rule and read about them or why they're uh important.
So I have these in rough chronological order here.
Um, on the older side, consider watching M, the German Fritz Lang movie about actually uh, it's not a very cheery topic, Jesse.
It's about a, I guess like a child's abducting serial killer, but it's from the thirties.
Um, So atmospheric.
It kind of touches on German Expressionism.
So many innovations in it.
It's actually a really good movie.
Watch Citizen Kane.
Citizen Kane kind of fell out of – I'm obsessed with this movie.
It kind of fell out of favor, because what happened is a lot of people watched it and were like what's so great about this?
What you have to do to understand it is watch another movie made that same year.
You're like, oh, this is great because –
He invented – Wells invented, like all of these techniques that now we're used to from sophisticated movies.
They weren't in the movies before it.
I mean he has nonlinear narratives.
He has these sort of – the types of cuts, these type of tracking shots, his use of long focus, his – even like little things, like I'm going to build a ceiling on this set because I want to be able to shoot low.
They actually had the floor of the set up on a platform so a cameraman could be down in a pit.
But to shoot up, you have to have a ceiling, and so they built a fake ceiling on the set.
He just innovated the cinematography in this, the darkness, the shadows.
Like this 20-whatever-something maybe like 27 or something comes in from radio and just innovates innovates innovates, innovates.
The most innovations in a single movie.
Technical innovation, since probably Birth of a Nation, but with 100 percent less.
Klu Klux Klan members.
So like that's good.
So I'm a big Citizen Kane fan.
If you can watch it with the audio commentary, that's worth it.
You got to watch John Ford.
You got to watch The Searchers.
You got to watch Vertigo by Hitchcock.
You got to watch The Good, The Bad.
And the ugly, I think that's, that's my favorite Clint Eastwood from that period.
You got to watch Bonnie and Clyde, read about Bonnie and Clyde before you watch it.
This introduced new Hollywood, read Pauline Kael on it, read Ebert on it.
There's, I think Bonnie and Clyde, there's a famous review.
I don't know if it's Morgenstern, who it is, who didn't understand it because, Bonnie and Clyde, you know this is Warren Beatty Hackman's in it.
Uh, It was bringing like a European-style personal filmmaking to Hollywood, just as the studio system was collapsing right.
Like this was – we went from The Sound of Music to Bonnie and Clyde.
It's a European-style film in the sense that it's more personal.
It's more nihilistic.
It's playing on like emotional realism or whatever.
There's a famous review of it that's like this is garbage.
And then they had to go back and write a new review like I was wrong.
Actually, this is a classic.
So you got to watch that.
You got to watch Jaws. arguably like the platonically perfect movie of the 20th century.
Then you got to watch some of the new Hollywood 70s, some other naturalist movie, naturalism rich movies.
I would suggest Dog Day Afternoon is good.
Um, so do, lumet.
You got to watch nashville, i think is very good.
You listen to the robert altman working with these multi-track recorders to have overlapping naturalistic dialogue.
I also like mccabe and mrs miller speaking of baby, which is like another altman movie of that era.
It's like a, a realist, naturalist reinterpretation of a western.
Watch that after the searchers.
Now that's a cool double feature.
You're going to get right there.
Um, Taxi Driver.
I mean, it's an unsettling movie, but man, the camera work in there.
The confidence of that movie.
Let's go modern, like 21st century.
Dunkirk, I think, is a masterpiece of writing and filmmaking.
I think I've been pushing Zone of Interest.
Not a very cheery movie. takes place right outside the gates of Auschwitz.
So I guess you could double feature this with Fritz Lang movie.
Um, I think it's a masterpiece.
There's, there's a lot about that movie.
It's so original the way that it was like crafted and constructed.
I saw in the theater.
I think it's fantastic.
Um, if you want something that's in the theaters now, the best thing I've seen recently is Marty Supreme.
It's one of the softy brothers, uh, fantastic kind of, again, you got to read about it, right?
It's, it's commentary on the American experience on capitalism, on the tension between ambition and family and where we come from and is beautifully shot and acted in the energy.
It's just like a really well done thing.
All right.
So I don't know.
I'm leaving out all good movies, but that's a place to get started.
What am I missing?
Jesse?
I mean, crossroads should be most of your time.
I saw that in the theater.
I saw that in the theater and got yelled at by the people behind me.
What happened?
I was making fun of it so much that at the end of the movie they were like you ruined this for us because you want to shut up.
And I was like, it was so bad.
Like you should have been on your phone.
So you were distracted by me.
Yeah.
That's the problem.
Nowadays they wouldn't have noticed it would have been on their phones.
Oh man.
What am I missing?
Well, Robert Duvall just passed away.
Yeah.
Okay.
We got to do some like Duvall apocalypse now.
Yeah.
Yeah, you got to watch Apocalypse Now.
There's such great, beautiful remasterings of that movie.
It's visually beautiful.
That's a fantastic movie.
Colonel Kilgore, that's classic Duvall.
Godfather, one and two.
It's like out of favor to say that's good.
It's a great movie, and he's great in that.
He wasn't in three because they weren't going to pay him enough.
Yeah, and three wasn't very good.
Yeah, three was horrible.
The Great Santini is very good.
I think Robert Duvall's – I mean –
He was in Network too.
He was in Network.
It was a great movie.
His most challenging role and hopefully the role that he's remembered for and the one that you should watch, I think is his appearance as the father of the Vince Vaughn character in Four Christmases.
That's an underrated movie.
My wife and I love the it's like a 2006 movie for Christmases.
It's Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn at the end of that era where, like you, would just put Vince Vaughn in a movie and he would talk fast and was kind of funny.
And Robert Duvall played his like functional alcoholic divorced father.
Mad Dog had a critic on talking all about him and he said that he was offered the Jaws leading role but he didn't want to be a main guy.
Yeah, I know a lot about – I was just reading about it again.
Everyone was offered those roles.
And you know how Schneider got it?
Spielberg was like at a thing socially with Schneider and was just telling him about the movie.
And he's like, why don't you put me in the lead?
And he's like, you know what?
Yeah, that makes sense.
And that was that.
And that's how he ended up in the – and they put him in the lead for Schneider.
We're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.
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All right.
So that's what we got.
Watch more movies.
All right.
We're going to move on now with our news and notes.
All right.
So I got to react.
This is something that I've been sent a lot of times.
I think a lot of people have been sent this a lot of times.
It's an essay that's been going around on X that went viral.
It's written by an AI startup entrepreneur named Matt Schumer.
And the essay is called Something Big Is Happening.
And it is a right down the middle, AI is about to change everything.
For real this time, let's all be worried type of essay.
I got sent this so many times.
For whatever reason, this crossed over into normie culture.
And out of tech culture and tech journalism culture, everyone seems to be reading this.
So by popular demand, I'm going to go through this a little bit.
I picked out three or four sections I think are important for understanding the message and approach of this essay.
And then I'm going to respond to it and we'll try to get down to the ground truth here.
So I'll have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.
All right.
I'm going to read something here.
I'll start with something from the introduction to the piece.
All right.
So here's Matt Schuber.
We'll be right back.
But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big.
The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
All right, that's quite the setup there.
There's some sort of classic AI reporting traps that are happening here.
There's no actual information in it.
It's pure emotional manipulation trying to give you a sense of the digital ick.
Make you feel uneasy.
It sets you up for this.
The emotional state it puts you in if you're not someone who's following AI closely is like yeah, your worst suspicions are true.
It's crazy what's going on out there.
And you know what?
All right, I'm going to let you in what's going on.
That is a classic – before we get to the content of this essay, that is a classic move.
Like I'm going to reveal to you what's happening and it's worse than you think.
I mean, that's like the classic move for everything conspiratorial thinking, for radical health trends.
It's a very compelling way to set up whatever you're going to say.
All right, let's get into the content itself.
I'm going to skip ahead a little bit now.
Here's the first, I think, substantive thing that's said here.
For years, AI had been improving steadily.
Big jumps here and there.
But each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came.
Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress.
And then it got even faster and then faster again.
Each new model wasn't just better than the last.
It was better by a wider margin.
And the time between new model releases was shorter.
I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.
All right, I'm going to stop right there.
This is our first piece of evidence that oh, this writer is willing to essentially make things up if they fit the vibe that he's trying to portray.
The way he describes this is actually in some sense the opposite of reality.
As someone who has been covering the AI – the generative AI revolution very closely for The New Yorker and here for this show, this is not how things happen.
It's opposite reality.
Things were moving really fast when pre-training scaling was working.
The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps.
This is where you're in the steep part of the lost power law curve from the Kaplan scaling paper.
The period he's talking about as we arrived in the 2025 is actually when progress slowed down.
It became a problem for the AI companies.
The general overall capability boost that happened from pre-training scaling stopped happening and they had to shift instead to a backup plan, which was we're going to do this sort of post-training work on very specific tasks.
And we're going to do things like post-inference time compute and we're going to turn our focus from general ability improvements that are clearly impressive to any user to instead chasing down these arcane named benchmarks that we can sort of teach the model to specifically do well on.
And there was this whole period where this was – for users were like I don't really – the main thing I'm noticing is like the personality of the chatbots changing.
And you're getting incremental improvements on specific activities where they could specifically try to post-train for that activity.
It was actually a bad period for growth, not a good period.
So this idea that changes were speeding up most I would say close watchers are saying no no, this actually slowed down.
And they had to try to find specific areas where some sort of notable improvement could make.
They found video generation was one that ended up being a bit of a bust.
And then the other place was in computer programming tools.
So I think he's extrapolating continued progress on the computer programming tools which I'll get into in a second.
It was not exponential but hard won with.
Like the models in general were getting faster at some sort of bigger pace.
It's simply not true.
I know it fits the vibe perfectly.
People talk about cloud code more, but it's simply not true.
All right, so let's read the rest of this quote here.
Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day.
GPT-53 Codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic.
And something clicked.
Not like a light switch, more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.
Again, these were just continued incremental improvements on these coding related agents which I've been reporting on for a while.
They've been impressive for a while.
They've been making progress in these somewhat frequent but relatively small steps that are built on fine tuning and other types of post training that they're doing specifically around programming tasks.
There is something like an inflection point where the latest – these latest models on certain sorts of like code auto-generation, agentic auto-generation tasks like it got just to a level where more and more people were like I think I can start using this more in my day-to-day.
But these are kind of technical shifts.
And they're very focused on what's specifically happening in programming.
So the idea that there's these models in general are exponentially speeding up.
This is the opposite of exponential.
Incremental steady progress on a small number of narrow applications where other applications that they thought the models would be much better at, so far they failed to be making progress on.
All right.
Let's jump into the details of the programming itself.
Matt writes, Done well, done better than I would have done it myself with no corrections needed.
A couple of months ago I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits.
Now I just describe the outcome and leave.
I'll skip the final details here.
So he's saying in the narrow world of computer programming –
This is the inflection point.
Advance that you can now, as a computer programmer, just tell the AI this is what I want and come back four hours and you have that app built.
He goes on to talk about that it not only builds the app, it tests the app, it fixes it.
You don't have to do anything anymore.
All right.
So is this how people are now using this technology?
The latest models that were released earlier this month.
Well, who can tell?
I can tell because I'm in the middle of a reporting project that I started just last week.
So with the exact models he's talking about, where I have so far received detailed notes on how they use AI from active computer programmers.
I have over 250 such case studies.
I've made my way through about half of them so far.
So I'm still kind of early in this progress.
But here's what I can tell you.
No one is wrong. saying, make me an app and walking away and coming back four hours later.
And it's like, there, I have it.
Let's release this.
That is not how programmers are using these very latest tools.
That only works for very specific types of apps.
They have to be in one of a small number of like very common style of applications that are much more and it's like a special languages sort of interface focused, not too big and you don't need to be particularly stable.
So you can, as like a hobbyist, kind of vibe code.
Hey, can you make me a Tetris game with Dungeons and Dragons characters or something?
And it will do that.
You can come back.
You'll have something.
But the 250 serious programmers I'm talking to.
That's not the way they're using the auto code generation.
It's much more narrow and specified.
Those who are doing this and a lot of them aren't those who are doing this talk a lot about how You have to use super clear specs.
This is exactly what I want you to do.
And then they let the model build that code for this piece.
And then they have to extensively test it because again, the models make mistakes, 20 percent of the time right.
And then they run a bunch of unit testing on it.
OK, I think this is working.
Let's integrate that in.
OK, now here's the next thing I need you to do.
And like one out of five of these attempts are like, OK, the AI just doesn't get it.
I'll just do it myself.
There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here with AI, but what he's describing so confidently is what a minuscule fraction of this broad sample of real active professional computer programs I talked to.
A minuscule fraction is using the tools in this way.
It's cool what's happening, but it's not, hey, go make me go do this.
I'll come back four hours later.
It's just done and I'm moving on in my life.
These are heavily supervised right now.
All right, let's keep rolling here.
Here's the next quote from the piece I want to highlight.
The AI labs made a deliberate choice.
They focused on making AI great at writing code first because building AI requires a lot of code.
If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself, a smarter version which writes better code which builds an even smarter version.
Making AI great at coding was a strategy that unlocks everything else.
This is grade A nonsense.
It's just vibing nonsense.
These AI agents do not let us make better AI models.
That's not how that works.
That's not what's happening.
They're very useful, especially if you talk to these programmers like I've been doing.
The reason why they're saving time is that there's a lot of very tedious tasks that happen when you build various software stacks or applications, like building out the interface and connecting all the interface elements to the right functions or integrating multiple different data sources into a common framework so that you can pull data from any of them.
Yeah.
This is tedious type of coding, especially if you're not an expert at, exactly like you haven't built a hundred of those type of apps before.
And it takes people a long time because they have to look up oh God, what's the library?
Call for the button.
What's the, what do I, how do I access this sort of data source here for this?
What's the call?
I got it.
What do I have to import?
And this type of stuff, these models can do automatically.
They know it already.
Like, God, that saved me so much time.
It's so tedious.
I don't have to do the tedious thing.
What they cannot do is like invent a new model of intelligence, improve the fundamental mathematics of machine learning, build us a better model for AI than we've ever seen before.
That's not how this works.
And none of the innovations in general of AI are programming-related innovations.
They're all conceptual mathematical innovations where someone who is an expert in machine learning realizes like, oh, reinforcement learning could be applied to a language model if we work through the different renormalizations of the vectors properly, and then someone goes off and programs it.
So this idea that tedious code or code that requires you to look up a lot of information can be automatically coded and that saves you a lot of time.
You cannot jump from there to say oh, AI can write itself.
Now, and now we're going to have this self-reinforcing loop.
That idea has been in the zeitgeist all the way back to the 1960s, When J.L.
Goode wrote the first paper on ultra-intelligence and introduced the idea of recursive self-improvement.
It is not, not, not what these tools are meant to do.
They cannot do that.
That's not what's going on.
This notion that the AI companies chose to build coding agents first so that they could build better models that could then do everything else is wrong.
The reason why we're hearing more about coding agents is because it's one of the only narrow tranches of applications where they could find a market.
They didn't choose.
There's a lot of other things that the AI companies promised products.
And I just I wrote an article back in January for The New Yorker about this, where in early 2025, they said this is the year that we're going to have these general use agents for all sorts of jobs.
We're there.
It's going to happen.
It didn't happen because it turns out that's much harder than coding agents.
They put a lot of effort in the video generation and like that did pretty well, but there was no market there because people didn't want to pay 200 a month to make TikTok videos.
They want there to be other markets.
They're just, the technology is not good enough.
It's not interesting enough.
It's not helpful enough.
We're not seeing it move the needle in other positions as much.
So we're hearing about coding, because it's like the only place right now where there's real progress being made.
And it is a good market.
And this technology could be really useful for programmers.
Again, I'm doing these surveys and I'm going to do a much bigger thing about this soon.
But this is like a narrow thing that's happening right now.
One of the places where these models have always been good, all the way back to the instruct model, the instruct GPT model that was helped to make the GPT-3-5, that ChatGPT was made on.
From the very beginning, the last half decade, we've known the one thing these models are good at is structured code, because it's very structured language with lots of good training examples.
And they've been making steady improvements on it using post-training techniques, and they've been passing various milestones as they do these.
And this is a good story for the computer industry, and it's an interesting story.
We might lose jobs.
We might gain jobs.
We don't know, and we should cover it well.
But the idea that the AI companies chose to do that first so that they could then make their own models smarter, and then there's going to be this takeoff and AI takeover straight-up vibe nonsense.
That's not what's actually happening.
So, okay, I'm going to leave it here, Jesse, because this essay makes me a little bit upset.
But let me be clear.
Summarize.
There are struggles with the AI industry post-GPT-4 the failure of Project Orion, the failure of the BMF model, the failure of the Grok-3 failure, where they moved to 100000 GPUs for training and didn't get big improvements, the shift towards post-training, more incremental improvements and benchmark chasing.
I've written about this.
Look at my article last August for The New Yorker for more about this.
This is the portrait of an industry that's not like it's failing.
But it's also not going gangbusters.
This is why, right now, the investment community is like a little bit nervous about the stocks for the big AI companies.
Like we need to see where your big revenue is going to come from and we're not seeing it yet.
It's like just a mixed story.
It's a cool technology.
They're trying to find markets.
They're finding some niche markets, customer service, video production.
That's a pretty small market, but there's good stuff there.
And in programming, they're pretty good at programming.
And they've been making steady incremental progress.
And the tools are now good enough, now that it's beginning to affect the actual workflow rhythms of non-trivial percentages of programmers.
And that's a cool, interesting story.
This essay is about a science fiction dream.
This is not an inflection point for most people if you're not a computer programmer.
This is not from here we get some rapid takeoff.
From here, everything changes.
And I've seen article after article after this essay came back, including one.
If you read my newsletter today and get at calnewportcom, I dissect an Atlantic article that does so much vibes on exactly this.
I just don't think that's an accurate way to think about this.
All right.
Interesting stuff is happening to computer programming.
This is not an inflection point that AI is about to rise over our heads and change everything.
Again, it's a task for which these models are supremely well-suited and all this progress has been incremental but steady.
To continue to refine and update, because it's the only place where they're getting non-trivial monthly subscription fees right now is honestly in that space.
So I don't want to say nothing's happening.
But also I think this essay is alarmist and I think he gets the technology wrong and he mixes truth with fiction and makes statements confidently that just aren't right.
So there's a lot of good reporting out there about AI.
This is not it.
You could ignore this one.
You could ignore this one.
So I don't know.
There you go, Jesse.
Did you see that essay?
Everyone sent me that essay.
I did not see it until I saw it in the script.
I mean he wrote it in part with AI and you can tell.
I don't know.
The bigger thing – not the bigger thing.
The other story here is these essays on X going viral is like definitely, I think, a thing of the winter of 2026.
And obviously that opportunity is going to get saturated and go away.
But remember that Dan Coe essay we did, that was also one of these X essays that went viral.
So I think we're in this moment where like you can go viral on X doing these long form essays.
And I bet it's not going to last past March.
It's going to get saturated.
And then that opportunity is going to go away.
But man, you're going to.
How many YouTube videos do you think are being made right now about how to go viral with your X essays?
There's probably so much content about this.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't like to think of myself as an AI skeptic, but I see myself as an AI realist.
I really want to ground everything I do and what's actually happening.
I don't like this vibe approach.
Well, I love the fact, how you referenced on an earlier show as well, that you're doing all the reading with your students from the past and you see all the recurring themes.
Yeah.
The doctoral seminar I'm teaching on superintelligence with AI doctoral students.
Yeah.
These themes are very powerful.
Yeah.
And they've come up again and again and again.
People – it doesn't mean they're true right now.
All right.
Let's hear from a listener here.
News and notes.
Let's get a note here.
We got an interesting email that was related to the Olympics, which are just sort of ending as we record this episode.
We got an email from Katie I want to read and then I'll react to it.
Katie says I've been following your work for years and it has helped me immensely in both my personal and professional life.
So thank you.
I thought of digital minimalism as I was reading Ilya Malinin's Instagram post after his heartbreaking solo performance in the Free Skate a few days ago.
He cites, quote, vile online hatred, end quote, as an impetus for his literal downfall.
I don't know if you saw that, Jesse, but I guess the quad god is from Vienna.
He's around here. fell during the solo.
Yeah.
They said, man, it was so hard.
They said there's no athlete who's more favored in his sport than he was in his sport.
But the two times I watched him, he did not win a gold medal.
They got on the team though.
All right, back to Katie's email.
I was struck by this, especially in the aftermath of Simone Biles' well-publicized experience, in which she cited similar demons.
I would have thought that elite athletes would have taken note and began to see social media and really any media coverage of themselves as far more of a liability than an asset.
No doubt an online present helps with sponsorships and other business deals, but is it worth it if it prevents someone from truly achieving the highest status in their sport?
If elite athletes will meticulously attend to their food consumption.
Why do they seem hesitant to limit their media consumption?
All right, Katie, I think that's a really good note.
It is going to happen.
It is kind of happening in elite athletics.
The coaches in the front offices are realizing this.
I've had conversations with like multiple GMs from the NBA.
I had – I talked with like the head of an internationally ranked rugby team.
Athletes are beginning to at least –
Teams are beginning to realize oh, this is a huge edge in a sports setting where small edges really matter.
The problem is the players are young and they're addicted because they've been on these things all the time and their whole life has often been about just training for sports and And it's an anxiety-producing type of life.
They don't have a lot else going on because they have to focus so diligently on the sports.
And so they use the phone as like here's my escape.
Here's my way to numb.
Here's my way to self-medicate.
And it's better than actual drugs or alcohol because I need to keep my body performing.
And they end up addicted and it's really hard for them.
It's why, for example, from what I hear talking to sports executives, the biggest issues are in the NBA.
Why?
Why? youngest players.
You have the smallest gap from high school.
You can go right from high school into playing for an NBA team.
Compare this to something like Major League Baseball where, man, it's a long road.
Usually like Eli Willits and you get recruited at 17.
You're going to go through all of these minor league teams.
Also, the games are played.
They're long and you don't have technology with you.
So NBA has this horse.
But anyways, I think eventually people are going to put their foot down from a coaching perspective and realize that This is getting you.
You're going to be better if you don't use this at all.
I think it would be a non-trivial advantage.
And once elite athletes are doing it, this often – that's why I like this trend – often accelerates trends into the general public.
Just like there are certain types of exercise and diet and recovery routines that elite athletes do that make their way down to how the general public does it, this could have a big impact.
To hear like really top athletes say, I don't even touch that stuff and it helps –
It means more people who aren't elite athletes might be like, okay, that's not so eccentric anymore.
One person who does do this is Alex Honnold, the climber.
He's talked about this a lot because for him it's not just if I lose a 5 edge I'm going to have a bad performance in a basketball game.
It's like if I lose that edge, I could fall and die.
So he goes on like a very long period in the lead up to his free solo climbs where he doesn't look at a phone, no social media nothing, so that his head can just get clear and he can get into this like mind space where he can concentrate more.
More athletes have got to follow this.
I mean, especially like these Olympians, these young Olympians, it just gets in their head.
Like, especially if you're like, if you're going to wear what you have to wear as a figure skater, you don't want to be on social media.
If you look like you're in blades of glory, like you do look like the character from blades, like you don't want to be on social media.
Just do your quad jumps, you know?
So I think Katie is right.
I think we are going to see that trend.
And I think that's good.
Did you watch any of the Alex documentary and climb in the skies here?
I watched it live.
Watched it live.
And then I watched, it kind of was a bummer.
I watched a video of a professional rock climber talking about it.
And he was like, I can't emphasize how easy this was.
He's like this is not – this is not a challenging climb for Alex Honnold.
That kind of goes with your theme of watching 30 minutes of a movie and then reading a review.
It did change my experience, yeah.
Yeah, it was interesting.
But yeah, but basically they put it on the rating and it was like a relatively low-rated climb.
He was like the only – he said you could do this –
It's like if you repeated this a thousand times, maybe he falls once but probably zero times.
Like for Alex, it's like for us, if someone was like, I want you to climb this step ladder.
You're like, yeah, I can climb the ladder.
Like I'm not going to fall or whatever.
It's like they said the main thing is just making sure that you had the right – make sure that you're trained up enough that you don't get arm fatigue.
Yeah.
It was like 70 minutes long.
I basically fast forwarded.
So it only took me like 20 minutes.
I got the gist.
I was chilling with some friends and then we just had it on.
Yeah.
I was at a friend's house for his birthday.
We kind of had it on the iPad.
Just like, Hey, is he fall?
No.
All right.
The scariest part was really the end.
You see the end.
Yeah.
He's standing on that little thing with those winds up there.
I mean, but then he went on his phone, right?
I wonder if he went on social media.
He's like, Oh, I finally got here.
Let me get on TikTok.
He was like, Oh my God.
And then he fell.
Would that be bad for him?
It would be good for us though, right?
Metaphorically.
Alex Honnold publicly on live TV falling to a gruesome death while his wife was there.
It would be good for reviews.
It would do well.
Kind of a bummer that didn't happen.
Cal's kidding.
It's kind of a bummer.
All right.
Let me do another note.
Quick update on my book, right?
So as longtime watchers and listeners know, my next book, which I actually –
It's taking me much longer than I thought is I'm writing a book about the deep life.
Cause I have this idea that, like when it came to distractions digital distractions in the office what actually worked is when I wrote a book called deep work that said yeah, distractions are bad, but what I want to give you is a bigger, better offer.
So books that were just about email being bad don't sell as well as the book that was.
Here's what you should do instead.
I realized I needed something similar for our digital lives outside of work.
It's hard to tell someone to get off their phone and, When the life outside of the phone is sort of unsettling or uneasy or anxiety-producing or just boring.
So you need a bigger, better offer.
We don't need to hear more about why the phone is bad.
We need to create lives that the phone is not that interesting.
So that's what the deep life is.
I talk about it a lot on this show.
Anyways, the update, Jesse, is I handed in my manuscript.
So I finally finished a draft of the entire book.
It's in the hands of my US and UK editors right now.
There's still a lot of work to be done after that.
Like significant rewriting happens during the editing phases, but still symbolically, to get a complete manuscript.
That's like, all right, I got my arms around it.
So I'm pretty psyched about it.
Can we talk about the conclusion in your strategy with that?
Or is that top secret?
You mean my conclusion that I haven't written yet?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I feel like the audience would love that.
So you're right.
I didn't submit the full manuscript.
I submitted the manuscript minus the conclusion.
But I've done this before because the point is this is just like a book writing thing.
But that's the last thing you write.
And typically when you finish a whole manuscript and I was like – I wanted to get it done before I went on a trip.
The conclusion is kind of rushed and they're bad because of that, and I find it's much better to like finish a whole book, step away from it for a few weeks, clear your mind, maybe even get edits back and then say I'm going to write the conclusion.
If the conclusion is the only thing you're writing and you've cleared your brain and you're no longer exhausted, then you'll write a really good conclusion.
But if it's the last thing you're writing at the very end of like a really hard push conclusion, isn't that bad.
So I handed a whole manuscript except the conclusion and I said, look –
I'm going to take a couple of weeks and then I'll attack the conclusion on the end.
So that's what I also leave the introduction towards.
That was the last thing I wrote before I submitted.
It was the introduction over the summer, when you were abroad for the month, or not abroad, but just away.
You had written a part and then had to throw it away.
I threw away a lot of that book.
Did that happen multiple other times?
Like I've thrown away a lot.
A lot.
Is that typical with books or – It just depends for me.
This one I've thrown out – as many words as I've written.
Like as I just submitted.
I've thrown out at least that many words.
There's a lot of that.
The first approach to the book wasn't right, so I threw that out.
The second approach was the right approach, but the way I was writing it wasn't right, so I threw out a bunch of that.
Some of that stuff I salvaged and could use in other places, but –
A lot of – Brandon Sanderson has a good quote about this, by the way.
You might know Brandon Sanderson as the author of Name of the Wind.
Actually, my son, my middle son is reading a lot of Sanderson.
Oh, nice.
He just finished the third book in The Mistborn.
I told him about the storm something.
I don't know.
I don't know what Sanderson says.
Well, the storm something –
Way of Kings.
I don't know.
But his other like major like epic one, he's like, oh, I got to read that.
But I was listening to Ferris' interview with Sanderson again, which is like a great interview.
And he said, this is the big divide between amateur and professional writers.
Amateur writers don't like to throw out chapters.
Professional writers do it all the time.
It's like I guess I'm a professional because I threw out a hell of a lot of chapters.
It's like this is good writing but it's not the right writing and then you got to throw it out.
But I think this book is going to be good.
It's a handbook.
I mean I really wrote it like a handbook.
I mean it's like – it's practical.
It's linear.
This builds on this, builds on this, builds on this.
Yeah. it's really meant to be, let's talk about cultivating a deep life.
So your phone's less interesting as like a engineering challenge.
Like let's be like very systematic about it.
So slow productivity came out in 2024, I think in spring.
When do you think this one will eventually come out?
A year from now.
So spring of 2027?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then you'll do like a book tour and everything?
Yeah.
Similar to the last time?
Yeah.
I will be...
I will be out and about book touring it up and doing all of our things.
We did a podcast here.
We did a live podcast here in Tacoma Park.
That was fun.
We did Pollux and Prose around here.
Did you come to that one?
Yeah.
Yeah, that was fun.
We got a big crowd.
Went to LA.
Went to Austin.
Do the stuff.
We'll do the stuff.
All right.
Finally, what am I reading?
I finished two books on vacation.
And I'm doing the count, Jesse.
This gets me up to four for February because I know you don't trust me anymore.
And I'm almost done with my fifth.
So we're recording this.
What's the date?
Like the 18th?
Yeah.
I'll finish my fifth probably tomorrow.
I believe you.
I just wanted to keep in the audience.
You don't trust me at all.
You think I'm trying to pull a fast one.
All right.
So I finished on vacation.
I finished a book I started before.
So we went to the Florida Keys for a long weekend.
I finished a book, a new book called a tensify like ATT, like a mix of attention, intensify.
It's like a splashy new like manifesto.
It's a collective of academics who are thinking and writing about attention and and the attack on attention from digital devices.
And this is their big new bold book.
It's smart, actually.
It's smart writing.
Yeah.
Actually there's a couple ideas in there I'll probably talk about.
Maybe make a future deep dive about.
But that was a smart book.
Definitely some good ideas.
And then the thriller.
I needed a thriller to read when I was in the Keys and I needed it to be related to that part of the country.
So I found a Lincoln –
Preston and Child's Gideon Cruise thriller called The Lost Island, which takes place in the Caribbean.
It's a little nuts.
It's a little nuts.
It was good set pieces.
The structure was not great.
Like it was very disjointed.
Interesting.
I don't want to spoil it, Jesse, but they're cyclopses.
And I didn't think – and I wasn't – it's not a fantasy book.
It's just a – it's a Cyclops.
I have two quick questions.
Yeah.
Would you ever want to be an editor?
No.
Or you just don't have any time, right?
No.
You'd rather write?
I'd rather write.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you talk to editors all the time.
Yeah.
God bless them.
I don't want the job.
Because they have to read all the time, right?
Yeah, which seems like it's fun.
But I think the frustration would be is like –
You get – here's the problem if you're an editor.
You develop fantastic taste because all you're doing all day long is reading.
You know what's successful.
You know what's not.
Like you know – you're just so good at assessing like what's good or bad.
And like 80 percent of what you read, you're like, this is not great.
That's the problem.
Like you occasionally get a book where you're like, this is great.
But you know too well why the stuff that's not great is not great, and I think that's got to be –
But what can you – it's not your book.
So you're like, I'll help the author.
But like I would have written this book completely differently.
I think that's got to be frustrating.
Also, they put too much work on editors' plates right now.
So it's like – I think I wrote about this in A World Without Email.
Digital technology, like email, changed the structure of the job of being an editor in the sense that – and personal computers.
They added like – seven or eight more parts of the book publishing process onto the plate of the editor.
Like now, like you're involved much more and more constantly in marketing and sales and book shipping and fulfillment and the cover design and all the you're in the mix on everything.
And because of this it's becoming much more like admin overhead heavy, like logistical nightmare of a job.
Whereas, you know, a hundred years ago it's like you had your manuscripts, you took them to your house in the Hamptons, like without the digital technology, like There was less.
You had to have your hands in beyond, like working on the books.
And editors don't publish more book per editor now than they did pre-email.
But they're just more busy, right?
So it's one of these things where, on paper they're like each of these new things email lets editors do makes them more productive on paper because it's – how could it be wrong to have more information or more say on things?
But in reality, it doesn't produce more good books.
Right.
So it's like one of these classic case studies of you think in the narrow this technology will make people more productive.
But then you zoom out on the metric that matters and it didn't.
So I think it's a hard job.
But the cool thing I work with editors they read so many books is they're like feedback is like on it.
Yeah.
You know, like you give it to a friend or someone or like, they're like, Oh, I like this.
Or what about this?
And like, sometimes it's useful.
Sometimes it's not the editor.
Like they see straight to your soul.
They're like this.
Nope.
Yes.
No.
What were you doing here?
You're forcing that like, because they're just so good at it.
So I love working with editors.
I don't think I could do the job.
I wouldn't be any good at it.
And then last question.
Did you read the Rogan article on the New Yorker?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did you read it?
Yeah, I read it.
Yeah, I got that issue kind of late, so I only read it more recently.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
We were talking about Offair a little bit.
The idea of Remnick listening to these Rogan episodes where the moon landing is fake and some of the more extreme Rogan episodes like oh man, that's funny.
But Rogan's a compelling broadcaster, so it's not the hardest job.
I thought it was a pretty good profile.
The main thing...
Here's what I've noticed.
I think the sort of elite writer world that I'm a part of, like the – in the academic elite world, like the biggest problem they have with Rogan is that our frame – it's like our frame for seeing the world is very much like rationalist intellectual frame.
Everything is about ideas and knowledge and argument.
So like Malcolm Gladwell did a big thing about this.
Remnick was really upset about this.
It's like why your job, Joe Rogan, is to be looking for wrong information and pushing back on wrong information and building correct structures of epistemology and knowledge, or whatever.
It's actually not the way that most people approach the world.
Most people approach the world like Joe.
Through, like social relations, like connection with people, like these type of things, emotional reactions, what's interesting, what's not interesting?
This makes me upset.
This makes me happy.
This is – makes me feel good.
I want to like be a leader and a friend.
It's like all these things that are – you know pre writing rationalist, post enlightenment type of thinking that all of like our elite people do.
And so they just see it very differently.
Like Rogan's like, Oh, someone's here.
I want to like connect with them and see if I can generate interesting emotions or, like I want to, something that's going to catch my attention.
But if it's like Remnick or Gladwell or me, our instinct is like The world – the reality is shaped by structure of information and you cannot deform that structure of information in like incorrect ways.
And if someone is saying something incorrect, you have to push back on it.
Then there's also like blind spots in it too, because it's – it becomes more – if the people are saying something incorrect on the things I really care about, you better push back on it.
But if it's like something where it's like, OK, yeah, this is incorrect information but like it's –
Thematically, I get what you're getting at.
I'm with you on that.
Like that's fine, right?
So it becomes a little bit – I'm just critiquing my own circle here.
It gets a little bit selective.
It might be like oh thematically, we're not going to get mad at something.
That maybe is like making a strong, progressive point, but in doing so is being loose with facts and reality.
And a lot of commentators from like the elite circles will be like yeah, but like thematically, that point is right.
So that's fine.
But if you are on like some health topic or something like you're getting at thematically this point of whatever we should – we trust big medicine too much.
But your facts are wrong.
It's like how can you not stop that person?
So we all have blinders on as well.
But it was a good profile and well-written.
He's a good writer.
He's a Pulitzer.
All right.
I think that's all the time we have for today.
Thank you for listening and watching.
We'll be back next week with another episode.
And until then, as always stay deep.
