Ep. 393: Can Movies Save Us From Our Phones?

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 Madsen 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 will 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 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 rmovies 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. When movies are over an hour and a half, I struggle to continue whether the film is really interesting or not. I just get bored easily and have to watch them in two parts or even three. And I even avoid watching films if I see they are too long. 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's 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. more uh 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 and an interesting tidbit about the making of that movie is that uh nothing major happens with al pacino's character of michael corley lone corley corley corley own 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 as in 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's 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, Pacino's got to stay. But it just caught my attention. We used to be OK 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 geek. 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. Well, Mizuta Lippit, 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. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people's attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. I can imagine that 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 lip it 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 that phones are degrading. The term is cognitive patience. Now, this was coined by the reading researcher Marianne Wolfe. 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 patients 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 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 Olympeka is going to come on the show, 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, right? 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's 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 you are probably being pushed away from because of the dominance of your short-term reward system and how that leads to the 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 let's make this our exercise relearning how to build up the cognitive patients 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 look it's easy to work on your health in January when you're still motivated by the new year to get up and go to the gym or make all those kale smoothies. But now that we're in February, that motivation is starting to dissipate. The practices that are going to stick are those that you're able to make into a habit. And when it comes to your health, here's one habit I recommend using AG1. 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It's the clean, trustworthy protein you want to be eating, especially at the start of the new year. Now, as an exclusive offer, new listeners can get their choice between organic ground beef, chicken breast or ground turkey in every box for a year plus off when you go to butcherbox slash deep That right your choice of organic ground beef chicken breast or ground turkey in every box for an entire year plus $20 off your first box. And as always, free shipping if you go to butcherbox.com slash deep. That's butcherbox.com slash deep. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. 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, okay? 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. but 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 reward. 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've 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 reviewer 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 reviewer analysis. Start it up again. Go another 30 minutes. Stop. Read another reviewer analysis. So 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 rewards 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 like I'm bored, right? 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 you can, your cognitive patience expands. Now here's my extra secret tip. This is one 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, a 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. OK, you know this, Jesse. I can't do top 10 list. I'm like there's a word for this. Like I can't rank things. I can't see 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 important. So I have these in rough chronological order here. On the older side, consider watching M, the German Fritz Lang movie about actually – 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 30s. So atmospheric. It kind of touches on German expressionism. So many like 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. They were like, what's so great about this? What you have to do to understand that 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. And 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% less Klu Klux Klan members. So 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 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 – this is Warren Beatty. Hackman's in it. 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 the sense that's more personal it's more nihilistic it's it's playing on like emotional realism or whatever and 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 um then you got to watch some of the new hollywood 70s some other naturalist movie naturalism rich movies i would suggest uh dog day afternoon is good um the city lumet you got to watch nashville i think is very good you listen to the robert altman working with these multi-track recorders that have overlapping naturalistic dialogue i also like mccabe and mrs miller speaking of Beatty, which is like another Altman movie of that era. It's like 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. 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. I think it's a masterpiece. There's a lot about that movie. It's so original the way that it was like crafted and constructed. I saw it in the theater. I think it's fantastic. 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 Softie Brothers. Fantastic. Again, you got to read about it, right? 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 and the energy is 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 wouldn't shut up. And I feel 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. Oh, Apocalypse Now. 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 it's 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 um the great santini he's very good and i think robert duvall's i mean he was in network too he was in network is a great movie um his most challenging role and i 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 um vince vaughn character in four christmases that's an underrated movie my wife and i love the the it's like a 2006 movie four 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 it 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 just read about again everyone was offered those roles and you know how schneider got it spielberg was like at a thing socially with schneider and was uh just telling about the movie and he's like why don't you mean 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 or schneider all right we're gonna take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors listeners of this show know that in the world of business i'm a fan of systems that can help organize the efforts of teams without systems work devolves into random emails and slack messages that distract everyone and lead to missed opportunities this is why i love pipe drive a fantastic sales crm system for small and medium-sized businesses. 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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. 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 to 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 in the 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. I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world and I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't, my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me, so what's the deal with AI and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version, the cocktail party version, because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that this was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. 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 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. 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 like general ability improvements that are clearly impressive to any user to instead chasing down these arcane named benchmarks. so we can sort of teach the model to specifically do well on. And there was this whole period where this was a real – for users, we're 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 one 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 of 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 the latest mod 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 so 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 this these models in general we're exponentially speeding up this is the opposite of exponential incremental steady progress on a small number of narrow applications or 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, I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built in plain English and it just appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix to finish thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find a work done. 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 described the outcome and leave. All right, I'll skip the final details here. So he's saying in the narrow world of computer programming, this is the inflection point advanced, 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 saying make me an app and walking away and coming back four hours later and is 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 in you. It's like 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 & Dragons characters or something? And it will like 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 these 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 talk 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. Uh, 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 they they're very useful especially like if you talk to these programmers like i've been doing the reason why they're saving time is that it's 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, you know, like the right functions or integrating multiple different data sources into, you know, a common framework so that you can pull data from any of them. This is tedious type of coding, especially if you're not an expert at exactly like you haven't built 100 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's saving 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 like machine learning, you know, 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 AI agents first, I mean 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. There's a lot of other things that the AI companies promised products in. 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 InstructGPT 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 model 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 gpt4 the failure of project orion the failure of the behemoth model the failure of uh the grok 3 failure where they moved to 100 000 you know gpus for training 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 uh for the new yorker for more about this this is the the portrait of an industry that's not like it's failing but it's also not going gangbusters this is why you know the 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 uh you know 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 calnewport.com. 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, um, it's alarmist. And I think it, it, he gets the technology wrong and he mixes truth with fiction and make 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 can ignore this one. So I don't know. There you go, Jesse. Did you see that essay? Everyone's sending 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 and 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 XSAs? There's probably so much content about this. 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 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 has helped me immensely in both my personal and professional life, so thank you. I thought of digital minimalism as I was reading Ilya Malin'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, he's from Vienna, he's around here um fell during solo yeah they said man i'm living so hard they said here's there's no athlete who's more favored in his sport than he was in his sport but i the two times i watched him he did not win a gold medal um they got on the team though uh 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 it seems to me that as sports grows and becomes more competitive the edge might be less and less in workout plans and diet regimes but in the still countercultural practice of social media abstinence. 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 had conversations with like multiple GMs from the NBA I had you know I talked with like the head of an internationally ranked rugby team Athletes are beginning to at least the 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 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? 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. You're 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 worse. But anyways, I think eventually people are going to put their foot down from a coaching perspective and realize 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 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 rock, 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 uh 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 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 climbing the skyscraper i watched it live watched it live um 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 this is uh not a challenging climb for alex hondle that kind of goes with your theme of you know 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's 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 um making sure that you had the right uh make sure that you're trained up enough you don't get arm fatigue it was like 70 minutes long i basically fast forwarded so it only took me like 20 minutes yeah 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 does 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 i finally got here let me get on tiktok he was like oh my god and then he fell let me bad for him be good for us though right metaphorically alex honnell publicly on live tv falling to a gruesome death while his wife was there be good for reviews i think we do well kind of a bummer that didn't happen cow's kidding it's kind of a bummer um all right let me do another note quick update on my book right so as long time 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 because 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 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. Then it's like, all right, I got my arms around it. So I'm pretty psyched about it. Can we talk about the conclusion and your strategy with that or is that top secret? You mean my conclusion? Did I have it 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, conclusions end up bad. So I handed the 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 my story. I also leave the introduction towards – that was the last thing I wrote before I submitted it was the introduction. um 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 uh 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 and there's a lot of that the first approach to the book wasn't right um so i threw that out the second approach was the right approach but the 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 so a lot of brandon sanderson has a good quote about this by the way uh you might know brandon sanderson as the author of name of the wind actually you know my son my middle son is reading a lot of sanderson oh nice he's he just finished the third book in the misborn i told him about the storm something i don't know i don't know what's that with a storm something way of kings i don't know but his other like major like epic one he's like oh i gotta read that uh but i was listening to ferris's interview with sanderson again which is like a great interview and he said this is the big divide between amateur and professional professional writers amateur writers don't like to throw out chapters and 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's 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 um 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 yeah 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 those last time yeah i will be i will be out and about book touring it up and doing all of our doing all of our things we did a podcast here that was we did live podcast here in tacoma park that was fun uh we did politics and prose around here did you come to that one yeah yeah that was fun yeah we got a big crowd um went to la went to austin do the stuff we'll do the stuff all right uh 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 you know the audience don't trust me at all you think i'm trying to pull a fast one um 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 um 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 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 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 cyclops. I have two quick questions. Yeah. Would you ever want to be an editor? Or you just don't have any time, right? That would be just rather write. I would rather write. Yeah. Yeah. But you talk to editors all the time. Yeah. God bless them. I don't want the job. Because they don't 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% of what you read, you're like, this is not great. You know, 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 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. Yeah. Yeah. 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 editor in the sense that it 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 100 years ago, it's like you had your manuscripts. You took them to your house in the Hamptons. Like without the digital technology, 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. 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 their 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? Rimnicks? 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. I just – we were talking about off air a little bit. The idea of Rimnick listening to like these Rogan episodes where – All fall. You know, the moon landing is fake and like some of the more extreme Rogan episodes like, oh, man. That's funny. But Rogan is a compelling broadcaster. So it's not like 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 it's 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. And 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 you know 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 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 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 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 um but it was a good profile and well rin 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 Be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.