Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 246: Kids and Phones

Episode Date: May 1, 2023

Are smartphones bad for kids? Cal walks through the data on this question, including how researchers came to be worried, their findings, critiques of their findings, and where we are today. He then gives recommendations for how to think about technology when it comes to your kids.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: Are smartphones bad for kids? [3:10]- Is the deep life dull? [49:35]- How do I stop doom-scrolling when I’m tired? [53:49]- Are smartphones bad for older people? [57:35]- How does Cal decide to adopt new technology or software? [1:02:06]- How do I stay deep while traveling at conferences? [1:06:33]The Books Cal read in March 2023 [1:12:38]Thanks to our Sponsors:grammarly.com/gostamps.com/deepmybodytutor.comblinkist.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined once again by my producer, Jesse. We had a week off of recording together. It's good to have you back. Good to be back. This is a little known fact about when I solo record. Jesse, you will attest that when we record, we won't take it. Yeah.

We just go live. We just rock and roll warts and all. Whenever you're not here, it's always two takes. Really? I usually will go about five minutes and then stop and then go back and like take another run at it. I don't know why. What did you do back in the day? I'm trying to think.

Back in the very like the deep day when I was early in the podcast, I would often, when it was all audio, I would off. I would stop all the time. because it was easy. And I would just go for a while, but if I get to a question, it would be really common. I might start answering a question and say, I don't really like that. And I could just, there's just one track. And the software was just me, it was just audio. I could just go back and, like, let me take another run at that.

So the tradeoff was I didn't prep. I would just list out a bunch of questions and rock and roll. But if I didn't like an answer, I might go back and take another run at it. Once we started doing video, I swapped out around and said, well, why don't I actually do a little bit of work up front, the prep more of the questions? but not take multiple runs at it. And that's how we've been doing it. And when I'm alone now, I do it all, you know, in one take, except for I always have to start twice.

It's just something about the first time I do it. You're not here. It throws me off. I get going. I'm rambling. And I always start over. Interesting. Yeah.

I don't know what it is. It's not three, though. It's never three takes. It's two takes. Jesse's not here. It's two takes. So, you know, I gave a talk the other day at my kid's school. Mm-hmm.

And it's me and some parents from the middle school. They ask if I would come give a talk about kids and technology, in particular kids in smartphones, what do we know about it? How do we know what we know about it? And what conclusion should we take away in terms of what the school policy should be, what should be recommended to parents, what parents should be thinking about with respect to their own kids. And I figured it's sort of a waste to have done all this research and build all these slides and only really deliver this information to a one room full of parents. So because I've had this question a lot, what is my take on kids and phones and when they should have phones and is it really dangerous? I thought we could talk a little bit about that on the show today. Yeah, I know that you mentioned it in prior episodes and some fans have been asking for it.

Yeah, yeah. And then we'll also, we can record this and there'll be a YouTube version of this discussion. So if you want to share it with other people who maybe don't listen to the show but worry about this problem, now this information will be out there. We can point to that video when people ask about it. So I thought it would be good. So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is, are smartphones bad for kids? And if so, how do we know that?

That's what I want to get into. So I have some of my slides here from my talk. So, you know, if you're listening, you might want to consider watching. This is episode 246. You can find it at YouTube.com slash Calnewport Media or at thedeeplife.com if you don't like YouTube. episode 246. I'll explain what I'm saying. You don't have to watch it, but I'm just saying if you want to see some of these graphs I'm referencing, watching the video version of this might be suggested. So as I looked into this question of when did researchers become concerned about kids and phones and why, the whole story seemed to break up into three acts. That's why I called this in my talk a saga in three acts. The first act we can start, I'm going to call it roughly 2012 to 2017.

That's the first act of the story. I call it an alarm is sounded. So this is the period where people first began to notice warning signs. This was actually the period in which the potential issues with smartphones, young people was first brought to my attention. So I remember as a young professor at Georgetown, this would have been in 2012. I was giving a talk somewhere on campus and I was walking to the talk with someone who was involved

with the student mental health center at Dartmouth. It's called Kat, or not Dartmouth, Georgetown. It's called Kaps. And if you're watching on the screen, you see a picture of the counseling center. And I remember smartphones and tech in general was not in my portfolio in 2012 as a writer.

So we were just having conversation. And this person mentioned to me, she said, you know, there's been a big change recently. the number of students that we are now treating with mental health counseling here at Georgetown has jumped up. And not only has it jumped up, but it has disproportionately jumped up to be anxiety or anxiety-related disorders. So we're seeing a lot more overall students and a much bigger proportion of the students we see are here for anxiety. I thought that was interesting. So I said, what's going on?

She didn't skip a beat. She said smartphones. And that caught me off guard at that time. smartphones what do you mean she said oh it's really clear to me anecdotally that the first group of students to arrive on campus having had smartphones during their adolescence were showing up way more anxious than we'd ever seen before we can now look back retrospectively and see that this was not an isolated anecdote happening at just one university i have a chart on the screen here for those who are watching this is from the american college health association annual survey it's showing percentage of u.s undergraduates diagnosed with a mental illness. And what do we see? At 2012, forward a very sharp uptick in anxiety and depression, which are, of course, quite interlinked by anxiety. So the dark vertical line, if you're watching this online, is 2012.

So what this one person at Georgetown was noticing was actually a nationwide trend, that something changed around 2012. Keep that date in mind. It's going to come up again. I think the issue got brought to the public's attention writ large. So it expanded from individual educators and mental health professionals being worried to the culture writ large being worried about maybe smartphones are causing the issue. I think Gene Twenge really helped make this a national issue in her 2017 cover article for the Atlantic that was titled, Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? The thing about Twenge is that her expertise is in studying differences between demographic generations.

That's what she does. How is this generation different than that generation? She's very good at teasing out what's real and what's not. And as she said in this article, and I have it on the screen as well, she'd been doing this for 25 years. And she says typically the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually and along a continuum. But then I began studying Gen Z. Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs,

and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation begin to disappear. In all of my analyses of generational data, some reaching back to the 1930s, I had never seen anything like it. So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was, and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in 2012. she began to make the connection that I think this has to do with smartphones. Here's another, I think, culture-defining moment. This was also 2017.

A big article in the New York Times Magazine written by Bin Wads and is at Luz. The article is titled, Why are more American teenagers than ever suffering from severe anxiety? And it's important because Bin Waw goes into this article. It's clear from the tone of the article that he is not very hospitable to the technology hypothesis. He was seen this as a standard moral panic type argument. The same thing we always say rock and roll music is going to corrupt the teens' brains. Video games are going to corrupt teens' brains. And he came into it with that frame.

But there's a key point in this article where he talks to actual anxious teenagers. And I'm quoting him here. To my surprise, anxious teenagers tended to agree. They didn't say, hey, old man, leave our phones alone. They said, yeah, these things are a problem. So by 2017, we've gone from spot reports of, wait a second, something is changing here. These young people, there's something different going on, and by 2017, we were openly debating, is it phones causing these issues?

All right, this brings us to the second act, the data wars. This takes place roughly between 2017 and 2020. This is when researchers began to seriously try to gather or study the data. to get a stronger, more data-driven conclusion on this question of a smartphone somehow involved in these increases in anxiety that were seen. This was a period of both proposals and critiques, which is good. This is how new sciences emerge, especially in social psychology, which is, by definition, a complicated field that rarely has super strong signals. There was proposals and critiques or responses to their critiques, and so that's why I call this the Data Wars. This was the period in which almost any New York Times article on this issue would say with big caveats,

there is some data, but it's contested. It's because this data war period is when the science was actually happening. Let me talk about two troubling streams of data that came out of this period, the critiques and the responses to the critiques. So the first bit of troubling evidence that emerged as we got more serious about this question was simply the timing. That 2012. That was a really, it's a really, it's. It's circumstantial evidence, but a really strong pointer towards smartphones at play. And here's why.

There's lots of different reasons you could come up for, come up with for why young people between 2012 and 2020 were becoming more anxious. The world felt like an anxious place. We had the financial crisis. We had the financial insecurity that that caused. We had the extreme partisanship and unrest that followed in the Trump era. And so it did seem like a period. of lots that were going on. The problem is none of this fit 2012 in particular.

The financial crisis was 2006 to 2009. The financial insecurity was felt strongly by the millennial generation. We were entering a job force then, not Gen Z. By the time Gen Z was entering a job force that was largely in the rearview mirror. There was a lot of political partisanship and unrest that arose later in the 2010s, but that was after 2012. 2012 was to Barack Obama Mitt Romney election. There was not an increase in partisanship there as compared to, let's say, even just a 2008 election in which we had Sarah Palin involved in that movement compared to the contract for America, Newt Gingrich and the Clinton era, that type of partnership.

There wasn't something new that happened in 2012 that wasn't also there in 2009. It wasn't also there in 1999. The populist revolutions of Trump, et cetera, that didn't really pick up. speed until 15 or 16, right? So that explanation doesn't quite fit it. Also, as we got more data, we saw these anxiety rises among young people happening in many, many countries. So we could not pin this on particular American dynamics. So what did fit this? Well, here's Gene. Oh, let me just show a couple of graphs here. These are just a couple other graphs that are showing 2012 being a big deal. So we see female, especially with female reports of sadness and hopelessness between 2011 and

2021. We see a significant increase from 36% to 57%. I'm also showing U.S. teams with major depression, especially with girls. We see a 145% increase as we move from 2012 to 2020. So these are just examples of lots of things we're pivoting on 2012. Here's Gene Z. twanging. She said, okay, what does match 2012? It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50%. That's what's changed then. After that point, you were much more likely as an adolescent to have a smartphone. Before that point, it was much less likely. None of these other potentially anxiety-producing trends match that date nearly as well. All right, so this was the first bit of troubling evidence to emerge, right?

It's circumstantial. And there's critiques. I would say one of the big critiques, and I'm showing this on the screen, an example now, was this idea that, no, no, no, no, we agree with you that there's not world events or cultural events that match to 2012 outside of smartphones. But the thing that really changed to 2012 was not smartphones, this critique says, it was that this new generation was coming of age, and they're more comfortable talking about mental health. They're like, that's, so this was a big question. critique in the early part of the data wars. You see rises in depression and anxiety because more

people are willing to say, I'm anxious or I have depression. This quote from the New York Times in 2018 is sort of typical of this period. Here's Richard Friedman writing the Times. He says, look, there are a few surveys reporting increased anxiety in adolescents, but they're self-reported measures from kids or their parents, and they're overestimating rates of discord because they're detecting mild symptoms, not clinically significant syndromes. This was claimed a lot during the early period of the data wars. So as good science does, it said, well, how can we look into this counter hypothesis? And the right way to look into this counter hypothesis is to say, let's find stronger proxies

for anxiety that have nothing to do with self-reporting. And in particular, I put two charts on the screen here, and these are both tragic, but they also give us deep insight. The first chart is U.S. teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm, ages 10 to 14. This gets around the self-reporting process. These are people who tried to harm themselves due to anxiety, and these are from hospital records. Look at girls. 188% increase between 2010 to 2020, with the increase getting particularly stark around 2012.

Even more tragically, we look to the right, we see suicides among U.S. teens. 2012 jumps up. 134% increase among girls. starting around that 2012 point. So it was a reasonable hypothesis that, well, maybe around 2012 we just got more comfortable talking about anxiety, and we were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms. Unfortunately, the hospital records show these indications rose at the exact same rate. So there really was an increase here.

Kids are, and starting around this period, having worse mental health. The second strand of troubling evidence was to correlational studies. So social psychologists often will work with these giant data sets, these giant data sets where researchers will go out and talk to tens of thousands of people and ask them about everything. And then after the fact, you can come back as a researcher and look for all sorts of connections within this data. If you want to know if people who like the color red is their favorite color or more likely to have had back surgery in the last six months, you can just go and look at this data and find those things and look for correlations, etc. So they did this. They said, let's start looking at this data. We'll look at young people and we'll look at correlations between these technologies and

negative outcomes. And they began to find lots of strong connections. Here's just one of many, many graphs that were produced in this period. This particularly one looked at UK adolescents with clinically relevant depressive symptoms. The X axis is number of hours per weekday on social media. The Y axis is percentage of teens who used that much social media that were dialysis. diagnosed as depressed. And as you see, when you increase from no time on social media to five plus hours, you get a significant increase in percentage of teens that are depressed. This is

particularly high for girls, where you go from a 11% depression rate for girls who don't use social media to almost a 40% depression rate for girls who use four to five hours of social media. All right, so we saw a lot of studies of this type. this generated critiques. So other researchers came along and said, yeah, you're finding these correlations, but, you know, it's easy to find correlations between things. The effect sizes are small.

And perhaps the most famous of these papers was published in 2019 by Presbylsky and Amy Orban. This is known by researchers in the field colloquially as the potato study. They went in and looked at one of these big data sets and said, and I'll read them here, the connection is negative but teeny indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero that it is roughly the same size as they find

for the association of mental health with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses. So they said, look, we looked and found these, yeah, you use more digital technology, you're less happy, but the effect is the same we found for eating potatoes on your happiness or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness. Their point being these are so small

that they're basically arbitrary. You're finding artifacts in the data. This article, the potato article, was cited a lot. Even until very recently you would see major newspapers like the New York Times often saying, because this was very influential, you know, studies show a potential connection between these technologies and negative mental health, but the effects are small. This is the type of paper that caused that. So as good science does, we looked at this. Now here's a response to the potato paper, co-authored,

by Gene Twenge and John Haidt. It was published in nature, human behavior, and it was called Underestimating Digital Media Harm. In this article, Height looked at Przbilski and Orban and said, well, wait a second. Wait a second, and I'm going to read his words here. The first issue to note is that the Potato's comparison was what they reported for all digital media use, not for social media use specifically. digital media includes all screen-based activities, including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling,

which are not harmful activities. In their own published report, when you zoom in on social media only, the relationship is between two and six times larger than for digital media. Also crucialist that Orbin and Probilski lumped together all teens, boys and girls, while many studies have found that the correlations

with harm are larger for girls. So height is saying it's almost like you're intentionally trying to reduce the negative impact. You're only showing the connection between all possible digital media use and negative social harms, even though your data set you were using had social media broken out. And all the discussion has been about social media. And Hight and Twenge said, so we looked at your same data set and just looked at social media, and you had a much, much bigger response, a response that especially if you break out girls,

was six times worse than eating potatoes. A very significant response. So I say here on the slide, this is John Hight being polite because when you really read this critique, you're wondering, how is there any other explanation for the potato paper other than a set of researchers who are saying, we want to report there's not really a difference here? It's otherwise hard to explain why they would choose what they chose and not talk about these other aspects to their paper if they were really just trying to understand is their harm here. All right, so let's get to the third act of this story, this research story on smartphones and kids. I call this third act a consensus begins to emerge. This covers the period of 2020 to 2023, so until today. Essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is the critiques have largely fallen away

and a consensus is emerging in the field that, yes, especially for girls, there is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health. the reason why this consensus emerged is, first of all, the critiques, as we talked about before, the main critiques during the data war were pretty thoroughly debunked. You know, after the potato paper, it's not like there was a lot of more stronger papers that said, really made a strong case that there wasn't a strong connection there. And the timing argument really seems to have been one for the people who were worried about smartphones. So that happened. But then what we began to get, and this is how a lot of emerging literatures begin to coalesce around a consensus,

we began to get multiple other independent sources of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion. When you have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer, that's often what happens in complex literatures that points it towards a conclusion. And that really began to happen in the last couple of years. So one of the threads was natural experiments. Here's a cool paper written by an economist Elaine Gou. And she looked at, in Canada, I believe, the arrival of high school. speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town.

When high speed wireless internet arrived, heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app. And so she looked at if we have nearby towns, demographically and culturally very similar, but we end up in this natural experiment situation where one town gets wireless high speed internet before the other, can we compare what's happening with teenage mental health in these two towns and see if there's a change? Yes, there was. Girl, teen girl, severe mental health diagnoses increased by 90% when the wireless internet arrived.

So it was a nice natural experiment. We also had some direct randomized control trials experiments. Here's a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al. They just took 143 undergraduates and randomly assigned them to either stop using social media or keep using it as normal. So it's a randomized prospective control trial. What did they find? the group that was told to limit their social media use showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression

as compared to the control groups. So that's interesting. I think maybe one of the strongest forces in helping a consensus come together was self-reporting, just talking to teenagers themselves. So when Francis Hagan leaked all of those data from meta a couple years ago,

what was known as the Facebook files, that's what the Wall Street Journal called it. One of the big, interesting findings in these leaked documents for META was the fact that they had done survey on teens and had found, that I'm quoting here, teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. So the teenagers themselves are saying, yeah, this is why we're more anxious and depressed.

This app, these phones. Other data began to find the same thing. I put up here a slide from research out of Australia. These are Australian teens. By far the number one reason they give for why they think youth mental health is getting worse is social media. I think this was the final smoking gun is the teens themselves are saying, this is hurting me, this is causing a problem. It is really hard to be a potato study style skeptic in the face of the teens themselves saying, yes, this is causing me harm. We're not teasing out subtle epidemiological effects, a slight increase in the background cancer rate for the towns that were using a different type of pipe in their water, or the individuals themselves have no way of detecting this change.

This is not that. This is a huge, loud, self-observable macro signal. This thing is making me uncomfortable. That ultimately is the big difference between this and past moral panics around youths and technologies. When my grandparents, let's say they were upset that my mom, was listening to the Beatles in the late 1960s, if they went to my mom and said, stop listening to those Beatles,

it's going to warp your mind. My mom would have said, you know, get out of here. What she would not have said is, I agree, these records are making me and my friends incredibly anxious.

I wish I didn't have to listen to them. That would have been a very different situation. So that's why I think this analogy to pass concerns about youth technology really begins to fall apart. Data aside, the teens tell you, yeah, I know this is making me anxious.

I don't like that I have to be. on it. So why does it do this? So let's look in particular at social media first and then we'll broaden out the smartphones. Why do researchers think social media is causing these negative impacts on mental health? There's a few reasons to come up. One is loneliness. Readers of my book, digital minimalism, this will sound familiar because I talk about this in digital minimalism. It's paradoxical at first, but using these social technologies more will actually lead you to feel less social. And what's going on here is

young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth. But this purely linguistic communication, just sending texts back and forth to each other

or commenting on each other's post is not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being all that social. There's no voice modulation, there's no body language, you're not in the presence of another person in the same room.

So you're in your room as a 14-year-old all day on text messages, and you tell yourself, wow, I'm so social because all I've been doing is talking to people. But as far as your brain is concerned, you're incredibly lonely because you haven't seen anyone all day. Social psychologists call this social snacking.

Lightweight, easy, digital socialization. We do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely. We see this in the data. I have two charts up on the screen now. One shows loneliness among teenagers. And you see, again, 2012 goes right up. The other chart shows daily average time spent with friends, starting in 2012 for the ages 15 to 24, go straight down.

More time on the phone meant less time interacting in person meant loneliness went up. There's an interesting observation, by the way, that John Haidt makes. This got underway around 2012, and it was so pronounced by the time the pandemic came along, the change wasn't even that big. And we can see this on this chart. I mean, certainly we continue to have a steep, we have a steep fall from 2000 in 2020, but we were having a steep fall from 2018 to 19 as well. So he pointed this out in a newsletter article he wrote earlier this spring. These effects of isolation were already so pronounced because of smartphones among American teens

that the difference of adding isolation through lockdowns actually didn't even make that big of a difference. We were already on that trajectory. Another issue here is performativity, especially with social media, especially with girls. Let me read something here from Gene Twangy. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. You're constantly worried about what other people are doing and how people are perceiving. you combine that with a teenage brain.

Come on. No way that's going to be positive. The final thing I want to mention here is the amplification of harmful behaviors. Online communities, for all their good, also have the dark side of it allows, especially vulnerable teenagers who are trying to find themselves and are open to suggestions and are feeling vulnerable and full of all these different chemicals. It's very easy to get caught in online communities that will then amplify harmful behaviors that will directly reduce your mental health, in a lot of cases, also your physical health.

We're beginning to see more lawsuits along these lines. I have a headline up here right now about a family suing meta because they blame Instagram for encouraging their daughters, eating disorder, and self-harm. There's all sorts of cases like this. So this is another source of this connection between reduced mental health and social media use is there's a lot of traps on there. You end up in a community that is cheering on something that in the end is going to you feel much worse.

All right. Social media is not the whole story. A lot of this data is looking at social media. Some of us looking at smartphones in general. I want to just briefly mention that even if you aren't using social media on a smartphone, if you're a teenager, there's other harms we know are there. Impedited thinking skills is critical. I talked about this in a somewhat recent episode of the podcast.

It's talking about Marianne Wolfe's work on the development of young minds. when they spend more times on screens. The short version of this is deep critical thinking skills. Require training. Training requires things like reading analog books that you struggle with. You can take time to pause and make sense of what you just read before moving on. Training requires self-reflection, the ability to hold thoughts in your working memories and work on it, having that time alone and that familiarity with it.

Smartphones get in the way of that training because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick. look like a L-shaped skim for things that are going to give you in text a quick hit of dopamine or excitement. Flea boredom. If you have any moments of downtime, have something right on your screen. I was watching, Jesse, I was watching this on the flight. It's not my flight to San Francisco. It was my flight to Utah a few weeks ago. I mean, like a 20-year-old guy sitting a row up in the aisle.

I was watching him use TikTok. I mean, it was crazy. It's like, because he had his phone out. They'll just be like some weird video. He was watching on average six seconds. And then he swipe and another video would come up. And he was swipe and another video would come up. That's just all he was doing.

The whole time? Well, the whole time for a while. Yeah. And I was watching over his shoulder. Man, glad I'm reading my Ellen Lightman book about transcendentalism and the human brain made me feel good. But, you know, the point is, is it's so rewarding the moment that you don't do the activities that would otherwise give you critical. thinking skills and so you're just not good at thinking deeply and that's a huge harm sleep deprivation is a big deal for teenagers and these smartphones look you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone they're going to

youtube until 4 in the morning when i gave this talk someone in the audience said there's a lot of middle schoolers there and one of the middle schoolers was talking about how all of her friends who have these smartphones are on them all night and then they come in the class they're completely tired they can't function they're doing really poorly on their on their test but they can't help themselves because if you have this, it's hard to turn it off. So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue. It's YouTube, video games, and social media scrolling. Solitude deprivation is another issue. I talked about this in digital minimalism as well. Our mind is not meant to constantly be processing information generated by another mind. We need time alone with our own thoughts to

recharge and to make sense of our world. Smartphones can eliminate that entirely from your existence because any moment where before you might have just been alone with your own thoughts, you can now pull out the thing. Over time, that makes us anxious. It also harms self-development at an age where we need it. 14, you're trying to figure yourself out. You're 15. You're trying to figure yourself out.

You need time alone with your own thoughts. Your brain needs it. And finally, we have this issue that smartphones in general minimize quality leisure. So the thing you're doing on the phone gets in the way of the things you should be doing. It gets in way of the things that's going to be more medium. meaningful or quality or sustainable or connect you more to your friends or your community or build skills or give you confidence. It's easier just to look at the phone and to watch Twitch. And so it gets in the way of something that could be better. This is often missed when we think

about smartphones and teens will hone in on the exact activity and say, well, my son isn't on social media. He's not doing performativity. He doesn't have to worry about online bullying. He's the thing he's looking at is really harmless. In fact, maybe there's like some science content in it. The issue there is not that what he's looking at is a problem is that because he's looking at all day, he's not doing the things to be good. So we've got harms with unrestricted smartphone access for young people that go beyond just the specific stuff that social media can do. All right. So where is this all headed? At the national scale, it's an interesting question.

Is there going to be some sort of legislative shift that's going to come out of this data now that the consensus has emerged? It's clear that this consensus has been understood and intake by legislative bodies and policymakers. I think it's now accepted that unrestricted smartphone use, especially for prepubescing kids, especially for prepubescing girls, is very dangerous. I think this has all been accepted now. So where is this going to head? I'm not quite sure. But here's one thing I would keep an eye on. Here's the surgeon general earlier this year.

He said, wait until your kids. are 16 to let them use social media. This conclusion, I think, is something that a lot of researchers are coming to. I talked to John Hyde about this, and he agreed with that as well. If you've made it through puberty, the development as an individual as well as the social development and everything that happens during that period, if you've made it through all of that before you then get unrestricted access to the internet and social media, you're in a much better position to succeed because you know who you are, who your friends are,

what you're interested in, what you're about. You've done all that work. And now if you get exposed to this, it's going to have a much less negative impact than if you get it at 12 or you get it at 13. So if you can wait till 16, this seems to be an emerging consensus. This might possibly be made in the legislation. One of the relevant things to keep an eye on here is the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or COPA. This act implicitly already encodes 13 as the main. minimum age that you can sign up for a social media service. Now, of course, these social

media services didn't exist in 1998. The actual wording here is 13 is the minimum age at which you can consent to give up your data privacy, which of course you do when you sign up for an attention economy platform like social media. The original version of this act had 16 in there. Tech lobbyist in D.C. got that push down to 13. There's calls now to amend it back to 16. So that could happen. There's other legislative avenues that are being pursued. It's tricky, but this is one to keep an eye on. What would happen if that law was changed?

It's not that this would make it really hard for individual young people to get access to social media, right? It's not super enforceable, but what it would give is a metaphorical chair to parents that are trying to tame this metaphorical lion. When you have your 13-year-old again and again saying, all my friends have this, I want this, why can I have it? all my friends have this, I want it, why can I have it? For the parents to be able to say, because it's illegal, is a very strong defense. And you're not putting these parents in this situation of having to be social psychology researchers and understand this literature. They can say it's against the law, I'm not going to break the law. You'll just have to learn not to have those friends, I guess.

You know, I mean, it's going to be, it would be helpful. So something like that may happen. Now, where do I, what do I conclude from all of this? I mean, to me, I would say that 16 age limit is a smart one. I think this is good. I think the data is pointing towards your safest bet, especially if we're talking about young girls, is 16 is the age below which you do not want to give a child unrestricted access to the Internet. If you give a young person a smartphone, you are giving them unrestricted access to the Internet.

You can do some parental controls. They'll get around them. They're better at it than you. This is the thing about kids. Right. Like, if we ever went to war, cyber war with China, and we needed in a sort of Ender's game style, brilliant kids that, like, help save us, here's how we would win the cyber hacking war. Just tell a bunch of 13-year-olds that if you bring down China's whatever infrastructure, you will get unlimited access to Mr. Beast videos. Because these kids become Dennis Nidri-style hackers when it comes to trying to get access to these things.

The same kids that can't even motivate themselves to take the garbage out. If they think they can access YouTube on their school's Chromebook, they're in there with soldering irons, you know. All right, I'm bypassing the main CPU logic here, and I'm hacking the main security grid by getting right to the op code lookup table in the ROM. They become expert computer hackers if there's a video game they can access or Snapchat lays just beyond those protections. So you give a smartphone to a kid, you're giving an unrestricted internet access. You give them unrestricted internet access. they can use social media. Even the definition of social media is getting a little bit hazy now.

A lot of the actual performative socialization has shifted from social media onto group text messages, so it gets a little bit, it gets a little bit hazy. And we have all these other harms that surround the smartphones, the sleep deprivation, the solitude deprivation. So it really seems like 16 is the safe time to say, okay, you can just have a phone and I'm not going to care too much what you're doing anymore. Does that mean that's the only age where you can have any type of device like this? Well, again, I actually asked John Hyde about this as well. And his thought was when you functionally need a phone, okay, because I don't know, I'm commuting the school on the city buses like a lot of kids do at my kid's school.

And you need an ability to maybe text your parents if there's an emergency or call your parents if, you know, the bus routes cancel or something like that. When they functionally need a phone, you can get them a phone that doesn't have Internet. So when you get to an age where I'm independent enough that having communication ability with me is going to enable this. independence, then get them some sort of communication device, but one without internet. 16 is what you can give them a smartphone that has everything. That seems to be the emerging consensus. I think five to ten years from now that will just be accepted. If you have, if your oldest, you have a child right now and your oldest child is two,

you're not going to have to think about this when they become 12. The cultural have shifted. You won't be giving an iPhone to your 12 year old. That will just be accepted. We're right now in this intermediate transition period where parents still have to make these decisions on their own. As far as I can tell, that's my best read of the literature. When it becomes, they're independent enough to functionally communication, give them a phone like a light phone, which looks great and can text well, but has no internet. Wait till 16 to give them unrestricted access.

So you can't have your own iPad or your own smartphone until you're 16. They will yell and gnash their teeth, but come on, everything in the history of the world that teenagers have wanted that their parents don't want. The teenagers have said, all my friends are doing it. You have to give it to me. This is not necessarily different. So I think that's where we're heading. Obviously, there's lots of caveats here. Some kids have a much easier experience with these technologies than others. Parents clearly know their own kids. There is, the one thing I'll also point out is I've heard before when I've been on the road or talked about my book is often sort of socially elite people have this storyline that less socially elite or less economically

elite people need these technologies and it's somehow classist to talk about this, that somehow having a 14-year-old not use a smartphone is like a yoga thing. It's like a luxury thing. And I can say having worked with lots of different groups from lots of different backgrounds on this issue, they would say nonsense to that. Everyone is worried about the kids with this. Kids are worried about this in all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different economic classes. So I don't think this is a yoga issue. This is like a teen smoking issue.

No teen should smoke. So we said you should wait until you're 18 to do it. I think it's closer to that than it is to, it would be nice to do meditation if you have the time for it. So we'll see. But Jesse, that seems to be where the data is right now. And it looks like policymakers are trying to get behind that. So we're getting close to a point where parents aren't going to have to figure this

all out on their own anymore. There'll be some more of these consensus. But I think that like your 12, here's your smartphone. Give us another five years. That's going to be considered something. Oh, wow. Don't do that. So are they still go on social media on their desktop?

Well, yeah, but desktops are controlled. Here's the family laptop. You use it in the kitchen. I can see what you're doing. Much different situation. I mean, there's a lot of great stuff to do on the internet, but doing it through the family laptop, you know, like we know a kid who's really into sports.

and so their family got them a subscription to the athletic. Like this is great. Like if I was really in the sports and I was 13, to be able to one of the activities I was able to do was like to go on the family computer and get super in-depth sports coverage. That's great. It's feeding an interest that the kid really has.

You know, another kid is really in the chess and they can do, you know, these chess games online. All that's great. But if all that's done through the family computer, it's like watching TV. You can't watch TV all the time, right? The parents say, you know, no TV is in the living room.

They're in charge of it. But you're going to watch a fair amount of TV, and it's nice. And like, that's what the internet should be for a 13-year-old. There's all these cool things on here that you can do, just like there's cool TV shows you could watch, but you can do them during times when it's appropriate on a machine where we kind of see what's going on.

Yeah. And even if they have school-issue laptops at, like, some of the private schools around here, there's probably some controls on that as well. Yeah, they all get around them. Yeah. They all get around them. Yeah, the school, it's funny.

We had a six, one of the neighbors who's always over. One of the neighbors is, I think, seven, maybe eight. hacked into YouTube on the Chromebook. I'm telling you, these kids that'll like stare at you for an hour if you ask them to do a fraction, if they could get access to YouTube, they are, you know, building a quantum processor to break the encryption, you know, based on whatever. But like, good news, I have a 108, 28, 28, qubit quantum processor I hacked together in the playground. and we're able to break the public key encryption that was keeping us out of Mark Rober videos. They become hackers. Anyways.

All right. So that's some thoughts. That's where I think the research lies right now. I think that's where we're roughly heading. All right. So, Jesse, what I want to do is we're going to move on to some questions. I found questions that roughly orbit this. I don't want to do all questions about kids and smartphones.

So instead, I increase the... the topic that I felt this show was covering. And we're going to talk in general about distractions and technologies and dealing with distractions and the quest to build the deep life. So we'll be a little bit more general. And then at the end of the show, we'll do books. Books I read in March. We never did that because I was traveling and technically we're still recording this episode

in April, even though it's coming out in May. So I don't know. I feel like it counts. So at the end of the show, we'll get to the five books I read in March. First, however, I want to talk about a sponsor that makes this show. possible, and that is grammarly go. Now, this is a very interesting new product offering from our good friends at Grammarly.

It's ironic I can't. I'm struggling to say grammarly. Grammarly. I've been saying this for two years now. For some reason, my grammar is wrong on grammarly. Grammarly go is very interesting because what's working. on here is that it uses generative AI to help improve the writing you're already doing in the apps in which you already write. Now, for people who heard my podcast episode recently on these

technologies, on GPT in particular, know that I'm not a big believer in the storylines that somehow these technologies have changed the entire world and they're intelligent or they're going to right away get rid of all jobs. What I argued in those past episodes, is no, what these technologies are really good at is taking in text and producing new text based on your intentions or things you want. So this, Grammally Go, is a perfect case study

of exactly where generative technology, AI technology based on large language models, is really well suited. So here's the type of stuff you can do with Grammarly Go. So you're writing in whatever app you would, you know, you would write an email, you're writing in a word processor document, wherever, and you have Grammarly Go sitting there like a assistant who can help you with your writing. So one of the things you could do, for example, is say, and these are real examples,

outline ideas on how to decorate a taco truck. Give me 10 possible captions for this post. You can actually ask for sample text that the assistant will generate for you, and you can then look at and integrate into what you are working on. You can also have the assistant, Grammarly Go, help you improve. your writing. So maybe you write something and then say, hey, can you make this sound more exciting? Can you make this sound more professional? Can you make this sound more inspirational?

This is the sweet spot of generative AI. This is what it can do so well that it spins your head. And so kudos to Gramerly to integrate this into their product line where it makes so much sense. So you can not only produce stuff, you can work into your writing. It's also a way to just improve the sound. or the tone of your writing. It's kind of a cool step forward. And this is, again, this is where I think

Genitive AI is going to have its impact in these targeted applications to things we do every day, especially text-based things we do every day. And it's going to be like that assistant sitting there looking over your shoulder, giving you that helping hand. It's a really cool, really cool product. So you'll be amazed at what you can do with Grammarly Go. Go togrammerly.com slash go to download and learn more about Grammarly Go.

that's G-R-A-M-A-R-L-Y.com slash go. Also want to talk about our old friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you short summaries that you can either read or listen to. They take about 15 minutes to read or listen to of over 5,500 non-fiction books. Now, what I like about Blinkist is that it gives you an ability to triage your reading life. We're a big believer here on the Deep Questions podcast that reading is critical. It's how you engage ideas. It's how you increase your understanding of the world.

It's how you get smarter. The question is how do you figure out what books to read? What Jesse and I do is we use Blinkist. We hear about a book. We'll add it to a list. We want to buy a new book. We'll take books off those list and we will listen to or read the blinks for that book. By getting the main ideas in just 15 minutes, you can assess pretty quickly, do I want to buy or read this whole book or do I really need, do I know what I need to know at this point? It really helps you decide which books are going to make the big impact and which books you're okay just getting the summary from. There's a lot of ways to use Blinkist, but that's the way we like to use it as our sidekick for helping to support the reading life. They also have ways to help you discover books.

I like the, they have collections where themed collections of books. Hey, read all these blinks and see which ones you want to buy. It's a cool tool. They have a new feature I want to talk about too called Blinkis Connect. It allows you to get two for the price of one. You set up a premium subscription. You can give a subscription to a friend who you think would also enjoy it. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

Go to Blinkist.com slash Deep to start your free seven-day trial, and you will get 25% off your Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T. Blinkist.com slash deep to get 25% off and a seven day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. And remember, now for a limited time, you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. All right, Jesse, I think it's time to get to some questions.

What do we got first? All right. First questions from Jeremy. Since I recently became a father, I found myself procrastinating on work and even at the office. I could spend all day on Reddit looking for that one stimulus so my brain could be satisfied. Same for books. I read more books since I've been listening to your show, but it always feels like there's something missing. Living a more deep or simple life seems to be a bit dull, and I can't shake that feeling.

Well, Jeremy, I have a couple things to say here. One is there is a transient duration to what you're feeling. This is a common effect. I felt this as well. When you become a new father, there's a weird combination of things that happen. So one, of course, you're tired, more tired than normal, more exhausted than normal, because you're helping to care for a newborn.

You also feel there's this sudden reduction of activity. Stuff you might have otherwise done. Now you're not going to, you're home. You're kind of helping to take care of the kid. But what happens often when the kid is really young is so you're home, but the kid is just napping or the kid is just feeding. And there is this sense of a sudden reduction in activity. I remember feeling this after our first was born, the sense of, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm here. The baby and my wife are napping. I'm like sort of not doing other

things. And I feel just like you're saying here, it's like things are dull or a little gray or there's just like a cap, your affect is cap because you don't have those things going on that that maybe give you hits of anticipation or excitement. That's transient and it goes away. The kid gets a little bit bigger. You fall back into a routine. If you have later kids, you don't feel that anymore because then it's just chaos. So when you have future kids, you're just taking care of the older kids and you're way

too busy to worry about this. So it's really a first kid phenomenon. And it does go away. I always used to think it takes about four months before you feel like a routine has returned after having a kid. And I learned over the many kids we've had over the years is just to treat that first four months differently. Like this is like an all hands on deck, unusual period. Don't extrapolate from this to the rest of your life.

Don't extrapolate from the lack of sleep to the rest of your life. Don't extrapolate from the reduction in aspirational professional activities for the rest of your life. It's four months. And usually after four months, you fall back into a routine and then you're mentally freed up. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is your vision of the deep life might be too dull. Right? I mean, if you're the way you've structured your life is you feel like this is just dull.

I don't know. I'm just, I read books sometimes and nothing's exciting to me. Construct a lifestyle vision that's more exciting. I mean, this is how VBLCC, values-based lifestyle center career planning works. You start with this vision of a lifestyle that resonates with you. And for you, it sounds like this will be a lifestyle vision that has some definition of excitement. I don't know what that means. It could be excitement that might have to do with non-professional projects or activities or hobbies or skills that you're trying to build.

It might be excitement in terms of a radical move to a new location that's very intentional about where you're going to be raising your kid and what your day-to-day life is going to be like. You're in a cabin somewhere as opposed to an apartment in Northern Virginia. or it could be a professional vision, changing your job, going out on your own, shifting over to a combination freelance, whatever. But if that excitement is something that resonates with you, you need a vision that resonates, that vision should include that excitement, and then you start working backwards. What are the moves I can begin making, given the capital I have right now, career and otherwise, that move me closer to that vision? And now you have something you're looking at. Now you're making progress, and now you're moving towards something that's going to resonate more. So we have the transient effect.

It's going to be four months your new father. Don't extrapolate from these four months. Any aspects of your life, don't extrapolate to what your life is going to be like. But as you leave that phase, if you feel like your life is dull, you're living the wrong vision. It's not your vision. It's a different vision. So build one that's more exciting. All right.

Who do we got next? Next question is from Jeff. In the absence of having a known activity to do next, I often get trapped doom scrolling in somewhere or the other. For example, if they're shutting down from work or having an experience a poor night's sleep, I'm too tired to focus on reading, so I end up scrolling Reddit. Well, Jeff, what we need to do here is work on your cognitive wiring. Right now, your cognitive wiring has learned looking at this screen, seeing Reddit comments,

gives me this little bit of hit of something, and that's what you're jonesing for. So anything that's not that is taking a lot of energy and intention from you. So if you're at all tired, it's like, well, that's just what I'm going to do. we're used to this from the addiction community. You know, this is my, when I'm stressed, I pick up a cigarette. When I'm sad, I pick up a drink, right? There's all of these addictive behaviors that historically you build these connections in your brain that when you feel a certain way, you go to the behavior. And when you look at these solutions to addiction from the addiction community, often they're built around replacement activities.

Okay, you need something else you do when you're stressed instead of picking up the cigarette and you have to figure out how to make that habit replace the original, right? This is why you might see a lot of heavy coffee drinkers among those who have just quit a substance and other types of substance abuse. They're replacing the activity with something else they can go to or carrot sticks used to be a big one. Or you see a lot of people leaving a substance addiction who get really fit because their exercise is replacing. They have to have a replacement activity. These connections get really strong. Now, the behavioral addictions created by things like doom scrolling Reddit are not nearly as strong as substance addictions. There's no chemical here that's crossing the blood-brain barrier and messing around with your actual neurotransmitter uptake.

So our challenge here is not as hard as stopping smoking when you get stressed, but we have the same principles. So what I would do is, A, look at replacement activities. high quality leisure activities at all different levels of energy requirements that you pursue and build in the habit and find enjoyment on, some that require very little energy at all, some that require more energy, and then two, add some obstacles to the current addictive behavior. I would say practice the phone-foyer method. When you come home, you plugged that phone in in your foyer of your house. It's there if you need to go look something up, but it's not right there in their pocket

when you're in the armchair, or you're at the dinner table, or you're trying to watch a TV show. You would have to get up and go find it to go to Reddit. And you would have to read Reddit standing up in the foyer. And you're like, I'm not going to do that. So you have a little bit of an obstacle. And then you invest in trying to find these other activities. It could be moving to fun books, paperback books, finding, you know, 1970s-era pocket paperbacks of spy thrillers,

things that don't take energy to read that you get used to thinking they're fun. It could be listening to the radio or sports on the radio, yard work, or craft, magazine reading, TV watching, walking with an audio book, different types of exercise, all sorts of activities you can through practice and intention, have them build up connections of this is what I do when I'm tired and I'm bored and I get a lot of fulfillment out of it. So you've got to go find and cultivate the alternatives and make the behavior you're trying to get away from a little bit more difficult.

And then give it two weeks. It takes about two weeks. And you will find I have very little interest in doom scrolling. But I do. I put on the baseball game and the radio. And if it's a little earlier, I like to go for a walk and listen to a funny podcast. It's not that hard to get these alternatives, but you do have to do a little bit of work. Jeremy and Jeff. We've got a lot of Js here. All right. Let's break that trend. Jesse, who's our

next question from? Is it a guy with a J name? Next question is from Shelley, actually. There we go. You have talked about unrestricted smartphone usage not being a good idea for kids. Do you think heavy smartphone usage by retirees can worsen their cognitive skills? My mother is 65, and their smartphone usage has really shut up since they retired. It's really common. You hear about this a lot. People's parents of our generation, their parents retire, and for the first time really begin using a smartphone,

they don't have nearly as much to do. There's not as much structured to their activities, and they get really caught up with online all the time, hitting that dopamine. It's like the kid who is raised without having access to sugar, and when they first get the college and have a meal plan card, are buying Twinkies every day at the convenience store because they're like, wow, I didn't realize this stuff tasted so great.

I'm going to eat these every day. So it is a big problem. I hear about it a lot. If you're retiring, then I'm saying, yeah, keep that in mind. You need to more so than you had to when you were working and raising kids and doing all this other stuff. You have to more than you did back then really structure your leisure time. What do I want to do with my time?

I think using the deep life buckets are a great way forward. Here's the aspects of my life. Now that I'm retired, let me work on. each, put keystone habits and rules in place, and then overhaul one by one, these aspects of my life. Choose at least one bucket to make a radical investment in, so where you make a radical move to support that bucket. You should always have at least one where you're doing that. So if it's constitution, you're like, I'm going to be one of these super fit 70-year-olds, or if it's contemplation, you might get very seriously involved in your church or whatever it is, right?

You've got to put a lot of energy into that because idle hands are the devil's playground. and that's going to be the case whether you're 65 or you're 16, so I'd be careful about it. Now, if it's your own parent, it's not what you can do. I mean, you could gently tell them about digital minimalism and et cetera. But you know what? What's Dave Ramsey calls it? What was it like diaper or bum wiping syndrome or something?

It's like, if I change your diaper, I'm not going to take advice from you. So it's very hard. Look, if you're 70, you know someone who's 75 and is on their phone all the time now, you can also say they've earned whatever they want to do. I mean, if they've had a long life, they've done a lot of things. And if that's what they want to do, I'm not going to stop them. But if I myself was retiring, I wouldn't want to end up, I think that's in some sense a waste of these years. So if it's yourself getting older, really focus on structuring, building around the buckets.

It's more important now than it's ever been. If you know someone who's older who's on their phone too much, you know, you can tell them about this type of stuff, but I just want to expect much changes. All right. who Dave Ramsey gets these calls all the time, by the way. Yeah, I would think. Parents. Like, my parents are doing their finances wrong. And his answer is always like, you're not going to be able to change that.

Or my parents are eating unhealthy. Yeah, it's like you're not able to change that. Yeah. Yeah. That one, you're going to have to let their friends do that. Their parents aren't going to listen to you. Hey, did you see, by the way, speaking of Dave Ramsey, my old friend, Rameet Sethi, has his new finance show out on Netflix?

I saw it came out with a book. and I listen to a podcast on him on the Divine. So he has a new, he has a new show, how to be rich, sort of a big splashy Netflix show. And it's like a Dave Ramsey type thing. He goes and sits down with couples

who are having financial issues and like helps them with it. That's what his podcast is about too, right? Yeah. So there's a TV version. It's kind of stressful. I would be so bad at this. You know me?

Like I have a very limited quota for how long I want to be around other people. You know, I'm not extroverted. And they have to like work with all these really tent situations where he hasn't told her about the money he's spent on this and they're also upset

I would just be crawling for the exit but Rameet's great with that type of stuff. He's big into like living a life that like designing a life that wouldn't be hindered by money and then trying to design it. Same as your value base career centric planning. Here's my, I've known him since

like 2004 or 2005. I remember Rameet was the first person to tell me he's like I have this friend and his name's Tim Ferriss and he wrote this book and it's really going to be big and I think you should read it. I remember that. He was buddies with Tim back then. His brother's cool too, Mnich. Entrepreneur. Cool family. Oh, and I wrote about Mniches is in one of my books. So it's all connected. All connected. All right. Let's do another question. What do we got? All right. Next question is from Ryan. Your audience knows that you're not prone to adopt software devices just because they're new or make a claim to improve your life.

Could you give some guidelines on how to think about adopting new technology or software? So like, Ryan, my default's approach is just to avoid new things. If I can avoid it, I will. If I can cluge together something I'm already working, that's what I'll do. And then if I finally decide to use something, I'm very likely to stop using it. I'll be, all right, I'm kind of using this, but my default is to get frustrated and to not use it, to fall away from it, or to stop using it. I'm not a big believer in the techno-utopian vision of cybernetic productivity, that with the right combination of tools and human,

you unlock these new levels of production. I often feel that the chore of organizing information and action and making plans, you know, it's a utilitarian chore, it's a rote chore, it's not that interesting. you need some sort of system that can keep track of this stuff, but simplicity and low friction is what's really important. That's something you can just do repeatedly. You don't have too much friction to get in the way. The difference between a good system and a bad system

is a difference of four minutes in your daily planning. It doesn't really matter. And so the overhead of trying to optimize technology tools is often worse than just you have something that works good enough. I got an email the other day. I forgot exactly what the wording was, but they're talking about, like, how could you, how could you be leaving all this productivity on the table that if you, they were upset with, I guess, that I was using incompatible technology systems when I track my task. And I have Trello and Google Docs and whatever, a Google Calendar.

And I know, there's, you could have a seamless system they were saying, where everything kind of connects together and you could automate certain things and how could you give up all that productivity? Here's what that's giving up. the difference between I spend three minutes or six minutes on Monday morning making my plan for the day. It doesn't matter. What matters is the 60 minutes I spend actually trying to do something good, do I give it my full attention and don't context switch? That makes a difference. Whether it takes me, I automatically have things jump into my notion board or I manually move it. Who cares?

We're talking minutes out of thousands of minutes that happen in the week. So to me, new stuff is annoying. So I'm usually relatively reluctant. And then once I let it fall back out unless it really earns its place. And then if it does, I'm really loyal to it. I would say the latest tool that's really earned its place, technological tool that's earned its place in my life in the sense that I didn't use before and now I use it regularly is probably Scrivener. Probably the writing software Scrivener had enough advantages over just using Microsoft Word that it's. I came into it tentatively, but I've now written a full book in it and probably a dozen New Yorker articles using it, and it stuck.

So it really earned its keep by doing something nothing else was doing in a way that consistently made my life better. That's what I'm really looking for. And if it doesn't do that, it's probably not going to stick around. Yeah, I got some pushback from we did that notebook fallacy piece. Yeah. Where I said, like, look, professional idea people don't spend very much time. managing or tracking or building systems to control their ideas. The proper organization and controlling and categorization and linking of ideas in digital systems is just not something that professional thinkers actually spend much time doing.

And there's sort of like a correlation between that. A lot of people who like to do that and did not like that claim. That's true. Professional thinkers have plenty of ideas. They know it's all down to execution. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, not having a system can be an advantage because if an idea sticks around, I didn't write it down anywhere, but it won't go away. That's how I finally convinced myself, all right, maybe this is the one I need to act on. So like for like a movie producer or a screenwriter or director, the idea not leaving them actually is what they're looking for to see if an idea is good. So in some sense, having some sort of complicated zettel casting system that's constantly showing them things that could be interesting to making connections would defeat the point. Mm-hmm. All right, let's do one more. Let's keep rolling here.

Last question's from Patrick. Thanks for your work. I got into it by my doctoral supervisor handing me a world without email, which changed my life. Now I feel more intentional about my choices than ever before. Here's my question. What advice do you have on staying deep when traveling to academic conferences? There's a little bit more background on here. Patrick is a PhD student or maybe a postdoc now and he's starting to travel. I guess his timing was such that a lot of his education had been during the pandemic where things were virtual and now he's traveling again, so he's wondering about it. I traveled a lot in my academic career, especially as a grad student, all throughout grad school into my postdoc years, traveled the world because what happens

is advisors don't want to go to all of these places to present papers because it's a pain. That's what grad students are for. And so I spent my 20s traveling all over Europe and South America and Canada and the U.S. presenting papers and traveling on the cheap, et cetera. So I have a big experience with it. I would say, Patrick, don't worry about being deep while traveling for conferences. Here's my advice. Wander, whatever city you get to, wander the city. I've spent a lot of time wandering a lot of cities around the world. Meet people at your conference, socialize, learn who people are, relationship building, it makes it a much more interesting experience. Bring along what I call optional deep work, something you can work on if you have time, but it's not necessary.

It's not my productivity depends on me finishing this while I'm at conferences. I would sometimes find myself in that situation, like a grant deadline and I had to finish at the conference, but I prefer to have it be optional. And if you do do deep work while at a conference, find a really cool place to do it. This was a big challenge of mine. I loved finding really cool places to the right when I was traveling around the world. You know, off the beaten path. I can sit on a bench overlooking the river in Paris. I remember riding on a rooftop bar in Bologna.

That's what I really enjoyed this, trying to find interesting places to work. And then finally, my whole thing when I was traveling, Patrick, for conferences, bring books. You're excited to read. I got the plane ride. You have this downtime. You're waiting in the airport. bring a new book that's fun. Like, I can't wait to read this and enjoy it.

Academic travel can be fun. So don't over productivity asize it. You have plenty of time for that. All right. So speaking of books, Jesse, I want to get to the books I read in March 2023.

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novel by Stephen King called the Colorado Kid. You know, I found this was a drugstore in Clearwater, Florida. I was looking for another book to read. I wanted something more fun as in a CVS in Clearwater Beach in Clearwater, Florida. And they had a small book section, which was all Daniel Steele. And then for some reason, they had a hard case crime edition of the Colorado Kid by Stephen King. So it's this cool sort of short, it's called an anti-mytery because it's a hard-boiled mystery type novel, but they never get to a solution, it's sort of postmodern. And so you're learning about this case, about this body that washed up on the shore of this small island in Maine, and there's these two hard-nosed old newspaper men, and they're telling it to their intern, this young woman, and they're kind of walking through the story and these clues kind of pile up, and no resolutions reached.

And so it was an anti-mystery. It's kind of deconstructing mystery. I love that hard case crime. They do this beautiful cover art. They re-released all of Michael Crichton's books. He wrote under a pseudonym in med school. They called them the med-school files, the med-school books, all with cool covers. Anyways, it was fun.

I read it on the beach and enjoyed it. Nice. But it just felt serendipitous. Why would that book? This 2003 release from Hard Case Crime, why would that? Why would that show up in this random CVS? But it was there. And so I felt like it was a sign.

I also read The Unsettlers by Mark Sunding. This is one of these books where you have a sort of very literate Harper-style writer who sets out on sort of a personal quest. And in this case, he goes and spends times with people who lived very unconventional lives, sort of simple, intentional lives of various types. and it's him spending time with these people and then reflecting on his own life so it's part memoir, part observation. And it was kind of interesting. Yeah, you know, I bought this book a long time ago

and then I just took it off my library shelf and read it. And I enjoyed it. He spent time with some people living very simply in Missouri and some urban farmers in Detroit, among some others. It's good. Does it motivate you to get your cabin? You know, the weird.

thing about it, and I think there's just the uncanny valley, is that when he was hanging out with other young people, like people are our age or younger, they kind of annoyed you, you know? But when he was talking about the generation before who had like moved to these farms or whatever in the 70s, it was fine. Like, yeah, these people are doing what they're doing. But when it was like other young people, it made me feel a little crumudgeonly. I mean, I'm Mr. Deep Life, and there were cases from like, I think you need a good job. you know like because there's like some of the top stuff these people that were like we put on capes and bike around the country to try to raise awareness about bringing together the earth and and you know some of it felt like there's people super far adrift yeah not like okay here's what's them they didn't go through a deep life systematic exercise I'd say it's a lot of like big swings happening um and so it's just like you feel like some of the young people I know people like that they always have a big idea and it's kind of weird and it's it's you know but then some of the people are really

really cool. But Mark's a great writer and it's, it was interesting. It really got me thinking. But it was that book that led me to my next book, which was Living the Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, which we did a whole deep dive on a few weeks ago. I forgot exactly what we called it, simple life or something like that. But I read that after the unsettlers. And this was the same idea, like Helen Scott Nearing, leaving Manhattan and moving to this farm in Vermont and homesteading. But because they're Depression-era people, there's this, you've, they're not people you know and then you can come at them with an objective

remove and it's much more easy to sort of find aspiration and draw example out of them. So anyways, that book was cool. It was written in the 50s and I did a whole deep dive on it. So living the simple life or something like that. Yeah. So look for that episode if you want to find out more about it.

I bought an old version of that. I felt like I needed a, I got the 1974 edition. Those type of books like to read in the original editions. I read a novel, C.J. Box had a somewhat recent novel called Shadows Real. I think I bought this in an airport somewhere. I like C.J. Box.

His whole series is a game warden in Wyoming. Joe Pickett. And it's cool. I like the Wyoming stuff. This one's got a lot going on. Stolen Falcons. Black Lives Matter protest. Murderous henchmen seeking stolen Nazi memorabilia,

which has shown up in Wyoming and ended up in the possession of Joe Pickett's wife. All of this happening in the same book. It was fine. So stolen Nazi memorabilia, that's stuff that the Nazis stole while they were in power and then? No, GI, American GI, took when they raided the Eagles Nest, Hitler's, whatever. And I guess there was something, I don't want to spoil too much, but there was a photo album that a GI brought home to Wyoming to where Joe Pickett lives. And it got passed down to his son.

And there's something incriminating in there for, I guess, a political leader now in Eastern Europe. And so he sends these henchmen, the Big Sleep County, to go get it back. And they're kind of murderers and they kill a bunch of people. But anyways, someone drops off at the library. Joe Pickett's wife is a librarian. So she has it and they're coming to, they're kind of lurking around the house and all this type of stuff is going on. Yeah, it's interesting. CJ Box has got into some Twitter con.

But Twitter countries aren't real controversies, but he's moved more, there's like more politics in his book. Like, not super right wing politics, but like right of center politics, you know. And then he's getting pushback like, why is this, is this like, why is this a right wing or something? And he says, that's Joe, he's like, these are the, for a, what's he trying to say? He's saying, these are the politics of this makes sense if you were a game ward in Wyoming. This is not my politics. This is the politics of the world of the book. So he's in this interesting back and forth.

I was like, wow, this is interesting. There's a whole plot line in here about Anthefa. And in the book, it's all really overprivileged white kids from rich households who are like dressing up and stuff and are like completely hopeless and are being manipulated by this evil guy who stole the Falcons. So it's like the whole plot line, this whole like anti-anthropes. antifah. It's like pro black life matter, anti-antifah. Like all the stuff is in C.J. Box. When I think of C.J. Box is typically like Joe Pickett is, you know, there's been a murder in the woods and he's in the game ward.

And so I don't know. CJ's going in interesting places. When was it written? That's pretty recent. Because it's all, I mean, it takes place during the, like, it must take place during the, when were all those, those protests and riots and stuff was 2020, right? So it had been written after that. I don't read a lot of CJBot. I always like the idea of liking genre books,

detective books or these type of books. And I just, I never really get into, I never really have gotten into a series. Like the last genre writer, I really just read everything was Michael Crichton when I was young. But these new ones where it's like, here's the character, you know,

it's like Hieronymus Bosch and Connolly or Joe Pickett and CJ Box. And here's the character. And every year there's a new book and it's this character. I really love the idea of being really into those, but it just doesn't click with me. Even the good ones. Like, C.J. Box is fine. You know, Connolly is much better. Like, Michael Connolly is great at this.

But I just can't get into it. I've read some. It just doesn't, I don't know why it doesn't do it for me. It's like fantasy. Like, I should like fantasy books. And I have a hard time. And I blame Brandon Sanderson. It's somehow his fault.

But, like, I should be a fantasy book fan. But, you know, I don't. I get bored. It's too much like Thouist wizard staff Will smite the dwarf or whatever And I should love that stuff And I don't know

Maybe it's just fiction I'm just not an accomplished fiction writer How many of the Stephen King books have you read? I have a hard time with King Because they're so long And he you know he All of his good books he wrote on Coke And it's all like stream of content

It's just like boom It's all over the place It's this really interesting approach But it's like not my style So I like the short ones Like the Colorado kid is like great king Yeah But I read like 300 pages of fairy tale and finally gave up.

It's really, it's a very interesting tone. It's very accessible and conversational. And I don't know. It just feels too like it's just going and things. He's spinning out ideas and doing this and that. And I don't know. It's not my style. I like a tighter, a tighter thing.

But I should like Stephen King. You know, I mean, I'm telling you, there's all these books I should like. I did read Name of the Wind. I did actually read All of Name of the Wind and I did enjoy it. So kudos Brandon. Anderson. Or name of the wind. I did read that.

It was good. And I read half of the second one and then I sort of lost steam. I think it's an issue I have with fiction. But my last book was also fiction. So I have three novels on my list. The last one was Haven by Emma Donahue. And it's just a novel about the monks who inhabited Skellig Island off of the west coast of Ireland. So there's this like desolate rock where there's a real monastery that was built on there during the in the medieval period.

And I saw it. I was out there. Years ago I spent some time in Dingle on the West Coast of Ireland, which is real near, real near to there. And it's a real place, a real monastery. They used it the film scenes from the rise of Skywalker. So like the place where Luke Skywalker is like hiding away on that island, that's Skellig Island. And so this is a fictionalized, it's historical fiction. So it's a fictionalized account of like the original monks.

And it just starts inland and Ireland and they sort of make their way out there. And they try to tame it and inhabit it. And that's the book. That was pretty good. Got to be cold out there on that island. Yeah, it's not optimal. It's not optimal. I looked up the reality.

So in reality, they used it seasonally for a while. Like the actual way it turns out is they would raise sheep on it and they would use it seasonally. It's not far from land. so the monks would come out there and they would stay on there during the summer because they would keep sheep there but they wouldn't live there in the winter they'd come back to the mainland it turns out to be the reality and then at some point they built some more permanent stuff and then the Vikings just you know how the Vikings do it was good I give it like a seven out of ten it was like fine writing not great writing that's pretty good yeah but like a great novel but also better than Shadow's Real by CJ Box so like on the on the scale, there is no falcons being stolen or murderous Nazi henchmen.

That was pretty good book. But it wasn't my, I'm not thinking, I've got to recommend this to everybody. But I am proud of myself for reading three novels. Yeah. Like for me,

uncharacteristic. All right. Well, anyways, speaking of novels, what does us do with novels, but we should wrap it up. Thank you, everyone, for listening to today's episode.

We'll be back with another episode next. week. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world,

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