Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 288: Confronting Your Phone

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

We’ve become so used to our phones in our lives that we’ve stopped realizing how arbitrary and unusual the content we’re watching really has become. In this episode, Cal looks closer at what we���re really spending time doing on our phones, then provides step-by-step instructions for healing this relationship. 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/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Confronting Your Phone [4:30]- What does Cal think about Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves To Death”? [28:35]- Can you pursue high quality leisure after a day filled with deep work? [33:14]- Can commercial breaks be used for high quality leisure? [37:24]- Will digital minimalism work in an age of augmented reality? [40:34]- How can a full time YouTuber practice digital minimalism? [46:53]-CALL: How to share content online? [52:38]CASE STUDY: Cost-benefit analysis of technology usage [1:00:39] CAL REACTS: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Search for Depth [1:06:43]Links:twitter.com/explore/tabs/trendinginstagram.com/explore/tags/popular/?hl=entiktok.com/foryou?lang=ennewcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch/the-consolations-of-fantasyUse this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”: peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/ FREE download excerpt and 2 Bonuses for “Slow Productivity”: calnewport.com/slow Thanks to our Sponsors: ladderlife.com/deepmybodytutor.comrhone.com/calmintmobile.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 a distracted world. So if you're new here, I'm a computer science professor who also writes about the various ways that technology impacts how we live, work, and relate with each other. On this show, I give concrete advice about the big ideas I tackle in my writing. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ in sunny Tacoma Park, Maryland. it's snowing slash raining simultaneously outside. So that's an inside joke for those here in the studio. Speaking of which, I'm joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

I guess it's nice outside. I don't know. It's snowing, which is nice, but it's also raining at the same time. Yeah, it's not too, too cold. But somehow that's worse. Hey, I wanted to check in real quickly on my book, Slow Productivity, which comes out in March.

The pre-order campaign is continuing to go well. We're getting close to pre-order numbers. I think we're starting to get some attention among the sales staff and some of the book industry. So this is all great. So if you like this show and you like what I talk about, I know you'll like this book. So if you're going to buy the book anyways, please consider pre-ordering it. Here's how it works. It's actually really simple.

You buy a copy of slow productivity wherever you want. Amazon, you pre-order it from your local bookstore. You pre-order it from our local bookstore to get a signed copy. You can find out more about that at calnewport.com slash slow wherever you buy it. And then you simply just email your receipt to Slow at pre-order bonuses.com. So then we have your receipt and your email address. Once we verify the receipt, we will just send back to that email address, two bonuses right away, a crash course on slow productivity, video crash course,

where I walk you through the core ideas of the book, and give you advice from the three main principles that you can put into action right away while waiting for the book itself to come out. We'll also send you a guide to my best articles on slow productivity, presented in chronological order with my annotation about what was going on in my thinking. And then later when the book comes out on March 5th, we'll send to that email address, access to audio chapter by chapter audio commentary that I'm recording. So you can go deeper into the book.

So it's real easy to do. You just send your receipt to Slow at preorder bonuses.com. All this information is also at Cald-Duport.com slash slow. I also want to mention we're going to do some in-person events. I'll talk more about these as we get closer, but I am excited for an opportunity to meet in person, some of you, my listeners of the Deep Questions podcast. The first such event will be on March 18th,

Saturday, March 18th at 3 p.m. at Politics and Pros here in Washington, D.C. It's going to be me talking about the book. I'm going to be joined on stage by my friend and friend of the show,

David Epstein, the number one New York Times bestselling author of Range, and we're going to have a conversation about slow productivity. Jesse, hopefully you're going to be there, right?

I'm going to be there. Jesse will be there. It'll be like the podcast happening live. We'll talk more about that when that comes up. There's a couple more events too, but hey,

mark that on your calendar. March 18 to 3. We'll have some in-person fun. All right, so that's my update on slow productivity for the day. I want to shift. I think what we're going to focus on today is something we haven't talked about in a while. Our phones and distraction, this is part of my bread and butter. I think this will be a fun topic to dive into.

I got a cool deep dive. I got some cool questions and a sort of zig for the final segment. I have a cool unrelated thing I want to react to. There's going to be some on-screen stuff. stuff today, especially during the deep dive. So if you're listening and want to see what I'm talking about, go to calnewport.com slash listen. This is episode 288. We post the video version of each of our episodes within a day or so after the episodes come out. So you can go find the video at 288 on the deeplife.com. Listen if you want to see what I'm talking about. All right, that's enough preamble.

Jesse, let's get started with the deep dive. So one of the things I'm most known for is the fact that I have never used social media. My 2016 TED Talk, which is titled Quit Social Media, just past the 10 million view mark. My 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In recent years, I've been extensively covering the social media industry from a critical perspective for the New Yorker. So this is something that I am deeply associated with. It occurred to me recently, however, how do I know I'm not missing out on something special? What if social media really has evolved into something that is a true source of value in a way that I am forgetting?

So I thought today it might be fun if I was to actually live here in the show load up some actual social media apps and see what's going on. Jesse, you can attest. I did not look at these in advance, so God knows what we're going to find. Yep. But we're going to look into some social media together and then talk about how we might repair our relationship with these tools. Jesse, it would be funny if what I turn on these tools, it turns out that I'm in the middle of like a global canceling campaign that I didn't realize. That cancel Cal is like the number one trending hashtag. It would be a funny way to figure that out.

All right, let's look at some real social media. For those who are watching at home, I'm bringing this up on the screen. We're starting with Twitter. Or as the kids call it today, X. Let's see what we can find. All right, right off the bat, there is a tweet response here. So there's a tweet. I don't know if you can see this.

There's a tweet, first of all, that's showing Taylor Swift hugging Travis Kelsey after their Super Bowl win. We're recording this a couple days after the Super Bowl. The original tweet says, imagine being against this. All right. But this tweet is being responded to. This response says, oh, Lord, okay, this response from smug fecundity, so I'm sure this is going to be very well-reasoned and compassionate, is the following. Look, I hope everyone finds a wonderful spouse and brings 10 kids into the world and raises them together. Here's why this falls flat for, quote, the audience, end quote. There's no hero's journey, no character arc. This is a perfect example of potential marriage as the capstone to a perfect life, and I'm against this message. Jesse, I don't even know if I know what that means. I don't know what that means either.

Okay, smug fecundity is upset that Taylor Swift is hugging Travis Kelsey. I wonder if she's whispering to his ears. Only two receptions for serious yardage. Come on, Travis. You can do better. See, I can be on Twitter. All you got to do is, like, think of something mean to say and hope that you get clout for it. Let me click on something else on here.

Hashtag Farmers Protest. All right. Let's just see what else is going on on Twitter. I don't know what this is a protest going on in India it looks like and then there's a lot of arguing back and forth about what's going on on so let me read this they're fighting for regime change behalf of opposition parties said the professional protester cheese ver Singh and here's some video of what looks like tear gas and a crowd there's a drone flight all right look this is I think this is like classic, as I would expect, this is classic Twitter. And I don't mean this in a dismissive way because what we're seeing here is both the good and the bad in Twitter.

The bad, I think, is let's all just take a pop culture event involving people that are impossibly distant from us, like Super Bowl champions and Taylor Swift, and just take turns seeing who can say like the more mean thing or smarmy thing and sort of hope we get clout. On the other hand, we also see Twitter highlighting here a protest happening in India that, you know, maybe you otherwise want to come across it unless you were reading a newspaper. All right, so there's Twitter. Let's check in on some other social media. See what we are missing. All right. Let me load up a browser here. We've jumped now on the Instagram.

The gram, as I'm told, it's called. I'm on the page here, Jesse loaded up, is popular. hashtag. So I don't know if that actually means popular post or posts that just happen to be associated with the word popular. I'm going to click on one. All right. I should be nervous, Jesse. If I click on this post, is it going to be something, let's see. It looks harmless. It looks like a nice couple in their young 30s, well-dressed with complicated glasses, arms interlocks. Let's click on this post. Oh, I got to log in. Oh, this is good. This means, Jesse, you don't use Instagram. All right, so we can't actually click on these without logging in. So let's just

look at them. That looks nice. Here's a person with huge muscles in the gym. Looking nice. We have people on vacation. This is kind of classic Instagram. Looking over a nice swimming pool with cabanas. So they're probably bragging about their vacation. All right. So here's a football thing. I just see a classic Instagram. People, everyone looks kind of happy. Everyone looks like they're in good shape. Everyone is sort of showing off a life that they want you to think is good. All right, God, help us. Let's jump over to TikTok. All right, what am I looking at here? It's a person playing a video game. All right. I mean, good, I suppose. Oh, I see. So look at this. So this is classic TikTok. Every time I touch the screen, it just throws up another video as soon as I get

bored. All right, here's a girl saying, how much do I owe you? Someone else says, it's okay. It's on the house. I don't even know what they are showing. Probably. something inappropriate. Here's a video game. Let me swipe again. I got hired security guard at a pizzeria. They're pouring stuff onto avocados. They fried an avocado.

All right. Fine. Here is some sort of mashed potato dinosaur volcano. My God, look at this, Jesse. You just like keep flipping, and it's, it's, here's something. Ah, that's weird. Okay, next. That's weird.

Okay, so there we go. We've seen, we've checked in on social media. 24. So here's my take. Look, there's nothing intrinsically evil about what I just saw. There's nothing inherently bad about engaging with anything I just saw, but I can tell you as an outsider who doesn't use these services, who is looking at these with fresh eyes.

Guys, this stuff is really weird. It's really weird looking at what we just saw there, not in isolation that any one of those things is crazy, but that the... foundation for a huge portion of our culture, the foundation of their engagement with their leisure time is based on these types of interactions, that I find to be strange. We get used to things once we've been in that world, but the outsider perspective here is these short videos, the people trying to be smug about celebrities and who can outdo each other, this pictures of various people's vacations, for this to be the foundation of your engagement with leisure,

if a time traveler came forward from 2005 and looked at what I just looked at, it's not that they would be horrified by the individual things. I really do think, however, they would be somewhat perplexed by the idea that this is the foundation of our culture's engagement with leisure. This stuff is okay, but it really does not seem like this should be the core of how we engage with the world outside of our work. So if you agree with this, what should we do about it? if you're like, you know what, I don't want to, oh my God, the video now, Jesse, because the TikTok's on my screen here still, they're pouring gravy down the mashed potato mountain. You see that?

Just imagine you're the time trailer from 2005. Okay, so I'm watching. Oh, and the music playing is the Jurassic World theme song while gravy pours down a shoot carved into a mashed potato mountain covered with chicken nugget dinosaurs. The Algonquin Roundtable, this is not. All right, so we could do better. We could do better than making this the main thing we're looking at.

So how do we make this better? Well, let me start with the biggest mistake people make when they finally get fed up with how much time they're looking at their phone. The biggest mistake people make is they go straight to white knuckle abstention. You know what? I am fed up with people's comments on Taylor Swift and dinosaur mountains.

so no more, no more phone. And I'm going to actually feel righteous by the fact I don't use my phone. You know these people because they will tell you immediately that they don't use social media or their phone. They will work it into every conversation. You can be in a building that's on fire. And you can say this way, this way. This is the only staircase that's not engulfed in flames quickly. And they'd be like, great.

Don't worry about this going on Instagram. I don't check Instagram anymore. I have an account, but I barely, and then they catch on fire. So you know when people, People are doing white knuckle abstention because they talk all the time about it. That alone doesn't work very well. My philosophy of digital minimalism, my approach for dealing with these issues, argues that these tools push out other things in your life and therefore then feel a void that those things used to fill. When you just do white knuckle abstention, you are faced with the yawning void of boredom and your own thoughts and anxiety.

it's very uncomfortable. You just sit there like, what am I supposed to do? You need something to have that smoothing distraction. So the first step is not to abstain from your phone. The first step is forget your phone, do what you want to do on your phone, watch your dino mountain gravy videos. But start adding at the same time really quality alternatives. Start adding into your life things that can eventually take the place of just looking at your phone,

that can eat away at that sensation of boredom and anxiety of being alone with your own thoughts that drives us back to the sukir of low-quality distractions. So what would these things look like? I'm going to give you six different things. We'll call this our high-quality leisure toolkit. Six different things that you should probably engage with, all of them to some degree in your life in preparation to change in your relationship with your phone. One is going to be reading.

You should read a lot more. It could be a mix of things that are just really fun, magazine articles or books that are really fun to read, as well as things that are smarter. A recent episode of this show, Jesse, I don't know if that was 286 maybe. I got into how to engage with this higher quality leisure, how to learn to engage with harder books. So you might want to check out that episode. All right. Second, higher quality video media, prestige TV, movies, documentaries, this is another piece of this toolkit.

This is content which I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that slightly more money and time was invested than in the video of gravy being poured down the mashed potato dinosaur mountain. So stuff in which real creative energy and focused effort was placed. Number three, skill-based hobby. Something you're into that requires a skill you can get better at. Your results get better as that skill improves. this creates a feedback loop that our mind really likes.

They can be more compelling to our mind than low quality distraction. Hey, I'm working on this new project that's as more advanced that I've done before. I think I might pull it off. This is compelling to me. Compelling enough that these other lower quality distractions aren't so strong in their appeal. Four have some sort of exercise-based hobby, some sort of physical fitness where you're trying to build a streak, finish, hit some marks in terms of where you want to get in your health, some sort of serious engagement with the physical.

Among other things, this frees up, it frees up your body, it releases these chemicals into your mind that makes you less, gets you out of this torporific state of, I'm low energy, I want to minimize energy, what's the lowest energy thing I can do to engage? It puts you more into a state of we're active, our muscles are growing, our low, lungs are being used. It changes your outlook at the world. Number five, get involved with communities that meet regularly, even if this is just friends that you have a standing, we go and see a movie every other week. We go to dinner once a month or a bigger, more organized activity, a league or a group that you go to, have something that meets regularly that involves other people. And six,

seek out adventures. I want to go travel to see the sports team play at the, away stadium. I want to go to this museum. There's a special exhibit that's coming. I want to go read by a waterfall that I heard about that takes a two-mile hike to get to. Things that are above and beyond what's easy and a really cool could create a really interesting experience. If you have these six things in your life reading, high-quality TV movies, skilled-based hobby, exercise-based hobby, regular meeting communities, and adventures, Take some time to add all these into your life.

Now you're going to be in a position where the monopoly that your phone has on your time and attention has dissipated. It is now competing against higher quality versions of things that can satisfy the same needs that we're driving you to your phone. Those needs are going to drive you one way or the other. But the phone gives you a low fidelity solution to what you crave, these high. high-quality leisure activities give you a higher fidelity solution, and therefore they're going to be more easily victorious. So that's step one. You put alternatives to your phone in your life before you even worry about your phone

habits. Step two, we declutter. Now, this is the core idea from my book, Digital Minimalism. I don't believe in detoxing in the sense of take a break and then go back to what you're doing before. I believe in decluttering. So you step away, you take a break as step one of making permanent change. So the way this works is that you take 30 days where you are now ready to stop using these optional digital technologies in your life, the TikTok, the Instagram, the Twitter, you step away from these optional technologies.

But now you're prepared to do so because you have these six areas of high quality leisure already in your life, already rock and rolling. Just lean heavily into those. You're not staring into the void. You're not sitting there like a detoxing, drug addict, shaking. Like, what am I going to do next? You're doing other things. So you're getting a taste of life without these tools. In doing so, you can see what you miss.

You could also figure out what you really care about. At the end of the 30 days, then you can decide what, if anything, you want to add back into your digital life. To add back a tool, it must be really valuable. Like, hey, this actually satisfied. something that's important to me. And two, when you add it back, you should have clear rules for how and when you're going to use it. So maybe Twitter comes back into your life because you realized you really do need to keep up with baseball trade rumors that are going on. This is really important to you that during the hot stove season, you do really like baseball and it helps you engage to hear the baseball reporters sharing rumors on player trades.

let's say this is the situation. Well, now that you know this is why you're bringing Twitter back into your life, you can have clear rules on it. All right, I check in on these rumors during lunch break. It takes about 20 minutes. I don't follow anyone on Twitter. I've just bookmarked the four baseball reporters who I follow, two for my team and, you know, maybe like Ken Rosenthal and Jay Papazan, national reporters have good sources. And I look at it on my desktop computer when I'm at work. So now I get that value.

Every day I go on and see what's going on, but I also don't have Twitter with me on my phone, and these are part of a much larger timeline that I can check at any time. It has endless information. I've put this tool back into my life for a specific reason with specific rules. This is how you reconfigure a digital life

that operates on your terms, supports what you value, and yet minimizes the unnecessary negative side effects. So none of this is about this technology is good or that technology is bad. None of this is about you need to live exactly this way versus that way. It's about intention. But you can't have intention about your digital life until you build a life that's better

than what we just saw when we took this quick tour through the state of social media in 2024. Again, what we just encountered here is fine, but also sort of weird and eccentric and idiosyncratic. To look at that now and again, who cares? it's like reading the tabloid and the supermarket checkout line. But if I found you reading the National Enquirer three to four hours a day, seven days a week, I would say, okay, buddy, I think we need a better hobby. And that is implicitly what we've all ended up doing. So to fix this relationship with social media and our phones more generally, put in place the alternatives that are much better. Get yourself to the place where your mind is increasingly embarrassed by choosing TikTok over all of these other much,

richer options and then do your organized declutter. If you want to find out more about this, my book Digital Minimalism, of course dives into all these details, but hopefully I've given you enough there to get you started. Did you see Jesse in the Super Bowl? There was an ad for Snapchat. I did. It seemed to me like Snapchat was trying to argue we're better. We don't have some of the same problems as other social media platforms.

even though Snapchat, as any social media research will tell you, has been at the core, for example, of the teenage mental health crisis and its intersection with social media. It's very big among teenagers and Snapchat conversations. It leads to all sorts of issues. I was joking with the person I was with when we were watching the Super Bowl. I was like, this is sort of like having an anti-fintanol ad sponsored by crack. Remember crack?

This was better in some sense than it was now with fentanyl. That was sort of the sense I got with that ad. It was hard to get cracks. So like, you know, you want to do as much of it. Fentanol is, it's an interesting argument. Hey, we're better than the other stuff that's causing damage. Oh, well. All right.

Well, there we go. So I'm not joining social media yet, Jesse, but I was good to see it. Yep. By the way, I was proud that Instagram was not signed in on your iPad. That means you must not be a heavy Instagram user. I tried to open it on the app on my iPad, and then it I was asking for my password and I haven't used it in a while and then I tried to find my password and I entered it. But then when you get, let you reset it.

So, no, I like that, though. That means you haven't, you haven't used it in a while and you've been okay. I've been okay. Think about all those beach vacations though you could have been learning about. Yeah. Every once in a while, like a coach, like my golf coach or someone will send me a video. So then I go in and check that out. Yeah.

People have done that too. And you can, they'll let you see like one thing. And then they'll see you have to log in. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there you go. All right. So, here's, we got a box.

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All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Who do we got first? First, questions from Henry. What do you think of Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death? I feel like that book fits well as a root for your digital minimalist philosophy. Do you think that the medium of screens fundamentally opposes the deep life? That's a good book. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

The late Neil Postman is often cited by people who do techno-criticism. So, Henry, I'm going to point you towards a recent article I wrote for The New Yorker. This would have come out in December. I don't remember the exact title of the article, but I can tell you it is about Neil Postman, not amusing ourselves to death, but instead his subsequent book, Technopoly. So I argue in this article that Technopoli is probably the best. full summary of Neil Postman's philosophy regarding technology. And in that article, I get into the impact of Postman's Technopoly theory on my own thinking about technology

and techno criticism, and it did have a big impact. So you're correct to note that Postman is related to my work. I draw probably more heavily from Technopoly than amusing ourselves to death. So check out that New Yorker piece to get a better sense of that. I like amusing ourselves to death. It definitely is a standalone book worth reading. What people often get wrong about it is they think it's just a book about TV being bad. And yes, that's the main theme. It was written in the 1980s, the amusing ourselves to death. It's talking about doing so with TV in the way that TV has evolved. But there is a deeper techno-critical argument that's proven very influential in that book. What Postman argues is technologies in general, but

and media technologies more specifically can affect a way cultures actually think. TV was just the latest example of this. So he talks in the book famously about how during the time of Abraham Lincoln, the media culture was built on newspapers. And newspapers would have really long articles in them, right? You have thousands of words, articles, and speech transcriptions. The American America at that time was actually highly literate. You didn't have a lot of other diversions, so you're plenty happy to spend lots of time reading all these details in the newspaper. He called it Alexagraphic Media Culture.

He said in Alexiographic media culture, we were very comfortable with consuming information in sort of long, discursive discussions. He's like, this is why, for example, when Abraham Lincoln was debating Stephen Douglas in the famed Lincoln Douglas debates, these were huge spectacles that have huge crowds, they would each talk for three hours at a time. Lincoln would talk for three hours. Then they would all get lunch or dinner. And then Stephen Douglas would talk for another three hours. And then Lincoln would have a one-hour rebuttal. And Postman said, we were completely comfortable with that in the mid-19th century because this was the media culture was one of long discursion.

And so he argues in the culture of the 80s, which was based on soundbite television, the way that we process information and think about things is much different. The media affects how we think. the bigger example I mean he goes into how Gutenberg and the printing press that gave us a way of thinking

and introduced a way of thinking that was more precise and structured and he said that the printing press changed the way we thought in such a way that the Enlightenment

and the scientific revolution became possible and until the printing press the media changed and changed the way our minds worked we weren't actually capable of having

the scientific revolution books came before it. Books changed how we thought. How we changed how we thought, we could do things like invent science. Newspapers changed how we thought, so we were comfortable with very long, discursive discussions, and so on. So, of course, the interesting question is how did social media and phones change the way we thought? How does it change the way we engage with the world? That's a question a lot of people post-postment have been tackling more recently, and it's a smart one to think about. If the media itself, the form of the media changes how we just cogitate, what does that mean about how our brains operate in a world of social media? That is something worth thinking about because I think those impacts have been profound. So check out that book.

It's a cool one. Check out my New Yorker piece about Technoply as well because that's also a very deep book. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Roshan. I was wondering if you could square the theoretical four-hour daily limit on deep work mentioned in deep work and the pursuit of high-quality leisure mentioned in digital minimalism. Is it possible to pursue a high-quality leisure activity on a day you completed deep work professionally?

Yeah, for the most part, it's not a problem. That four-hour daily limit, what that comes out of actually is people who are in states of more intense, deliberate practice. So that number was first identified in a study of professional violin players. Four hours broken into two two-hour chunks was about, on average, the maximum a professional player could practice because when professional players practice, it's incredibly intense. They don't just play stuff they know how to play. They're instead systematically and deliberately trying to push their skills to the next level.

Pros can do that for four hours, but not much longer. We see that in other places as well. There's a type of software development called Extreme Programming in which you sit two people at the same monitor. It is very intense programming where the one person is looking over your shoulder and you're trying to build the best code with someone watching you do it. This is very intense because you have to have like a violin player practicing complete unbroken concentration.

I write about this a little bit in my book, A World Without Email. So what they found with extreme programming is that it's super productive. You would think, hey, we're doing two people per screen. We're going to get half as much done. But the code is so good. You get quality code so fast. It's incredibly productive. But they also learned it's you can only do it for a certain number of hours a day.

People completely burn out. You know, you get like four o'clock in the afternoon. It's like everyone has to go home and take a nap. There is no notion of working late in an extreme programming environment because it's too exhausting. High quality leisure typically doesn't trigger this. Unless your high quality leisure is intensely practicing your instrument, high quality leisure is not going to exhaust you in the same way as fully focused deep work. So you should be okay.

If you feel like what you're doing is pretty exhausting, like maybe you're working on a novel on the side as a leisure project, and that really can like extreme programming, like practicing instrument, that really can actually make a lot of demands. You know, do less of it and balance it out with other leisure activities that pull from different parts of your brain are less exhausting. There's a cool book on this from the early 20th century, Arnold Bennett's How to Live on 24 hours a day. And one of his arguments is even if you're exhausted from your work, if you switch over to unrelated high-quality leisure, your energy raises not false. Right.

So he's arguing our brain, yes, our brain needs rest. but it gets that rest and sleep. So yes, we do have to sleep every day. But when our brain is active, like we are awake, it does not actually demand in the way that we imagine complete downtime, where it just needs to sit there and do nothing or consume very low-quality media. In the world of Arnold Bennett, sort of snobby,

striving middle-class England in the early 20th century, he described as sort of low-quality media that you're drinking and like playing cards and sort of just sitting around and listening to popular music. And he says, you don't need that. This idea that you need that's not true. Ponder poetry or whatever his definition of high-quality leisure is. He said it'll re-energize you. Brain wants to do interesting stuff. So yeah, you might have to adjust a little bit, but you should be able to find on almost any day, unless you're actually sick, a groove of high-quality leisure that is going to feel better and be able to be able to be able to find on almost any day unless you're actually sick a groove of high-quality leisure that is going to feel better and be.

be more energizing than just falling back to let me do nothing hard at all. I actually have a listener sent me a first edition of how to live 24 hours a day. I have a display to my library. Yeah, I think you've mentioned that before. Yeah, it's really cool. I'm really happy to have that. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Sam.

Hi, Cal. I'm working on digital minimalism, and one of the high value activities I want to include in my life is watching sports on TV. But there are so many commercials throughout sports that I feel like I could use a commercial time better. Do you have any ideas on how to deal with activities that have inherent frequent breaks such as sports? What do you do, Jesse, when you're watching TV sports? I, that's a good question. Yeah, I just, like for instance, during the Super Bowl, I had it on. Yeah, it was just on. But a lot of times during NFL games, like on Sundays, I'll be at work.

So the son's on it anyway. Yeah. So you're kind of just checking in. But then on like a a Saturday or sorry like a Monday night game I will yeah just have it on one of the things I used to like well I still do I wrote about this in my newsletter is reading a book while listening to baseball on the radio that's a favorite of mine maybe even outside on a summer day you read a book and then you sort of put the game on when that when it comes back and with baseball you can kind of tune in and out a little bit right so you're like okay if something interesting is happening I'll really listen but now it's going to commercial break I'll go back to my book if they're a pinnet race, I could get more reading done because as we got towards later innings, I would turn the radio down when we were pitching because it was too much stress. Then you could get a whole half inning of reading because when it's your team up the bad, it's all possibility. You're like, hey, anything good could happen here, nothing that terrible could happen other than we just get outs.

So I don't know. If you're watching sports on TV, I would say it's fine to have some sort of leisure activity that you're going back and forth through, I would not make it work-related because if you contact shift like into your email and then back to the football game, your mind is now stuck between these two worlds

and you're not going to get the sense of relief of doing something unwork-related. So don't make it work-related. Also, don't make it engineered to be addictive. So you mentioned in the longer version of your question that you're watching YouTube videos, I don't like that necessarily that tension between, hey, look at me, look at me, like addictive, if the content has these recommendations

that are grabbing your attention. And now you're competing that against the high-quality activity. I would rather your secondary leisure activity be a little more boring. Be on that same level of slowness as the game on TV itself. So I think a book is a good example. Some other sort of analog thing that you're working on, something that you're trying to fix, you're cleaning something while the game is on, and you kind of clean, during the commercials, maybe have a secondary activity that is on an equal level of slowness.

It's not competing for your attention because then you really get the experience then of your brain downshifting to this medium, which itself, I think, is just clearing and useful. So I think it's okay to have something to do during the commercials. Just don't make it work related. Don't make it too addictive. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Chris.

How do you envision digital minimalist interacting with augmented reality once the technology has advanced sufficiently to replace all the screens in our lives as you have predicted? Well, first of all, I still think my prediction is not being discovered enough, not necessarily from me, but I don't see enough other people talking about that prediction, in particular in their coverage of the new Apple Vision Pro. I don't know that everyone yet is still on the same page that I'm on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they're doing this is because you don't need to, once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don't need to own separate screens. Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Rayban glasses,

I don't need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar-sized screens wherever I happen to be. So why buy all those things? That's a huge industry. The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple's profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens and nice brushed metal boxes. If those all go away, Apple's in trouble, so they want to own the virtual screen future.

And I'm still convinced that's where we're going to end up. If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glass. If I want to watch TV, there's a screen put on the wall projected by my glasses. If I want to write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses. I don't need to own other bits of electronic. I just need whatever drives those glasses. So when people do hear about this future, their concern is, like Chris's concern is here in this question, are we going to be super distracted in a way that we don't even know now?

because there is no hard line between reality and the digital. Could our whole world be full of these distractions? Here's my current guess. No. I think even in a world of virtual engagement, so augmented reality engagement, we are still going to prefer the screen metaphor as the mediation with the digital.

So even when these screens are not physical, They're being projected in the space by a pair of Apple glasses. We still are going to want our digital to be within some sort of screen, a clear demarcation between the digital and the real. It would be possible, of course, for the digital world to be fully integrated in a more obfuscated way with what's going on around this. I don't think we're going to want that. I don't think that's what the market's going to demand. I think the market is going to be very happy with I don't have to buy screens anymore. My TV is awesome because I can just.

just make a giant screen without having to buy one. I don't need a separate laptop and iPad or what have you because I can just have four monitors whenever I need it. This is great. I don't need keyboards and mice. It's just going to look at my hands. I think that is going to be a compelling pitch to the market, but the screen metaphor will persist.

I mean, think about this. This has been the dominant metaphor of media consumption for over 500 years. Basically, when we switched from the scroll to the codex, the bound codex, as our our way of conveying written technology, the idea of a constrained rectangle containing information has been what we've done. Movie screens, constrained rectangles, televisions, constrained rectangles, computer screens, constrained rectangles, phones, iPads, video games, constrained rectangles, which information is found.

So I think that metaphor is going to continue, not because it's necessarily the best way. I mean, maybe it's, you know, it is better to have. the things we're interacting with just sort of be in the world and we can't tell the difference between them and other things. Maybe it is better, but psychologically and philosophically, I think we prefer to have a clear demarcation between real and fake. So yes, I think it's going to, AR is going to completely up in the consumer electronics industry. Most of us will be engaging with a world augmented with digital elements just all day long, but it might not look

as paradoxical as this might seem that different than our current world today. We might not be able to reach out and grab the screen we're looking at but I think it's still going to be a screen. There might be some exceptions,

some games, etc. But some pop-out stuff. But I don't, you know, I don't even think so. Like so, Jesse,

I see like a lot of these demos of checking email and AR. Mm-hmm. The demo videos, they like to have it sort of your messages fly out or like they're kind of in space and you're scrolling in space and then over here you're writing and you'll maybe but I also think people will be happy with no I can just have a giant screen in front of me so it's you know I can see my I have two messages

side by side I don't need the messages to float in like little envelopes I'm fine with what Gmail looks like I just want to be able to access Gmail wherever I am and have like a really big screen where I can look at two messages side by side and drag things back and forth. So I think something like the screen metaphor, that's my new prediction, is going to dominate. Also, it's just technically easier.

It's going to be that, that's going to be easier than trying to more complexly integrate digital elements to the real world. The easiest thing to do with AR is just try to anchor a screen in space as you move around. So we'll see, but that's my current,

that's my current guess. I still haven't found a excuse to get an Applevision pro. I'm trying to find like an article. idea that would require me to get one of those to mess around with. How much are they? 3,000 bells. Oh, really? Yeah, I think they're expensive.

Jaron Lanier just wrote a good New Yorker piece on this. I'll have to check it out. That might have burned my opportunity to convince the New Yorker that I really need an Appalvision Pro. Or you just bar his. Yeah. Well, yeah, maybe I can. Darren, come on. He helped invent virtual reality, so I think he was well suited to write about this.

He probably has, too. Yeah, I should. He probably does. He probably does. All right. What we got next? All right. Laura, next question.

How can I have a digital minimalist life when I have an online business based on social media? I'm a full-time YouTuber who struggles with keeping up with my subscribers' interactions. I have a channel with 30,000 subscribers that keeps growing at a very good pace. I've been trying to reply to all the comments on my channel, but lately it's been getting harder. Well, Laura, I think it's a good question because it emphasizes. is a common confusion about digital minimalism. You don't have a digital minimalism problem. You have an entrepreneur workflow problem.

And I want to distinguish between these two because I think it's important. When people hear digital minimalism and they know that it has to do with having a more healthy relationship with your tools, they often change the second word in their head. And so, yes, what we're talking about here is digital minimalism. Minimization. The goal of this philosophy is to use as little technology as possible. To remove technology from your life, more removal is better than less. And from the perspective of digital minimization, you say, oh, I'm spending all this time on YouTube. That goes against minimization because I'm spending time on YouTube, and so maybe this philosophy doesn't hold.

Minimalism, though, is different. Minimalism says you figure out what's important to you in your life. you figure out what tools, if anything, support these things that are important because you know why you're using the tools. You could put rules around their use that dictates how and when you use them. So in this case, you run a, you're a YouTuber.

Your business is based on YouTube. Clearly, when you go through this exercise, you would say, yes, engaging with YouTube does support things I value, such as making money and keeping my job. My job requires me to use YouTube. There's no problem there.

digital minimums say there's a reason why you're using YouTube. It would also say, of course, have rules about how and when you use it to make sure that you do the stuff that's important, but not paying unnecessary side effects. And this is where I think this becomes a business workflow problem. Your issue is your channel is grown and it takes a lot of time to interact with subscribers. Like that's your problem. That's a business problem. That your rules for engaging with YouTube as your channel grew was I'm going to try to answer user comments because that leads to more engagement. engagement and will help the rate at which my channel grows. I guess this is like a common

YouTube strategy idea. And now your channel is up to a given size that these interactions become more difficult because of scale. So what do you have to do is a business workflow problem. All right? Either I have to put aside more time for doing this or move on to the next stage of my channel growth where I no longer try to interact directly with subscribers. I mean, all YouTube channels will eventually go through that stage. Once you get to a certain size, you're not interacting with your commenters. I mean, we just had Ali Abdel on the show. He's not sitting there.

He has 5 million subscribers. He's not sitting there trying to answer every comment. So there's some point where that no longer makes sense. And maybe you're at that point, which would mean you stop doing that. And if you're not at that point, my suggestion would be to lean into the how and win attributes. The digital minimalism says you should place around any technology in your life and be much more structured about it. I have one hour here and a half hour here every other day. where I go through and reply very quickly to comments,

I don't look at them otherwise. So I've put fences around it. That's where you are. You either need better fences, wider pastures fenced in for this behavior, or you need to move on from this behavior. But this is a business workflow problem more than it is a minimalism problem.

Minimalism is not about stop using technology. If you have to use technology, give up on it. It's about being intentional. So just be very careful about your intentionality here with YouTubers and comments and say, is this necessary? Is there another way I could do this? Let's rethink how I want to engage with these tools. But that's a business workflow issue. I mean, I remember going through this with my newsletter and blog. Very similar, Laura, to what you're talking about here. Early on, we're talking 2007, 2008 when I started this. I answered every email that people sent me. And I was talking mainly to students back then. And so I would get these emails from students with specific problems. And I really liked trying to give them advice. A, if, felt useful, and B, it helped me better keep up with what are the specific issues that students

right now are facing. As I talked about often on the show, however, there was this point where I had to stop doing that. There was just too many readers, therefore too many emails. It was taking up too much of my life. It was stressful. I couldn't keep up. I was spending hours working on it. And eventually I had to evolve to the next stage of my media career and say, okay, I no

longer have a sort of open email address where I just answer questions. It's just not sustainable. And it was weird and then I got over it. So, you know, maybe you're there. But I like this question because if you use your business is based on social media, you could still be a digital minimalist. It's to have to be intentional. If you're having trouble with your work, it might not be a technology problem,

but just a workflow problem. We don't talk to our subscribers on YouTube. Is that something people do, Jesse? Like is that help your channel grow or something? I think it might, but it seemed like it would be pretty. I don't think I would know how to do that. Like what, I don't know how comments work on YouTube.

You just go to the YouTube studio and then you do it in like the back end. Yeah. And then it would show up as coming from like the channel itself. Uh-huh. Audience, I'm unlikely to do that. So if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube,

I am unlikely to go in and start responding to the comments. But there you go. YouTube is a weird beast. All right, do we have a call this week? Yes, we do. All right, let's do that. All right, here we go. Gidey, it's Logan here.

I'm a Kiwi currently living in the US working as a financial consultant. I have a question around decentralized social media. I've spent the last five years developing my artistic drawing skills to a proficient level and feel that I could now generate some real revenue. I'm not about to quit my day job. My question is more about how do I share my content with an audience? How do I monetize it? How do I do this and still maintain control over what I create while not handing over the reins of these things and my audience to a large social media company?

Ideally, I would only use social media as a tool to funnel viewership into some other thing. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I've heard you talk theoretically about this idea, but don't really know how you imagine it to work and practice. Cheers for all the hard work, Al. Well, I got two ideas here. one, let's just talk fundamentals. You want to sell something online. You're monetizing a rare and valuable skill you have online.

There's a fundamental principle here which says you need a home where like a home base for this material, this content, the drawings, music, artwork, whatever it is. You need a home base that you can control or allows you to control what you're selling. you also want to have control over how it's sold. So never let your home base for what you're trying to monetize online be something owned by someone else. So this is what would happen, for example, if your main place where you hold your contents on a social media platform. That's their content. You're working for that platform to help them harness eyeballs.

They decide how they show it to people. They decide how the selling works. They can do what they want with that material. This is very different than having your own website, for example. It's very different than selling things using the Shopify store. It's your stuff. Shopify is just helping you sell it. It's very different, let's say, you know, a podcast.

Yeah, you'll have a hosting service somewhere, but this is just a server that host your MP3 files, which are your MP3 files. And all these other players like Spotify or Apple iTunes players are just getting copies from the server. You own it. It's yours. So you want to own, have a home base for whatever you're trying to monetize online, the more you can have your own home base that you can control and that you own the better. You can then use, as you mentioned, various platforms de jour to try to draw attention to this home base. So for writers, for example, their home base might be an email subscription newsletter and they use other social media tools to try to pull people towards it.

But what matters is their list. artists might show some of their artwork on Instagram, but they have a website where their art lives and where you can actually order limited edition prints through their own Shopify store. They can control it. Podcasters like me, we put video versions of these podcasts on YouTube.

There's a whole new audience there, a younger audience that can learn and find these on YouTube, and some people just like to watch it. But the show itself lives. We own it. It lives on our own third party podcast server. like that's what matters to us is the show itself is something we own. You can shut down YouTube tomorrow and it doesn't matter because we have this show with an audience we've built and we owned and so on.

So I think that's a good principle. Two, go into this idea of using existing algorithmically recommendation-driven platforms like social media to promote your work. Go into that with your eyes open and care. What I often tell people who are wondering, okay, I have this old-fashioned skill. how do I promote it in the new media world? I say start by seeing what you would have done 12 years ago. 2012, we think of that, roughly speaking, as the point where social media tipped into becoming something that was generally assumed to be used. That's when it really grew to cultural ubiquity.

All right, so what would you have done in 2011? How did people who drew get attention to their work and sell their work? How did people who wrote books used to get attention to their work? How did artists get attention for their work? How did musicians find and grow in audiences in 2011? Ask yourself that question and start there. Because what often turns out is those are still the main ways you should do it. That social media, sure, you can go on there.

Maybe there'll be some break, but more likely it'll just be you are dedicating your time to help generate attention for these companies so they can monetize it more. I think the reason why we get so, it's so appealing to think, I want to promote this work on social media is because there's this lottery ticket feel to it. Hey, you never know these TikToks might go viral and I'll be the next Justin Bieber. That could happen, but it probably won't. Now, the platform will string you along, give you a little burst. to views every once in a while so you think that you're just around the corner.

But for 99.9% of the people, that's not how it worked. The old-fashioned way is what really matters. I'm a musician. I get better at playing. I start performing. I build up my own audience and mailing list. My skills get to a place where this begins to attract the attention of A&R executives who are desperate to find actually really good musicians.

Now that I'm connected with the ARO representatives, I go on tour. I'm opening for bigger bands. They've set me up to do. That puts me in front of a bigger audience. This gets me ready. It probably takes about 10 years. but now we're ready to actually have an awesome album. We have the whole mechanisms of this record label behind the album.

That's complicated and boring. What's better is I'm on YouTube, and next week, Kim Kardashian or Mr. Beast is going to mention one of my songs. Then 10 million people are going to view it, and then I'm just going to have a lot of money. There's a lottery ticket feel that I think new media, social media, gives to us. There's also a scariness with the existing traditional methods

of getting an audience. many creative fields. There's a scariness because it is rife with rejection. Well, an agent might say, I don't want your book. You perform and they don't call you back because your music's not that good. You try to move your drawings in a gallery or sell prints at the market and people don't like them. Social media kind of hides you from that type of rejection. It's like, no, like it's out there and it engineers like a, it engineers like a,

a background hum of attention. So if you're on social media, you'll make sure that, like, you're going to get some people are going to see you. You'll have some followers. So it gives you that simulacrum of people care. And then you have this lottery ticket mentality in the background. Hey, this could take off any time.

It's just psychologically easier. So I think we get seduced by these new channels because it gets around everything that made succeeding as a creative hard just 12 years ago. We get seduced by these new channels. That being said, you might find when you do this exercise that, no, no, no, there is a particular now market for this stuff that didn't exist before, and there's a way to get there through a particular

social media channel. So, sure, go and out your eyes open, execute that plan carefully. But be careful about just this general seduction, that somehow everything that has always been hard about trying to make a living in a sort of interesting, creative, autonomous field, that you can bypass all that through social media. The person who's winning in that equation is Mark Zuckerberg, right? The person winning that equation are the people that can monetize all that time you spend doing this sort of like easy low return activities online, monetizing your attention. Be very careful about how you use that world and why you're using that world.

All right, so I want to do a case study before we get to our final segment. We found a case study that has to do with digital minimalism. I don't think I got a name on this one actually. So we'll just call this person anonymous. All right, here's what he wrote. In May of 2022, I read a post on less wrong.com called Do a Cost Benefit Analysis of Your Technology Usage. I immediately read digital minimalism, completing it in June of 2022,

and beginning my digital declutter, then gradually removing more and more apps from my phone. I also eventually picked up deep work and spent time on improving my time-blocking and multi-scale planning game. It's been 1.5 years since I read digital minimalism and started applying its lessons. Since then, I have 1. Drastically increased how much I read. 2.

Drastically increased how much I exercise. 3. Incrementally increased how much I sleep. And 4. Significantly increased the amount of movies and video games I have. actively and consciously consumed, in contrast to passive or regretful consumption. After one and a half years of saying to my wife, let me tell you what Cal Newport says you should be doing, she has gone from rolling her eyes and making fun of my hints and razor to forcing me to listen to her read out loud passages from so good they can't ignore you. Well, there's a good and a bad in there.

The negative lesson there is don't bother your wife about Cal Newport stuff. Trust me, there's thousands of wives and girlfriends around the world who are tired of hearing about Cal Newport. My empathy goes out to your wife. But the good in here is that digital declotters and digital minimalism works. He got intentional about his technology usage. He added things into his life that was more meaningful to him. And look at these changes. He's reading.

He's exercising. He's sleeping more. He's much more conscious about how he engages with media. This is someone who I can tell you is probably a lot less anxious, a lot more engaged than he was before, probably a lot more productive in work as well. It's like the heavy drinker doesn't realize the impact this is having on their lives, the hangovers to lack of energy, the lack of other pursuits,

until they move on. And then they realize, oh, my God, life is in technicolor before it was in a sort of fuzzy black and white. So I love hearing those case studies. you can completely change your relationship with your phone. It's not as hard as you think. And the results when people do can be pretty cool. All right.

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the news. Interestingly, we are combining this final segment with a... another segment, which is our weekly slow productivity corner. The slow productivity corner is where we do answer a question or tackle a segment each week that's related to my upcoming book, Slow Productivity, which you can pre-order now. Go to Calnewport.com slash slow to read an excerpt and find out more. I usually use a question, but I had this final segment which put me in a slow productivity mood because it featured someone who has featured in the book.

So the person I want to talk about today is J.R.R. Tolkien, author of other things, among other things of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In particular, there's a quote that was sent to me by a curator of medieval manuscripts at one of the libraries at Oxford. So I thought that was just so cool that I was like, I'm going to take seriously whatever whatever you send me. You know when you're getting a message from a curator of medieval manuscripts at Oxford,

they're probably not writing you about kettlebells or bow hunting. Or TikTok videos. They're probably not, hey, do you see this fire TikTok video? At first, I thought this guy was suss, but now I know they're Audi 9,000. I'm mixing late 90s lingo with modern lingo.

No, it's very dignified. So he sent me this quote from Tolkien. I'm actually going to bring up an article on the screen for those who are watching that also includes this quote. There's an article here from the new Criterion called The Constellations of Fantasy that is talking about this really cool Tolkien exhibit that was put on by the Morgan Library Museum a couple years ago. What I like about some of this artwork. So you can see for those who are watching on the screen, an illustration that Tolkien did himself. of for the Hobbit. You sort of see this fantastical

English landscape. I assume this might be the shire done in pastel colors. Here he is working, picture of him working. All right, here's other illustrations he did. It's from a series of stories he did for his children about Father Christmas.

It's a fantastical picture he did about it's Father Christmas going to his snow palace. Here's a collection of graph paper from the exhibit. that had been paced together and on here Tolkien has drawn out a map of middle earth

this was his first map of middle earth this caught my attention because you know I know a lot about Tolkien I read the Raymond James academic biography a couple years ago he's living his life at Oxford where he's being overwhelmed to some extent by the administrative by the details of being a lecturer at Oxford in the early 20th century

the stresses of being in a field philology that was transforming into modern linguistics and he was on the old-fashioned side of that. He was grading a lot. He was preparing a lot of courses. He was really busy and feeling overwhelmed. He also worried about money. Meanwhile, look what he's doing.

He's drawing these almost childlike fantastical images. His imagination was soaring. when Lord of the Rings began to do well he finally saw that he had a chance to spin less time with all of these grinding activities that he just sort of felt were put upon him and more time in these fantastical worlds

that are revealed through his artwork and this brings us to the quote that was sent to me by this curator of medieval manuscripts from Oxford it's a quote in a letter sent from Tolkien to Stanley Unwin So here's the quote, writing stories in prose or verse has been stolen, often guiltily, from time already mortgaged and has been broken and ineffective. I may perhaps now do what I much desire to do and not fail a financial duty. So what he's pointing out there is that he had been stealing time from these other professional grinding activities to which it had already been mortgaged.

to work on these fantastical images that really spoke to him. And once his book started doing a little bit better, he finally had time to actually, without guilt, focus on this thing that's really important to him. There's a slow productivity lesson in there. Tolkien, as an exemplar of fast productivity, of all these things I'm doing and juggling as a professor and doing all these things, wasn't that happy.

Where did he find real peace, being able to return to these fantastical worlds that he was creating, working on fewer things, slowing down on the work, obsessing over the quality of the few number of things he did. This is hard to get to. Not all of us are going to get there completely. Not all of us are going to write Lord of the Rings.

I give a lot of advice in my book about how to move towards this world, but I just thought it was a great example of the joys of slowness. This is what Tolkien wanted to do was engage in this slower, more engaging world to get away from the fast productivity of his time. So the issues we face today in our world of slack and email were issues that Tolkien faced in the early 20th century in his age of academic responsibilities. And so I just thought it was cool to see that quote and to see these examples of the fantastical

worlds that really drew his attention. Here's another one here. Here's an ink drawing he did called eerieness. I mean, he had like this childlike imagination, but it was sophisticated. That's what he wanted to do. and eventually he would slow down enough to be able to do it. And there he found this real contentment. So perfect example of the promise of slow productivity.

And a great excuse, Jesse, to hear once again our slower productivity theme song. All right, so that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. Remember, calnewport.com slash slow to hear more about my book. Thedeeplife.com slash listen for instructions on how to submit your own questions and calls to the program. We'll be back next week with a new episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here.

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