Dhru Purohit Show - Is Social Media Destroying Your Brain? with Cal Newport

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Eight Sleep. What if we thought about social media the same way we think about sugar? With this ancestral perspective, it might be easier to see the benefits we can gain from more time away from something that’s become so ingrained in our daily lives.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Cal Newport about this and so much more.  Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, and the author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. Cal is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. If you’ve ever wondered how social media might be affecting you, your productivity, and even your reality, this is the podcast for you.    In this episode, we dive into:    -Why you should be as concerned about your iPhone and Instagram usage as you are about grains and sugar (7:31) -How technology is designed to feed into implicit expectations (14:43) -Falling off the bandwagon when it comes to technology use (19:35) -How to become a digital minimalist (22:40)  -How to create healthy boundaries around social media and technology use (35:49)  -Why the advice of “follow your passion” is completely missing the mark when it comes to fulfillment (38:53) -Cultivating a deep life and creating keystone habits (58:38) -How to plan your time for optimal productivity (1:02:48)  -How social media use and gaming impacts kids and their brain development (1:05:30)  -Minimizing technology that isn’t useful (1:16:52) Also mentioned in this episode: -The Time-Block Planner - https://www.timeblockplanner.com/ For more on Cal Newport, follow him on YouTube @CalNewport and visit his website, https://www.calnewport.com/. This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, InsideTracker, and Eight Sleep. Magnesium Breakthrough from BiOptimizers really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. It contains seven different forms of magnesium, all of which have different functions in the body. There isn't anything else like it on the market. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off—just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru and use code DHRU10. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 25% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Mattress is so smart that it adjusts your temperature and can even give you individualized recommendations on how to sleep better the next night. To get yours, go to eightsleep.com/dhru to check out the Pod Pro Mattress or mattress cover and save $150 at checkout. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our mind is constantly context switching because of that is constantly befuddled. That's why we feel anxious and overwhelmed and exhausted by our work by 2 p.m. We created a digital environment that's actually terribly suited to our brains. Hi everyone, Drew Prode here. Today we're talking with Cal Newport, bestselling author and professor at Georgetown University about the dangers of the overuse of smartphones on our brain and the body. It's a fascinating conversation. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the Drew Prote podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. He's also the author of seven books, including most recently A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism and Deep Work. These titles include multiple New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into over 40 languages. Cal is also a contributor and a writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. We invited Cal on the Drew Pro-Roy podcast to talk about the dangers of the overuse of technology

and how it's impacting our brain and our body. It's a fascinating conversation for anyone who wants to bring more joy into their life, remove distraction, and start to really unpack how our smart, phone may be sucking away at our ability to be present. Cal, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm a huge fan. We were just chit-chatting a little bit. Read all your books and just thank you for your work.

I'd love to jump right in and I pulled this quote in my research for this interview. I'd love to jump right in and share this quote with our audience and get your take on it. Because, of course, it is your quote. And this is from an article that you wrote in 2019 and you shared that it's becoming increasingly clear to me that if you're serious about ancestral health, which a lot of the members of our audience are, you should be as concerned about your iPhone and Instagram as you are about grain and sugar as the former are equally as foreign to our evolutionary adaptation. Can you give us some examples about some of the top ways that heavy or too much use of

technology, including iPhone, social media, can act like sugar and excess grains or excess processed carbohydrates in our body and brain. Well, I mean, certainly when you think about, let's say, sugar through the ancestral health perspective, what you see is, okay, our body knows about sugar, it has some cravings for sugar, it knows how to handle sugar. But if you overwhelm it, let's say, with massive quantities of sugar, artificial sweeteners, something that was not around in our evolutionary past, it overloads those systems and can cause a lot of negative side effects. The digital tools of today, especially those that are social,

do something similar for arguably an even more important and powerful part of our wiring, which is the social centers of our brain. There are a few things that are more important to the way humans are wired than our sociality. We depend on tribes for our survival. We've always depended on tribal alliance and connection to actually pass on our genes. We take it very seriously and we evolve for a very long time in a context in which we lived in very small, close-knit tribes. That part of our brain has a very hard time dealing with, and this is just one example of many, but dealing with social technologies.

And there's a bunch of different things that go wrong here. I can give you two quick examples. One thing that goes wrong here is that those deep social circuits don't identify text on a little glowing piece of glass, it doesn't identify that as socializing. So we have this more recently evolved part of our brain that says, I've been on WhatsApp all day long. I'm so social. Look at all these people I'm talking to. But you have these deeper parts of your brain that are much more used to incredibly rich streams of information. We're hearing voice. We're seeing people's body language. We have this back and forth dance of trying to mimic each other and see what the other person is

thinking about them. When you get rid of all those streams of information, our mind doesn't recognize is just socializing. So you can get the paradox of loneliness, even though you're on social, quote unquote, technologies all the time. Also, of course, we don't know how to deal with the type of interactions you see. When you go to massive scale,

homogenized platforms like a Twitter, like an Instagram, where thousands and thousands of people you don't know can see what you're doing and comment on it. And again, our brain can tell us, that's just a troll saying, you know,

you're the worst. But there's a deeper part of our brain that says, if someone around us is saying you're the worst, we're probably two months away from starving because they're not going to share food during the next famine. And we take it incredibly hard. So I mean, there's a lot of ways when digital technology is messing with some of our ancestral wiring, this social aspect of our brain and how it disconnect or connects with these social technology, I think is one of the big ones. Expanding on that, can you talk a little bit about comparison and expectation? Comparison and And a little bit of what you know about evolutionary biology and how our brain was designed to compare. It's actually been part of our survival mechanism is comparing, but how has our modern life

hijacked that unique need for our brain to want to compare ourselves to other people around us? I mean, again, if you go back to a tribal context, and I mean that literally, not in the modern ideological sense, but literally, here's my tribe. It is a small number of family units that live together and have some sort of genealogical stability there in that type of small paleolithic context. Yeah, I want to see what other people are doing. I want to compare myself to what other people are doing. Look, this person who's roughly my age in the tribe is getting more attention, let's say,

from the elders because they are being braver on the hunts. And from that feedback, I feel, okay, I need to be braver myself. I need to take, be more aggressive on the hunt. I'm reading the signs, comparing myself to others to figure out where I should be and how I should act. So it's very important. But again,

if we now expose ourselves to Instagram, and it's not a tribe made up of 17 family groups, but it's 17 million different people that are roughly my age that are on there showing these carefully curated digital portrayals of their life, it screws with that circuitry. Like, man, all these people are so happy and they're doing so well.

And how did that guy get a jet? Why is he walking into a jet? And why do all the women he know wear bikini is like, man, I must be doing something. I must be doing something wrong. And so you get the negative, that negative feedback without the actual positive impact of it, which is trying to actually push you to change your localized behavior. So again, it really screws with the way our brain is wired. We're not supposed to be exposed so intimately to such a large group of other people.

It almost seems if we wanted a design experiment to make somebody unhappy, part of doing that would be you know there's a lot of people that are interested in health in this podcast but we would feed them a lot of processed foods because we know the impact of that on the body and the brain and especially ramping up inflammation but another way on the mental side would be constantly exposing them to what other people have that they don't and as a byproduct of that their expectations starting to become completely at a whack so that seems like a good way if you wanted to design an experiment to make somebody unhappy, you would do those two things. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. If we were trying to make it on happiness machine,

if we're an evil mad scientist, eat a lot of sugar. Yes. Okay. Look at people's pictures on Instagram all day. Yes. And then I would throw two other things in there. Put yourself into these artificial social context in which you have people saying negative things about you. So let's constantly put ourselves in a context. We're going to be exposed to people say negative things about us, that we're going to blow out of proportion. And then finally, let's create this addictive environment where we keep coming back to a screen again and again so that it's not just what we're doing. It's what we're not doing. So let's now also set up a circumstance where we are actually depriving ourselves of the many activities that humans need to thrive.

We're depriving ourselves of actually being in the real world, interacting with people in the real world, sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of. of people that we care about, trying to emerge as a leader in a community of real people that we can see and that we actually share a geographic context from being outside in nature, seeing the sun pushing our bodies, to get all these things that are important to us and just not do that. And instead, look at these screens, do comparisons, have people say bad things about us, and, yeah, throw in some bad food too. You've got a misery machine, but that misery machine is also known as modern American culture.

Going back to expectations, there's explicitly. expectations that maybe others place on us and that we place on ourselves. And those can be written. It could be externalized in some way, spoken. There's implicit expectations, things that we just pick up because we feel that everybody else is doing them. When the topic of social media comes up, sometimes there's this feeling of like, well, I'm smarter than the algorithms that are out there.

I'm smarter. I can use it in a better way. But how is technology designed in a way to? feed into those implicit expectations that many of us are walking around with without even really realizing that we are carrying the weight of them. I mean, I have to emphasize as a computer scientist who is, I'm very highly trained. And I remember going through my training, being at MIT, getting my doctorate, and watching these companies essentially come up to the computer science building with wheel barrels full of money. And so we want the,

very smart as best possible engineers here to come and help us do one thing. Get everyone else to look at these things all the time. The amount of money and brain power that goes behind getting you to look at that screen is staggering. And it's staggering because the stakes are so high. You have these large social media public companies that are worth easily $500 billion or more. The stakes are so high. And so you can tell yourself like, yeah, I'm, you know, I'm pretty smart. I'm better at this than other people. I'll be fine. And you're the one that's probably going to get hit even worse, right? This is like the Kruger Dunning effect. It's because you feel a little bit too positive about yourself that you let your guard down. And I got to say, the expectation that always

baffles me, I'm going to use this word in a different way here, but the thing that has always consistently baffled me is why in the last 15 years did there emerge this idea that it was somehow mandatory to be doing something so arbitrary that I'm going to be looking at this screen and posting these pictures with these kind of code word tags and these little bitmap pictures that represent emojis and trading memes back and forth and clicking thumbs up and thumbs down and scrolling on the phone. It's not that there's something wrong with it, but it's also kind of arbitrary. And yet somehow this cultural expectation arose that like, of course everyone does that.

And that if you don't do that, that it's somehow weird. I think that is the greatest trick that these companies ever pulled, even more so than any of the addictive aspects of their technology was changing the culture to think that their technologies were somehow fundamental. And that continues to baffle me to this day that it is somehow considered eccentric if you're someone like me who has never had a social media account. One of the things that we talk about a lot on this podcast is the idea and the concept of metabolic flexibility. And for those that are not familiar, the concept is that when the baseline of your diet, when the baseline of the foods that you eat and your exercise and your sleep is dialed in,

you can dabble a little bit in eating foods that may not be part of your baseline and generally be okay with them. So if your baseline is good, you eat a lot of low-carb, you know, polyphenol-rich vegetables and other stuff, get good quality protein and fats that are in there. You work out and have a good mixture of that. Then fine, you're at a birthday party with your kids on the weekend and you decide to include a little bit of cake. It's all good. and then you get back to your baseline from there. Is there a world of that when it comes to the use of technology

and more specifically social media, since that's a little bit of what we've been talking about? Well, I think that's the ideal world. And in the context of technology, the term I give for that approach is digital minimalism, which is a philosophy where you start by focusing on what you're all about. All right, what's really important to me? What do I want to spend my time doing?

you get that dialed in. You are intentionally cultivating a life around the things that matter to you. And then from that very stable foundation, you look around and say, are there places where I can deploy technology to amplify or help these things I know are important? And to a digital minimalist, they're dropping in technologies very intentionally, getting really good benefits out of them. They know why they're using them. So it's very easy for them to put guard rails on that technology.

Because when you know why you're using a technology, it's very easy to put up guard rails about how you, you use it, and it makes their life better, right? So that is my approach. That's the approach that I think is probably most healthy for people, this intentional selective deployment of tech to help specific things you care about with specific guardrails. I think what most people do instead is digital maximalism, which is if there's any possible benefit for this technology, I'm going to bring it into my life and I'm going to do it haphazardly because I don't know, I don't want to miss out on something. That's completely unsustainable and that's where most people are. Now, I know you're a fan of health.

I don't know what your protocols are, what the things are that you do. I'm very curious. about that if you feel like chiming in about that. But again, one of the concepts that we talk a lot about on the podcast is every so often, and I don't even like to use this word, you know, life comes in and we feel like we're not following the protocol that maybe is the one that we want to follow, which is, by the way, for everybody who's listening, that's life in every aspect, right? You get distracted from your work, a distraction comes in, you get off your protocol for your body or your diet that you want to do. All things happen. And we can, what I would use, I don't use this phrase, but what people classically call falling off the bandwagon.

Now, a big part of our show is helping us to identify the early stages of when we're starting to fall off the bandwagon, so to speak, and then intervening in early, so you shorten them out of time so you don't have to have some wild bender where you're eating all sorts of processed junk for like weeks and weeks and months and months. But great, you had a couple days where we're off. Okay, no judgment. You're like a GPS that's just getting back on track. What does that look like when it comes to technology?

What are some of those early signs that, hey, we're not practicing digital minimalism, and we might want to take an opportunity to reset here? Well, critical to minimalism is not applying it to your life as a generic goal. Oh, I want to be more digitally minimalist. I feel like I'm using technology too much. I'm being insufficiently minimalist. That doesn't mean anything, right? I mean, it's like in health, if you say, yeah, in general, my goal,

is to be a healthy eater. And, you know, I'm kind of feeling like I'm not being so healthy, so let me try to be more healthy. You would say, what does that mean? No, you need to say, this is actually my nutritional philosophy that I eat this and not this. And I have a plan. It's written down somewhere. I know very clearly what it means to fall in off of it. We need the same thing in the digital world.

Don't just have a just stalt gut feel. Am I using technology too much? Write down. These are the optional personal technologies I use. These are why I use. use each of these, and this is how I use each of these, where how can mean things like when on what devices, what features with what types of perhaps extra blocking software you might add to keep the experience more clean. You have it written down. Now, you can revisit that and update that

when circumstances require it. That's fine. Change what's on that list. But now it is crystal clear. What does it mean to fall off the bandwagon? I'm not doing this. And I think this is a real issue with digital minimalism is that unlike other aspects of our life, where we've tried to intentionally gain improvement, we stay too vague here. And we say things like, I think I'm on Instagram too much. I'm going to stop trying to try to look at it in the evenings. Like it's just you get a vague feeling and then you throw out like a vague rule. And we just, I mean, imagine if we try that with food.

I don't know. I'm eating. I just feel unhealthy. Maybe I'm going to not eat chips at night or something. That vague randomness is not going to turn around and have you be, you know, six months later. an incredibly good shape and feeling great. We've got to be way more specific. That applies to our digital lives as well. On that note, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Some of the happiest friends that I have, and I have a lot of them, I'm very fortunate. When it comes to their relationship with social media, and many of these people are New York Times bestselling authors. They've built very successful businesses. One of the things that they do is they have some version of this rule,

which is I go on social media to basically post and I don't really interact with a lot of content from other people. It's a little bit of a selfish rule, but that's part of what they need to stay happy. One of those individuals is my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, is that he doesn't really post these days on social media very much, but if he has to go online for an Instagram live or do something he logs on for it, uses as a tool for that.

And then people often ask, how does he deal with all the criticisms that are out there about him? the people talking shit or saying this or that. It's like he just doesn't see it. And he just focuses on his work. And if people have thoughtful feedback for him, that's great. But he just uses it in a very selfish manner. Is that one example of what digital minimalism could look like in somebody's life?

That I'm going to have a rule that I go on and I'm not consuming, but I'm going on to post something or share my work with other people. That's real common. There's a lot of authors when they go through an, an exercise of digital minimalism say, you know, it's good for my audience that I do whatever. I like my friend Ryan Holiday post a stoic quote every day. And you know what? That's useful.

There's people who follow me just to see that quote every day. And his thing is the daily stoic. So it makes sense to have a daily piece of advice. But he's not on their reading. It makes a lot of sense. You're being very clear about it. Another example like this that came up a lot when I was doing research for one of my books was artist. So I learned that visual artists have experienced a real sort of renaissance, essentially

because of Instagram in a very specific way. If you're a visual artist, your creativity depends on being exposed to lots of other art within your genre, because you have to take in all these different things people are doing. Your mind chops it up and reassembles it, and that's where the creative insight comes from. So it used to be, if you're going to be a successful visual artist, you had to live in one of a small number of cities where these artists were showing their work. Instagram has a whole art subculture where artists show their work online on Instagram. So now, you know, you can live in Topeka and be exposed to a very narrow and interesting niche of art from all around the world. So there was like this real benefit for visual artists.

But I had a bunch of visual artists go through this exercise and becoming digital minimalist. And when they could identify, that was what they needed to do on Instagram. That was the value they were getting. They could quickly say, oh, well, let me take it off my phone. I don't need to be on their posting. I'm just going to follow 10 artists whose work I really respect. And I'm going to have a ritual. It's going to be Friday night at five. I have a glass of wine. It takes me 20 minutes. I look at everything they've posted. It's very inspiring. And that's my only interaction with Instagram all week. They work backwards from what's the real value I get out of this? And then how can I isolate that and get rid of all of the extraneous pull of their attention and negative externalities.

And so there's a lot of ways you can, when you focus on what matters to me with this tech and you work backwards from that, there are so many options that are so interesting about how you engage with it and also so much more healthy. I love to chat about your story a little bit in the context of this. What matters to you and how did that lead to some of these boundaries that not only that you've written about publicly, but that you embrace in your life? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I'm known, for example, in part for not having accounts on the standard social media platforms. I never have. It just, it didn't hit me at the time when those platforms were first launched.

I didn't really see the utilitarian argument to be on them. Most people were joining these platforms early on just out of more exuberance. It's interesting. And I had things going on and said, I don't know about that. And then I got this interesting separation where I watched them spread and spread and spread. And I said, I just can't see a major benefit I'm going to get being on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. And I see a lot of potential harms. So when it came to the things that matter to me professionally, which for me, it's all about the quality of thought. I'm really a big believer. The type of work I do is to try to think deeply and have really well thought through intellectual frameworks, really powerful ideas that can actually move or change the way people

behave to have really deep thoughts expressed and expressed well. So really caring about my craft. So this is another thing I spent years and years on just trying to hone my craft, how good I'm at writing and deepening my thoughts, improve my writing, deepening my thoughts, prove my writing. That was very important to me. At some point, I said, look, I think it would be good to have a closer, closer feedback loop relationship with at least some subset of my audience because that's how I can figure out what's important in their lives and how my, how my work is impacting them. But instead of just signing up for all the social media services. I said, well, how do I want to do that? Like, let me trade all the cost and benefits. And so my online presence is much more independent,

I would say. I have a website, blog, an email newsletter. I have a podcast. This is all very independent. These are things I can control. They're not part of a larger platform. They're not interactive in the sense that it's not lots of posting and random people commenting. Right. I mean, it's a very sort of careful and intentional deployment that allows me to still have a tighter timeline feedback loop and connection with my audience, but helps me sidestep some of the negative externalities that if I had to, for example, God forbid, be on Twitter all day, trying to be interesting and trying to get retweets and seeing all of the negative comments coming back. I would be a ruined man if I had to do that. So I've just been very, very careful. I like technologies. I'm a huge internet booster.

I'm very wary in particular of the platform monopoly. and the negative externalities they incur. So I'm very carefully try to navigate through this world to use this tech on my own terms. There's this quote that Naval Ravi Khan would share. He'd say, you know, play stupid games, get stupid rewards. And a lot of what social media rewards is very extreme versions of, sort of takes on things, more extreme than the way that people would normally talk about things in real life. And I think a lot of people feel like they have to play the algorithm to get the

attention that's there. So you have this increasing pull to the extremes because people are feeling like they have to fight to get attention. And in a way, it sort of gives a much more pessimistic viewpoint of our fellow human beings. I think most people out there, most, not all. Most people out there are good people and they want to have, you know, they'd be open to dialogue if you met them in person and they'd probably act, you know, quite normally. But social media sort of bastardize our views because part of the way that they've had to get noticed is taking an extreme take on things to get favored, liked, and reshared. Do you have any thoughts on that and how that plays into a little bit of what people call polarization today?

Yeah. I mean, it's the context of the social media interaction. action is it's so toxic for a lot of reasons. And, you know, none of this was necessarily intentional. These were unintentional side effects of just the, the underlying dynamics of these platforms. But let's just take Twitter as an example and why Twitter helps to enforce polarization. So there's what you're talking about, which is, oh, I'm going to get more rewarded, perhaps if I am, if I am more extreme, have a big take, that's going to get spread. But there's also an emergent enforcement mechanism. And this is just basic crowd. dynamics, but crowd dynamics that explode in the terrible places when you scale them to hundreds

of millions of people, which is where they were never actually supposed to be deployed. There's an enforcement mechanism where because feedback from your particular group hits you as so intense and so negative, it makes you feel so bad, there is a real aversion to, I don't want to get tagged by my team because I literally chemically feel really bad. And so what happens is you drift, you drift more towards the extreme of where your team is because the tagging usually comes from you getting too far away towards the other team, right? You're going to be okay if you go too extreme in your team's direction. So if you're, let's say, politically on the left and go farther to the left or politically on the right and go farther to the right, you're not going to get tagged by your team for that. But if you go the other way, you will.

So what happens is the center of gravity begins to shift in those directions. So if you're going to have this incredibly intense and rapid feedback enforcement mechanism on idea conformity, the overton window for your team shifts more and more and more towards the extreme. And so when you're on social media, it collapses in almost any axes. So no matter what subject matters we're talking about, be it politics or be it debates in health, be it sports. It collapses into these extremes that drift farther and farther to the extremes. And so A, things get more polarized. And so that happens. And B, you have a complete stifling of interestingness and creativity.

That is an environment in which creative, original independent thought just withers and dies. It cannot live in that world where you can so easily and quickly have such intense negative reinforcement and enforcement of your group's identity and what they, what they think about. And so you get this weirdly sort of Orwellian world where you get pushed and have to stay within very tightly enforced narrow confines that are very extreme and no other thought is allowed. And this is true on almost every topic that's debated on a platform like Twitter. I think that's an intellectual wasteland and a misery-making machine. You know, I did an interview

for GQ right at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, for example. And I said, let me tell you what one of the biggest public health interventions would be right now for mental health. And that would be if we shut down Twitter. If you came and you and you shut down Twitter, you're going to significantly improve the mental health of everyone in the year or two to follow. And I think that turned out to be absolutely right. And that's just one example among many is that that is an intellectual wasteland.

It is not that dynamic on those platforms just is not a good place to be. I just don't see what comes good out of it. And then that feeds back in the real life. So then if you're a political figure, you have young staff. They're very online. They are seeing what's going on on Twitter. They think that's real life. That pushes the real life politician in that direction.

You're a news reporter. If you're a news reporter, trust me, I know this from firsthand experience doing book tours. They're very online. So they see what's going online. They think that's the real world. They're reporting shifts to sort of reflect the dynamics that you see on Twitter. So it then spills out into the real world. So we create this intellectual wasteland and misery-making machine that stifles all creativity,

makes people unhappy. And then we allow that to begin to pull the real world. towards its reflection. It's like an anti-intellectual upside down. Use a Stranger Things analogy. So as you can tell, I'm maybe not too optimistic about the world that creates. And so excuse to rant, but there's very little good, I think, that has come out of. Not that there wasn't great potential for having really easy, low friction communication between anyone.

And I think that's a great thing the Internet can do, but it broke. Something about the way we set it up with these platforms, intentional or not, broke our brains. you know, knowing that, again, to make the parallel, you're talking about, like, shutting down Twitter would have been one of the best things for our mental health. And of course, you know, we live in a society, luckily, where that can't easily be done by the authorities that are out there, which may have some consequences, like free speech will have some consequences, but overall, that protection is a generous protection that, you know, many of us are able to do the things that we do. And the parallel example of, like, sometimes I'll hear people say,

like we need just like ban processed foods or or these other other items knowing that again that's not likely and there's so many layers that are there that go into it. It seems to be that one of the ways of doing this is that we have to educate the population and you're doing that through your work better than anybody that's out there and coming on podcasts like mine and many others and helping people understand like if you don't do this, here's what you're sacrificing, right? If you don't do this, here's what you are most likely going to give up. And going back to something that you mentioned at the beginning of the interview, which is the motivations that actually want us to step into this world of either digital minimalism or focused work is by not setting up boundaries, we're only

giving up our highest aspirations and goals and dreams in life. You know, I say that facetiously is that Take what you care about for the audience that's listening. Take the areas in life that you genuinely want to make progress on, that you want to give back to the world, that you want to make a dent in your career in your field. If we don't set up boundaries around our use of technology, we are at a great risk of sacrificing that thing that we care the most about. What are some examples that you've seen out there, even in your own life, actual things that you've run up against that if you didn't set up boundaries, you wouldn't have gotten

some of your greatest work or contributions to societies done and distractions would have kept in and swept away whatever it is that you wanted to work on. Well, so I don't have exposure to most of whatever the hum and distraction that is that's going on on social media platforms because I don't use them. And because of that, I was able to build a long-term writing career that's based on, I put my head down and I write for a long time. Like I think things through and I have my narrow audience. Do we have some interaction people I've known for a long time? My newsletter subscribers, some of whom have been with me for 15 years.

And then I put my head down and I write. I think it's made a big difference in my work because the impact it has on my work is that it's often received as, well, this kind of came out of nowhere, or this seems like there's something original about this, or something about this is catching my attention. And the reason why I think it does that is because my voice, my approach, my techniques, how I cover the topics is not so formed by the constant battering back and forth interaction online, formed by all of the push and pull and ebbs on your intellectual tides from the likes

and dislikes and the trends and the memes. And I'm not exposed to a lot of that. I sort of work on this stuff in isolation and bring it out into the world. And because it's divorced from that matrix of existing back and forth whatever, I think it can be more impactful because it can seem intellectually. People have a hard time thinking like, well, I don't understand like what tribe do you fit into? And the reason why that baffles people, for example, is that if you're online, you have to fall into one of the tribes. You're being literally arrow shot. Well, not literally opposite of literally.

metaphorically arrow shot at you and you have to go to one side of this field or the other or get punctured. And so it can be baffling for people. I don't see the right cues in the way you talk. Like it should be really clear. You're on this team or that team or this team. And so I know if I like you or don't like you and I don't understand where you exist.

Right. I mean, these type of things I think are actually to my advantage. And it's nothing special I did except for avoid deep exposure to this really artificial crowd dynamic that defines social media. I heard you in another interview. talk about pivoting topics for a second. I heard you in another interview say that the advice that a lot of people commonly get,

especially young people, which is follow your passion, might be or is completely missing the mark when it comes to fulfillment and its relationship with deep work. Can you talk a little bit more about that and that phrase that many people hear, follow your passion. Oh yeah, I went deep on that for a while. And let me just briefly step back and give, I'll give the audience a quick lay of the land here of my books. We can place these things in time.

We can place the ideas in time. But basically since 2012, the books I wrote were so good they can't ignore you, deep work, digital minimalism, and a world without email. Okay, so those are the four books. And just to place everything in context, deep work. in a world without email are all about my thoughts on distraction in the world of work and the rise of constant communication and what really matters in the workplace. Digital minimalism, which came between those is what we were just talking about. It's my book about having a

coherent philosophy for technology use so it doesn't take over and impoverish your life. The first book in that sequence was So Good They Can't Ignore You. This takes us back to 2012. This was the book in which I argued, Follow Your Powerful. passion is bad advice. And I didn't come at the project with that goal. I came at that project with a much more clear goal, which was to answer the question, how do people end up loving what they do for a living? So I thought that was a very interesting question. I was a postdoctoral associate at the time about to go into the academic job market and figured if there was any time in my life, I was going to get a lot of leverage out of understanding what leads people to love their work.

This would be that. I need to understand that now before I lock my in for a job for life. And then I went out to research that book. And what was clear immediately is that the most commonly provided answer to that question is follow your passion. Then you do a little bit more research and it becomes clear that that's nonsense advice. It's just nonsense advice. Here's the issue. First of all, it's new. You can trace the etymology of the phrase, follow your passion. It arose in the late 1980s. This is not some sort of deep Aristotelian ethic for you know, how to actually be happy and work. This does not have some deep Christian roots.

The Christian notion of calling is way more sophisticated. Calling might be something you really hate doing, but has a much deeper value to it. That's a much more rich and complicated topic. No, this idea that you're wired to do one thing, and if you match your work to that thing, you'll be happy. That's the late 1980s, early 1990s. It was like a very new thing.

My generation was the first to be raised, being told, follow your passion was somehow good advice. and the two issues with it is, A, most people do not come pre-wired with a pre-existing inclination that matches well to the existing array of modern 21st century knowledge work jobs. This idea that we're wired to do one thing, we can just discover that through introspection. There's no evidence that's widely true. For most people, that's not true. And two, we have a lot of research on workplace satisfaction and motivation. What we do not find in that research is that matching the content of your job,

to a preexisting interest is somehow critical for you ending up feeling highly satisfied or deriving great meaning out of your work. That is just not a signal that shows up much in the research. Things like autonomy, impact, connectiveness, mastery. These we know are very important for feeling like your work is very influential. This notion that, oh, I was wired to be a social media brand manager for a pharmaceutical company. And so now I have to go out and find that job. And that's what's going to make me happy.

this match is a simplistic idea. It's like a Disney movie narrative of how workplace satisfaction comes. The real story is more complicated, but more interesting. And so I think the intention behind telling people to follow their passion is good. The intention is you should have the goal

of being passionate about your work, which I agree with, but the content of the advice, that you have a passion, you have to identify and match it to your work, boom, you're set. That content is nonsense and probably makes people worse off.

And it suffers a little bit from what would be kind of called loosely like the survivor bias. We hear the stories of people who say that I followed my passion and then we attribute their success to that. For every person that is in that camp, there's also another 100 people or about a thousand more that followed their what they thought was their passion, maybe didn't have the right boundaries around protecting something that they genuinely wanted to investigate, got distracted by, you know, social media and other sorts of things and ended up on the other side of it where they never really were able to make anything out of that original pursuit that they wanted to have versus what I'm partly hearing from you is that it's hard work and putting in the hard work and doing some of the heavy lifting the same way we would do heavy lifting with weights is what it requires to build up our focus and give continued attention to some pursuit

that we want to investigate. Would that be accurate? Not only is that accurate, but the issue is even worse than survivorship bias. We have two biases that stack. So yes, there's a survivorship bias. We don't hear from all the people who were sure they wanted to be whatever, you know, sports writers or something. And it really didn't work out and they were miserable.

We don't hear from them. But we have another bias that stacks on top of the of the survivors, which is a, I invent the term the self-reporter bias, which is most of the people. who say, yes, my advice is to follow your passion. That's not what they did and it's not what they really mean. Right. So I started that book talking about Steve Jobs, given his famous commencement address in 2000,

I believe this was 2009 at Stanford, where he stood up there with a gown on and he gave this very famous commencement address that was largely interpreted in part as him saying, follow your dreams. I mean, I went back and I pulled out the Stanford Daily news. And that's literally the headline. Jobs tells graduates class of 2009 follow your dreams or whatever. I went back and looked at the whole history of Steve Jobs really deeply. This was before

the Isaacs in biography. I actually talked to people who were there early on. I talked to, for example, the person who bought the first Apple One circuit boards from Jobs and Wozniak at the Bight Shop and Mountain View. And this story is very clear that he didn't follow a passion to be a computer entrepreneur. In fact, I uncovered evidence that in the same calendar year that Apple was started, he was fired from his technology job for not caring. He disappeared to go to a commune in northern California. And when he came back, like, I'm sorry, dude. Like, you just are so lazy. Like, you obviously aren't interested in this. You're fired, right? This was not someone who had a burning passion to start a technology company. That came later. So when most people are saying,

follow your passion. What they really mean is follow the goal. You should have the goal of ending up passionate about your work. Don't settle for not being happy about your work because it's going to have such an impact on your life. You have to fight to get yourself into a career situation in which you're really passionate. That's what they mean, but they short-handed to follow your passion. But there is that implication and follow your passion that you have the passion that you can pre-identify and follow. So it's not just survivorship bias, it's actually self-reporting bias. Like the people who save all your passion didn't do that themselves. And the real story is exactly what you talked about.

Nine times out of 10, if you talk to people who love what they do, the backbone of that whole trajectory is skill. They got good at things that were rare and valuable. They then deployed that skill as leverage to take control of their career, shape it towards things that resonate and away from things that don't. That type of leverage over your work because you're good at something that's rare and good it's something invaluable, is the elixir that allows you to get all the other things that makes great work great. And it has very little to do with I am wired to do this one very particular

job. If you take that analogy of career and we would think about how that would be overlaid to people's health pursuits and their health interests of feeling healthier so that they could be there for their grandkids one day or maybe losing some way. Or maybe losing some way. wait, if that was one of their goals. How would we take that sort of layer that we just covered in here about continue to focus on something and be good at it? Could that and can that be applied to how people think about their goals in the context of health and wellness?

Yeah, I think it definitely can generalize. I mean, let's step back and think about it with our abstraction hats on. So when we think about career satisfaction, the abstraction there is figuring out what are the, what are the things you want? What are like the valuable things? How do people get the valuable things? That's the key question. Right. So in the world of work, when you ask those questions, what are the valuable things in work?

And you find out, oh, it's not just matching to your passion. It's autonomy. It's mastery. It's a sense of impact or creativity. It's connection to other people, et cetera. And you say, well, how do I get those things? And in the world of work, it turns out, well, you have to have something valuable. valuable to offer and return. Everyone wants those things. It's a market. You have to have something

valuable to offer in return and work. That's going to be skills. So what do you need to do? Oh, let me focus really intensely on getting good real quick. And then you start thinking, how do I train my work skills like an athlete would train for competition? And you're off to the races. Well, you could apply that same mindset probably, right? If we're thinking about health, if we're thinking about well-being, you've got to answer those two questions. Well, hey, what are the things I want? And make sure you have the right answers there. Like, what am I really going for in my health or in my fitness, it would really make a big difference in my life. And then you asked a second question, how do people actually get that?

And that's where, for example, you know, watching your show or reading Mark Hyman's books or whatever, where you get the real information about what actually matters, what actually moves the needle. And then you're executing from a place of knowledge, right? But that's systematic. I think people don't often, aren't that systematic. they're more instinctual and gut. Like, I feel bad about this.

I like the way that that thing intervention sounds. Let's just go do that. And what I'm often pushing is like, well, let's step back and be more careful. Like, what is it that you want? Why? Let's make sure those are the right things you want. How do people actually get those things? Not what you want to be true.

Oh, I can't just go buy six kettlebells and get up at 4 a.m. or something. And then I'm going to be better. Like, oh, I see how this works. I've got to change this with my diet. and change my routine and completely rethink my philosophy of this and that and understand insulin or whatever it happens to be. And you get to the reality of what actually matters. I'm a big believer of that. Find out what the real goal is and then find out the real story about how people accomplish that goal and then figure out, can I do that and how can I integrate that into my life?

It's evidence-based, as realistic, it's pragmatic. You know, going back to that question of actually asking ourselves what matters still to the date, if you survey most young people, and you're very known for talking about how social media even within what somebody might call like a healthy usage is completely different for somebody, you know, 13 and younger whose brain hasn't fully developed compared to like somebody who's in their 20s or 30s. And I have a couple questions about that. We'll come back to that.

But if you look at a lot of young people, they actually don't have a lot of great examples that they feel around them. And because social media is so ubiquitous, they don't actually know what genuinely drives happiness and fulfillment. So I'd love to pull on one of those threads a little bit. And going back to that original article in terms of, I think it was like digital minimalism and how it relates to ancestral help, one of the things that you talked about inside of there was a few examples.

There was three of them that relate to actually being ancestral drives that we have, the way our brain and our body is wired. And one of the ones you mentioned inside of there, which was number three, was humans have a strong desire and drive to see their intentions manifested concretely in the world, be it sharpening a spear, starting a fire, or bending an electrical conduit into an efficient pattern. So talk about that drive. We have a strong drive to see our intentions manifested concretely in the world. What does that look like in our modern world? And what, again, is chipping away at our ability to make that a reality? Well, there's an actual section of the human brain that as a center that as far as we know is likely unique, the humans, the study I found more recently looking into this topic more deeper, was trying to consider macaque monkeys, which have a relatively closely evolved human brain.

They couldn't find a center of macaque monkeys. but there's the center in our brain that what it does is very good at has an objective, lays out a plan that we then go execute to accomplish that objective. Obviously, animals can do this, but it's typically more instinctual or there's a very narrow set of exactly what these type of plans are. Humans can do this very generally, right? The way this thing works, I'm oversimplifying here, is we feel good when we have a plan and we're executing it and we see the thing actually executed.

We feel good because that's the actual drive towards doing these things. And we feel bad on the flip side when we're not doing this. We're not planning and executing and we're falling. We have a plan or we fall short on it. Or, and this is something I've been writing about recently, we overload that circuit by having 500 things that we have to do in an email inbox with a thousand emails. And that's a whole other issue, but it's a real problem.

So we feel good doing that, which is, by the way, partially why I have been a, a bit of a contrarian with this recent movement of work and effort is all bad and constructed. And basically we can apply economic materialist arguments that say that's just our bourgeois mind being brainwashed by the capitalist to try to extract labor from us. We should just do nothing. That's when we're most happiest. And how can we reduce the activity we have to do? Completely mismatch with human brainwiring.

We get miserable if you take away goal-directed activity. This is why productivity is a powerful genre. not just because we were tricked by the capitalist, but because our brains feel good, just like we feel good after we go for our run and get those endorphins. We feel good when we come with a plan, we organize it, and we execute it,

and we see the thing done. And it was that, the evolution of that part of our brain that drove these cultural innovations that we see that pushed our species forward. Oh, we invented fire. We got better at shelter. We got clothes, then better clothes.

We built simple tools, the more complicated tools, et cetera, right? That section of our brain drove us. And so we're wired to do this, to have an idea, make a plan executed and see the thing actually built. And so we need that in our life. And in the modern world, we're alienated from that.

We're alienated from that in our work, especially computer screen work, which is more and more of the U.S. economy in particular. This is Matt Crawford's idea, is that it's so abstract and ambiguous what work means when all we're doing is answering emails and working on PowerPoint slides all day. We never actually look at the clock that we finished assembly. We never actually see the house that stands. And before it was just timber on the ground. And it confuses our brain.

And we don't know that we're actually doing anything. What do I actually do here? I sent a lot of emails and had Zoom open all day long. What is that? What did I build? What was my objectives? What is my plan? That can be very alienating.

And then in our life outside of work, the screen grabs our attention. And when you're looking at the screen, you are not building something, training for something, cooking something that didn't exist before, picking up and honing a skill, learning how to do that lick on the guitar that you couldn't do a week previously. And when you take that away from people in their work life and their life outside of work, it is really bewildering and alienating from our actual instinct, our instinctual human drives. And we feel, uh, and anxious. Then we try to just get the chemicals with more distractions to try to paper over that existential

void. It's not good. We need to have ideas. make a plant, execute and see the thing done. Humans have to have that just like we need water, just like we need exercise. For anybody that finds himself in the category of, I'm always starting projects, but I don't finish them. What are some simple exercises that they can use to start to build up the muscle in their body

to have these wins that start to give them the confidence again that I actually, because You know, there's a lot of people that are out there like, oh, I'm just not good at this. The way that people say that I'm just not good at math, right? It's like, okay, maybe you didn't have a good teacher. Maybe it's not something that you worked on. But just to intrinsically believe that you're not good at math, and that's a whole reason to throw it out the window, is a very debilitating thing that's out there. So for somebody who wants to build up their muscle in this category and finds himself starting projects but not seeing them through, what are some. small things they can do starting today to head in the right direction.

Well, there's a strategy we talk about a lot on my podcast for exactly this goal. And the idea here, and I think it's a good way into this, is, okay, take your life and divide it into, we call it buckets, the deep life buckets. Because the way that when I talk about this, for example, my ride down my show, I often make the goal of living this life that's much more attuned with our human wiring, this life is more meaningful and intentional and so less stressful. We call it the deep life. So divide your life into buckets for the major areas of your life that are important to you.

So there might be a bucket for craft, which is like my work and, you know, my work, but also things I build maybe like hobbies. You would have constitution probably in there, my health, et cetera. A huge one would be community serving my family, my friends, my community, being a leader, someone looks up to you. Like we have real. That's very, very important. often my listeners will throw in something like I call contemplation to capture some combination of philosophy, theology, ethics, that sort of spiritual, ethical, philosophical portion of your life.

Here's the things that are important to my buckets. All right. Baby steps. Step one, all we want to do is establish one habit in each of those buckets that I do every day. So in this strategy, that is just the table stakes. And we call them keystone habits. It's something you do every day. that's not trivial, but it's also not impossibly hard and there's no way you're going to do it. And you track that. Hey, I write down in a notebook every single night whether I did these or not. That's what you're committing to. And so this takes some adjustment because you'll make some mistakes and some of the habits will be way too ambitious.

You have to find that sweet spot where it's non-trivial, but it's tractable, that's doable. All right, that's step one. So you do this. This takes about a month. Now you've told your mind, each of these areas of my life are important. and I'm willing to do optional activity on a regular basis and reap the rewards from it, because I have whatever these small habits are. Then what I recommend is dedicating one at a time, one month to each of these buckets.

So I'm going to do a month just on craft, but I'm going to do a month just on Constitution, where you really overhaul and think about that part of your life and make some sort of major significant change that you can give your full attention to for a month. Some people spend six weeks for each of these buckets. where when I'm on the Constitution month of the Constitution six weeks, I'm all about really now seriously giving a lot of my attention to my eating and exercise habit and try and completely overhaul that and how that works. And then once that's running, I do a month or six months on the next part of my life,

et cetera. So you're giving it time to do these more major overhauls. If you do this about six months later, you're going to find that in multiple areas that are important to you in your life, that you actually are making consistent progress on pretty ambitious and really important types of behaviors or projects. And now you're someone who feels like they are able to take control of their life and shape it towards things that are important.

And you're off to the races. And that just gets you started. To move on towards a really deep life, that's just a starting point. But that's what gets you in the game. Genuine question, because I saw it, and I'm actually curious for myself, I saw you have a planner. Does that help with this area? is it sort of designed to help people think and organize their,

their projects in this framework that you just shared? Yeah, I do have a planner, and the planner does have for every day a space for metric tracking, and that's exactly where you would put these, when you're doing that first step of this progress, that's exactly what you could use that space for, tracking those keystone habits. Now, the bigger idea of that planner,

which is a different answer to your original question, is that planner is called a time block planner, because I'm a big believer. We're going to talk just abstractly, about time management. I'm a big believer of intentionally planning what you want to do with your time in advance as opposed to reacting in the moment and asking, what do I want to do right now? And when we're looking at the scale of the day, I'm a huge known as a proponent of time block planning your day where you actually give every minute of your workday a job. You block,

it's called time blocking. You draw out blocks on this grid format in the planner. Okay, here's a meeting. And then from 9 to 930, I'm working on this. And from 930 to 11, I'm working on this. You block out the hours of the day and label them. It's a really effective way of tackling your workday that typically you get about 2x more done versus the list reactive method, which is what most people do, which is, okay, what's next? They look at their calendar. I don't have a meeting. They look at their inbox and do emails for a while. Maybe they look at a to-do list and try to take something off of it. That's a really low efficiency way of actually allocating your time. So I'm a big, a big proponent and I'm certainly known for my connection to time blocking.

So I eventually just got tired of hand formatting generic notebooks for time block plans and just publish my own planner. Yeah. We'll link to it in the show notes. I've been time blocking for probably a good 20 years that my entrepreneurial career is there. And I really credit it to a big reason why I'm able to do as many things as I'm able to do is that it's the putting your budget down on paper and deciding, where you want your money to go versus what a lot of people do is at the end of the month,

they look at their credit card statement. They're like, okay, well, what's my budget? Well, how much did I spend on restaurants? How much did I spend on this and that? Well, that's not a budget. That's just showing you where you've spent all your money. But was that the decision that you wanted to make? And does that meet your goals of planning for retirement or saving for a trip or saving for a house? So it's that intentionality. And for anybody that's not doing time blocking right now and you want to get into it, again, we'll link to the show notes, your planner, that you have there. Okay, I want to pivot topics and go back to a thread that we were pulling on a little earlier. We, we're not banning social media, at least anytime, anytime soon, just like we're not

banning, you know, processed food companies anytime soon. And so while we are gearing up for the increase prevalence of them, especially in the case of the metaverse is going to be, you know, is starting to enter into our worlds. For those people who have kids and are thinking about the best way to apply your work and your framework from the different books that are there and integrate them into their lives with kids, what are some things that you're thinking about and recommending to them in the state of the world that we live in right now. Don't give kids smartphones. Don't give kids social media accounts. And I don't care if the kid says but everyone is doing it. That has been the excuse of kids for essentially every behavior that is

bad for them for the whole history of which they're being kids. I don't think that's a strong argument. Their brains can't handle it. I'm increasingly convinced of this. It's a topic I followed for a long time. Earlier this fall, for example, I did a big article for the New Yorker, where I tried to round up what the latest expert thinking was on social media and its impact on kids. And all of the signals I can find say, yes, it's hard to not let your 14-year-old have a smartphone. Yes, it's hard not to let your 14-year-old have a social media account do that hard thing. I just think that's, I think that's where we are. They can have a, you can give them a, there's all sorts of alternative phones that allow them to text message you.

or their friends, they'll let you know if they're in trouble or need a ride to coordinate with their friends. They don't need an iPhone to do that. They don't need an Android phone to do that. I think five years for now, that's going to be the standard. We're in a transition point right now where we're starting to realize, hey, maybe this experiment of just letting anyone use tech was a bad one. And that's where I think we're, that's where we're falling. I think under 16, no way. I honestly think under 18, no, but I know that's more difficult. And that makes teenagers hate me. But I just don't think it's a particularly poor match for the teenage brain. I want to share a hot take with you that I have. A lot of my friends that have kids,

I don't have kids yet. I want to in the future. A lot of my friends that have kids and don't give their kids social media accounts, I often notice that their kids, and I grew up with video games, but I played a very different type of video game, their kids will have iPads. And whether it's something like roadblocks or other games that are out there that are internet connectivity-based games. My hot take is that some of those games are basically just another form of social media. And parents might be better off instead of having their kid, I love video games and I grew up playing them.

Instead of having your kid play an internet connectivity game that's there, which are really sort of digital casinos and wire kids' brains to, you know, the pursuit towards these digital rewards, they might be better off getting them. not internet-based gaming station and having them play that if that's something that they want to have video games. And you could even set up additional boundaries, which is it's something that the parents and the kids get a chance to play together. So we talked about social media and kids. What are your thoughts on my hot take when it comes to some of these gaming and them being basically social media and disguise for kids? Well, I can validate the basics of that take because

it's well accepted. What we actually see in the social psychology study, the social psych study of technology and kids, is that there tends to be a real gender split. So when we're talking about adolescent girls, you're going to have way more issues with social media. And the main issues you're going to have is negative impacts on mental health, increases and reports of self-harm, etc. When we look at adolescent males, it's actually video games is a much bigger issue. Social media is not as important. I'm talking in generalizations here, but it's not as important into that group. The issue with, and you're exactly right,

it's massively online games. So internet-connected games where many, many people play at the same time. The issue there is it's different. It's actually addiction. So you begin to play those obsessively and way more than is good or useful or healthy for you. Those are actually some of the most addictive technology

that's out there. Massively online video games are perhaps the most addictive digital technology. there are. People can play them until they die. And it's because they're engineered incredibly carefully in this casino-like format, much more addictive than social media, much more addictive. So there's two different types of harms here. So if you're the adolescent using social media, the harms are much more directly to your mental health. It comes from the comparisons to other people, the overload of time spent doing communication, which burns out our brain, and the way

in which you can have these context-free negativity going back and forth, which again, for the adolescent brain, can be incredibly traumatic. So it's a mental health problem. With video games, it's an addiction problem, that those massively online games are incredibly addictive. When they first began trying to consider technology addiction as maybe something to even put as a disorder in the DSM, it was video games that they first thought about.

So that's a problem for young boys because they don't do anything else. It's the issue of addiction. I don't do anything else. So I think you're very right to point out, Both of these are issues. Different groups seem to have issues with different ones these technologies. The harms are different, but they're both bad. The solution in both cases is a very digital minimalist solution, which is you have

to work incredibly hard as a parent to have the alternative. And this is a central idea in digital minimalism. White knuckling abstention from technology that is taking over your life is not on its own a successful strategy. It makes you feel terrible. It doesn't really last. Replacing that technology with something that is much more sustainable and powerful and positive, that is almost always the most sustainable strategy. So adolescence, it's very hard, but so much work has to be put into making sure that they have these deeply meaningful alternative high value activities to which they can put their energy. So like a classic traditional one, of course, would be a serious involvement in sports.

you know, this team is very important to me. I'm on the varsity baseball team or on the JV team trying to get to the baseball, the varsity baseball team. I have all these kids that are on my team. I don't want to let down and we're training and we have the shared sort of context and these structures and discipline and I'm around the coaches. Fantastic. Another classic examples of this, for example, is theater. I'm in the, you know, middle school theater crew, and I have this whole group of people that we're trying to improve our craft. And so there's lots of different examples here, right? I had a business when I was an adolescent. I was really trying to get into that world of starting businesses. That is what adolescents need. They need to have these

high value activities that they feel ownership over that pushes them and has craft, but a community that they're a part of. You have to have the alternative. And so it's a game of pushing and establishing the high value meaningful alternatives that helps them grow until one of those catches. And then like the lion tamer with the whip and the chair is the mass. massively online games over here and the TikTok over there, you're trying to keep those at bay. It seems like one of the consequences, and luckily it's getting more and more attention in this day and age, but it really got not a lot of attention in the beginning. One of the consequences of how hard, in particular, the United States went when it came to school closures, which naturally

as an extension led to sports closures, led to music closures, led to a lot of things. for again generally what's regarded as a much lower risk group when it came to COVID-19 is we underestimated the harm of removing all these other aspects that played such a central role in making sure that there was enough good stuff that were part of kids' lives that it crowded out or it helped to crowd out some of the overuse in technology not necessarily I mean if you have a comment about that you can, but I don't want to necessarily pull you into a topic that you don't want to jive in on. Well, but no, I just want to say that what you're saying was it's a really good point because it was like a natural experiment, right? So we had this natural

experiment where we took a lot of those activities I was talking about out of kids' lives. And what we did directly observe was a retreat mainly by boys into video games and my girls more. Again, I'm generalizing. But these generalizations are pretty robust in the literature towards more just heavily I'm on my phone by myself. And the mental health impact of that was massively negative, massively negative. So we had a natural experiment. There's been some good reporting on this, if people want to see, see this from more of a narrative or emotional standpoint. Alec McGillis has done some great reporting on this. There was a, it's a tragic article. And I apologize, I don't remember the venue. It might have been the New York Times Magazine, where he looked at two

schools, one in New Mexico, the border with Texas was right there, and the school next to it was in Texas. So these were schools that were a few miles apart, and they had different COVID policies. So the same people, they live back and forth. They all live within a few miles of each other. New Mexico was closed down. Texas was open, playing football, Friday night lights, all that stuff was going on. And he went there and profiled what happened to these kids' lives across the border in Mexico. And it just got more and more desperate. And the tragic conclusion to the story was this aspiring star football player committed suicide by the end of the story, which sort of captured, you know, how important it is to have these meaningful activities and that these solo,

hey, both the kids in New Mexico still had their video games and still had their phones. It didn't do it for them. It just made things worse. And I think we saw that repeated throughout the pandemic. We had the surge in general come out last month and say there's a pandemic of mental health health among youth that we're also facing right now, I think that's a big part of it. We took away these activities that hit what we need. We go back to the cheap simulacrum, which is video games and social media, and it makes people more miserable. And so I think this is a really good point. It's why I was way more on the side of be incredibly wary about school closures and try to get schools open as quickly as possible, in part because I was so

immersed in trying to understand what young people need and how much danger they're in. And how much danger they're in. Again, it's the chair in the whip. How hard it is right now to try to keep these other things away and get young people into what they need to thrive. It's so hard in our context that you close down their school. And it's a huge, it's a huge mental health problem. And we have to see, we've seen it. And it's tragic. I'm glad it's getting the attention that it deserves. There's been some people like Dr. Veney Prasad that's been very vocal all throughout the pandemic. Seems like the tide is shifting and obviously for the health of kids everywhere that I hope that it does. Have you come across anything in your research around dosing when it comes to those in person? Some people are going to

crave it more. Some people are going to crave it less, but like you've talked about before, we're biologic wired to need it. And it's a big part of what allows us to know that we're safe and secure and taking care of in the world. How do you think about dosing and recommendations for your audience who's looking for some guidance of something to shoot for, especially if they don't have regular gatherings or even, I believe there was a New York Times article a few years ago that, you know, most people,

you know, are struggling, especially as they get older to even have one best friend in their, in their life that they, you know, can consider a best friend. So yeah, how do you think about dosing?

Everyone needs it. Everyone needs it. There's differences in terms of how much you, you crave, sociality. There is there's this introvert, extrovert scale, though that's a little bit more complicated. I think we simplify that. But there's no one, there's no one who escapes the need to needing to be around other people, communicating in person with other people, serving other people, sacrificing non-trivial time and intention on behalf of people they care for. Everyone needs

that. I think some people feel the loss more acutely and quickly than others, but everyone everyone needs it, I think, regardless of your sensitivity. It's why the advice I give the young people as they're heading down to the world for the first time is your number one thing you need to care about is being someone that your community looks up to as a leader or someone they can rely on. That is what you should be doing. And how do you get there? You got to help people. You got to connect to people. You got to see what people are doing. You got to be reliable. You have to act with character. You have to be involved in people's lives. I mean, this is what your brain is going to care about more than anything else. If it feels like I am a leader in a community, someone that people depend on and look up to you, that is more important to your brain than how much money you make in your job, what your house looks like, and God forbid, how many followers you have on a social media platform. That stuff pales in comparison. Your brain's going to say, yes, we've done it. I feel good. We're not super anxious is people count on me. And that you have to earn, and you can't earn that on a phone. When we're talking about fulfillment, one of the things that you've shared in the past

is that, well, I'll actually even ask you if you wouldn't mind going into it now. What is fulfillment? Because this goes back to this idea that we often don't know what will make us feel good. And because we're paying attention to a lot of other sources out there, again, could be the news, could be social media. It can be very confusing that we think that people look happy and it's because they have X, Y, and Z material possessions are surrounded by a particular group of people. But what actually drives deep and meaningful fulfillment in our lives, separate from deep work, we've talked a little bit about that. What are some other things that really drive that notion and lead to us feeling like we're living a fulfilled life? Well, I mean, we can identify a specific thing.

So like what I was just talking about, being someone that there's a community that depends on, like that's absolutely critical for fulfillment, a feeling of efficacy, the fact that you can do skilled things and create skilled outcomes, create things that are a value to the world. that that is also really important for fulfillment on wonder is really important for fulfillment. But I think even more important than listing those things is underscoring that you have to do the work of figuring this out for yourself and that it's hard. And it's why in that in the digital minimalism book, the big core action suggestion that kicks off that book is that you take 30 days and you stop using any optional, I call it optional personal technology. So you don't use social media. You don't do online news. You don't do streaming. You don't do streaming video. You don't do video games. You minimize text messaging down to

just like important logistical things like my daughter needs to get picked up from school. And the reason why I say you step away from 30 days is not some detox nonsense. And that's a whole other rant the way that the digital people have completely perverted the word detox to mean the opposite of its original intention. The reason why you do it is to clear space to do reflection and experimentation and figure out through direct experience, this is what matters to me. This is what makes me feel fulfilled. That requires time. It requires you being alone with your thoughts again and again.

That's very scary, especially for young people. You have to do it. And it requires experimentation. I did this. I signed up for this. I spent more time doing that. And so I recommend people on a semi-regular basis. Spend a month doing that, like spending a lot of time reflecting and experimenting so that you

can refine your personal answer to that question of what's important to me. How important is to think about. space and habit triggers and cues in the way that our space is designed when it comes to minimizing the usage of technology that we is considered optional and we don't need and it kind of comes in as a distraction and and optimizing the use of technology that actually is helpful in us pursuing a sense of deep work and creating deep work in our life. Yeah. So we're going to shift the deep work right now.

Now, we're going to shift to this question, which is deep work. And just to give the definition is when you're focused intensely without distraction on a single professional activity. And my big argument about deep work is that in a lot of jobs, it's those type of efforts that move the needle. It's the skilled pursuit that's getting your full undivided attention. That's when you can perform at your highest. You can apply your skills at your peak.

It's going to be fulfilling in the moment and produce the most value in the long term. It's what really moves the business, right? No one ever made a fortune out of being quick to respond. responding to emails. They made a fortune by building something that was valuable that requires focus. So deep work is really important. And it's difficult because there's numerous sources of distraction pulling out of. So yeah, environment can matter.

I think one of the big, I talked about this in some of my books, one of the big unforced errors in knowledge work was multitasking computer operating systems. So from the engineer's perspective, right? And this is the revolution that began with some of the early Macintosh operating systems and the early Windows operating systems. From the engineer's perspective, they say they took the general purpose computer, personal computer, which was a breakthrough in the 1980s because you could use the same machine to do lots of different things. And that was very useful. And you can go back and look at advertising for the Apple. And they say, look, you don't have to buy different machines to do different things.

You can change the software. And the same machine can do accounting, but the same machine could then do video games. the same machine can help you keep track of recipes. You don't have to buy multiple machines. Great. General purpose computer. Then you get to the 90s, an engineer say, well, what if we could do all those things at the same time?

Wouldn't that be better? And so instead of being in the place it used to be where I'm taking out this floppy disk and I'm putting in this another flopping disk and I'm turning off the computer and turning on now I have a new use for the computer, you could just have everything open at the same time. And from an engineer's mind, they say, well, that's just more options. That's better. But it's a catastrophic digital content.

to try to do work of any meeting because the human brain can't do lots of things at the same time. Not only could it not do lots of things at the same time, it can't switch between things faster either. You can't just jump from one thing to the other and suddenly be doing the other thing. It takes a while to change our focus from one target to another. So actually, the ideal pacing of digital work to the human brain was probably reached with the Apple 2, where it took about five minutes to switch from one piece of software to the other. You have to shut it down, turn it off, change the floppy disk, boot it from scratch, boot it off the disc, get the new software running.

That actually more or less is an optimal match to the way our brain works. So we created a digital context that's been catastrophic for our ability to actually work effectively. Because to an engineer, they said, I don't know, isn't it going to be more efficient if I have the thing right here? Isn't that going to be inefficient if it takes five minutes to switch from one program to another? And in the end, what they created was, I think, a disaster, a cognitive disaster in which our mind is constantly context switching because of that is constantly befuddled. That's why we feel anxious and overwhelmed and exhausted by our work by 2 p.m. We created a digital environment. It's actually terribly suited to our brains. When we were starting off this interview, we were talking about like, if we wanted to design

a machine that induces unhappiness, here's what it looks like. In that same way, if we wanted to design a machine that induces anxiety, I think it's a really big aha moment when a lot of people realize that their current lifestyle is exactly that machine. It's exactly that machine. If you're somebody that's struggling with overwhelm, burnout, anxiety, and of course, there's a lot of factors that play into these things, including socioeconomic components and things like that. But if we're just talking about the modern world of most people that are probably listening to this podcast, is that the way that our life is designed and the way that we work inside of institutions is exactly perfectly designed to create this epidemic of anxiety and overwhelm. and burnout, along with a deep lack of unfulfillment that most people are feeling. How pessimistic and optimistic are you on the core factors that need to change that begin to allow us to live in a different environment?

You're looking out now, five, 10, 20, 50 years. How pessimistic are optimistic are you that things will get any better or worse? I'm relatively optimistic. And let me tackle the world of work separately from the world outside of work. So in the world of work, as I was just talking about, we've accidentally created these cognitive environments. They're catastrophic for our ability to actually do work. So the multitasking computer was bad enough. Email and Slack made it 100 times worse.

So now not only do we have like lots of programs we can switch between very quickly, we have a incessant incoming stream of communication from other people that's urgent and demands attention. And it's a disaster. And so I wrote this book recently, my most recent book, was called A World Without Email. And it really got it. Like how did we get there? Spoiler alert accidentally.

So it was no one's plan that is sending and receiving 116 emails a day was productive. It's accidental. And what do we need to do about it is we have to really start to get intentional about the cognitive aspects of how work happens and actually design everything about work from like the way the office is actually physically designed to the way that we do software, to the way that we communicate with each other, to the way we keep track of how many things do we assign to a person at a time. All of that has to be looked at with the human brain in mind. That I'm very optimistic about, you know, I've been on the road talking about that book. And I'm talking to a lot of C-suite types, CIOs in particular and CEO types. And they are 100% on board

because there is money to be made because the way we are working is very unproductive. And so I'm very optimistic that the world of work is going to change, mainly because the way we work now is an incredibly low return on the investment in human brains that does reflect the main capital investment of knowledge work. So I think 10 years from now, the idea that we're going to send email all day while we're in Zoom, no way. We're going to be much smarter about how does the human brain work? And maybe we should actually match how we work to the brain because people will be happier and we're going to produce more. In our life outside of work, I am still optimistic. I mean, I think like variants of a virus, other things will come along. But I do not think that the current moment of there being a small

number of massive monopolies that dominate social media monopolies that dominate internet life. I think that period is already ending. People just don't realize it already. I think the world in which Facebook and its companies it owns and Twitter and maybe like one other social media company dominates the internet, I think that's going to be a certain moment in techno history that was interesting, that was bad in the end, it's not going to last that long. And my short explanation for that is that the whole dominance of these platform monopolies was built upon network effects. You have to sign up for Facebook because you want to interact with people you know and everyone's on Facebook. And so no one could compete with Facebook because your cousin and your college roommate weren't

on the other service. They're on Facebook. So that's the service you had to join. I think, and I've talked about this in detail in other shows, I'll just be brief here. But I think the social media platforms made a fatal mistake when starting around 2012, 2014, when they got spooked by Twitter and how Twitter was growing all these users, they got spooked and said, we have to get away from our services being about connecting and checking in with people you know. and we have to instead make these services about algorithmically optimized distraction entertainment. And they all switched over to timeline models

where you can just scroll things endlessly in algorithms, look at how you like and what you read, and use that to select you and give you things to look at. So these social media companies got rid of their network effect advantage. People have migrated their digital interaction with other people largely off of platforms like Twitter and Facebook and onto things like group text message chats or instant messenger services.

So they've lost that network effect. and now they're just competing with any other source of distraction to entertainment. The problem is there's lots of good sources of distraction entertainment. This podcast is a great example, right? This is a very interesting thing. I might listen to this instead of looking at articles that, you know, the Twitter algorithm pulls up for me. Streaming is a big distraction, right?

They're putting billions of dollars to build incredibly high-end creative entertainment. Maybe that's more interesting than seeing what articles to Facebook algorithm is serving up for me to look at on my phone. So I think that's a game where they're not going to maintain these five, six hundred billion dollar valuations because once they switched over to saying let's be about distraction entertainment, they entered an arena that was crowded. And there's a lot of other big gladiators in that arena. So I think this moment of, you know, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and TikTok like dominate the world, that's going to pass. I think that's going to be good for people.

I'd love to ask you just in conclusion, just a couple things about health and how your viewpoint and your approach to really focusing on the essential things that truly matter that will give you in the end what actually matters and less of what doesn't. How have you applied that to your own pursuit of health? As deep as you want to take that or as high level as you want to take that, I'm very curious to how you think about the key categories of sleep, you know, diet and even things like, you know, physical activity. Yeah, well, I mean, so I'm a believer.

So when it comes to eating, I keep it simple. and this notion of eating quote unquote clean means a lot of different things are a lot of different people and has a lot of different implications that goes down a rabbit hole that I've never really fully explored. But let's just keep it down to like the Michael pollen definition. You know, real food, lots of plants, cook it yourself. You know what's junk. Largely avoid the junk. And I'm a big believer in baseline activity. My entire adult life is like for, yes, you can have exercise routines, etc.

But baseline activity that you have built into your routine multiple long. long walks. I'm a big believer. I have this baseline of every single day, no matter what, I'm going to jump on a pull-up bar. And I have a pull-up routine. I do like 36 pull-ups with different grips. Because to me, that's all just about major muscle groups get used in a hard way every day. Like, they don't get a shutdown. And I don't know the physiology behind it. I don't know the exercise science behind it. But just like your body says, we move a lot. We get a lot of fresh air and sunshine. And like major muscle groups get hurt, like moved really hard, like really intensely like almost every day. So yeah, we're needed. Yeah. And just make that the baseline. And then you can

figure out exercise routines on top of it. So, you know, I don't like winter. So I tend to really up my exercise in winter. I have a concept two rowing machine, for example. And I'm doing a sort of a day by day concept two winter rowing workout, which reminds me on my old college rowing days where you're, you know, in the cold garage with the wool hat on, doing terrible things on an erg. Like I'm really into that type of that type of thing and et cetera, et cetera. So that type of stuff I play with and have fun and don't want to get into a rut. But it's like eat real food, right? And we know what that means and have a lot more baseline activity than I think most people do.

And I'm trying to get that higher. I don't, the winner is hard, man. I've got a really busy schedule as a professor that ebbs and flows. And just the coincidence of what I'm teaching and what committees I'm on is really busy. And so I'm fighting a war right now that I'm not happy if I'm not outside a lot every day. I'm trying to figure out how to keep that alive because to me that's very important. And I've been doing that my entire adult life. You know, when I was at MIT, for example, every day we were out there.

I was out there with my dog. We ran at lunch every day. We did calisthenics on a barge in the Charles and we would just sweep the snow off and make a hole in the snow to do pushups. Like we just had these, you know, just do it, man. Be outside, be outside more than it's reasonable. Have a baseline of always moving your muscles. I love that foundational stuff. And I don't know the science behind it.

I'm just saying it makes me happier. And the last one, sleep? Is it something that you prioritize now, especially as you continue to get older? Have you been somebody that's always, you know, been one of the few people that are out there that can get away with like, you know, five, six hours sleep? Just curious for you to chime in on that as we wrap up. Yeah, no, I can't get away with a little. I need sleep. I feel tiredness pretty significantly.

But my issue with sleep is that I have recurrent insomnia issues. So which play a really important role in an interesting and an important role in my life, right? Because they have been these insomnia issues, which aren't great. And they're not frequent, but they come and they, you know, I don't like it, right? Because I get tired pretty easily. You take away, you mess up my schedule a little bit. It's not great. And so it's hard for me, for example, to take sleep advice because for people with insomnia

issues, sleep advice is the worst. Like I have to fast forward past, I can't read Matthew Walker's book. I can't hear advice. I can't hear Arianna Huffington talk about why sleep's so important because like if you can't control it, it's just, it's just, you know, it's like reading a book about the dangers of sugar and yet like you have a condition in which you have to eat a crazy amount of sugar sometimes. Like I don't want to.

Right. But it's actually, and I've talked about this before, it has played a really influential role in the way I think about life and work and happiness and the deep life. And a lot of things I write about because it, it's. stops me from getting too ambitious. I can't, I don't feel like I have the, the possibility of just let's get after it and just pile up a bunch of things and just crank it and like, let's go and start this big company or like write the book in six months or whatever, because I'll just stop sleeping. And it'll all, and it's a national governor. So I feel like

whatever it is that causes this in me is like governor on my activity. And my entire life has and how do you figure out how to over time produce things of meaning that are, you know, that you feel good about or impactful and enjoy your life moment the moment, but have this breathing room and have this flexibility. I have been, I feel like I was forced into that. Because if I try to do it the hardcore way, my mind says, nah, we're not doing that. And I hate it. And so it's interesting. It's as if there is this, this larger power that basically in my life is ensuring that you've got to figure out a more sustainable, you got to live sustainably. You got it.

You have no other option. We're not going to let you do the other thing. And so that might be part of the reason why I write a lot about and talk a lot about is like, okay, well, then maybe I need to help spread this word. I just want to acknowledge you for opening up and being, you know, sharing about that because I may not be struggling with insomnia or somebody else who's listening may not be struggling with insomnia, but everybody has that thing in their life. And what you really did there is it's the classic superhero approach.

You know, the Batman became the Batman because his deepest fear was bats and falling into the well, depending on which comic series and things you look at. And he took that, he took that insecurity. He took that fear. He took that thing, which was very real in his life. And he turned it into an advantage by using it to set boundaries that are there. And again, somebody, it may not be insomnia. for them, but we all have that. We all have that in some aspect of our life. And when we can honor it

and understand that these wounds are actually some of our best strengths if we learn how to use them as such and not wish that they were any different than they are. You know, you're a smart guy. You have access to a lot of different people that are out there. I'm sure you tried a lot of different things for insomnia. And I'm sure some things worked and a lot of things maybe didn't work. So there are fundamental things that make up who we are. And if we can understand that, then we don't wish it was different and we can turn them into the superpower that they could that they could become. So I just want to acknowledge you for sharing that and for also just coming on the podcast and covering such a wide range of topics that we jumped into.

It was really such a pleasure to be able to talk to, Cal. And I want to throw out just a couple plugs here. You mentioned at the beginning, you're not on social media. I think YouTube is one of those in-between categories. And you have a new YouTube channel for anybody who's watching this on YouTube. and if you're not in your own own podcast, please go over and subscribe where on a regular basis, you get questions from your community and you dive deep into these questions. And it's my favorite content of yours.

You really go deep into these questions and you share the nuances in their approach. And your channel has a name and we'll link to it in the show notes. But do you want to mention it here as well? Yeah. Yeah. So real quick, what happened is, so my podcast, deep questions, the whole format of the podcast is my reader sending questions about all these type of things you and I were just talking about and I answer the questions.

Like half the show is about deep work and half the shows about the deep life. The problem we found was the podcast formats long form. And so like, what if, you know, question number three in yesterday's episode was the one that you really cared about or wanted to remember. So what we did is we said, why don't we take every question I do on the podcast? and film it and release it as a standalone video. We also have video of the full podcast as well. So that way people who listen to it can save and remember, go back to or share individual

questions. So that's what we're doing on YouTube is a way of basically breaking up my podcast into all of the sections so that it's actually usable beyond just like the initial experience of listening. So yeah, it's a brand new channel. So you have to be around for 30 days before you can get. your customized simple URL. So I'll say the easiest way to do it is just go to Calnewport.com.

You know, go to Calnewport.com and click on podcast, and there's like a link right there to go to YouTube or just go to YouTube and search for Cal Newport. I mean, there's a lot of interviews on there with me of other people, but you'll soon find the channel is called Cal Newport is the actual name. So you'll turn it up pretty quickly. Yeah, and we have the link below as well. Cal, anything else that you'd like to send our audience towards? You have these fantastic books that are there.

We've linked to them below as well. The most recent one being about email, which you had mentioned earlier, do you have an ask or anywhere else that you'd like to send our audience that's watching today? Yeah, so I have those books that I wrote that we've been talking about. We pulled from all those books in today's conversation. The podcast is deep questions. The videos of the podcast questions are on YouTube. I'm not on social media, so you can't find me there.

I write a weekly essay. I've been doing this since 2007 on all these type of topics. So if you want that essay, you want to join that crew that's the hardcore Cal's types that have been around for a long time, you can sign up for that at Calnewport.com. And you can get that essay email to you. But beyond that, I don't have a big ask beyond just think deep, live deep. You know, keep and maybe not, maybe not spend quite so much time on your phone. That's a beautiful ask right there. the world would be a better place. And anybody who's listening, you might end up making your dreams come true that you actually want to bring into the world. Cal, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Look up to you incredibly. And I want to just acknowledge you for putting in the amount of solitude, putting up with boredom, which is a good thing that we all want to be able to put up with to allow the deepest ideas to come through you, to really be a vessel for things that were, meant to be brought into the world. So I just want to thank you and acknowledge you for coming on the podcast and sharing your work. Really appreciate it. Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it.