The Jordan Harbinger Show - 159: Cal Newport | Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

Cal Newport researches cutting-edge technology and writes about the impact of these innovations on society. He is the author of Deep Work, So Good They Can't Ignore You, and Digital Minimalism. What We Discuss with Cal Newport: Why focus in our modern era of endless technological distractions is the new IQ. Why your greatest competitive advantage may lie simply around decluttering and resetting that focus. The best ways to declutter the mental landscape to optimize your capacity to focus. How Henry David Thoreau's analog lessons from Walden can be applied to your 21st century digital lifestyle. How you can use technology to improve your daily life without becoming absorbed by its distractions. And much more... Sign up for Six Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger, and I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. What if we got rid of the idea that we needed to somehow try to be smarter or more educated than everyone else, which is very hard, by the way? And instead, we shifted to the idea that we needed to be more focused than everyone else. Sounds equally difficult, but it's actually not. In fact, the bar is pretty low here. My friend Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and author of Digital Minimalism. Well, he thinks that focus is actually the new IQ, and I love this. Because a while back, he ran an experiment where people removed social media from their lives and then added the tools back in as needed if they were the most effective tool for the job.

This isn't just a digital detox. Far from it. This is about working backwards from the things that you value most, and then asking for each, what is the best way to use technology to support this value while happily missing out on everything else? On today's episode, we're taking lessons from the Amish. We're taking lessons from digital detox. We're taking lessons from people who have done experiments, science, if you will, computer science in a way, reverse. I've used a lot of these principles to great effect.

I've given a handful of copies of this book to other friends of mine, especially those in creative or high-performance spaces that require maximum focus. The results were astounding. Today, come explore the idea that our greatest competitive advantage may lay simply around decluttering and resetting our focus, and we'll get some practical steps to help us make that. that happen. So let's Marie Kondo our brain today here with Cal Newport. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits, which I've worked on for years here, check out six-minute networking. That's a course that's free. Used to be called Level 1. Now it's called Six-Minute Networking. That's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash

course. All right, here's Cal Newport. One thing that I love about the minimalist idea here is focus is the new IQ is one of the things that you'd said. Explain that. It's counterintuitive, and I love that. Well, I mean, I think in our modern knowledge economy in particular, what's the skill that really matters? What's the skill that builds value? And I think it is the ability to focus. So if in the mid-20th century, IQ became the big thing, we need more engineers, we need people who are. As smarter you are, the better you're going to do, it's shifted now. And now the ability to put sustained attention is what's going to become the scarce ability. the thing that's going to create a lot of value. There's various reasons for this, but,

but this is the summary pitch, is focus is what's going to rule the economy. At least that's my idea. Okay. And, and you're sort of analog to this is like the key to thriving in this new high-tech world that we have is actually using less tech, because the tech, this high, this Archimedes lever that we have is now kind of come full circle and is now weighing us down, right? It's like resting on our head. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about, if you believe this premise that, sustained concentration produces lots of value. Now you have to worry what's going to be the enemy to sustain concentration. And so it's not technology in general. It's the technology that has either been designed or incidentally becomes a huge strain on your attention. So what we know from

psychology, and this is actually a very important discovery, and this is something that we only really got to in the last, let's say, 15 years, so context switching is what kills you. Right. The context switching is, and I remember first hearing about this in law school, because it was like, I'm taking notes, wait, I got an I, I'm back to my notes. What are we talking about? Hey, there's another I. Yes.

For those of you who don't know what IMs are. AOL instant messenger changed the game. Did that come before texting? Yeah, right? Yeah, that was early 90s. So that was like the first status updates were on there. Yeah, it was pre-Facebook by a minute. And so that's where I finally started to realize when I would read things like context switching

or task switching or the whole, hey, you know you think you're a good multitasker, but you're not. Yes. And then I remember asking people going, hey, you know, our teacher will go, turn that internet off. Don't use the Wi-Fi. We don't even,

why do we have Wi-Fi in the classroom? And of course, everyone went, I'm a good multitasker. And then everyone's grades went and took a total dump. Well, and it shifted, too. So we used to say that. So we used to say,

I'm a good multitasker. And then in the early 2000s, the research became kind of clear and there's lots of pop articles that said, okay, you can't do the simultaneous thing. The window here, the phone, and the typing,

You're talking gibberish. You're doing terrible work. Like we learned, okay, literal multitasking doesn't work. But where context switching snuck up on us is that people thought they were single-tasking. This is what's happening now because they only have one thing open for the most part. So I'm just looking at Microsoft Word and I'm trying to write whatever, a legal brief. But every 10 or 15 minutes, I do the quick check, which is the, let me just look at the phone or the quick check of the inbox. It doesn't feel like multitasking because I'm not doing it simultaneously.

But what we know now from the research is that when I do that quick check and then come back to the main thing I'm working on, there's a residue left in your mind that lasts a long time to clear that reduces your cognitive capacity. So then when you think you're single tasking, you're fighting this attention residue effect. And so what most knowledge workers who are doing sort of elite level knowledge work and think that their single taskers are really doing is every five or ten minutes, a quick check of a tab or a phone, which puts them in a persistent state of reduced cognitive capacity. So it's almost like they're taking reverse nootropic. Like, I want to be dumber, right? I want my mind not to work as well.

And the worst piece about it is no one realizes they're doing it. They're like, I don't multitask anymore, right? Let's high five. We figured it out. But they're still having this massive effect on their concentration. And so it's not the three windows open at once that's killing us. It's the glance over at this device or this window every 10 or 50 minutes. And that can be just as bad.

That's one of the reasons that I like the iPad that I'm using here. If you're watching this, you can see me use it. this it's actually harder to multitask on an iPad look there's ways to do it you can do the split screen thing i've heard you can do the command tab app switching but it's just there's less stuff going on and since all the sounds are off and the internet is off yeah it's a little bit of a different animal than working on a laptop where things are bouncing in the dock and like little things are popping up and all the notifications are off on this thing it's essentially a like a dumb phone with a giant screen. Yeah. And it took me a long time to get here because I used to just use the,

an iPad or phone notes or something like that. But then of course, you know, it's vibrating. And it's like, oh, well, I'll ignore that. But I just, I couldn't. And if the guest, I shouldn't blame the guest. If for some reason my attention wavered, it would be like, I can get away with just looking at what that is. Just 10 seconds. Just for a second. Yeah. And my producer caught me and he goes, what's wrong with you? You're being so weird with such and such guest. And I go, crap, if you noticed some percentage of 4.8 million monthly list is going to go, what the hell's wrong with him right now? And the answer is Gmail. That's what's wrong with me. Yeah. I'm freaking typing a note to my mom. Yeah. So that I don't forget, even though it'll be in my

inbox in 20 minutes when I'm done. I'm still doing that. And it's not, that's the multitasking, right? But you're right, the whole, oh, I can do this and then pop back in and I'll pick up right where I left off is just not real. It doesn't work. Yeah. And we didn't, this effect was actually somewhat unknown. So I talked recently. This is after even my more recent book came out. But I was talking with one of the psychologists who helped innovate this field. Her name is Sophie Leroy. And the story she told me was that when she first came back to psychology, she had been out in the actual world of business and been doing consulting. And so in the early 2000, she came back to psychology. And she was looking at her. thesis research said, we have to study the effect of all this context switching back and forth between things. And at the time, people in academia didn't believe that it could possibly be true that people were switching their attention so much. Because this was just when the email

movement had really taken off. This is when the workplace and knowledge work had started to hit that type of rhythm of constant inbox, constant inbox. It had it been like that before. Right, because you would have had before, you would have had to work to find stuff to do. Yeah. That you could even switch to. Like, I'm going to look at this paper, then that paper, then look something up in the dictionary. Portum was a big deal. It used to be a big deal in work. The water cooler, remember? Like, I got to go chat by the water cooler because if I don't have anything to do for an hour.

Like, that's not an issue anymore. No. Everyone's busy. Yeah. A lot of the, I designed this course that helps people network and develop relationships. And I'm like, people go, oh, I don't have time. And I'm like, do this during your Instagram time. You know what I mean.

And people are like, hey, so now I have a ton of time to do these drills. Yes. And if you look at screen time on your phone and it shows you what you've been using. Oh, it's been great. Have you done this with your friends? I mean, my phone's too old to have it. But my life has been showing me the numbers. Yeah.

And now everyone's talking about this. I'm hearing about it all the time. We kind of call it the screen time game. It's not really a game. It's just a laugh at the dinner table. We'll be with our friends and we'll be like, hey, open up screen time. And they'll be like, oh, I don't even know what that is. And you'll see people that have like 32 hours of phone use and 18 of them are

Instagram, and that's in a week, by the way. Yes, the first time, if you can be there, the first time someone discovers they have the screen time feature. Yeah. That's when you really get the real truth. Once they know they have that feature, it's been great. Actually, it's been good for minimalism worldwide because people settle down. But the first time they discover, like, uh-oh, yeah, that's what I suspected.

Look, if you're listening to music because you have that kind of job, you know, maybe you've got a labor job. And so it's like, yeah, Spotify, 20 hours. Great, you're listening at work. I get it. Or during your commute. But when you see somebody who's got 18. 22 hours of Instagram or like Tinder or something.

Yeah. You just go, you just, you tell them and then there's this pause where they're just kind of looking at the ground. And you know, what they're thinking is, I have a part-time job. Yeah. On Instagram and Tinder. And it's just, you can just see them think, what could I have done with this time instead? But this is why Facebook is worth $500 billion.

Right. I mean, where else can you get someone to give, not just their attention for 20 hours, but actually actively giving data about themselves and being set up for advertisements that have been tailored to themselves. And all of that's constructed. I mean, I get into it in the new book, the degree to which the large social media platforms

right around the time that they had to start thinking IPO said we have to re-engineer this experience. We don't have nearly enough user engagement minutes. I mean, old Facebook, old Instagram, people were not using that 20 hours a week. They had to completely re-engineer it to try to create that behavior. And so there's this level of artificial

among it. Like the idea that we're checking it this much, that's very, very recent, and it's very, very constructed. And once you pull off those layers, you're like, oh, this is, this is the screen time thing I think is great, is that it's revealing these business plans pretty clearly. Right, right. Except for now people are going great. I should invest in that. There's also this, the same kind of, I don't know if this is a cognitive bias or what, but people go, yeah, but I don't really do that. That's why screen time is an app is so valuable, because you really can't, it doesn't lie. Yeah. And when, When I look at it, I go, I don't use my phone that.

Holy crap. What? You know, and it's interesting to see because it's the same thing that people do. It's got to be a similar bias where people go, I want to vote for that policy. And you go, but you don't make anywhere near like the estate tax, for example. Your whole life, you will never make the amount of money that you will need to take advantage of this policy. And then in their head, they're thinking, well, yeah, but next year and the year after, you never know what's going to happen. My business is going to explode.

I'm going to go on Shark Tank. It's going to pull up. Yeah. So it's like the same kind of bias where it's like, future me is going to be so much better off than what I'm doing right now. Yeah, I don't use that much. Maybe I use a lot now, but I know I'm not going to in the future. I'm making changes, yeah. Well, you've gotten some hot water, sort of maybe we're dramatizing a little bit.

But you have this strong stance that social media is really hyped up, that people shouldn't really use it. Tell us about this, because you have kind of the broader point that technology should work for you instead of you literally working for it, which is what we're doing now? Well, I'll tell you this. I used to get in a lot more hot water. And this is what's interesting that I've observed, because it's been years that I've been out there publicly quite skeptical about social media and how much that people use it and how important is it really. And I would uniformly get back a lot of pushback. Almost every time I would do these things, right? And about two years ago, one and a half years ago, there really was a shift. And it's, it's, the water

I guess we want to use that metaphor has really cooled down. There is something going on out there out there in the culture because I would used to go out there. I'd write an op-bed for the New York Times. I'd say something provocative like, hey, millennial, social media is not going to get you a job. Actually, if you take that time using social media and maybe work on building up a new skill and it'll probably be better, your employers aren't really looking at your Instagram follower accounts to see if they should hire you and not everyone can be associated. Except in my case, but maybe we're the exception here.

This is the problem. There's like six or seven Jordans and then everyone else is like, yeah, I'm going to be that. going to be a social media brand manager. You don't want to be this, I tell you. There's a lot going on there. So, yeah, I'd write arc like that. I got a lot of pushback. People write articles.

And it changed. It really has changed. So I don't know what it is. Well, I have some theories. But definitely there's a shift out there in the culture where my skepticism around social media, my push towards intentionality, my push towards digital minimalism, is no longer seen nearly as eccentric as it was, even as early as, let's say, year and a half ago. that's good to hear well that's good news right that means your message has been received at some level

well i can't take credit for it the message has been received at some level yeah because i can see that right people probably said get with it you're just like a a young lidite who's basically get off my lawn even though i'm a computer scientist like you hate technology yeah i was like well like that would be kind of self-hating of me i guess yeah this is like i can imagine people saying this is just get off my lawn social media edition, right? Yeah. And now... Yeah, you don't understand it. Also, a lot of conflating of social media with the internet. Like, what do you mean you don't like the internet? Like, how are you going to, you know, you want to go back to having no internet? And I'm like, well, I'm just old enough to remember the internet before social media. How old do you? 36.

Okay, I'm 39. Almost. Almost. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Cal Newport. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard. visit jordan harbinger.com slash deals if you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to jordan harbinger dot com slash subscribe and now back to our show with cal newport so i do remember a time pre-internet i remember loving the internet early on but i also remember the smartphone this podcast has been around this show has been around since before the iPhone yeah so right 2007's the iPhone right and this

came out in 2006 that was our first shows so i remember that time really clearly because i was actually in the digital space then. Yeah. And I remember getting the iPhone and just being, my friend showed it to me, and I think about this moment a lot. It was probably one of the few times I audibly went, whoa. Yeah. Because I just saw the world change when I saw that school light up.

Yeah. But if you go back, go back and look at the original keynote address or go back and look at the original advertising. There was nothing about the original vision of the iPhone. That's right. There wasn't like, hey, there's data. There wasn't like you were going to do this, right? And I actually went back in the book and talked to the development lead, the guy who led the team for Steve Jobs to develop the original iPhone.

And he confirmed, and this is what I had remembered this vaguely, but I wanted to get back to the source. The pitch for the iPhone was twofold. One, it's a pain to have your Nokia razor and your iPod, right, both in your pocket. You know, we got to put those together so you can have one device. And the phone calls are going to be easier to make. It has visual voicemail and you can scroll through the contacts. I mean, Jobs really thought the interfaces for making calls and, checking your messages on the first-generation smartphones were sort of an insult to sort of aesthetic

beauty. He didn't even mention the internet connectivity in his keynote till like 33 minutes in. Yeah, to be fair, the iPod. It was nothing to... Yeah, but it was like the iPod and it was the phone features, right? I mean, he had no notion that this was supposed to be a constant companion. There was no notion that this was supposed to change your life, right? It ended up changing the way we live. Like, we now look at this all the time. Steve Jobs was just taking two things that people already were doing, which was listening to music and making phone calls, and they'd been doing that forever, is like, I can now, through technology, make these things you love and make the experiences even better, which was pure, like, minimalist

Steve Jobs, which was focus on the things that really matter and make that experience beautiful. The notion that, like, no, no, we're going to change the way you live with this device so that it's a constant companion and that you're like an air traffic controller, like constantly monitoring information all day and sending out dispatches. That wasn't anywhere in the original vision for the iPhone. That's really interesting to see. Of course, that device had to change the way. Now it has to adapt to the way we've changed.

And of course, the companies that have evolved on there. I mean, of course, that goes for almost every media company or social media company or internet company. Facebook, I remember when that came up, it was like, great. Finally, there's essentially a yearbook. We used to call it a Facebook. With relationship steps. That was the great. It was a yearbook with relationships.

The whole point, as I saw it in college, because I went to Michigan where we had, It was like us in 38 other schools or something had this thing. And you could find your friends from high school. You could find out who in your dorm or in your classes was dating someone else. And you could see what they looked like and get their name. And you could find out stuff like that little basic life info. Like where are they living now? That was it.

Yeah. Which was a fine vision. Yeah. I mean, I write about that in the book. The people saw it. I went back and interviewed people. How do you remember it when it first came to college? And it was sort of a triviality.

It was kind of fun. You'd go on there with friends and look some things up, but that was it. The idea that now you would use it 50 minutes a day on average, like the average American user does with Facebook products. That was nowhere. So that includes Instagram. It includes Instagram, which is important. But Instagram is just Facebook too.

I mean, essentially, Instagram is just taking the place. Facebook 2.0, you mean? 2.0, right? I mean, it was like, okay, people are getting tired of some, you know, their grandma's on Facebook, so we'll just go to the new interface. That was literally my exact. I was like, you know what, this, I don't need to be on here. with my aunt being like, I disagree.

Yeah, but your aunt's probably just a year away from being on Instagram. I'm pretty sure she is. Yeah, but I mean, the original vision looks nothing like the way people use it today, which is a big part of this unease that I think people began feeling the last two years, this thing that I've noticed. It's not really about utility. Like, the wrong question is, is this a terrible thing I'm doing when I'm actually looking at the phone? The real issue is autonomy, that I sign up for this thing in the dorm room.

They'll look at the relationship status of my old high school friend, And they changed the whole game on me. They changed it at some point around 2011, 2011, 2012 to be this engineered compulsive experience. And now I'm trying to sit here and have dinner with my friend from high school, and I have to pretend to go to the bathroom because I feel this compulsion to have to look at this. I didn't sign up for that. No. They sort of re-engineered this thing, just like the iPhone. You bought it because you didn't want to have a separate iPod.

And then the experience got re-engineered. Four years later, you're sitting here all day long with the air traffic controller. So there's really an autonomy issue out there where people are saying, I don't want to talk about. talk about is this useful or useless? I want to talk about why am I spending so much time looking at this? And when was it that I ever agreed that this is what I wanted to do? Jaron Lenny and I talked about this on the show as well. And, you know, I'm just starting to think, this is a clunky analogy that I'm coming up with here on the spot, so bear with me. But it's almost like pain killers, right? It's like you get an injury. Your doctor says, take these.

You'll be able to function. Yeah. Because right now you're an excruciating back pain. Yeah. And then fast forward three years later, you're buying them from somebody off the street. just because you're addicted to them. And I'm not saying that whoever invented OxyContin deliberately did this. In fact, there's some speculation that might be very credible that they did, and it wouldn't surprise me. But that's kind of what we're seeing with the social media game is, hey, do this so you can find your friends and keep in touch.

Oh, that's great. I love that. Wait a minute. Why am I obsessing over the amount of likes this got after an hour and debating whether to delete the post because it doesn't look popular enough? Well, in this case, we know it was intentional. Right. But with Lock the Cotton, we're trying to figure it out.

But with Facebook in particular, we now know the story pretty well. I mean, they had to get the user engagement minutes up because of the IPO. There's a lot of pressure from the original investors, right? Where's my 100x return? To get the 100x return, we have the IPO of the size. To get an IPO of the size, we've got to get revenue to this. To get revenue to this, we have to get the engagement numbers and the data we get way higher. The experience that we have today on, let's say, Facebook or Instagram, it feels like this is what social media is,

but it's actually quite different than it used to be. And the big insight they had was Facebook 1.0 in 2006 was actually quite static. You could post things about yourself. Occasionally people would come to read it. You could read what other people had posted. And that was about that. If you went on Facebook in the morning on Monday, there'd be no reason to go back on later that day. Because your friend probably hadn't changed their relationship status that day or something.

It was something you occasionally did. That's a disaster if you want to get 100x return for Facebook investors. So this current experience is what they re-engineered, is when they moved the most. mobile, they added things like the like button and auto tagging of photos and making it really quick to leave comments. They had to change the experience from posting things and looking at what people posted to, we have to create a rich stream of feedback coming to you. We need all throughout the day there to be these sort of little rewards coming constantly to someone like this, it's someone common on this, that someone tag me in this photo. We want them to come intermittently.

So sometimes you hit this thing. Hey, there's some likes. Sometimes you hit this thing, nothing. There's a slot machine. Like a slot machine. Well, they actually went and read the research papers that had been innovated and the consultants who worked in Las Vegas casino gambling who figured out what's the right reinforcement schedule for the slot machine. Like how close should you get the winning big? How often do we have to do that so that the old lady keeps pulling it?

They figured out that psychology decades ago. They read those papers in Silicon Valley. And then this was integrated into this. I don't have this verified, but I've heard from two different people now who have some connection to Facebook that they actually would hold off on. some of the likes and feedback so that it's more intermittent. Oh, so like if you got a thousand, they would just sort of drip it to you. Let's hold some back and then drip some out and make it more.

No, I have an independent confirmation of that. But the key thing is this whole experience of social approval indicators about you constantly coming forward. That was the big insight that made this from a sort of an interesting venture funded tech firm into a $500 billion company. That's what keeps you coming back. And this was so brilliant about it. Not only that keeps it coming back, but when you send this feedback of likes and comments and tags, whatever, That's what gave them all the data that allowed them to then do advertising at levels of precision that was unprecedented. Right.

That's what Jaron and I were talking about. It's like how deep that rabbit hole goes. 19,000 data points they track. That's obscene. Yeah. And that changed. That's the whole point is that's not what people signed up for. No.

I mean, unless you're 17 years old or something like that. But those of us who are age, it's not what people already signed up for. They changed that. I've been interested in this because I find things like social media, especially in the last year and a half. have been just really effectively and actively making me less and less happy. No surprise. But I find myself comparing myself more to others in ways that are unhealthy and quite frankly, completely meaningless. FOMO, fear of missing out, which I never had before. Like, I'm not the person who looks at Instagram and goes, wow, they're on the beach that looks so great. And yet

there's so many different ways to have FOMO now that Instagram will find yours. Facebook will find yours. And then once it, once it does, somehow through the magic of tracking 19,000 data points, it just goes, oh, you think that when somebody is hanging out with their wife and kid and the environment is sunny and they're on vacation and they're wearing white clothes and reading, that's what gives you the most, I don't know, make me whatever, but that's what makes you feet like linger the longest on that photo or like zoom in or whatever they're tracking. And now that's all you're seeing. And now that's all I'm freaking seeing, right? And it's very bizarre, but it also makes me.

And so I'm like, okay, I got to get away with this. And my point is I'm not immune to this, even though I'm acutely aware of all of this, having done the research. I'm essentially, and I'm not saying this to brag at all because I think I'm throwing myself under the bus here, essentially like a one percenter myself in terms of influence online, being a so-called internet wannabe celebrity, whatever you want to call, influence, or I hate that word. Yeah.

But none of that has added any value to my life. outside of making great connections with people, which is very possible, I know, without active participation in social media. Well, I mean, Jaron talks about this a lot smarter than I'm able to, but essentially when you take algorithms and you let algorithms loose with just these objectives, like, okay, we want, you know, we want to show things that, you know, Jordan lingers over. Right. It seems like an innocent thing to do, but when you have all of this data coming from you and

you just let loose a statistical machine learning algorithm, it creates all of these unexpected consequences. I mean, it's a lot of what happened with the outrage amplification that we see right now. It's not so much that a brilliant attention engineer sat down and was like, all right, here's our business. Our business is outrage, right? Yeah, they're like, no, no, it wasn't that, right? The cigar chomping, whatever. He's like, this is how we're going to get eyeballs. No, no, it's the engineer. It's like the nerd like me that was like, I've got this great algorithm that's going to do something good. It's going to watch what you like and try to give you more of what seems to catch your attention. and then it's the algorithm, starts amplifying up these outrage cycles because it turns out

when something really gets you emotionally engaged, you spend more time on it, you're more likely to send it. And so the algorithm doesn't know that, okay, what it's actually doing is putting you into a fury every time you go on Twitter or something like this. And this is where, you know, Jaron talks a lot about the dehumanizing effect. Right. Of these, when you let algorithms then sort of control what you see and how you act, the digital stream that we now consume.

So it's this algorithmically created digital stream. of information that algorithms are controlling just to try to keep you as engaged as possible, has all of these far-reaching consequences, and they're all emergent. So we just get surprised, and we look up, and you're not talking to your aunt anymore, and you hate your old friends from high school, and all this stuff is going on. And there's a couple data science engineers somewhere. It's like, uh-oh. I think let's kind of back slowly out of the room. Right, right, because they're not really in control of what's happening. It reminds me of something Gary Kesperov told me. I think it's from his book, Deep Thinking. Yeah.

And one of the ideas from the book is chess algorithms are actually still kind of hard and clunky for computers, and especially the older ones were really bad. It was like the longer you waited, the better move the computer would come up with because it took forever. And one of the moves that computers were doing in chess games, as shortly as a few years ago, was doing things like sacrificing the queen. And that's something you do in chess when there's a very specific set of circumstances. Right, very rare. But it was rare. And then the computers were like, oh, I'm just going to sacrifice my queen first because whenever this player is about to win, they sacrifice their queen.

And it's like, yeah, you can't do that to get to the victory part. You have to have the victory part wrapped up and then you do that. Yeah. And the computer doesn't really know that. So the computer doesn't say, let's piss everyone off. And even the data engineers, the data scientists aren't saying, here's an idea. Let's piss everyone off and scare them. It's just that when people are pissed off and scared, that's when they're like, oh, I'm going

research this. Hey, have you seen this? Share this with my mom. I want to share this with my whole family because this is terrifying. And they don't see that. Right. Because you have a billion users. You can't sit there and actually watch what Jordan's doing. It's just, you know, on average, this decimal point got higher on the engagement index after it went through our convoluted neural network, you know, reinforcement learning model. And everyone's high-fiving. It's completely abstracted away from the guy in the bunker. Yes, exactly. We've got to start getting rations down here because the world's about the end. And I know that the tech is going to be useful. I mean, techno apologists will always say, hey, look, there's useful elements of this technology.

Let's dispense with that because even Jaron Lanier, who hates social media, doesn't think we need to become Luddites entirely. Well, he's another computer scientist. That's true. I'm sort of in his mold. Right. I love technology, but I also know the history, right? So I know that you have to be critically engaged with new technologies from a human stance. So if you're not critically engaged, like, okay, what is this tech? What do we want to do with it? what are we worried about? What do we like what we don't like? If you're not asking those questions, whenever this happens historically, we end up in trouble. And this is what happened to us. There was this period of exuberance, essentially the second, after the first dot com boom, we had a

recession and the second web 2.0 instigated.com boom. There's just this sort of exuberance. We're like, you know what? Silicon Valley is just going to shower us with Bill Markle's, it gifts from the nerd gods. And it's all great and it's all high tech. And the stock market has been a bare market for 15 years in a row. So like, let's not complain, right? Everything is good. And so we just went through this period after the smartphone and high-speed wireless internet revolution. I'm like, let's just try everything, which is not bad, right? When there's a new technological breakthrough to have an experimental period, it's sort of interesting and trying to see what's out there. But it kind of ran amok. And so I think what's happening now is that people

are stepping back and saying, we have now graduated from that early exuberant experimental period when all these technologies were new and we're just downloading apps and we're having that wow reaction when we see the iPhone for the first time. We're done with that. We're moving on to the next stage. We're like, okay, now let's step back and say, how do we really want to integrate these things? This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Cal Newport. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit jordanharbinger.com

slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to us on The Overcast Player for iOS, please click that little star next to the show. It really helps us out. And now for the conclusion of our interview with Cal Newport. You must be a Bill Marfan because my next note, which I assume is from your book,

is even he says, checking your likes is the new smoking. And I love that because it pretty much sums up my old, I used to do that. I don't do that anymore, and I know how dumb it is. But here's the thing. I knew at the time how dumb it was. too. Yeah, but if you look at that clips, that's where the nerd gods line came from too, is this monologue he went. So why was he saying was the new smoking? Well, what he was showing was is a clip

of Tristan Harris on 60 Minutes. So Tristan Harris is a former Google engineer who essentially became a whistleblower. So here's someone who was trained in BJ Fogg's persuasive technology lab at Stanford, where they really get into the psychology of how to influence behavior with technology, did a startup, got bought by Google, really kind of got an inside look about how you can influence people's behaviors with technology, kind of turn states witness. Yeah. And we'd be like, okay, I'm going to be a whistleblower on this. Like, I want to go and talk about it.

Went on a media tour and he went on 60 Minutes to talk about, this is where we started getting these analogies of the slot machine. He's like, you have to understand. This is like pulling the slot machine. We're being engineered for this. And Bill Maher cut to the famous 60 Minutes interview of the tobacco whistleblower. Right, where they all stand up and say. Well, but then there was an interview.

The guy who I think Russell Crow played in the Michael Mann movie, the inside. Thank you for smoking. Oh, different one. Yeah, a different one about what happened to this guy. He was like the original whistleblower who said, look, they knew it was addictive. They lied when the seven of them stood up and said that whatever. And he was looking at these clips back to back because this looks pretty familiar. And so that really caught my attention. And so I think Bill had a good, I think he had a good take on it. It was like these are not the nerd gods giving us gifts, right? We've lost that relationship, especially in the attention economy. It's now a little bit more like the tobacco companies and the fact that like we know this thing. is addictive. We made it addictive. We're doing great because it's addictive. And we're pretending like, no, it's just everyone connecting. Don't you want people to express themselves?

Cranky Bill. Sometimes he's right. I follow him on Instagram. Ironically, but not ironically. Digital minimalists like yourself, essentially, the idea here is what? Dominate the technology instead of being addicted to it or having it dominate us? Yeah, you dominate. The same way, like, if you're a minimalist with respect to your physical possessions, right, like what do you do? You say, I want stuff that's really, really useful that I really enjoyed. I don't want the crap. So if you're a minimalist with your physical possessions, you clean out the house and you only bring back in the things that you really need, that you really like.

I mean, this is like Maricondo or the minimalist. So this is just the same thing in your digital life. And so what I actually recommend the people is you probably have a bunch of clutter in that digital house because we just came out of this 15-year period of exuberance where we just tried everything. So what I'm recommending is get rid of it all. Wipe the slate clean, get all the optional tech out of your personal life and then rebuild it from scratch, except for this time, do it with a lot of intention.

Like, what do I actually care about? What do I actually want to do? I'm 39 now. I'm not in high school, so actually I probably have different objectives than I did when I first downloaded Facebook. What matters to me? Now, let me go out and find tech tools that I can use very intentionally to get big wins. And so it's like, let's get all the junk out of the house, let's clean out the garage, and rebuild back up from scratch a much more streamlined and intentional and high ROI style digital life. And so that's the basic of digital minimalism. It's where thousands of people out there have been doing this. It's starting from scratch. Clearing it out, rebuilding from scratch. You've got the clutter as costly, digital declutter that

you'd started. And I used to do this before. I'm essentially not even on Facebook. I just use Messenger now, but I use other social media. And part of that, a large part of that is the fact that it's for business. You know, engage with show fans. It's really the only thing I do there and family and friends. But what I used to do is. before I really realized this is a business tool for me was every day I would go through the birthday list on Facebook and I would delete anyone who I'm like, who is that or whatever, that person. I would just unfriend them.

And there was a point at sort of peak declutter on Facebook. This is probably almost 10 years ago now. I probably had like 600 people that were still connected to me there. Now I probably have the max of 6,000 plus, you know, you know, 20,000 bagillion friend request that I've just given up looking at. Yeah. And these aren't, you know, these are show fans. I'm not trying to talk about how popular I am.

It could carry less on there. But the idea is that I had just, my news feed was all relevant stuff that actually I was interested in. Yeah. That was still dangerous because that was when they were optimizing this. So I would just spend eight hours scrolling through the algorithms for watching. Yeah. Right.

The algorithms for watching. But how do we declutter? What do we, first of all, you say declutter. What is this? Yes, clean out the garage. How are we doing this in a digital way? Yeah. Well, the thing I've been pitching is a 30-day process, which seems to work.

I ran this experiment last year where I asked for volunteers to do this 30-day process. I didn't think I'd get very many because it was a big ask. You have to step away from everything for 30 days. I thought I'd get 20 or 30. I could have an interview for the book. 1,600 people ended up signing up to do this, which told me, okay, there's a hunger. But here's the process, and here's what I learned about it. The process is you take 30 days.

You take everything you can off the plate, right? So I'm not talking about business, but stuff that's in your personal life, digital things in your personal life, that you can walk away from at least temporarily without it causing irreparable harm in the short term step away from it, right? 30 days. During the 30-day period, there's a couple goals. I mean, one, there is a detox effect, which I think is important, though I think detoxes for the sake of detoxes is somewhat nonsensical. I don't buy this trend that if you just take occasional breaks, that's somehow going to solve the problems in your digital life. I think it's kind of like taking occasional breaks from heroin. Yeah, it's a weird appropriation of the word detox because, of course, in substance abuse, the whole notion of detox is it's the first step that then upon which you can build a new life that doesn't have the original problems. I think the idea that you're like going to step away for 30 days, here's my plan, and then go back to everything that I was doing before after those 30 days is a weird abuse of the word detox.

Yeah, good point. I haven't thought of it. It has to be the first step towards actually changing your life. There is a detox effect, but it's also a time to reflect and figure out, okay, what am I actually about? that is, what do I care about? What do I actually want to spend my time on? And then when it's over, the screen you use when trying to decide what to bring back in is you say, is this particular technology the best way to use technology to help one of these small number of things I've identified as being very valuable?

The answer is the technology is to get yes for that question. That's what comes back into your life. So if something is somewhat helpful or kind of helpful or maybe helps with some conveniences, that's not a high enough threshold for it to get back into your life. So you're just bringing back in huge ROI tech and ignoring all the lower ROI tech. And that's classic minimalism, which says it's okay to focus on a few really important things

and miss out on valuable things but lesser value. If you ignore the lesser value things and put all of your energy into the higher value things, you actually end up better off. That's the core proposition of minimalism. And so that's exactly what this 30-day process is trying to bring to your digital life. So give me an example here.

Is this, would this be like, okay, I'm getting rid of all social media on my phone? Online news. All messengers and all online news. And then after 30 days, I go, hey, look, I really need my to-do list app, which has some media functions of sharing tasks with my wife and my producer. Yeah. I need that. That's been, I miss that.

Yeah. That helps me communicate. Or Slack. This is how I communicate with my team. I need that on my phone. But what I don't need is Facebook Messenger, Instagram, the news app, whatever. Reddit, all this garbage. If I don't need, it's not that, is this useful or not?

It is, is this the best way to use technology to help something I really care about? So it's not enough to say, well, Facebook helps me connect with people and I really value relationships. That might be true, but you have to ask, is that the best way? Being on Facebook and doing the happy birthdays or whatever, is that the best way to use technology to actually help strengthen your relationships? And the answer might be no, right? So it has to be the best.

But the other caveat to that, and this is what really seems to help, is that when you let something back into your life, you go past a binary, question of what, and you add the how and when. So digital minimaists, what they do is they don't just say, okay, I do really need, let's say Facebook, that's it. Now I'm just a Facebook user and I'll be on there 50 minutes a day. They say, well, how am I going to use Facebook and when am I going to use it? And so, for example, I talked with a lot of visual artists who said creativity is crucial. And for visual artists, Instagram is a very important source of creativity because a lot of artists post works in progress. And if you're creating your own visual art, you have to have this constant

stream of varied inputs of people doing interesting things because that's the grist that you mill to actually have your own creative insight. So it's crucial to what they do. So a lot of visual artists would say Instagram is the best way to use technology helps something that's value. Whereas like I would not answer the same way. I can't I don't have any values for which Instagram is the best way to help it. But the same artist will then do the how and win. And so what's really common about those artists who go through the minimalism process is that they usually will say for the how question, well, of course I don't need on my phone. Nothing about me getting it on your On my computer, there's nothing about me getting creative input from Instagram that means I need to be able to check it all the time.

That doesn't make sense. And I don't need to just use it generally. I'm going to coel down my list of people I follow to the 10 artists that are most important. The win, well, actually, if we're honest, if I go on Sunday night for 30 minutes, I can see everything new that these 10 new artists have done. And so now they're getting 99% of the value at Instagram. And they're giving up 99% of the cost. They're looking at this thing for 15 minutes on their desktop once a week. so it has almost no negative impact on their ability to be present and do things and other things

they value in their life. And yet they're getting almost all the value out of it. So it's the high threshold to let it back in. And then you add that how and the win structure around it. And that's what really, that's what makes digital minimalists if you know one. That's why they're not looking at their screen so much. That's interesting. We'll throw that in the worksheet for this episode because I think that's really key. Because a lot of people are going, oh, I can't get rid of this. And so they just go on with their same habit. But if you go, all right, I can't slash shouldn't get rid of this. But what I should do is not check it every five seconds while I'm at dinner. What I can do is decide, like you said, the when. Monday is from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.,

that's when I'm going through and looking at this on this app, and it's not in my phone. Or if it only exists on the phone, you know, you install it on your iPad that you're not carrying with you. You're not carrying with you. Something like that. I like the intentionality idea as well. Intention trumps convenience. Yeah. Let's go into this. It sort of segues nice. into this really interesting point about the Amish using technology, which I was very surprised to hear. Yeah, well, so the foil to minimalism is historically maximalism. And so maximalism says, what matters is value. So if something could bring some value into your life, and you don't get that, it's like you're losing that money. So if you come across some app, it could give you a little bit

of convenience or something like that, the maximalist says, if I don't download that app and use it, it's like someone is stealing that from me, right? Like, I'm losing it. And so maximalism is what drives people in the digital space to use everything and download everything. If there's any value or any convenience, you got to use it because you really fear the loss. If I lose that, it's like someone's taking this away from me. Minimalism is the opposite, which says, no, no, you want only focus on the big wins and on purpose ignore the small wins. One of the reasons why this less is more philosophy ends up making you net, net better off is that there's a huge value you get just by being intentional. So just the idea that I'm now being incredibly careful

about how I use technology so that I can really focus on things that are important to me. That gives you huge satisfaction that can often outweigh the little benefits and inconveniences you've lost by no longer keeping in your life a lot of these small apps or services that gave you these small little wins. And so the intentionality itself is something that can really trump all the small little values and inconveniences, which is a big reason why I think in various minimalist movements, people end up happier, even though they're purposefully ignoring things or walking away from things that in isolation could maybe bring them a little win.

The Amish used technology. This was so shocking to me. This is one of the most memorable parts of the book, in my opinion. I had no idea that the Amish were actually allowed to do any of that. You hear, oh, they don't even use buttons on their shirt or whatever, all this kind of apparently not super true anecdotes. Yeah. Well, there's this idea, this false idea about the Amish

that basically they froze technology at some point. Right. Right, like they came here in the 18th century and we're like, okay, this is it. Right, that's what I thought. Yeah. Just went, hey, the time is frozen in 1842 or whatever it is. Yeah, but then if you read accounts of, so I was, I learned a lot about the Amish from Kevin Kelly, for example, because the technologist Kevin Kelly spent a lot of time among

the Lancaster County Amish when he was younger. Very bizarre being the founder of Wired. Yeah, founding editor of Wired. Yeah, but brilliant guy. And he writes about this. He's like, it's so weird because you'll pull up, you know, you're pulling up at an Amish farm. and an Amish kid will come rollerblading by, you know, and you go into the house, and the babies are in disposable diapers. And they have a huge solar array that is powering their whatever.

And I wrote about someone else talking about coming to a Mennonite farm, and they're sort of in a bonnet and homespun clothes as they're running a computerized CNC router machine. This $250,000 piece of equipment. Internet control. Yeah, right. Amish have websites. They'll often have someone else that runs it for them. So what's really going on? actually what the Amish do is just an extreme type of intentionality-based minimalism.

So they have one value that's very important, which is the strength of their community. And they have this very clear rule, which is when it comes to new technologies, all that matters, does it strengthen our community or weaken it? That's what matters. I don't care how high-tech it is or not. And so typically if a new technology comes along, it might be relevant, they say, let's test it. And there'll be some usually an Amish alpha geek in the community that says, great, I'm going to get the iPhone, I'm going to get, I'll put the phone in my house, whatever it is.

I'll try the new technology. I'll get a car, you know, and they observe like, hey, is this strengthening the community or is it weakening it? And if it's weakening the community, they say, we don't want to use that. That must be a tough position to be in. Because I can imagine going, oh, I'm going to get a smartphone and see how it goes, and you're just like, damn, this is awesome. Yeah. This is so not good for me. I have to tell the elders not to do this, and they're going to make me get rid of this. You know, you're going to lose it. You know, you're going to lose it. But that's why you have rollerblades and disposable diapers, because hey, the supposed to diapers are just useful. It's not going to bring the community apart. But cars,

cars were terrible because then people would leave and go places as opposed to visiting with each other. So it was terrible from a community point of view. Telephones in the house were bad because people want to go see each other. But most Amish communities have telephones for the community. They put them in like a communal place. So you can still, because it's useful. They have tractors often because it's really a pain with the horses. Some still use the horses. But they'll put non-numatic tires on the tractor so that you can't use it as a substitute car and drive in the town. So you can drive it in a field, but you can't drive it on the road. Now, they're, obviously, they go to huge extremes. But what's interesting to me is that it's astonishing that the old order Amish still exist in the

middle of the mid-Atlantic U.S. Right. I mean, they're completely surrounded by Walmarts and they all spend the year during Rump Springer actually being out there. I mean, it's not like they don't know about all the conveniences of modern technology. Right. It's not North Korea where they're like, yeah, the worst of the world's pretty much the same as us. Yeah, it's about the same or it's real terrible, right? Like people hate their iPhones, right? No, no, no, no, they know what's going on. I mean, there's people at their farms taking pictures of them with their iPhones.

And yet it's somehow, it's somehow persisted, which I think is astonishing. And the reason is persisted in part is because you can get so much value out of being intentional that even in this case of extreme inconvenience. Because this intentionality here is creating incredible inconvenience, right? I mean, no electricity in your house, it comes from, everything. It's so inconvenient. And yet the order has remained for 250 years. It's because the value you can get out of intentionality can really trump inconvenience.

Now, there's a lot of issues with the old order Amish. I don't think that people should act like the Amish. But I think why their example is interesting is that just underscores that for humans, intentionality can be massively valuable. And we way overestimate convenience. Like, this is what I really, I'm going to hate it if I don't have this convenience. We get that wrong. And we way underestimate how much we're going to enjoy,

actually feeling like we're in control and making decisions based on our values as opposed to, yeah. I guarantee you that someone Amish is listening to this. So watching this right now on Roomspring. In fact, I made a joke a lot years ago. I said, oh, there's only one group where we can make fun of without any repercussions. And I said something like, you know, the Amish people, because we know none of them are listening. And it was like the next day someone was like, hey, so funny story. I'm Amish.

I'm on Roomspringer, which is like this, it's supposed to be a year, but a lot of people extend it to two, three, maybe four years. where they just get to go out and be, I guess, worldly, check everything out and see if it's for them. Yeah, and something like 90-something percent come back. Yeah, which says a lot. Because you would think, why are they doing that? They're letting people go experience the world. They're never going to come back.

And it's like nine out of ten are like, you know what? This has been fun. I'm out. Yeah, yeah. Though in fairness, we should say also, if they don't come back, they're going to be isolated from their families, and they're also not very well educated in the Amish community, so they don't have a lot of options. Good point, yeah.

You're also recommending we take social media off the phone, spend an hour or more without our phone or computer. I saw, I can't remember where this was, somewhere on, somewhere on Netflix, somewhere on some internet thing that you would recommend me getting rid of. And they had the guy trying to do tasks. And they took his phone from him, but they mimicked all the sound effects. So they were texting his phone while it was behind him. Have you seen this?

I've seen the study, yeah. Yeah. And they just couldn't do, he was going insane. And they put, the one I saw, they put, heart rate monitor. Right, right. But they said, oh, no, this is for a heart rate test. And then they were like, they're very close. clever, like, oh, your phone messes up the equipment, so it's going to move it over there.

That's right. And then they would call it, but they had the equipment on because of the fake experiment. And they were, especially with like young teenagers, the heart rate was like, phth. Yeah. It was like an intense stress reaction to hear the phone, but not be able to. They were cutting to him, like, literally sweating. And he's typing something in, like, Microsoft Word. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, yeah, he's not, he's not, he's not lifting an airplane or something. Right. Yeah. And he's sweating. And he's there, every time the text would go, you could just see like the And it was gradually kind of raising and staying there as he had to keep in his head. Check my phone later.

Check my phone later. As if the phone's not going to remind you again. I thought that was so interesting. The book has rules for how to make decisions, intentionality, make these decisions really carefully and conscientiously. I'd love for you to give a reason or two why maybe people shouldn't get rid of, I don't know, this podcast, for example, and continue to do that. Because I think that goes, it's a good example for intentionality.

You know, that this is the only way to get this type of information maybe. And it's, I don't know, I won't make your argument for you. Are there positive reasons to keep things like podcasts? Yeah. On your, in your phone. Yeah. In your life. Like, I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I don't have any social media accounts.

I have a smartphone, but it's an old smartphone, right? I mean, every minimalist has their own combination of things. And this is why the intentionality lens is the right lens and not the tech is good versus bad. Because for a lot of people, for example, podcasting actually is an answer to, is, this the best way to use technology for a certain value. For a lot of people, actually, being engaged in the world of ideas, being intellectually engaged, being sort of worldly, right, the old-fashioned sense is a value, right? I want to be, I want to engage my mind. I want to know things. I don't want to be procreal. Podcast or what's killing right now with that.

I mean, the rise of long form is crazy that people will sit and listen to a three-hour interview with a scientist or something like this. Thank God, because I was worried my, I saw my career going down the toilet with the rise of social media. I just thought, I'm screwed now. Old school media didn't understand this. Social media, I mean, the social media executives didn't understand this either. They're baffled. And you know, the thing is about podcasts, right, especially in long form podcast, is that they're not, it really frustrates Silicon Valley. They're not consolidated. You don't need a large, you don't have to be part of some walled garden and part of a $500 billion company. And so this is, this is an example of a

technology that I love and that people really engage with. I'm also a huge fan of blogging, for example. Now, that's idiosyncratic to what I do, but for me and some of the things that are valuable to me as a writer who works in the world of ideas, to be able to experiment with ideas on a much faster time cycle than, say, books, and they have an audience of really smart people who can give me feedback and have this ongoing dialogue has been a massively beneficial technological activity in my life, and I've been doing it for over a decade. Whereas if I'm, let's say, tweeting about the type of stuff I write about, the benefit I'd get from that would be much less. So the blogging was the right answer. When it comes to using the internet to be informed and worldly and connected to the world of ideas, podcasting for me, for example, in a lot of people, is an affirmative answer, right? You ask the question, is this the best way? Actually, I think it probably is when you're commuting to be able to hear like an interesting conversation for an hour.

Like, actually, that's a great technological use. So it's a clear distinction. The sort of Luddite, which is a complete straw man anyways, Luddite versus tech or whatever, which is this sort of crazy straw man that makes no sense, is no one's been talking about that and no one's interested in that. It's more about me versus the real estate prices in San Francisco, right? I mean, that's really, where can I get the big wins and when am I being jerked around and actually standing up and starting to think about that seriously? That's what this is about. I want to go back real quick to some of the health

concerns here because post-1995 kids in their insane social media use, the human brain isn't wired to be constantly wired. And you have a really good point in the book about how social media teases our brains or ward centers, not just the slot machine, not just the dopamine response that we talked about earlier, but social media use lowering our desire to actually engage in real life. It doesn't fill the same kind of need because there's no vocal tonality, there's no body language. So it leaves these processing networks in our brain just a little bit underused, just a little bit unsatisfied. A lot underused. This was fascinating to me.

I'd never thought about this. Yeah, I went deep on the research about human sociality. And what I discovered, and I guess this makes sense on reflection, is that being social is at the core of our species' success. And because of that, huge portions of our brain are dedicated to social processing. I mean, it's a huge thing that makes a human human is that we can actually sit in a room. and figure things out. Like what's your body language doing? What's the tone over here?

Let me predict what's going on. Let me read your mind. This is the big thing. Neuroscientists call it mind reading. Let me project into your mind and try to understand your subjective state. So now I know how to react to you or what's going on. And so these brains are social processing computers and they need it and they crave it. The social system is hooked up to the pain centers.

And there's these really sort of disturbing experiments where, you know, you find that someone who is feeling intensely lonely, like they've been isolated because maybe the like a death of a spouse or something like this, painkillers actually can reduce that feeling because it's so important in our species histories to be social that the social aspects of the brain are hooked into the pain, senses of the veins, right? So we are social animals, right?

I mean, Aristotle had it right. What happens with social media is the digital interaction, the stuff that was hatched in, you know, Harvard dorm rooms 15 years ago, looks nothing like our brain expects. So typing something on a screen, clicking on a heart, like seeing a number next to a thumbs up or whatever, that does not hit those same sinners.

These sinners in our brain that have evolved over a million years, they don't recognize the stuff you see when you hit the app as having anything to do with socializing. So we get these paradoxical findings in the research literature that says when people use social media more, they get more lonely. It doesn't make any sense. It's supposed to be connecting me to people. And it's not that the phone is making them lonely. It's that they're replacing the stuff that they need.

And this is no substitute for this. And this is what's creating this loneliness epidemic, is that this tricks your frontal cortex, the new part of your brain, like, hey, look, I said happy birthday to 25 people today. I'm incredibly social. I've done it. It's good. I'm the teenager. I don't have to leave my room. I've been talking to people all day. But then behind that thin layer of frontal cortex, there's the whole rest of the social brain. As far as it's concerned, we haven't talked to anyone in days. So it's like being really hungry. And then someone says, here's a half a peanut and some sugar. And you go, okay, but I'm still hungry. But you're for that one second, you're like, oh, I'm good.

Yeah, you have more high fructose corn syrup and peanuts or something like that. Or you smoke a cigarette and the nicotine for a little bit. You don't feel the hunger craving, but your body still needs it. Yeah. And so this is what's going on with teenagers, and it's so distressing. They're having all this, this huge mental health crisis, which I had heard about anecdotally. I mean, I wrote about how maybe four or five years ago I was doing a lecture at a college, and it was sponsored by the mental health center.

And so I was talking to the head of the mental health services. I'm like, hey, what's going on? What should I know? And she's like, we've had this spike in mental health issues. Like, we've never had this many students. And it's not the normal variety of things. It's all anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. I was like, well, what's causing that?

She's like, it's a smartphone. It's the very first generation of students who showed up with their smartphones and knew what they were doing. And I was like, well, that's kind of anecdotal. And then the sweeping research came out over the past few years that found that this signal is incredibly strong. And that the other alternate explanations, people try it a lot of alternate explanations. They've all been falling apart, right? The only signal that's actually amplifying as people do more and more research is that it's doing this and not doing as much as this. It's creating real problems.

And so I talk about teenagers in part because it's like the canary in the coal mine. They take this idea of let's not interact in the real world to ludicrous extremes, right? I mean, you and I'm, even if we're using a lot of phone, I don't know, like I have kids and family and I live in a town. I'm still going to interact with a lot of people. But teenagers are sitting, they sit in their room, they don't get their driver's license, they don't go to parties. Is this generally true? Because, of course, plenty of teenagers are amazing people that do all this. And I also think I get where they're coming from because social media requires less energy.

They're really efficient. It requires less energy and it seems, but they're a great case study, right? Like, let's take this independent variable, which is this how much we spend on our phone versus interaction. Let's find a group that happens for various reasons to push it to an extreme. And then we can see what happens. And so when you push it to an extreme, like what's happening with teenagers right now, we see this huge spike. sort of unprecedented from a demographic point of view. We've never seen things change this much between generations,

this huge spike in anxiety and anxiety-related disorders, which tells us bad things happen as you start to starve the social brain of what it needs. Now, for someone like you or I, who's not going to maybe be as extreme as like the most extreme 16-year-old, it's not maybe going to be a massive anxiety disorder, but it gives us this background hum. The sort of background hum of anxiety that people just accept now, I think a lot of that is we don't realize it,

but we're basically misusing this computer. It's wondering, where is my, where is my interaction? So if we get rid of all the social media, we actually need to cultivate high quality leisure time, social connections. Otherwise, I would imagine when we reintroduce it, we're just going to end up with the exact same problem. And it's also really hard. So this is something I learned during that 1600-person experiment,

is people were surprised by how hard it was that first day when they didn't have the digital stream to entertain them. them. And the way a lot of people talked about it was, especially people who were old enough to have quite a bit of adult life before and after Wiseford social media use, which again, it's very new. It's like five or six years. They were surprised the degree to which this had subtly pushed out of their life, the high-quality analog stuff that they used to do and really enjoyed. And then even realized they didn't decide to do this. It just sort of pushed it out because it was easier. And so it was scary at first. Like, I don't know what to do with my time. Then

they got back to high-quality leisure, the type of stuff they used to do. Even something as simple as going to the library and getting a stack of books, right? And then they were overjoyed to discover, man, this stuff is really good. Like actually using my hands and building something or doing a thing with a community group or playing with a sports league and trying to re-remember how to throw the ultimate frisbee or even just reading books or whatever, they forgot how much satisfaction you get out of actual quality leisure. And so the good news is that when people actually got that back into their life during

the 30 days, a lot of them reported they lost the taste for this. It's like when you stop eating the junk food and start eating the real food, for a month and then you go back and try to eat a Snickers bar and it's a really sweet and kind of weird. Right. And why is it falling apart of my mouth in this perfect way? Like the whole thing is like disturbing. They lost their taste for like, well, I don't know if I want to just do that, right? Maybe I want to be Ron Swanson instead and I want to go back out and work on my canoe or chop some wood or whatever. But high quality leisure is crucial. We've lost it. And when you bring it back, it's a completely different experience. Last but not least, do you have a really interesting

practical takeaway. And we'll in the worksheet, of course, go over some of the decluttering detox and the reintroduction. Of course, in detail in your book is where the rest of that is. But the conversation office hours, I thought was a really interesting practical takeaway that everyone should implement right now. Tell me about this, because I immediately wanted to do this. And I was like, wait a minute. And I told Jen, my wife, who schedules everything for me, I was like, okay, I know this is a pain, but I want you to basically move all this stuff to this other time. And she was like, oh, God, you know, but it's going to save me so much. And so far, I love the idea of being able to ignore certain things and be like, I'll do them later in a way that compartmentalizes the pain. Yeah. Well,

I mean, phone calls turn out to be very effective. Right. Because you're actually doing analog interaction and there's limbic consonants and these other types of effects that makes it fires up that social part of the brain. So phone calls are much, much better than text face communication. The problem is the overhead, right? Because we've kind of lost the cultural structure around, I'm just going to call you up. You're probably not going to answer. People aren't expecting phone calls. And so the hack you're talking about is basically you have some set times that you know

you're going to be available. And then whenever you're in a circumstance where you're talking or interacting with someone that you would like to have a phone call with, you can get rid of all the overhead by just saying, here's my office hours. You know, from four to five on Tuesdays and Thursdays or whatever it is, I'm always available. You can always call me. Here's my number.

There's no social landmines there. You know I'm available. You know I'm happy to take calls. You just call it. I'll probably pick up. And it's an easy hack that gives you a lot more of this higher quality interaction. And then you can just shut people towards this when you get the, hey, Jordan, like, can we grab coffee or hop on a call or whatever?

I'm sure you get a lot of those. All the time. Yeah, to be able to say like, hey, I always am happy to talk to people. Like, you can always call me between these hours on this day. It's like a small hack. In fact, one reviewer even made fun of me because they said so obvious, but I don't think it is actually. I mean, it's a simple thing. But it really works really well.

And so I think it's worth emphasizing. So I'm glad you brought it up. Right. the reason more people don't do this is because since the phone's with us all the time, the point is we're reachable all the time. But that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Before cell phones, if somebody called your phone and you weren't there and you didn't pick up, nobody would be like, what the hell?

What's going on? What's going on is it's Sunday. I'm not in the office. And people would be like, oh, of course. Now, though, hey, I called your phone twice this weekend. You didn't answer. Yeah, I didn't want to. I don't answer my phone except on.

at 5.30 to 6 o'clock, five days a week, and every other time, I'm not reachable by phone. And people are worried. I think people are too worried that everyone they know is got really annoyed at them if they don't have their phone with them all the time. Or if they're like, look, I don't answer text or whatever. The reality is people don't care. They're not thinking that much about you. No. And they adapt really quickly. And so I'm one of these people. My family knows it. You know, he sent me a text message. It's a very low probability that I'm going to see it in an answer, right? Like I'll look at my phone a few times during the day or something like that. And they just expect, like, okay, I don't expect that it's like just 10 years ago.

I don't expect that Kyle is always next to his phone. And they've sort of adapted and they don't, they don't care. They're sort of used to it. And so people will adapt is essentially what I'm saying, is if you switch to a lifestyle, which I recommend, where you sometimes have your phone and you sometimes don't, and you're not always reachable. Nothing bad happens. And you gain huge positive, such as time alone with your own thoughts, which turns to be, turns out to be crucial, the flourishing. And people aren't thinking about you as much as you think they are. They're not sitting there stewing, you know, like, Jordan, how dare he think that he can't? They don't care. Also, we're training people to react to certain way. They get trained. People train. Like,

great, Jordan doesn't always have his phone. I got it. I don't expect, I won't last minute text him if I need something. And then they move on, right? And now you've gained back a lot of solitude and undistracted time. And so, yeah, these seem like small, small hacks or maybe scary hacks, but they work really well. Cal Newport Digital Minimalism. Thank you very much. Thank you. Jason. So, you did of the digital minimalism stuff. And it's different than detox, right? It's not just like, hey, stop using social media. It's completely different. It's a system. Yeah, it's a great system, too. I have dialed back. I've followed Cal Steps and have been dialing everything back. I'm doing

it for 30 days. And I have found that I am much better off without a lot of the things that were on my phone. And even on my iPad, I've dialed it back and only have certain things that I need to do for work that make my life better. And I love the book. I devoured the book. I've given a couple copies out too to some of my friends who really needed it. And I think almost everybody actually really needs it now. And this is great advice. I've loved Cal's stuff for years. His deep work stuff has been fantastic. And this is just another add-on to his, like, awesome library of just taking back your mind. Yeah, I like that, taking back your mind. It really is kind of what he specializes in. So definitely check out digital minimalism. I was talking with Charlaman the God while I was in New York.

If you don't know who he is, super popular FM radio, DJ, talk show host, interviewer. And he was freaking out about digital minimalism. He's like, this is going to be a game changer. This is going to change the world. Like, he was really excited about this. And he just, because this is a guy who gets 10,000 tweets a week, literally, probably, and has millions of followers on Instagram. And he's like, you know what?

I'm just not going to do this. And he changed the way that he uses that stuff. He actually ended up deleting his Twitter because, as you can imagine, when you're a hip-hop interviewer and you have a Twitter, it's just a cesspool. And it was making him feel awful. But the steps are different for everybody. They're based on your needs. And so this for him, this for me was just a really big deal. Digital minimalism will link to it in the show notes.

And if you want to know how I managed to book all these great people and manage my relationships using systems, tiny habits, and not a lot of social media, not a lot of clutter, check out six-minute networking. It's a course that I made to replace level one. It is free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course, and it's got new drills, new exercises. If you liked level one or if you were too lazy to start doing it, six-minute networking is a great place to kick that off. It takes just a few minutes per day.

I'll let you guess how many. And this is the stuff I wish I knew a decade ago. It's not fluff. It is crucial, and that's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Speaking of relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Cal Newport. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and I do use social media to engage with you all, and I do that deliberately. There's also video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. This show is produced in association with Podcast One, and this episode was co-produced by Jason de minimis DePhilippo and Jen Harbinger.

Show notes and worksheets are by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which is definitely the case with this episode. So please share the show with those you love, share the show with maybe even something that you don't. Lots of more in the pipeline. Very excited to bring it to you.

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