Ep 246: Are Smartphones Bad for Kids?

00:00:00.000 | So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is are smartphones bad for kids?

00:00:06.600 | And if so, how do we know that?

00:00:09.860 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.

00:00:19.040 | The show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:28.200 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined once again by my producer Jesse.

00:00:33.020 | We had a week off of recording together. It's good to have you back.

00:00:38.480 | It's good to be back. This is a little known fact about when I solo record.

00:00:43.340 | Jesse you will attest that when we record we one take it. Yeah, just go live. We just rock and roll warts and all.

00:00:50.680 | Whenever you're not here

00:00:53.200 | It's always two takes. Really? I usually will go about five minutes and then stop and then go back and like take another

00:01:00.680 | Run at it. I don't know why. What did you do back in the day?

00:01:04.400 | Trying to think back in the very like the deep day

00:01:09.340 | When I was early in the podcast I would often

00:01:13.500 | When it was all audio, I would off I would stop all the time because it was easy

00:01:18.720 | I mean I would just go for a while

00:01:20.160 | but if I get to a question, it would be really common and I start answering a question and

00:01:24.160 | Say I don't really like that and I could just there's just one track and the software was just me

00:01:29.260 | It was just audio. I could just go back and like let me take another run at that

00:01:33.120 | So the trade-off was I didn't prep I would just list out a bunch of questions and rock and roll

00:01:37.680 | But if I didn't like an answer, I might go back and take another run at it

00:01:41.000 | Once we started doing video I swapped out around and said well

00:01:43.820 | Why don't I actually do a little bit of work up front the prep more the questions?

00:01:47.480 | But not take multiple runs at it and that's how we've been doing it and I and I when I'm alone now

00:01:52.120 | I do it all you know in one take except for I always have to start twice

00:01:55.160 | It's just something about the first time I do it. You're not here throws me off. I get going I'm rambling and

00:02:00.840 | And I always start over interesting. Yeah, I don't know what it is. It's not three though. It's never three takes

00:02:06.120 | Two takes Jesse's not here. It's two takes

00:02:09.880 | So, you know I gave a talk the other day at my kids school

00:02:16.600 | Or that it's me and some parents from the middle school. They asked if I would come give a talk about

00:02:20.720 | Kids and technology in particular kids and smartphones

00:02:24.200 | What do we know about it?

00:02:26.480 | How do we know what we know about it and what?

00:02:29.600 | Conclusions should we take away in terms of what the school policy should be what should be recommended to parents?

00:02:34.520 | What parents should be thinking about with respect to their own kids and I figured it's sort of a waste to have done all this

00:02:39.640 | research and build all these slides and

00:02:42.680 | Only really deliver this information to a one room full of parents. So because I've had this question a lot

00:02:48.200 | What is my take on kids and phones and when they should have phones and is it really dangerous?

00:02:53.120 | I thought we could talk a little bit about that in the show today

00:02:55.920 | Yeah, I know that you mentioned it in prior episodes and some fans have been asking for it. Yeah

00:03:00.680 | Yeah, and then we'll also we can record this and there'll be a YouTube version of this discussion

00:03:06.720 | So if you want to share it with other people who maybe don't listen to the show, but worry about this problem

00:03:11.040 | Now this information will be out there. We can point to that video when people ask about it

00:03:14.280 | So I thought it would be good. So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is our

00:03:18.200 | smartphones

00:03:20.000 | bad for kids and

00:03:22.000 | If so, how do we know that?

00:03:25.000 | That's what I want to get into so I have some of my slides here from my talk

00:03:29.880 | So, you know if you're listening you might want to consider watching. This is episode

00:03:35.520 | 246 you can find it at youtube.com slash Cal Newport media or at the deep life

00:03:41.320 | Calm if you don't like YouTube's episode 246, I'll explain what I'm saying

00:03:46.400 | You don't have to watch it, but I'm just saying if you want to see some of these graphs. I'm referencing

00:03:50.200 | Watching the video version of this might be suggested

00:03:54.760 | So as I looked into this question of when did researchers become concerned?

00:04:01.360 | About kids and phones and why the whole story seemed to break up into three acts

00:04:07.840 | That's why I called this in my talk a saga in three acts the first act we can start

00:04:14.400 | I'm gonna call it roughly

00:04:16.960 | 2012 to

00:04:19.000 | 2017 that's the first act of the story. I call it an alarm is

00:04:24.000 | Sounded so this is the period where people first began to notice

00:04:30.240 | Warning signs. This was actually the period in which the potential issues with smartphones young people was first brought to my attention

00:04:36.640 | So I remember as a young professor at Georgetown. This would have been in

00:04:41.320 | 2012 I was given a talk somewhere on campus and I was walking to the talk with someone who is involved with the student

00:04:48.640 | Mental Health Center at Dartmouth is called cat or not Dartmouth Georgetown

00:04:53.280 | It's called caps

00:04:53.920 | And I it's if you're watching on the screen you see a picture of the the counseling center

00:04:57.400 | And I remember smartphones and tech in general was not in my portfolio in 2012 as a writer

00:05:02.800 | So we were just having conversation and this person mentioned to me. She said, you know, there's been a big change

00:05:08.520 | recently

00:05:10.320 | the number of students that we are now treating

00:05:13.800 | With mental health counseling here at Georgetown has jumped up and not only has it jumped up but it is

00:05:20.160 | Disproportionately jumped up to be anxiety or anxiety related disorders

00:05:25.480 | So we're seeing a lot more overall students and a much bigger proportion of the students. We see are here for

00:05:29.920 | Anxiety, that was interesting. So what's going on? She didn't skip a beat. She said smartphones

00:05:36.400 | And that caught me off guard at the time

00:05:39.160 | Smartphones, what do you mean? She said? Oh, it's really clear to me

00:05:42.000 | anecdotally that the first group of students to arrive on campus having had

00:05:48.120 | Smartphones during their adolescence were showing up way more anxious than we'd ever seen before

00:05:53.480 | We can now look back retrospectively and see that this was not an isolated

00:05:57.960 | Anecdote happening at just one University. I have a chart on the screen here for those who are watching

00:06:02.800 | This is from the American College Health Association annual survey. It's showing percentage of US undergraduates

00:06:08.160 | Diagnosed with a mental illness and what do we see?

00:06:10.960 | at

00:06:12.760 | 2012

00:06:14.080 | Forward a very sharp uptick in anxiety and depression which are of course quite interlinked by

00:06:21.200 | Anxiety to the dark vertical line if you're watching this online

00:06:23.880 | It's 2012

00:06:26.200 | So what this one person at Georgetown was noticing was actually a nationwide trend that something changed around

00:06:31.800 | 2012 keep that date in mind. It's going to come up again. I

00:06:34.720 | Think the issue got brought to the public's attention writ large so it expanded from

00:06:41.440 | Individual educators and mental health professionals being worried to the culture writ large being worried about maybe smartphones are causing an issue

00:06:50.040 | I think Jean Twenge

00:06:52.040 | really helped make this a

00:06:54.160 | national issue in her

00:06:57.000 | 2017 cover article for the Atlantic that was titled have smartphones destroyed a generation

00:07:03.640 | The thing about Twenge is that her expertise is in studying

00:07:09.440 | Differences between demographic generations. That's what she does

00:07:13.280 | How is this generation different than that generation?

00:07:16.560 | She's very good at teasing out what's real and what's not and as she said in this article and I have it on the screen

00:07:21.200 | As well, she'd been doing this for 25 years

00:07:24.200 | And she says typically the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually and along a continuum

00:07:30.440 | But then I began studying Gen Z around 2012

00:07:34.720 | I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states the gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep

00:07:40.680 | Mountains and sheer cliffs and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation begin to disappear in

00:07:45.920 | All of my analyses of generational data some reaching back to the 1930s. I had never seen anything like it

00:07:53.200 | So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in

00:08:00.240 | 2012

00:08:03.000 | She began to make the connection that I think this has to do with smartphones

00:08:08.120 | Here's another I think culture defining moment

00:08:12.200 | This was also 2017 a big article in the New York Times magazine written by Ben Wadson is that lose?

00:08:17.080 | The article is titled. Why are more American teenagers than ever suffering from?

00:08:21.560 | Severe anxiety and it's important because Ben Wad goes into this article. It's clear from the tone of the article that he is not

00:08:29.320 | very hospitable to the technology hypothesis

00:08:32.840 | He was seen this as a standard moral panic type argument the same thing

00:08:38.040 | We always say rock and roll music is going to corrupt the teens brains video games are going to corrupt teens brains

00:08:44.240 | And he came into it with that frame, but there's a key point in this article

00:08:48.320 | where he talks to actual anxious teenagers and

00:08:51.400 | I'm quoting him here to my surprise anxious teenagers tended to agree

00:08:57.080 | They didn't say hey old man, leave our phones alone. They said yeah, these things are a problem

00:09:03.320 | so by 2017 we've gone from

00:09:05.840 | Spot reports of wait a second something is changing here these young people. There's something different going on and by

00:09:13.120 | 2017 we were openly debating is

00:09:15.720 | It phones causing these issues

00:09:18.400 | All right, this brings us to the second act

00:09:21.600 | the data wars

00:09:24.000 | this takes place roughly between

00:09:26.000 | 2017 and

00:09:28.000 | 2020 this is when researchers began to seriously try to gather or study the data to get a stronger more data-driven

00:09:35.320 | Conclusion on this question of a smartphone somehow involved in these increases in anxiety that we're seeing

00:09:40.920 | This was a period of both proposals and critiques, which is good

00:09:44.940 | This is how new sciences emerge, especially in social psychology, which is by definition a complicated field

00:09:52.520 | That rarely has super strong signals

00:09:54.360 | There was proposals and critiques or responses to the critiques. And so that's why I call this the data wars

00:09:59.040 | This was the period in which almost any New York Times article on this issue would say with big caveats

00:10:05.480 | There is some data, but it's it's contested. It's because this data war period is when the science was actually happening

00:10:11.720 | Let me talk about two troubling streams of data that came out of this period the critiques and the responses to the critiques

00:10:17.620 | So the first bit of troubling evidence that emerged as we got more serious about this question was simply the timing

00:10:23.720 | that

00:10:25.040 | 2012

00:10:26.320 | that was a

00:10:28.120 | Really? It's a circumstantial evidence, but a really strong pointer towards smartphones at play and here's why

00:10:33.600 | There's lots of different reasons you could come up for come up with for why young people between 2012 and 2020

00:10:42.260 | We're becoming more anxious the world felt like an anxious place. We had the financial crisis

00:10:48.960 | We had the financial insecurity that that caused we had the extreme partisanship and unrest that followed in the in the Trump era

00:10:56.880 | And so it did seem like a period of lots that were going on. The problem is none of this fit 2012 in particular

00:11:03.780 | The financial crisis was 2006 to 2009. The financial insecurity was felt strongly by the millennial generation

00:11:10.940 | We were entering the job force then not Gen Z. By the time Gen Z was entering a job force

00:11:15.120 | That was largely in the rearview mirror

00:11:17.400 | There was a lot of political partisanship and unrest that that arose later in the 2010s, but that was after 2012

00:11:25.320 | 2012 was the Barack Obama Mitt Romney election

00:11:30.240 | There was not an increase in partisanship there as compared to let's say even just a 2008 election in which we had Sarah Palin involved

00:11:37.600 | in that movement

00:11:39.000 | Compared to the contract with for America Newt Gingrich in the Clinton era that type of partisanship

00:11:44.400 | There wasn't something new that happened in 2012 that wasn't also there in 2009 wasn't also there in 1999

00:11:51.040 | The populist revolutions of Trump etc. That didn't really pick up speed until 15 or 16, right?

00:11:56.940 | So that explanation doesn't quite fit it

00:11:59.400 | Also as we got more data, we saw these anxiety rises among young people happening in many many countries

00:12:06.200 | So we could not pin this on particular

00:12:08.200 | American

00:12:10.800 | Dynamics. So what did fit this? Well, here's Jean. Let me just show a couple graphs here

00:12:17.320 | These are just a couple other graphs that are showing 2012 being a big deal

00:12:21.440 | So we see female especially with female reports of sadness and hopelessness

00:12:28.000 | between 2011 and

00:12:30.800 | 2021 we see a significant increase from 36% to 57%

00:12:36.400 | I'm also showing US teens with major depression, especially with girls. We see a hundred forty five percent increase as we move from

00:12:42.640 | 2012 to 2020. So these are just examples of lots of things were

00:12:46.560 | pivoting on 2012

00:12:49.520 | Here's Jean Twenge

00:12:52.400 | She said okay, what does match 2012?

00:12:55.280 | It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone suppressed 50%

00:13:00.560 | That's what's changed in

00:13:03.360 | after that point

00:13:05.240 | You were much more likely as an adolescent to have a smartphone before that point. It was much less likely

00:13:10.080 | None of these other potentially anxiety producing trends match that date nearly as well

00:13:15.720 | All right. So this was the first bit of troubling evidence to emerge right is it's circumstantial and there's critiques

00:13:21.760 | I would say one of the big critiques I'm showing this on the screen an example now was this idea that no no

00:13:26.360 | We agree with you that there's not world events or cultural events that match the 2012 outside of smartphones

00:13:33.400 | But the thing that really changed in 2012 was not smartphones

00:13:36.960 | This critique says it was that this new generation was coming of age and they're more comfortable

00:13:41.640 | Talking about mental health. They're like that. So this was a big critique in the early part of the data wars

00:13:47.560 | You see rises in depression anxiety

00:13:49.960 | Because more people are willing to say I'm anxious or I have depression

00:13:54.680 | This quote from the New York Times of 2018 is sort of typical of this period. Here's Richard Friedman writing the Times

00:14:00.920 | He says look there are a few surveys reporting increased anxiety in adolescents

00:14:04.360 | But there's self-reported measures from kids or their parents and they're over

00:14:08.000 | Estimating rates of discords because they're detecting mild symptoms not clinically significant syndromes

00:14:13.300 | This was claimed a lot during the early period of the data wars. So as good science does it said well, how can we?

00:14:20.220 | Look into this

00:14:22.400 | Counter hypothesis and the right way to look into this counter hypothesis is to say let's find

00:14:27.800 | Stronger proxies for anxiety that have nothing to do with self-reporting

00:14:31.480 | And in particular I put two charts on the screen here and these are both tragic

00:14:35.640 | But they also give us deep insight. The first chart is US teens admitted to hospitals

00:14:41.160 | for non-fatal self-harm

00:14:43.800 | ages 10 to 14

00:14:46.320 | This gets around the self-reporting process. These are people who tried to harm themselves due to anxiety and these are from hospital records

00:14:52.640 | Look at girls

00:14:55.560 | 188 percent increase between 2010 to 2020 with the increase getting particularly stark

00:15:02.580 | around

00:15:04.480 | 2012

00:15:05.880 | Even more tragically we look to the right we see

00:15:07.880 | suicides among US teens

00:15:10.560 | 2012 jumps up

00:15:13.040 | 134 percent increase among girls starting around that

00:15:16.680 | 2012 point

00:15:19.160 | So it was a reasonable hypothesis that well, maybe

00:15:22.560 | Around 2012. We just got more comfortable talking about anxiety. We were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms

00:15:29.240 | Unfortunately, the hospital records show these indications rose at the exact same rate. So there really was an increase here kids are and

00:15:37.000 | Starting around this period having worse mental health

00:15:40.280 | The second strand of troubling evidence was to correlational studies

00:15:45.760 | so social psychologists often will work with these giant data sets these giant data sets where researchers will go out and talk to tens of

00:15:52.600 | thousands of people and ask them about everything and

00:15:54.760 | Then after the fact you can come back as a researcher and look for all sorts of connections within this data

00:16:00.400 | if you want to know if

00:16:03.280 | People who like the color red is their favorite color or more likely to have had

00:16:07.480 | Back surgery in the last six months. You can just go and look at this data and find those things and look for correlations, etc

00:16:15.040 | So they did this they said let's start looking at this data

00:16:17.040 | We'll look at young people and we'll look at correlations between these

00:16:21.080 | Technologies and negative outcomes and they began to find lots of strong connections

00:16:25.880 | Here's just one of many many graphs that were produced in this period

00:16:28.360 | This particularly one looked at UK adolescents with clinically relevant depressive symptoms

00:16:33.880 | the x-axis is

00:16:36.160 | number of hours per weekday on social media

00:16:39.520 | the y-axis is percentage of teens who used that much social media that were

00:16:43.880 | Diagnosed as depressed and as you see when you increase from no time on social media to five plus hours

00:16:51.240 | You get a significant increase in percentage of teens that are depressed

00:16:57.720 | this is particularly high for girls where you go from a

00:17:02.920 | 7% depression rate for girls who don't use social media to almost a 40% depression rate for girls who use four to five hours of

00:17:10.640 | social media

00:17:11.960 | All right, so we saw a lot of studies of this type

00:17:13.960 | this generated critiques

00:17:17.040 | So other researchers came along and said yeah, you're finding these correlations, but you know

00:17:20.760 | You could it's easy to find correlations between things the effect sizes are small

00:17:25.120 | and perhaps the most famous of these papers was published in

00:17:29.440 | 2019 by Przbylski and Amy Orbin. This is known by researchers in the field colloquially as the potato

00:17:37.040 | Study they went in and looked at one of these big data sets and said and I'll read them here

00:17:42.240 | The connection is negative, but teeny

00:17:45.200 | Indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero

00:17:48.840 | That it is roughly the same size as they find for the association of mental health with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses

00:17:55.840 | So they said look we looked and found these these yet you use more digital technology

00:18:00.640 | You're less happy, but the effect is the same we found for

00:18:03.840 | Eating potatoes on your happiness or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness their point being these are so small that they're basically arbitrary

00:18:10.560 | You're finding artifacts in the data this article the potato article was cited a lot

00:18:15.540 | Even until very recently you would see major

00:18:18.320 | Newspapers like the New York Times often saying because this was very influential

00:18:24.520 | You know studies show a potential connection between these technologies and negative mental health, but the effects are small

00:18:32.160 | This is the type of paper that caused that

00:18:34.800 | So as good science does we looked at this now? Here's a response to the potato paper

00:18:40.740 | co-authored by Gene Twenge and John Haidt

00:18:44.160 | It was published in nature human behavior, and it was called

00:18:49.240 | Overestimating digital media harm in this article height looked at Przbylski and Orban and said well wait a second

00:18:57.000 | Wait a second, and I'm gonna read his words here the first issue to note is that the potatoes comparison?

00:19:03.500 | Was what they reported for all digital media use?

00:19:07.440 | Not for social media use specifically digital media includes all screen based activities including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling

00:19:15.720 | Which are not harmful activities in their own published report when you zoom in on social media

00:19:21.000 | Only the relationship is between two and six times larger than for digital media

00:19:28.080 | Also crucial is that Orban and Przbylski loop lump together all teens boys and girls while many studies have found that the correlations

00:19:34.680 | With harm are larger for girls so height is saying it's almost like you're intentionally trying to reduce

00:19:41.220 | the negative impact

00:19:44.240 | You're only showing the connection between all possible digital media use and negative social harms even though your data set you were using had

00:19:51.280 | Social media broken out and all the discussion has been about social media and in height and 20 said so we looked at your same

00:19:57.680 | Data set and just looked at social media

00:19:59.680 | And you had a much much bigger

00:20:01.640 | Response a response that especially if you break out girls was six times worse than eating potatoes a very significant response

00:20:07.200 | So I say here on the slide

00:20:10.040 | this is John Haidt being polite because

00:20:13.320 | When you really read this critique you're wondering

00:20:15.680 | How is there any other explanation for the potato paper other than a set of researchers who are saying?

00:20:20.480 | We want to report. There's not really a difference here. It's otherwise hard to explain why they would

00:20:26.700 | Choose what they chose and not talk about these other aspects to their paper if they were really just trying to understand is there harm

00:20:34.360 | here

00:20:36.360 | All right, so let's get to the third act of this story this research story on smartphones and kids

00:20:41.100 | I call this third act a consensus begins to emerge this covers the period of 2020 to 2023 so until today

00:20:48.360 | essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is

00:20:51.520 | The critiques have largely fallen away and a consensus is emerging in the field that yes, especially for girls

00:20:59.640 | There is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health

00:21:05.280 | The reason why this consensus emerges first of all the critiques as we talked about before the main critiques during the data war

00:21:11.800 | Were pretty thoroughly debunked, you know after the potato paper

00:21:16.060 | It's not like there was a lot of more stronger papers

00:21:18.440 | It said really made a strong case that there wasn't a strong connection there and the timing argument really seems to have been one for

00:21:23.980 | The people who are worried about smartphones so that happened

00:21:26.320 | But then what we began to get and this is how a lot of emerging literatures begin to coalesce around a consensus

00:21:31.760 | We began to get multiple other

00:21:34.900 | Independent sources of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion

00:21:38.380 | When you have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer

00:21:43.080 | That's often what happens in complex literatures that points it towards a conclusion and that really began to happen in the last couple of years

00:21:49.440 | So one of the threads it was natural experiments. Here's a cool paper written by an economist Elaine Gu and

00:21:56.300 | She looked at in Canada

00:21:59.560 | I believe the arrival of high-speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town

00:22:04.800 | when high-speed wireless internet arrived

00:22:07.560 | Heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app

00:22:12.480 | And so she looked at if we have nearby towns

00:22:15.440 | demographically and culturally very similar

00:22:18.640 | But we end up in this natural experiment situation where one town gets wireless high-speed internet between before the other

00:22:24.760 | Can we compare what's happening with teenage mental health in these two towns and see if there's a change?

00:22:28.840 | Yes, there was

00:22:30.840 | Girl teen girl severe mental health diagnoses increased by 90%

00:22:35.400 | When the wireless internet arrived so it was a nice natural experiment

00:22:40.880 | We also had some direct randomized control trials experiments. Here's a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al

00:22:46.720 | They just took 143 undergraduates and randomly

00:22:50.040 | Assigned them to either stop using social media or keep using it as normal. So it's a randomized

00:22:57.680 | Perspective control trial. What did they find the group that was told to limit their social media use showed significant

00:23:03.840 | reductions in loneliness and depression as

00:23:06.960 | compared to the control groups

00:23:09.840 | So that's interesting. I

00:23:12.760 | Think maybe one of the strongest

00:23:15.240 | Forces and helping a consensus come together was self-reporting

00:23:20.820 | Just talking to teenagers themselves

00:23:24.120 | So when Francis Hagan leaked all of those data from meta a couple years ago

00:23:29.040 | What was known as the Facebook files as what the Wall Street Journal called it one of the big interesting?

00:23:33.440 | findings in these leaked documents from meta was the fact that they had done survey on teens and

00:23:40.120 | Had found that I'm quoting here

00:23:42.680 | Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression

00:23:46.240 | This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. So the teenagers themselves are saying yeah

00:23:51.840 | This is why we're more anxious and depressed this app these phones

00:23:55.160 | Other data begin to find the same thing. I put on the slide a put on put up here a slide from research out of

00:24:02.520 | Australia these are Australian teens

00:24:04.640 | By far the number one reason they give for why they think youth mental health is getting worse is social media. I

00:24:09.760 | Think this was the final smoking gun is the teens themselves are saying this is hurting me

00:24:17.000 | This is causing a problem. It is really hard to be a potato study style skeptic in the face of the teens themselves saying

00:24:24.360 | Yes, this is causing me harm. We're not teasing out

00:24:27.320 | subtle epidemiological effects a

00:24:30.200 | slight increase in the background cancer rate for the towns that were using a different type of pipe in their water where the individuals themselves

00:24:36.400 | Have no way of detecting this change. This is not that this is a huge

00:24:40.280 | loud

00:24:42.200 | Self-observable macro signal this thing is making me uncomfortable that ultimately is the big difference between this and past moral

00:24:49.920 | panics around youths and technologies

00:24:52.600 | When my grandparents let's say they were upset that my mom was listening to the Beatles in the late

00:24:57.760 | 1960s if they went to my mom and said stop listening to those Beatles

00:25:01.840 | It's going to warp your mind. My mom would have said, you know, get out of here

00:25:05.520 | What she would not have said is I agree

00:25:08.480 | These records are making me and my friends incredibly anxious. I wish I didn't have to listen to them

00:25:12.800 | That would have been a very different situation

00:25:15.320 | So this is why I think this analogy to past concerns about youth technology

00:25:20.040 | Really begins to fall apart data aside the teens tell you yeah, I know this is making me anxious

00:25:25.080 | I don't like that. I have to be on it

00:25:27.080 | So, why does it do this

00:25:30.160 | So let's look in particular at social media first and then we'll broaden out the smartphones

00:25:33.980 | Why do researchers think social media is causing these negative?

00:25:38.360 | Impacts on mental health. There's a few reasons to come up. One is loneliness

00:25:42.440 | Now readers of my book digital minimalism. This will sound familiar because I talk about this in digital minimalism

00:25:48.800 | It's paradoxical at first but using these social technologies more will actually lead you to feel less social

00:25:56.440 | And what's going on here is young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth

00:26:05.720 | but this purely linguistic communication just sending text back and forth to each other or

00:26:10.760 | commenting on each other's post is

00:26:13.120 | Not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being all that social

00:26:17.720 | There's no voice modulation. There's no body language. You're not in the presence of another person in the same room

00:26:23.640 | So you're in your room as a 14 year old all day on text messages and you tell yourself wow

00:26:28.560 | I'm so social because all I've been doing is talking to people but as far as your brain is concerned

00:26:32.600 | You're incredibly lonely because you haven't seen anyone all day

00:26:35.600 | and

00:26:36.600 | Social psychologists call this social snacking

00:26:38.600 | Lightweight easy digital socialization we do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely

00:26:44.320 | We see this in the data. I have two charts up on the screen now

00:26:47.480 | One shows loneliness among teenagers and you see again 2012

00:26:52.520 | Goes right up. The other chart says shows daily average time spent with friends

00:26:59.500 | Starting in 2012 for the ages 15 and 24

00:27:03.840 | Go straight down

00:27:05.840 | more time on the phone

00:27:07.960 | Meant less time interacting in person meant loneliness went up

00:27:12.280 | There's an interesting observation by the way that John height makes this got underway around

00:27:16.800 | 2012 and it was so pronounced by the time the pandemic came along the change wasn't even that big

00:27:22.480 | And we can see this on this chart

00:27:24.320 | I mean certainly we can we continue to have a steep we have a steep fall from 2000 in 2020

00:27:30.600 | But we were having a steep fall from 2018 to 19 as well. So he pointed this out in a newsletter article

00:27:36.760 | He wrote earlier this spring

00:27:38.600 | these effects of isolation were already so pronounced because of smartphones among American teens that the difference of adding a

00:27:46.040 | Isolation through lockdowns actually didn't even make that big of a difference. We were already on that trajectory

00:27:51.400 | Another issue here is performativity

00:27:55.400 | Especially with social media, especially with girls. Let me read something here from Jean Twenge

00:28:00.680 | Girls use social media more often

00:28:02.680 | Giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them

00:28:09.000 | Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes

00:28:17.720 | So you're constantly worried about what other people are doing and how people are perceiving you combine that with a teenage brain

00:28:24.520 | Come on, no way. That's gonna be positive

00:28:28.440 | The final thing I want to mention here is the amplification of harmful behaviors

00:28:31.860 | Online communities for all their good also have the dark side of it allows especially vulnerable

00:28:37.640 | Teenagers who are trying to find themselves and are open to suggestions and are feeling vulnerable and full of all these different chemicals

00:28:43.880 | It's very easy to get caught in on line communities that will then amplify

00:28:49.440 | Harmful behaviors that will directly reduce your mental health and a lot of cases also your physical health

00:28:55.120 | We're beginning to see more lawsuits along these lines

00:28:58.200 | I have a headline up here right now about a family suing meta because they blame Instagram

00:29:03.000 | for encouraging their daughters eating disorder and

00:29:06.560 | Self-harm, there's all sorts of cases like this. So this is another source of this connection between reduced mental health and

00:29:13.520 | Social media use is there's a lot of traps on there

00:29:17.800 | You end up in a community that is cheering on something that in the end is going to make you feel much worse

00:29:22.440 | All right

00:29:27.760 | Social media is not the whole story a

00:29:29.760 | Lot of this data is looking at social media. Some of it's looking at smartphones in general

00:29:33.840 | I want to just briefly mention that even if you aren't using social media on a smartphone if you're a teenager

00:29:38.960 | There's other harms we know are there

00:29:40.960 | Impeded thinking skills is critical. I talked about this in a somewhat recent

00:29:45.880 | episode of the podcast

00:29:48.440 | It's talking about Marianne Wolfe's work on

00:29:51.560 | the development of young minds when they spend more times on screens the short version of this is

00:29:57.000 | deep critical thinking skills

00:29:59.000 | require training

00:30:01.000 | Training requires things like reading analog books that you struggle with you can take time to pause and make sense of what you just read before

00:30:07.760 | moving on training requires

00:30:10.200 | Self-reflection the ability to hold thoughts and your working memories and work on it having that time alone and that familiarity with it

00:30:15.920 | Smartphones get in the way of that training

00:30:18.680 | Because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick

00:30:22.160 | Look like a L-shaped skim for things that are going to give you in text a quick hit of dopamine or excitement

00:30:29.200 | flee boredom if you have any moments of downtime have a

00:30:33.360 | Something right on your screen. I was watching

00:30:36.240 | Jesse I was watching this on the flight

00:30:38.920 | There's not my flight to San Francisco is my flight to Utah a few weeks ago

00:30:42.240 | Maybe like a 20 year old guy sitting a row up in the aisle. I was watching him use tik-tok. I

00:30:49.600 | Mean it was crazy. It's like cuz he had his phone out. They'll just be like some weird video

00:30:54.080 | He was watching on average six seconds and he swiped and another video would come up and he was swiping another video would come up

00:30:59.980 | That's just all he was doing the whole time. Well, I don't know the whole time before a while

00:31:03.720 | Yeah, I was watching over his shoulder

00:31:05.800 | man, glad I'm reading my

00:31:08.100 | Ellen Lightman book about transcendentalism and the human brain made me feel good. But you know, the point is is it's so

00:31:16.800 | Rewarding the moment that you don't do the activities that would otherwise give you critical thinking skills

00:31:21.280 | And so you're just not good at thinking deeply and that's a huge

00:31:24.240 | Harm sleep deprivation is a big deal for teenagers and these smartphones. Look you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone

00:31:31.160 | They're gonna YouTube until 4 in the morning

00:31:33.160 | When I gave this talk someone in the audience said there's a lot of middle schoolers there and one of the middle schoolers was talking

00:31:38.880 | About how all of her friends who have these smartphones are on them all night and then they come in the class

00:31:43.900 | They're completely tired. They can't function. They're doing really poorly on their on their tests, but they can't help themselves because if you have this

00:31:50.720 | It's hard to turn it off. So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue. It's a

00:31:55.840 | YouTube video games and social media scrolling

00:31:59.680 | Solitude deprivation is another issue. I talked about this in digital minimalism as well

00:32:04.760 | Our mind is not meant to constantly be processing information generated by another mind

00:32:10.180 | We need time alone with our own thoughts to recharge and that makes sense of our world

00:32:13.980 | Smartphones can eliminate that entirely from your existence because any moment where before you might have just been alone with your own thoughts

00:32:21.660 | You can now pull out the thing

00:32:23.840 | Over time that makes us anxious. It also harms self-development at an age where we need it

00:32:29.200 | 14 you're trying to figure yourself out. You're 15. You're trying to figure yourself out. You need time alone with your own thoughts

00:32:34.660 | Your brain needs it

00:32:37.260 | And finally we have this issue that smartphones in general minimize quality leisure

00:32:41.180 | So the thing you're doing on the phone gets in the way of the things you should be doing

00:32:45.060 | It gets in way of the things that's going to be more meaningful or quality or sustainable or connect you more to your friends or

00:32:50.640 | Your community or build skills or give you confidence. It's easier just to look at the phone and

00:32:54.860 | to watch twitch and

00:32:57.720 | So it gets in the way of something that could be better

00:33:00.660 | This is often missed when we think about smartphones and teens will hone in on the exact activity

00:33:05.500 | And say well my son isn't on social media. He's not doing performativity doesn't have to worry about online bullying

00:33:11.160 | He's the thing he's looking at is really harmless

00:33:13.460 | In fact, maybe there's like some science content in it

00:33:16.160 | The issue there is not that what he's looking at is a problem is that because he's looking at all day

00:33:20.580 | He's not doing the things to be good

00:33:22.580 | so we've got harms with

00:33:24.880 | Unrestricted smartphone access for young people that go beyond just the specific stuff that social media can do

00:33:32.360 | All right, so where is this all headed at the national scale it's an interesting question

00:33:37.180 | Is there going to be some sort of legislative shift?

00:33:40.540 | That's going to come out of this data. Now that the consensus has emerged. It's clear that this consensus has been

00:33:46.640 | Understood and intaked by

00:33:50.540 | Legislative bodies and policymakers. I think it's now accepted that

00:33:54.340 | unrestricted smartphone use especially for prepubescent kids, especially for prepubescent girls is very

00:34:01.940 | Dangerous, I think this has all been accepted now. So where's this gonna head? I'm not quite sure

00:34:06.780 | But here's one thing I would keep an eye on

00:34:09.620 | Here's the surgeon general earlier this year

00:34:11.920 | He said wait until your kids are 16 to let them use social media

00:34:17.120 | This conclusion I think is something that a lot of researchers are coming to I talked to John Hyde about this and he agreed with

00:34:25.000 | That as well if you've made it through puberty

00:34:27.680 | The development as an individual as well as the social development and everything that happens during that period if you've made it through all of that

00:34:34.000 | Before you then get unrestricted access to the internet and social media

00:34:37.800 | You're in a much better position to succeed

00:34:41.120 | Because you know who you are who your friends are what you're interested in what you're about. You've done all that work

00:34:46.680 | And now if you get exposed to this it's gonna have a much less negative impact than if you get it at 12

00:34:52.880 | Or you get it at 13

00:34:55.320 | So if you can wait till 16 this seems to be an emerging consensus

00:34:58.680 | This might possibly be made in the legislation

00:35:01.280 | One of the relevant things to keep an eye on here is the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA

00:35:07.140 | this act implicitly already in codes 13 as

00:35:12.760 | The minimum age that you can sign up for a social media service

00:35:16.780 | Now, of course these social media services didn't exist in 1998

00:35:19.840 | The actual wording here is 13 is the minimum age at which you can consent to give up your data privacy, which of course

00:35:26.460 | You do when you sign up for an attention economy platform like social media. The original version of this act had 16 in there

00:35:34.280 | Tech lobbyist in DC got that pushed down to 13. There's calls now to amend it back to 16

00:35:41.420 | So that could happen. There's other legislative avenues that are being pursued. It's tricky

00:35:48.320 | But this is one to keep an eye on what would happen if that law was changed. It's not that this would make it

00:35:53.640 | Really hard for individual young people to get access to social media, right? It's not super enforceable. But what it would give is

00:36:02.800 | a

00:36:05.160 | metaphorical chair to parents that are trying to tame this metaphorical lion when you have your 13 year old again and again saying all my

00:36:11.300 | Friends have this I want this. Why can't I have it all my friends have this I want it

00:36:14.560 | Why can't I have it for the parent to be able to say because it's illegal is a very strong defense and

00:36:20.320 | You're not putting your these parents in the situation of having to be social psychology researchers and understand this literature

00:36:25.880 | They can say it's against the law. I'm not gonna break the law

00:36:27.880 | You'll just have to learn not to have those friends, I guess, you know, I mean, it's it's gonna be it would be helpful

00:36:33.240 | So something like that may happen

00:36:35.600 | Now, where do I what do I conclude from all of this? I mean to me I

00:36:39.800 | Would say that 16 age limit is a smart one

00:36:45.100 | I

00:36:46.580 | Think this is good. I think the data is pointing towards your safest bet especially if we're talking about young girls is

00:36:51.940 | 16 is the age

00:36:54.580 | Below which you do not want to give a child

00:36:57.540 | unrestricted access to the Internet

00:37:00.740 | If you give a young person a smartphone you are giving them unrestricted access to the Internet. You can do some parental controls

00:37:06.220 | They'll get around them. They're better at it than you. This is the thing about kids, right?

00:37:10.540 | Like if we ever went to war cyber war with China and we needed in a sort of enders game

00:37:18.300 | Style brilliant kids that like help save us. Here's how we would win the cyber hacking war

00:37:23.100 | Just tell a bunch of 13 year olds that if you bring down China's whatever infrastructure you will get unlimited access to mr

00:37:30.180 | beast videos because these kids become

00:37:32.680 | Dennis Nidry style hackers when it comes to trying to get access

00:37:38.420 | To these things the same kids that can't even

00:37:40.460 | Motivate themselves to take the garbage out if they think they can access YouTube on their school's Chromebook. They're in there a soldering irons, you know

00:37:48.100 | All right

00:37:48.620 | I'm bypassing the main CPU logic here and I'm hacking the main security grid by getting right to the opcode lookup table in the ROM

00:37:56.140 | they become

00:37:57.620 | Expert computer hackers if there's a video game they can access or snapchat lays just beyond those protections

00:38:04.360 | So you give a smartphone to a kid you're giving an unrestricted Internet access

00:38:06.940 | You can money restrict to Internet access. They can use social media

00:38:09.460 | Even the definition of social media is getting a little bit hazy now a lot of the actual performance

00:38:14.500 | Socialization has shifted from social media on to group text messages

00:38:18.360 | So it gets a little bit it gets a little bit hazy and we have all these other harms that surround the smartphones the sleep

00:38:23.820 | deprivation the solitude deprivation so it really seems like

00:38:26.700 | 16 is the safe time to say okay, you can just have a phone and I'm not gonna

00:38:30.580 | Care too much what you're doing anymore

00:38:33.980 | Does that mean that's the only age where you can have any type of device like this?

00:38:37.660 | well, can I actually ask John Hyde about this as well and and his thought was

00:38:40.940 | When you functionally need a phone

00:38:43.820 | Okay, because I don't know

00:38:45.980 | I'm commuting the school on the city buses like a lot of kids do at my kids school and

00:38:49.260 | You need an ability to maybe text your parents if there's an emergency or call your parents if you know

00:38:54.700 | The bus routes cancel or something like that when they functionally need a phone you can get them a phone that doesn't have Internet

00:38:59.820 | So when you get to an age where I'm independent enough

00:39:03.740 | That having communication ability with me is going to enable this independence then get them some sort of communication device, but one without Internet

00:39:11.740 | 16 is what you can give them a smartphone has everything that seems to be the emerging consensus

00:39:16.700 | I think five to ten years from now that will just be accepted

00:39:19.340 | If you have if your oldest you have a child right now and your oldest child is two

00:39:23.220 | You're not going to have to think about this when they become 12 the cultural have shifted

00:39:27.940 | You won't be giving an iPhone to your 12 12 year old that will just be accepted

00:39:32.100 | We're right now in this

00:39:34.100 | Intermediate transition period where parents still have to make these decisions on their own as far as I can tell that's my best read of the literature

00:39:41.460 | When it becomes they're independent enough the function of communication give them a phone like a light phone

00:39:46.820 | Which looks great and can text well, but has no internet wait till 16 to give them unrestricted access

00:39:51.620 | So you can't have your own iPad or your own smartphone till you're 16

00:39:54.180 | They will yell and gnash their teeth

00:39:56.740 | But come on

00:39:57.660 | Everything in the history of the world that teenagers have wanted that their parents don't want the teenagers have said all my friends are doing

00:40:02.860 | It you have to give it to me. This is not necessarily different. So I think that's where we're heading

00:40:07.060 | Obviously, there's lots of caveats here. Some kids have a much easier experience with these technologies than others

00:40:12.580 | Parents clearly know their own kids

00:40:15.940 | There is the one thing I'll also point out is I've heard before when I've when I've been on the road or talked about

00:40:21.580 | my book is

00:40:23.580 | often sort of

00:40:25.460 | Socially elite people have this storyline that less socially elite or less economically elite people

00:40:32.140 | Need the need these technologies and it's somehow

00:40:36.540 | Classist the talk about this that somehow

00:40:39.900 | Having a 14 year old not use a smartphone is it's like a yoga thing

00:40:43.720 | It's like a luxury thing and I can say having worked with lots of different groups from lots of different

00:40:48.380 | Backgrounds on this issue. They would say nonsense to that

00:40:53.340 | Everyone is worried about the kids with this kids are worried about this in all sorts of different backgrounds all sorts of different economic classes

00:40:59.100 | So I don't think this is a yoga issue. This is like a teen smoking issue

00:41:02.300 | No teen should smoke. So we said you should wait till you're 18 to do it

00:41:06.980 | I think it's closer to that than it is to it would be nice to do meditation if you have the time for it

00:41:13.300 | So we'll see

00:41:15.420 | But Jesse that's that seems to be where the data is right now and it looks like policymakers are trying to get behind that

00:41:21.180 | So we're getting close to a point where parents aren't gonna have to figure this all out on their own anymore

00:41:24.820 | There'll be some more of these consensus ease, but I think that like you're 12. Here's your smartphone

00:41:29.440 | Give us another five years. That's gonna be considered something. Oh, wow. Don't do that. So will they still go on?

00:41:35.980 | Social media on their desktop. Well, yeah, but desktops are controlled

00:41:40.820 | Here's the family laptop you use it in the kitchen. I can see what you're doing

00:41:44.860 | Much different situation. I mean, there's a lot of great stuff to do on the Internet, but doing it through the family laptop

00:41:51.060 | You know, we know we know a kid who's really into

00:41:53.260 | sports and

00:41:55.220 | So their family got him a subscription to the athletic like this is great

00:41:58.740 | Like if I was really in the sports and I was 13

00:42:00.860 | To be able to one of the activities I was able to do was like to go on the family computer and get super in-depth

00:42:06.380 | Sports coverage. That's great

00:42:07.340 | It's feeding an interest that the kid really has and another kid is really in the chess and they can do you know

00:42:11.620 | These chess games online all that's great. But if all that's done through the family computer, it's like watching TV

00:42:16.700 | You can't watch TV all the time

00:42:18.820 | Right, the parents say no TV now TV's in the living room

00:42:21.500 | They're in charge of it, but you're gonna watch a fair amount of TV and it's nice and like that's what the Internet should be

00:42:25.100 | For a 13 year old there's all these cool things on here

00:42:27.380 | That you can do just like there's cool TV shows you could watch but you can do them

00:42:31.780 | During times when it's appropriate on a machine where we kind of see what's going on. Yep

00:42:36.300 | And even if they have school-issued laptops that like some of the private schools around here

00:42:40.420 | There's probably some controls on that as well. Yeah, they all get around them. Yeah, they all get around them. Yeah, that's cool. It's funny

00:42:45.420 | we had a

00:42:47.580 | Six one of the neighbors who's always over one of the neighbors is I think?

00:42:50.980 | seven, maybe eight

00:42:53.860 | hacked into YouTube on the Chromebook

00:42:55.980 | I'm telling you these kids

00:42:59.020 | That'll like stare at you for an hour if you ask him to do a fraction

00:43:04.580 | If they could get access to YouTube

00:43:07.540 | They are you know building a quantum processor to break the encryption, you know based on whatever like good news

00:43:16.460 | I have a hundred eight twenty eight qubit quantum processor. I

00:43:20.420 | Packed together in the playground and we're able to break the public key encryption that was keeping us out of

00:43:27.140 | Mark Rober videos they become hackers

00:43:30.660 | Anyways, alright, so that's that's some thoughts that's where I think the research lies right now. I think that's where we're roughly heading

00:43:39.380 | All right. So Jesse what I want to do is we're gonna move on to some questions. I

00:43:45.620 | Found questions that roughly orbit this I don't want to do all questions about kids and smartphones. So and so instead I I

00:43:51.500 | increased the

00:43:53.900 | Topic that I felt this show was covering and we're gonna talk in general about

00:43:57.060 | distractions and technologies and dealing with distractions and the quest to build a deep life

00:44:00.980 | So we'll be a little bit more general and then at the end of the show, we'll do books

00:44:04.180 | Books I read in March. We never did that because I was traveling and technically we're still recording this episode in April

00:44:11.060 | Even though it's coming out in May. So I don't know I feel like

00:44:13.860 | It counts so into the show. We'll get to the five books. I read in March

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00:47:46.500 | Now what I like about Blinkist is that it gives you an ability to triage your reading life

00:47:53.420 | We're a big believer here on the deep questions podcast that reading is critical. It's how you engage ideas

00:47:58.540 | It's how you increase your understanding of the world is how you get smarter

00:48:01.620 | The question is how do you figure out what books to read what Jesse and I do is we use Blinkist?

00:48:06.580 | We hear about a book. We'll add it to a list. We want to buy a new book

00:48:11.660 | We'll take books off those lists and we will listen to or read the blinks for that book

00:48:15.640 | By getting the main ideas in just 15 minutes. You can assess pretty quickly

00:48:19.980 | Do I want to buy or read this whole book or do I really need do I know what I need to know at this?

00:48:25.420 | Point it really helps you decide which books are gonna make the big impact and which books you're okay

00:48:30.540 | Just getting the summary from there's a lot of ways to use Blinkist

00:48:33.660 | But that's the way we like to use it as our sidekick for helping to support

00:48:38.300 | the reading life

00:48:40.860 | They also have ways to help you discover books. I'd like the they have collections were themed collections of books

00:48:46.780 | Hey read all these blinks and see which ones you want to buy. It's a cool tool

00:48:49.580 | They have a new feature that I want to talk about too called Blinkist Connect

00:48:52.540 | It allows you to get two for the price of one

00:48:55.180 | If you set up a premium subscription, you can give a subscription to a friend who you think would also

00:49:00.980 | Enjoy it. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience

00:49:06.180 | Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven-day trial and you will get

00:49:10.240 | 25% off your Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T

00:49:18.460 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial Blinkist.com/deep

00:49:23.580 | And remember now for a limited time you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions

00:49:30.900 | for the price of one

00:49:33.540 | All right, Jesse I think it's time to get to some questions what do we got first

00:49:39.120 | All right, first questions from Jeremy since I recently became a father

00:49:43.180 | I find myself procrastinating on work and even at the office

00:49:46.940 | I could spend all day on reddit looking for that one stimulus so my brain could be satisfied same for books

00:49:52.820 | I read more books since I've been listening to your show, but always feels like there's something missing

00:49:57.060 | Living in living a more deeper simple life seems to be a bit dull and I can't shake that feeling

00:50:03.520 | Well, Jeremy have a couple things to say here

00:50:08.020 | One is there is a transient period

00:50:11.940 | transient duration

00:50:13.940 | To what you're feeling. This is a common effect. I felt this as well when you become a new father

00:50:19.580 | It's a there's a weird combination of things that happen. So one of course you're tired

00:50:24.580 | More tired than normal more exhausted normal because you're helping to care for a newborn. You also feel there's this

00:50:32.200 | sudden reduction of

00:50:34.940 | Activity stuff you might have otherwise done now. You're not gonna you're at your home

00:50:39.540 | You're kind of helping to take care of the kid. But what happens often when the kid is really young is so you're home

00:50:44.740 | But the kid is just napping or the kid is just feeding and there is this sense of a sudden reduction in activity

00:50:50.820 | I remember feeling this after our first was born the sense of I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm here

00:50:57.580 | the baby and my wife are napping I'm like sort of not doing other things and I

00:51:02.060 | Feel just like you're saying here

00:51:06.340 | It's like things are dull or a little gray or there's just like a

00:51:09.620 | Cap your affect is cap because you don't have those things going on that that maybe give you hits of anticipation or excitement

00:51:16.860 | That's transient and it goes away. The kid gets a little bit bigger you fall back into a routine

00:51:20.660 | If you have later kids, you don't feel that anymore because then it's just chaos

00:51:24.700 | So when you have future kids, you're just taking care of the older kids and you're way too busy to worry about this

00:51:30.260 | So it's really a first kid

00:51:32.380 | Phenomenon and it does go away. I always used to think it takes about four months before

00:51:36.780 | You feel like a routine has returned after having a kid and I be I learned over the many kids

00:51:42.740 | I've we've had over the years is just to treat that first four months differently

00:51:46.980 | Like this is like an all-hands-on-deck

00:51:49.500 | Unusual period don't extrapolate from this

00:51:52.260 | to the rest of your life don't extrapolate from the lack of sleep to the rest of your life don't extrapolate from the the

00:51:58.700 | Reduction and aspirational our professional activities for the rest of your life

00:52:01.340 | It's four months and usually after four months you fall back into a routine and then you you're mentally freed up

00:52:07.500 | So that's one part of it

00:52:08.940 | the other part of it is

00:52:10.940 | Your vision of the deep life might be too dull

00:52:13.500 | right, I mean if you're

00:52:16.700 | You if you're the way you've structured your life is you feel like this is just dull. I don't know

00:52:21.980 | I'm just I read books sometimes and nothing's exciting to me

00:52:25.100 | Construct a lifestyle vision that's more exciting

00:52:28.540 | I mean this is how VBL CCP values based lifestyle center career planning works

00:52:32.980 | You start with this vision of a lifestyle that resonates with you and for you. It sounds like this will be a lifestyle vision

00:52:39.900 | That has some definition of excitement. I don't know what that means. It could be excitement. It might have to do with

00:52:45.820 | Non-professional projects or activities or hobbies or skills that you're trying to build it might be excitement in terms of a

00:52:54.820 | radical move to a new location

00:52:56.820 | That's very intentional about where you're going to be raising your kid and what your day-to-day life is going to be like you're in

00:53:01.580 | A cabin somewhere as opposed to an apartment in Northern, Virginia, or it could be a professional vision changing your job going out on your own

00:53:07.980 | shifting over to a

00:53:10.700 | Combination freelance whatever but if that excitement is something that resonates with you

00:53:14.980 | You need a vision that resonates that vision should include that excitement and then you start working backwards

00:53:20.220 | What are the moves I can begin making given the capital I have right now

00:53:23.480 | Career and otherwise that move me closer to that vision and now you have something you're looking at now

00:53:28.660 | You're making progress and now you're moving towards something that's going to resonate more. So we have the transient effect

00:53:33.080 | It's going to be four months your new father don't extrapolate from these four months any aspects of your life

00:53:38.080 | Don't extrapolate to what your life is going to be like, but as you leave that phase

00:53:41.580 | If you feel like your life is dull

00:53:44.340 | You're living the wrong vision. It's not your vision. It's a different vision. So build one that's more exciting

00:53:50.460 | All

00:53:51.820 | Right, who do we got next?

00:53:53.620 | Next question is from Jeff in the absence of having a known activity to do next

00:53:58.860 | I often get trapped doom scrolling in some way or the other for example

00:54:02.220 | If they're shutting down from work or having experienced a poor night's sleep. I'm too tired to focus on reading. So I end up scrolling reddit

00:54:08.540 | Well Jeff what we need to do here is work on your cognitive wiring right now

00:54:15.820 | Your cognitive wiring has learned

00:54:18.580 | Looking at this screen

00:54:20.580 | Seeing reddit comments gives me this little bit of hit of something and that's what you're jonesing for

00:54:25.960 | So anything that's not that is taking a lot of energy and intention from you

00:54:30.260 | So if you're at all tired, like well, that's just what I'm going to do. We're used to this from the addiction community

00:54:35.200 | You know, this is my when I'm stressed I pick up a cigarette

00:54:38.820 | When I'm sad, I pick up a drink right? There's there's all of these addictive

00:54:46.020 | Behaviors that historically you build these

00:54:48.740 | Connections in your brain that when you feel a certain way you go to the behavior and when you look at these

00:54:54.700 | solutions to addiction from the addiction

00:54:56.980 | community often they're built around

00:54:59.180 | replacement activities

00:55:01.780 | Okay, you need something else you do when you're stressed instead of picking up the cigarette and you have to figure out how to

00:55:08.020 | How to make that habit

00:55:10.940 | Replace the original right this is why

00:55:13.680 | You know, you might see a lot of heavy coffee drinkers among those who have just quit a substance and other types of substance abuse

00:55:20.100 | They're replacing the activity with something else

00:55:21.780 | They can go to or carrot sticks used to be a big one

00:55:24.000 | Are you see a lot of people leaving a substance addiction who get really fit because their exercise is replacing?

00:55:30.100 | They have to have a replacement activity these connections get really strong now

00:55:33.900 | The behavioral addictions created by things like doom scrolling reddit are not nearly as strong as substance addictions

00:55:39.220 | There's no chemical here that's crossing the blood-brain barrier and messing around with your actual

00:55:43.140 | neurotransmitter

00:55:45.860 | Uptake so our

00:55:47.900 | Challenge here is not as hard as stopping smoking when you get stressed, but we have the same principles

00:55:52.420 | so what I would do is a

00:55:55.060 | Look at replacement activities

00:55:57.460 | high quality leisure activities at all different levels of energy

00:56:02.420 | Requirements that you pursue and build in the habit and find enjoyment on some that require very little energy at all

00:56:08.780 | Some that require more energy and then to add some obstacles to the current addictive behavior

00:56:14.500 | I would say practice the phone for your method when you come home you plugged up phone in in your foyer of your house

00:56:19.880 | It's there if you need to go look something up

00:56:21.580 | But it's not right there in their pocket when you're in the armchair

00:56:24.340 | You're at the dinner table. You're trying to watch a TV show

00:56:26.660 | You would have to get up and go find it

00:56:28.340 | To go to read it and you would have to read read it standing up in the foyer

00:56:32.380 | And you're like, I'm not gonna do that

00:56:33.620 | So you have a little bit of an obstacle and then you invest in trying to find these other activities

00:56:38.160 | It could be moving to fun books paperback books

00:56:40.540 | Finding you know

00:56:42.420 | 1970s era pocket paperbacks of spy thrillers things that don't take energy to read that you get used to thinking they're fun

00:56:48.380 | Could be listening to the radio or sports on the radio yard work or craft magazine reading

00:56:53.480 | TV watching walking with an audiobook different types of exercise all sorts of activities you can through practice and intention

00:56:59.900 | Have them build up connections of this is what I do when I'm tired and I'm bored and I get a lot of fulfillment

00:57:05.260 | out of it

00:57:06.220 | so you got to go find and

00:57:08.220 | cultivate the alternatives and make the

00:57:10.900 | Behavior you're trying to get away from a little bit more difficult and then give it two weeks

00:57:15.460 | Takes about two weeks and you will find I have very little interest in doom scrolling

00:57:19.300 | But I do I put on the baseball game on the radio and if it's a little earlier

00:57:23.160 | I like to go for a walk and listen to a funny podcast

00:57:26.460 | It's not that hard to get these alternatives, but you do have to do a little bit of work

00:57:31.420 | Jeremy and Jeff got a lot of J's here. All right, let's break that trend Jesse. Who's our next question from is

00:57:37.780 | Is it a guy with a J name?

00:57:39.700 | Next question is from Shelly. Actually, there we go

00:57:42.180 | You have talked about unrestricted smartphone usage not being a good idea for kids

00:57:47.040 | Do you think heavy smartphone usage by retirees can worsen their cognitive skills?

00:57:51.900 | My mother is 65 and their smartphone usage has really shot up since they retired

00:57:57.980 | It's really common you you hear about this a lot people's parents of our generation their parents retire and

00:58:04.020 | For the first time really begin using a smartphone. They don't have nearly as much to do

00:58:09.020 | There's not as much structure to their activities and they get really caught up with

00:58:12.700 | Online all the time hitting that dopamine

00:58:15.300 | It's like the kid who is raised without having access to sugar

00:58:19.380 | And when they first get to college and have a meal plan card are buying Twinkies every day at the convenience store

00:58:25.460 | Because like wow, I didn't realize this stuff tasted so great. I'm gonna eat these every day. So that it is a big problem

00:58:30.340 | I hear about it a lot

00:58:32.060 | Um, if you're retiring that I was like, yeah, keep that in mind

00:58:35.180 | You need to more so than you had to when you were working and raising kids and doing all this other stuff

00:58:40.460 | You have to more than you did back then really structure your leisure time. What do I want to do with my time?

00:58:46.180 | I think using the deep life buckets are a great way forward. Here's the aspects of my life now that I'm retired

00:58:51.660 | Let me work on each but keystone habits and rules in place and then overhaul

00:58:55.540 | One by one these aspects of my life choose at least one bucket to make a radical investment in so where you make a radical

00:59:02.140 | Move to support that bucket. You should always have at least one where you're doing that

00:59:05.100 | So if it's Constitution, you're like I'm gonna be one of these super fit 70 year olds or if it's contemplation

00:59:11.680 | You might get very seriously involved in your church or whatever it is, right?

00:59:14.860 | You got to put a lot of energy into that because idle hands are the devil's playground and that's going to be the case

00:59:21.540 | Whether you're 65 or you're 16

00:59:23.900 | So I'd be careful about it. Now if it's your own parent, it's not what you can do. I mean you could

00:59:30.380 | Gently tell them about digital minimalism and etc. But you know, what?

00:59:34.840 | Was Dave Ramsey calls it?

00:59:37.620 | Was it like diaper bum wiping syndrome or something? It's like if I change your diaper, I'm not gonna take advice from you

00:59:43.380 | So it's very hard

00:59:44.740 | Look if you're 70, you know, someone who's 75 and is on their phone all the time

00:59:48.860 | Now you can also say they've earned whatever they want to do. I mean if they've had a long life

00:59:53.700 | They've done a lot of things and if that's what they want to do

00:59:55.480 | I'm not gonna stop them. But if I myself was retiring I wouldn't want to end up

00:59:59.940 | I think that's a in some sense a waste of these years. So if it's yourself getting older

01:00:03.880 | Really focus on structuring building around the buckets

01:00:07.540 | It's more important now than it's ever been if you know someone who's older who's on their phone too much, you know

01:00:12.400 | You can tell them about this type of stuff, but I just wouldn't expect much changes

01:00:18.740 | Alright who Dave Ramsey gets these calls all the time by the way, yeah parents like my parents are yeah

01:00:24.460 | Doing their finances wrong and his answer is always like you're not gonna be able to change that or my parents are eating unhealthy

01:00:30.880 | Yeah, it's like you're not gonna change that. Yeah. Yeah that that one you're gonna have to let their friends do that

01:00:35.620 | Their parents aren't gonna listen to you

01:00:37.620 | Hey, did you see by the way speaking of Dave Ramsey

01:00:40.940 | My old friend Ramit Sethi has his new finance show out on a Netflix

01:00:46.660 | I saw he came out with a book and I listened to a podcast on the divine

01:00:51.380 | So he has a new he has a new show how to be rich sort of a big splashy Netflix show

01:00:56.220 | It's like a net Dave Ramsey type thing

01:00:58.140 | He goes and sits down with couples who are having financial issues and like helps him with it

01:01:03.460 | That's what this podcast is about - yeah, so there's a TV version. It's kind of stressful. I

01:01:08.220 | Would be so bad at this, you know me like I have a very limited quota for how long I want to be around other people

01:01:15.460 | You know, I'm not extroverted and they have to like work with all these really tense situations

01:01:20.340 | We're like that he hasn't told her about the money he spent on this and they're also upset

01:01:24.580 | I would just be crawling for the exit but Ramit's great with that type of stuff. He's big into like living a life that like

01:01:31.780 | Designing a life that wouldn't be hindered by money and then trying to design the same as your value base career cycle centric planning

01:01:39.680 | Yeah, he's my I've known him since

01:01:41.680 | like 2004 2005

01:01:44.460 | I

01:01:45.940 | Remember Ramit was the first person to tell me he's like I have this friend and his name's Tim Ferris and he wrote this book

01:01:52.340 | It's really gonna be big and I think you should read it. I remember that he was buddies with Tim back then

01:01:56.420 | His brother is cool to Manish

01:01:58.740 | Entrepreneur

01:02:01.700 | Cool family. Oh and I wrote about Manish's in one of my books. So it's all yeah all connected. Oh connected

01:02:07.340 | All right. Let's say let's do another question. What do we got?

01:02:09.580 | All right. Next question is from Ryan

01:02:12.540 | Your audience knows that you're not prone to adopt software devices just because they're new or make a claim to improve your life

01:02:18.660 | Could you give some guidelines on how to think about adopting new technology or software?

01:02:22.900 | It's like Ryan my default approach is just to avoid new things

01:02:26.860 | If I can avoid it, I will if I can kludge together something. I'm already working. That's what I'll do

01:02:32.760 | And then if I finally decide to use something

01:02:35.640 | Very likely to stop using it

01:02:38.780 | I'll be alright. I'm kind of using this but my default is to get frustrated and did not use it to fall away from it

01:02:44.180 | Or to stop using it. I'm not a big believer in

01:02:47.660 | the techno utopian vision of cybernetic productivity

01:02:50.740 | That with the right combination of tools and human you unlock these new levels of production

01:02:58.980 | I often feel that the chore of organizing information and

01:03:03.420 | action and making plans, you know, it's a

01:03:07.500 | Militarian chore. It's a rote chore. It's not that interesting

01:03:11.620 | You need some sort of system that can keep track of this stuff

01:03:14.900 | But simplicity and low friction is what's really important. That's something you can just do repeatedly

01:03:19.340 | You don't have too much friction to get in the way

01:03:21.060 | The difference between a good system and a bad system is a difference of four minutes in your daily planning

01:03:27.780 | It doesn't really matter and so the overhead of trying to optimize

01:03:31.660 | Technology tools is often worse than just you have something that works good enough

01:03:37.180 | I got an email the other day. I forgot exactly what the wording was, but they're talking about like how could you

01:03:42.620 | How could you be leaving all this productivity on the table that if you they were upset with I guess that I was using incompatible

01:03:50.100 | technology systems of my when I track my tasks that I have Trello and

01:03:54.780 | Google Docs and

01:03:57.420 | Whatever a Google Calendar and other thing you could have a seamless

01:04:01.540 | System they were saying where everything kind of connects together and you could automate certain things and how could you give up all that productivity?

01:04:07.460 | Here's what that's giving up

01:04:09.420 | The difference between I spend three minutes or six minutes on Monday morning making my plan for the day. It doesn't matter

01:04:16.620 | What matters is like the 60 minutes I spend actually trying to do something good

01:04:21.700 | Do I give it my full attention and don't context which that makes a difference whether it takes me

01:04:25.980 | I automatically have things jump into my you know notion board or I manually move it who cares is we're talking minutes out of out of

01:04:33.700 | thousands of minutes that happen in the week, so

01:04:36.740 | To me new stuff is annoying

01:04:38.500 | So I'm usually relatively reluctant and then once I let it in I let it fall back out unless it really earns its place

01:04:44.420 | And then if it does I'm really loyal to it. I would say the latest tool that's really earned its place technological tool

01:04:49.820 | That's earned its place in my life in the sense that I didn't use before and now I use it regularly is probably Scrivener

01:04:56.940 | Probably the writing software Scrivener had enough advantages over just using Microsoft Word that it's stuck

01:05:05.860 | I came into it tentatively, but I've now written a

01:05:08.980 | Full book in it and probably a dozen New Yorker articles using it and it's stuck

01:05:15.220 | So it really earned its keep by doing something nothing else was doing in a way that consistently made my life better

01:05:21.420 | That's what I'm really looking for and if it doesn't do that. It's probably not gonna probably not gonna stick around

01:05:26.060 | Yeah, I got some pushback from we did that notebook fallacy piece

01:05:31.940 | Yeah, where I said like looks professional idea people

01:05:35.780 | Don't spend very much time

01:05:38.540 | managing or tracking or building systems to control their ideas the the

01:05:43.300 | Proper organization and controlling and categorization and linking of ideas and digital systems

01:05:48.500 | It's just not something that professional thinkers actually spend much time doing and there's sort of like a correlation between that

01:05:53.300 | It's a lot of people who like to do that and did not like that claim. Mm-hmm. That's true

01:05:59.380 | Professional thinkers have plenty of ideas that they know it all it's all down to

01:06:02.460 | Execution. Yeah. Yeah, in fact not having a system could be an advantage because if an idea sticks around I

01:06:11.100 | Didn't write it down anywhere, but it won't go away

01:06:13.700 | That's how I finally convinced myself

01:06:15.540 | All right

01:06:15.900 | Maybe this is the one I need to act on so like for like a movie producer or a screenwriter director the idea not leaving them

01:06:23.260 | Actually is what they're looking for to see if an idea is good

01:06:26.340 | So in some sense having some sort of complicated Zettelkasten system that's constantly showing them things that could be interesting to making connections would defeat

01:06:32.900 | the point

01:06:33.540 | Mm-hmm

01:06:34.940 | All right. Let's uh, let's do one more. Let's keep rolling here. All right last questions from Patrick. Thanks for your work

01:06:40.700 | I got a note by my doctoral supervisor handling me handing me a world without email

01:06:46.100 | Which changed my life now, I feel more intentional about my choices than ever before. Here's my question

01:06:51.740 | What advice do you have on staying deep when traveling to academic conferences?

01:06:56.540 | So there's a little bit more background on here Patrick is

01:06:59.620 | He's a PhD student maybe a postdoc now and he's starting to travel

01:07:03.980 | I guess his timing was such that a lot of his

01:07:06.340 | Education had been during the pandemic where things were virtual now. He's traveling again. So he's wondering about it

01:07:11.580 | I traveled a lot in my academic career, especially as a grad student all throughout grad school into my postdoc years

01:07:18.380 | traveled the world

01:07:21.020 | Because what happens is advisors don't want to go to all of these places to present papers because it's a pain

01:07:27.220 | That's what grad students are for and so I I spent my 20s

01:07:31.300 | Traveling all over Europe and South America and Canada in the US presenting papers and traveling on the cheap, etc

01:07:37.500 | So I have a big experience with it. I would say Patrick don't worry about being deep while traveling for conferences

01:07:43.100 | Here's my advice

01:07:45.660 | Wander whatever city you get to wander the city. I've spent a lot of time wandering a lot of cities around the world

01:07:51.580 | Meet people at your conference socialize learn who people are relationship building. It makes it a much more interesting experience

01:07:59.900 | Bring along what I call optional deep work something you can work on if you have time, but it's not necessary

01:08:06.780 | It's not my productivity depends on me finishing this while I'm at conferences

01:08:10.860 | I would sometimes find myself in that situation like a grant deadline and I had to finish at the conference

01:08:16.020 | But I prefer to have it be optional and if you do do deep work while at a conference

01:08:19.700 | Find a really cool place to do it

01:08:22.180 | This was a big challenge of mine. I loved finding really cool places to write when I was traveling around the world

01:08:29.420 | You know off the beaten path I can sit on a bench

01:08:33.740 | Overlooking the the river in Paris. I remember riding on a rooftop bar in Bologna

01:08:40.860 | And that's what I really enjoyed this trying to find interesting places to work

01:08:44.860 | And then finally my whole thing when I was traveling Patrick for conferences bring books

01:08:49.380 | You're excited to read you got the plane ride. You have this downtime. You're waiting the airport

01:08:54.180 | Bring a new book. This fun. Like I can't wait to read this and enjoy it

01:08:59.380 | Academic travel can be fun. So don't don't over productivity a size it you have plenty of time for that

01:09:05.500 | All right. So speaking of books Jesse. I want to get to the books

01:09:09.060 | I read in March

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01:12:39.060 | All right, Jesse, let's do some books

01:12:42.220 | Let's do it. All right. So these are the five books I read in March 2023

01:12:46.780 | We're recording this in April. So it still counts, even though you're gonna hear this in May

01:12:50.660 | the first book a

01:12:53.580 | short novel by Stephen King called the Colorado kid

01:12:57.540 | You know, I found this was a drugstore in Clearwater, Florida

01:13:04.440 | I was looking for another book to read

01:13:07.180 | I wanted something more fun as in a CVS in Clearwater Beach in Clearwater, Florida

01:13:11.660 | And they had a small book section

01:13:15.220 | Which was all Daniel Steele and then for some reason

01:13:19.200 | They had a hard case crime

01:13:21.820 | Edition of the Colorado kid by Stephen King. So it's this cool sort of short

01:13:25.440 | It's called an anti mystery because it's a it's a hard-boiled mystery type novel, but they never get to a solution

01:13:32.460 | it's sort of postmodern and

01:13:34.060 | And so you're you're learning about this case about this body that washed up on the shore of this small island in Maine

01:13:40.100 | And there's these two hard-nosed old newspaper men and they're telling it to their intern this young woman

01:13:45.420 | They're kind of walking through the story and these clues kind of pile up

01:13:48.740 | And no resolutions reached and so it's an anti-mystery. It's kind of deconstructing mystery. I love that hard case crime

01:13:56.740 | They did use beautiful cover art

01:13:58.860 | They re-released all of Michael Crichton's books. He wrote under a pseudonym in

01:14:03.540 | Med school they call them the med school files the med school books all with cool covers. Anyways, it was fun

01:14:09.320 | I read it on the beach and

01:14:11.320 | Enjoyed it nice, but just felt serendipitous. Why would that book?

01:14:16.100 | this

01:14:18.460 | 2003 release from hard case crime. Why would that show up in this random CVS?

01:14:22.780 | But it was there and so I felt like it was a sign

01:14:25.680 | But I also read the unsettlers by Mark Sundin

01:14:31.060 | this one of these books where you have a sort of

01:14:36.460 | Very literate

01:14:38.320 | Harper style writer who sets out on sort of a personal quest and in this case

01:14:42.840 | He goes and spends times with people who lived very unconventional lives

01:14:46.160 | Sort of simple intentional lives of various types and and it's it's him spending time with these people and then reflecting on his own life

01:14:54.440 | So it's part memoir part observation and I was it was kind of interesting

01:14:58.320 | Yeah, you know, I bought this book a long time ago and then I just took it off my library shelf and read it

01:15:03.640 | I enjoyed it. He spent time with some people living very simply in Missouri and some urban farmers in Detroit

01:15:09.780 | among some others

01:15:12.640 | That's good

01:15:14.680 | does it uh

01:15:16.600 | Motivate you to get your cabin

01:15:18.600 | You know the weird thing about it

01:15:20.400 | And I think there's just the uncanny valley is that when he was hanging out with other young people like people are our age or younger

01:15:25.040 | They kind of annoyed you

01:15:27.800 | you know, but when he was talking about the the generation before who had like

01:15:33.400 | Moved to these farms or whatever in the 70s. It was fine. Like yeah, these people are doing what they're doing

01:15:39.180 | But when it was like other young people

01:15:41.180 | It made me feel a little curmudgeonly. I mean, I'm mr. Deep life

01:15:44.880 | There were there were cases from like I think you need a good job

01:15:47.940 | You know

01:15:48.880 | Because there's like some of this over-the-top stuff these people that really we put on capes and bike around the country to try to raise

01:15:53.980 | Awareness about bringing together the earth and then and you know it some of it felt like there's people super far adrift

01:16:00.480 | Yeah, not like okay. Here's what some they didn't go through a deep life

01:16:04.460 | Systematic exercise I'd say it's there's a lot of like big swings happening

01:16:08.080 | and

01:16:09.720 | So it's just like you feel like some of the young people I know people like that

01:16:12.800 | They always have a big idea and it's kind of weird and it's it's you know

01:16:16.680 | But then some of the people are really cool, but Mark's a great writer and it was interesting

01:16:20.960 | It really got me thinking but it was that book that led me to my next book

01:16:24.000 | Which was living the good life by Helen Scott nearing which we did a whole deep dive on a few weeks ago

01:16:30.080 | I

01:16:31.120 | Forgot exactly what we called it simple life or something like that

01:16:34.440 | But I read that after the unsettlers and this was the same idea like Helen Scott nearing leaving Manhattan and moving to the this farm in

01:16:42.520 | Vermont and homesteading but because they're depression era people there's this you they're not people you know, and then you can come at them

01:16:49.600 | With an objective remove and it's much more easy to sort of find aspiration and and draw example out of them

01:16:56.460 | So anyways, that book was cool. It was written in the 50s and I I did a whole deep dive on it

01:17:01.260 | So living the simple life or something like that. Yeah, so look for that episode if you want to find out more about it

01:17:06.800 | I bought an old version of that. I

01:17:08.800 | Felt like I needed a I got the 1974 edition

01:17:11.940 | Those type of books like to read in the original editions. I read a novel CJ box

01:17:17.400 | Had a somewhat recent novel called shadows real. I think I bought this in an airport somewhere

01:17:22.020 | I like CJ box

01:17:24.500 | he's his whole series is a game warden in Wyoming Joe Pickett and

01:17:30.880 | It's it's cool. I like the Wyoming stuff. This one's got a lot going on

01:17:35.100 | Stolen Falcons

01:17:39.220 | black lives matter protest

01:17:41.500 | murderous henchmen seeking stolen Nazi memorabilia

01:17:46.140 | Which has shown up in Wyoming and ended up in the possession of Joe Pickett's wife all of this happening in the same book

01:17:53.380 | That's fine

01:17:55.300 | So stolen Nazi memorabilia that stuff that the Nazis stole like while they were in power and then no GI

01:18:01.860 | American GI took when they raided the Eagle's Nest

01:18:06.820 | Hitler's whatever

01:18:09.620 | and

01:18:10.660 | I guess there was something I don't want to spoil too much

01:18:13.580 | But there was a photo album that a GI brought home

01:18:16.560 | To Wyoming to where Joe Pickett lives and it got passed down to his son and there's something

01:18:22.980 | incriminating in there for I guess a political leader now in Eastern Europe and so he sends

01:18:29.580 | These henchmen the big sleep County to go get it back

01:18:32.820 | And they're kind of murderers and kill a bunch of people and but anyways someone drops it off at the library

01:18:38.100 | Joe Pickett's wife is a librarian

01:18:39.420 | So she has it and they're coming to there they're kind of lurking around the house and and all this type of stuff is going on

01:18:44.500 | You know, it's interesting CJ box has got into some Twitter con Twitter countries aren't real controversies, but he's

01:18:50.860 | He's moved more. There's like more politics in his book

01:18:53.680 | Like not super right-wing politics, but like right-of-center politics, you know

01:18:59.060 | And then he's getting pushback like why is this it's just like why is this so right wing or something?

01:19:03.820 | And he says that's Joe. He's like these are the for a what's he trying to say?

01:19:08.900 | He's saying these are the politics of this makes sense. If you were a game ward in Wyoming. This is not my politics

01:19:16.020 | This is the politics of the world of the book. So he's in this interesting

01:19:19.260 | Back and forth. I was like, wow, this is interesting. There's a whole plot line in here about

01:19:23.740 | Antifa and in the book it's all

01:19:28.420 | Really

01:19:32.140 | overprivileged white kids from rich households who are like dressing up and stuff and

01:19:37.060 | Are like completely hopeless and are being manipulated by this evil guy who stole the Falcons

01:19:42.020 | So it's like the whole plot line this whole like anti-antifa

01:19:46.140 | It's like pro black life matter

01:19:48.140 | anti-antifa like all this stuff is in

01:19:51.140 | CJ box when I think of CJ box is typically like Joe Pickett is

01:19:55.500 | You know, there's been a murder in the woods and he's in the game board

01:19:59.140 | And so I don't know CJ is going in interesting places

01:20:01.140 | When was it written that's pretty recent because it's all I mean it takes place during the like

01:20:07.380 | It must take place during the when we're all those those protests and riots and stuff was 2020, right?

01:20:13.260 | So it has been written after that. I don't read a lot of CJ, but I always like the idea of liking genre books

01:20:20.180 | detective books or these type of books and

01:20:23.220 | I just I never really get into I never really have gotten into a series like the last genre writer

01:20:28.760 | I really just read everything was Michael Crichton when I was when I was young

01:20:31.860 | But these new ones were like here's here's the character

01:20:34.640 | You know, it's like Hieronymus Bosch and Connelly or Joe Pickett and CJ box and here's the character and every year

01:20:41.980 | There's a new book and it's this character. I

01:20:44.140 | Really love the idea of being really into those but it just doesn't click with me even the good ones like CJ box is fine

01:20:50.340 | You know Connelly is much better like Michael Connelly is great at this, but I just can't get into I've read some

01:20:55.380 | It just doesn't I don't know why it doesn't do it for me. It's like fantasy. Like I should like fantasy books and

01:21:01.580 | I have a hard time

01:21:04.740 | And I blame Brandon Sanderson

01:21:06.980 | Somehow his fault like I should be a fantasy book fan

01:21:11.540 | But you know, I don't I get bored. It's too much like

01:21:14.500 | Thou is the wizard staff will smite the dwarf or whatever and I should love that stuff and I don't know

01:21:20.860 | Maybe it's just fiction. I'm just not a accomplished fiction writer. How many of the Stephen King books have you read?

01:21:26.060 | I have a hard time with King

01:21:28.060 | Because they're so long and he you know, he all of his good books

01:21:31.300 | He wrote on coke and it's all like stream of content just like boom. It's all over the place

01:21:35.500 | It's really interesting approach, but it's like not my style

01:21:39.900 | So I like the short ones like the Colorado kid is like great King

01:21:42.820 | Yeah, but I read like 300 pages of fairy tale and finally gave up because really it's it's it's a very interesting tone

01:21:49.820 | it's very accessible and

01:21:51.820 | Conversational and I don't know it just feels too like it's just going and things or he's spinning out ideas and doing this and that

01:21:59.620 | And I don't know. It's not my style. I like a tighter a tighter thing, but I should like Stephen King, you know

01:22:05.540 | I mean, I'm telling you there's all these books. I should like I did read name of the wind

01:22:09.140 | I did actually read all of name of the wind and I did enjoy it. So kudos Brandon Sanderson

01:22:13.860 | For name of the wind I did read that it was good and I read half of the second one and then I sort of

01:22:19.540 | Lost steam. I think it's an issue I have with fiction

01:22:21.820 | But my last book was also fiction. So I have three

01:22:24.980 | Three novels on my list. Mm-hmm. The last one was Haven by Emma Donahue and it's just a novel about

01:22:33.700 | The monks who

01:22:38.420 | Inhabited Skellig Island off of the west coast of Ireland

01:22:42.240 | So there's this like desolate rock

01:22:44.740 | Where there's a real monastery that was built on there during the medieval period and I saw it. I was out there

01:22:51.080 | Years ago. I spent some time in Dingle on the west coast of Ireland

01:22:55.960 | Which is real near real near to there and it's a real place a real monastery. They used it the film scenes from

01:23:01.360 | The rise of Skywalker. So like the place where Luke Skywalker is like hiding away on that island

01:23:06.880 | That's Skellig Island. And so this is a fictionalizes historical fiction. So it's a fictionalized account of like the original

01:23:13.160 | monks and it just starts inland in Ireland and they sort of make their way out there and they try to

01:23:19.080 | They try to tame it and inhabit and that's the book. That was pretty good. Gotta be cold out there on that island

01:23:24.300 | Yeah, it's not optimal

01:23:25.660 | Not optimal. I looked up the reality. So in reality

01:23:30.420 | They used it seasonally for a while like the actual way it turns out is they would they raise sheep on it

01:23:37.020 | And they would use it seasonally. It's not far from land

01:23:39.460 | So the monks would come out there and they would stay on there during the summer when they're because they would keep sheep there

01:23:44.920 | But they wouldn't live there full-time. They wouldn't live there in the winter

01:23:46.860 | They'd come back to the mainland it turns out to be the reality and then and then at some point they built some more permanent

01:23:51.820 | stuff and then the Vikings just

01:23:53.820 | You know how the Vikings do

01:23:57.340 | It was good. I give it like a 7 out of 10. It was like fine writing not great writing. That's pretty good

01:24:03.580 | Yeah, not like a great novel but also better than shadows real by CJ box. So like on the on the scale

01:24:10.800 | it's a it's

01:24:13.260 | There is no Falcons being stolen or murderous Nazi Nazi henchmen

01:24:17.580 | That's pretty good book, but it wasn't my I'm not thinking I got to recommend this to everybody

01:24:21.380 | But I'm proud of myself for reading three novels. Yeah, like for me

01:24:25.820 | the uncharacteristic

01:24:27.820 | All right. Well anyways speaking of

01:24:29.900 | Novels, I'll just do with novels, but we should wrap it up

01:24:33.940 | Thank you everyone for listening. Today's episode. We'll be back with another episode next week and

01:24:40.020 | Until then as always stay deep

01:24:42.620 | [MUSIC]

Ep 246: Are Smartphones Bad for Kids?

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