So today I wanna talk about digital distraction. One of the big issues we face with our digital lives is the following dual reality. On the one hand, we are not happy with our relationship with the type of digital content that's delivered through our phones. We're spending too much time looking at it.

We don't love the quality of what we're looking at during all that time. On the other hand, calls to step away from new and popular technologies can seem regressive or unsustainable. I mean, what are we gonna do? Just pretend like phones don't exist, like people did not ever invent social media.

So we're sort of trapped between both unhappiness and inevitability with distracting digital content. So what I wanna do today is offer an interesting new way to think about and navigate these challenges. At the core of this new way is going to be an analogy about food. So this is actually based off of a newsletter article I published a couple of weeks ago.

So you can also find the article at calnewport.com/blog, or if you subscribe, check your newsletter. All right, so I opened up this essay and I wanna open up this discussion with something I noticed when I was in London a few weeks ago. There was a big marketing push going on when I was in London for the paperback edition of Chris Van Toleken's big UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People.

Why do we all eat stuff that isn't food and why can't we stop? So this was in all of the bookstores that I could see in London and I went to a lot of bookstores in London because you know me, that's the type of thing I do. All right, so I had to find out more about this.

I ended up looking at the book and I discovered this term ultra-processed food, which is at the core of Van Toleken's book is a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system and it was inspired by Michael Pollan's concept of edible food-like substances, which he talks about in his book, In Defense of Food.

So ultra-processed foods are made by breaking down real food to their organic building blocks. You might take soy, you might take corn and break it down into these organic building blocks and then you reconstitute new fake food from these organic building blocks that you fill with a lot of sugar and salt and fat and you soak in all sorts of other types of chemicals to make them shelf-sable or to have the right mouthfeel and you end up with these, as Pollan would call them, edible food-like substances that are not like any real food that exists, but they're hyper-palatable.

Once you start eating them, you can't stop to eat, which is a problem because they're highly caloric and they're junk. Like they're made from base building blocks and full of salt and full of fat. So very bad for us. This book was all about how ultra-processed foods is very profitable, is very bad for us.

We should basically avoid them and it's causing huge amounts of problems in our current health system. So once I learned about this, this made me think a little bit about our problems with digital content. I began to come up with what I think is a useful analogy between digital content and the way we think about food.

So I'm gonna bring up a diagram here for those who are watching as opposed to just listening. Jesse, people will be disappointed to see that I actually pre-typed out the words here so you don't get to see me actually write by hand the words, which looks roughly as you would expect if you tried to teach writing to an inebriated chimpanzee.

I would say that's roughly what my handwriting looks like when I try to write on screen. So I typed this out. Instead, I'm making a bit of like a food pyramid here. And what I'm gonna do is analogize types of food, starting with minimally processed, moving up to moderately processed and ending with ultra-processed.

So the food hierarchy that nutritionists use right now, I'm going to analogize these to types of technology. And we're gonna find this in the end to be useful for how to think about the most distracting of technologies. So at the bottom of this pyramid, we have minimally processed. So for food, minimally processed food is gonna describe things like whole foods, right?

So it's an apple, it's a broccoli or something like this, right? We can make a connection between minimally processed foods and printed linguistic media, right? So I'm starting to make a connection now to types of foods and types of media. So I'll draw this on here now, but when it comes to minimally processed, let's think about things like books, linguistic media.

This is a type of media that's been around for a long time, at least 5,000 years, not enough time for a lot of brain evolution, but plenty of time for cultural evolution. We've sort of, our culture has evolved along with written media like books. We sort of have, we know how to deal with them.

Our mind knows how to handle them. There's a lot of quality in written media. So I think about our media equivalent to minimally processed food is gonna be linguistic media like books. Then we move up to moderately processed food. All right, in the world of food, this is where we get things like white bread, dry pasta, and canned soups, all right?

When these came along, we're like, okay, these are, they're more convenient than minimally processed food. They don't require as much prep, but they tend to be higher calories, maybe a little less quality. It's easy to maybe eat a little bit too much. And so, you know, we thought about moderately processed food with some care.

Well, I'm gonna draw a media analogy from moderately processed food to mass media. Right, so you put mass there. It's like television, like radio. I'm also gonna put, I'm putting web two here. That's not quite right, but what I mean by this, I'm gonna mean things like email newsletters and podcasts.

So it's user-generated content, but not super curated, a little higher quality than like a comment on a post or something like this. So that sort of older early web two version of user-generated content, sort of like high quality, low barrier to entry, but hard to find, hard to curate.

Like I have to be convinced to subscribe to an email newsletter. I have to be convinced to subscribe to a podcast. And then we have the ultra processed food at the top, which is more recent. And when it comes to media, I'm gonna analogize this to social content. So I'll put social media.

It's a useful analogy, minimally processed, moderately processed, ultra processed. Now here's the thing, when it comes to food, we know how to deal with each of these levels. The advice is pretty straightforward. You can eat, don't worry about minimally processed food. Go ahead and eat what you want to eat.

When it comes to moderately processed food, have moderation. You don't have to avoid it, but be careful about it. It's very palatable, it's easier. Be careful about eating too much of it. And for ultra processed food, as we now know, eat sparingly. In fact, avoid it altogether if you can.

You don't necessarily need that in your lives. We could have similar advice for the corresponding media. So when we go to the minimally processed level and we get printed linguistic communication like books, as much as you want to read, it's great. Consume as many books as you want. No limit.

Read, read, read. We're not worried about it. When it comes to the moderately processed media, so now mass media like television or online streaming shows or podcasts or email newsletters, have some moderation and maybe look for the higher quality spectrum of these things, right? Like the same way we deal with moderately processed food.

So what might that mean for media? That might mean, for example, schedule. If you're gonna watch TV shows, be like, yeah, at night, I'm gonna watch for like this 90 minutes and here's what I'm gonna watch. And I chose something that's pretty good, pretty high quality, right? As opposed to I just default to watching stuff and I'll binge for hours at a time.

When it comes to something like email newsletters, it's fine to read them. I think email newsletters are great. You don't want them to be a portal to other distractions, just like you don't want processed food to be the portal to binge eating. So maybe use one of these clipping services.

Someone was telling me the other day about a really cool service. One of the listeners emailed me about this, where you can send articles or email newsletters to your Kindle. There's you like press a button, it shoots it to your Kindle. So you can kind of shoot stuff to the Kindle throughout the day.

And then later you're like, I'm gonna go sit on the porch or at like the beer garden at the local whatever. And I'm gonna read these, like I have five articles I found that it's like on my Kindle. So it's not distracting. There's no portals to other types of distraction.

Same thing, podcast, it's fine. Like to listen to these while you're doing other things. Just make sure, for example, that you have a regular dose of vitamin boredom. We talk about this in my book, "Digital Minimalism." You wanna make sure that you don't take all solitude out of your day.

So as long as every day you have a little bit of time where you're doing something boring with nothing in your ear, and every week you have an extended amount of time where you're doing something boring, like going on a long walk without something in your ear, you should be fine.

Otherwise, yeah, you can listen to podcasts. So we can have these like reasonable rules. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, "Slow Productivity, "The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. Here's where things get interesting. When we move up to the ultra-processed level, what do we say about ultra-processed food? Avoid that stuff. Why don't we say something similar about ultra-processed content like social media content?

Like, yeah, use that sparingly, and if possible, actually, you probably just want to avoid that. Now, I want to make this, I mean, this is kind of the key of the discussion here. I want to make this analogy much more precise when it comes to ultra-processed food and social media, 'cause I want to convince you that the way we deal with ultra-processed food is a perfectly reasonable way to think about ultra-processed content like social media content, all right?

So here's the thing about ultra-processed food. We talked about how they build things down to the building blocks and then recombine and build these fake foods that are highly appealing. Something similar is happening with social media content, right? It's not just some vague notion of, like, it's addictive. Something very similar is happening.

So let me get more specific about this, okay? In fact, I'm going to draw this here. So let me go to a clean screen. All right, I'm going to draw this visually. There is a loop that happens when it comes to social content that I think makes this analogy to ultra-processed food more than just a very rough analogy.

So here's the current loop for social media content. We start with, I'm drawing sort of like a blue box here. All right, so Jesse, this is a pool, all right? Why do I have a pool here? Because this is what we start with is in the feedback loop for social content.

You start with a pool of user-produced content that's very large. Lots of people are posting content on TikTok, on Instagram, whatever it is. All right, this then is going to move along the cycle and we are going to have recommendation algorithms. So, you know, there's a computer involved. So I'll draw my world-famous computer drawing.

All right, so we have a computer involved, right? So then we have recommendation algorithms that selects among this very large pool of content to figure out what to show you, the user. So I'll put the user is over here. All right, and then whether you like it or not, then that feedback makes it back to the producers of the content for the pool, right?

So now you're getting this feedback. A lot of people viewed it. Not very many people viewed it. This got a lot of likes. This not get a lot of likes. This got a viral lift. This other thing did not get a viral lift. So that then affects how you produce your content so that it better serves the out, better works with the algorithm and the taste of the users and on and on and on.

The output of this, the effect of all of this is something like what food scientists do with ultra-processed food. So the producers of content in this, constantly getting this feedback about algorithmically mediated consumption, constantly adjusting what they're doing, end up, and this is the cycle of almost any large-scale social platform, end up basically breaking down media content as we know it into its base building blocks and then reconstructing them into these forms that have never existed before, but are hyper-palatable to these very specific dyads between recommendation algorithms and the particular consumption habits of consumers that they're trying to get their media to.

The result is frankenfood, but in media form. So this is why we see really unusual types of content forms suddenly begin to proliferate on these platforms. It's this feedback loop. And this is very similar to what the food scientists do. I'm gonna read a quote from my article on this that gets to the heart of this.

"In this way, the users of social media platforms "simulate something like the food scientist's ability "to break down corn and reconstitute it "into a hyper-palatable edible food-like substance. "What is a TikTok dance mashup, if not a digital Dorito?" All right, so if we go back to this, we're like, okay, this connection between ultra-processed food and social content is not just a lazy analogy.

It's very similar. And so for the same reasons we say, why don't we just avoid ultra-processed food because we will consume a ton of Inez crap, we could say the same thing about social media content. Now, here's why it's really, I think, useful to think about this through this analogous form is that we are comfortable with that food advice.

No one says, if you come out and say, you know what, ultra-processed food, for all these reasons, you should avoid it. No one comes out and says, whoa, you're anti-food. No one says that. No one comes out and says, when you're like, look, just, I would not eat Doritos and Oreos, and this is not real food, and it's weird, it messes with your mind.

No one will say, hey, Luddite, this is the inevitable progress of food technology, don't get in the way of it. No one will say, when you push back on ultra-processed foods, well, that's just because you're older. The kids, see, this was invented, Fruit Roll-Ups were invented when we were kids.

We don't say to our parents' generations, well, look, the kids are just more up on more newer foods, and you're just being old-fashioned and are scared of what's new. No, we say, this particular type of food is built in a lab by scientists so that we'll buy a lot of it, and it's very expensive, and it's really bad for us, let's just avoid that.

So when we make this analogy to content, we realize, oh, it's possible to be more selective about digital content without having to be accused of being anti-technology, without having to be accused of ignoring the inevitable progress of technology, without having to be accused of being a sort of kids-these-days codger on their porch trying to yell at the stuff that the young people find natural.

We can instead say, there's all sorts of media content, we can be savvy about how we approach it and read a bunch of books, have some more structure and moderation about stuff like TV and streaming and podcasts, and then stay away from the digital Doritos. It's completely compatible with a healthy media consumption diet.

So that's why I found this analogy to food really useful, because it helped me see how strange and unusual and eccentric and narrow and specific social media content is. And when I see it as ultra-processed food, I can recognize it's high-tech, I can recognize a lot of advances were needed to make this possible, and I can also say, I don't want any of that on my plate.

And so this analogy gives us a way of stepping away from the stuff that's making us unhappy without somehow feeling like we're doing something radical. If you're okay without eating Lay's potato chips every day, it's really not that much different to say, I don't use Instagram every day. All right, so that food analogy I find useful.

That there is something exceptional and unusual and not somehow teleological built into the future of the internet with a lot of this stuff that's happening with social media. It's not the future of the internet, it's food science. It's we've made Snickers bars irresistible, you know? And when I see it that way, I'm like, okay, not for me.

And hopefully we don't have to see that anymore as being some sort of weird, unusual stance. All right, so I don't know, Jesse, ultra-processed content, it doesn't have to be a big political statement not to consume it. - The one thing I think you want to think about is most grocery stores you go into, the middle of the store is basically moderate to ultra-processed food, right?

So it's pretty hard to avoid. You have to really know to stay on the outskirts of the grocery store. - So what's the phone equivalent? It's like you want something about apps on your phone or something like this, the middle of your phone versus the outskirts of your phone.

Yeah, I know, it's the same thing. There's a lot of pressures going into making you, so the store puts it right up front and center, and in our cultural lives, people just keep talking about the stuff that's being spread around it. - And you go in the app store, the most popular apps are probably some of those social media apps that you see and people buy.

- And cultural stories are happening there. But do you buy this analysis, Jesse? It seems to me, before, and even maybe when we started the show, but certainly a few years before that, the talk about social media content, the way I'm talking about it now, is this was this weird profit-seeking diversion from the internet that got really big, but it's really not good for us, and we can kind of move on without it.

That used to be crazy talk, right? I mean, people are like, "What are you talking about? "That is the internet. "This is what the internet is supposed to be." It doesn't feel like crazy talk as much anymore. So now I'm really trying to give people vocabulary and ways of thinking about, yeah, all you're doing is saying no to Doritos.

This is not some anti-technology stance. It's not even a major stance. No one is going to think twice if you don't have the craziest of junk food in your house, like the stuff we had growing up. Do you remember Dunkaroos? - Kind of. - Right? It's not TikTok Dunkaroos.

Dunkaroos was cookies shaped like kangaroos and a bowl of chocolate packaged up with chemicals so it could stay shelf-stable for whatever, and you would dip the cookie in the chocolate. That's what our generation was told. I mean, is that not like the current generation and TikTok? Like, yeah, this is just like what you do on the internet.

We ate Dunkaroos and had fruit by the foot. Remember that? - Oh, yeah. - You'd pull it out. Yeah, and now we're like, "Oh, that was basically poison." I mean, I think that's how we're gonna see this current age of like, "Of course I'm scrolling these videos of people." It's the weird hyper-palatable but foreignness of social content.

Just like on, so on TikTok, it's these weird visual forms. That's just weird. It's not the way we've ever seen content before, but it just works right. On Twitter, I really think it's more, I mean, it's text, but it's more about this weird sort of hyper-argumentative tribal sort of cynical warfare.

Like, it's this tone that has evolved to be like, "This is the Dunkaroos of like text posting." You know? Instagram, I don't know it well, but you get these weird visual niche cultures of like the mom blogger in the white linen, wind-bappled, blowing dresses. He brings her kids to collect wildflowers to put in jars.

And with guys, it's like the muscles and the, you know, I don't know what you're doing, like lifting heavy things by private jet. There's these weird like visual languages that have this kind of compulsion. YouTube can get this like Mr. Beast style editing rhythm that's like unlike anything else that existed before, but it's this feedback loop.

It's just breaking stuff down and reconstituting the way that like works well in these algorithm human diets. So anyways, we don't need it. We don't need ultra processed content. Or if we do, eat sparingly. And don't feel like somehow this has to be at the core of your diet.

I guess we're stretching this analogy pretty far, but. - I love the term digital Dorito. - I mean, that's TikTok, it's digital Dorito. All right, so we've got some questions, a lot of questions on people struggling with tech and distraction and trying to build a more meaningful life. Excited about those.

But first, let's hear briefly from a sponsor. All right, this show is sponsored by Better Help. So we were just talking about all of this ultra processed content. Well, one of the things that can make you do is feel really bad. You know, you're seeing all this weird stuff.

It's shallow, it's lower quality. It gets you in your head and you feel bad. Now, if you're already struggling with what's going on inside your own head, the way you feel about yourself or the world, dealing with ruminations, dealing with anhedonia, all of these things, ultra processed content is only gonna make that worse.

So step one, let's cut out the ultra processed content. Step two, let's get some professional help. If you are unhappy still with this relationship within your head, that's where Better Help enters the scene. If you're thinking of starting therapy, Better Help is a great way to get started. Why?

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So stop comparing or floundering with your ultra processed content or feeling bad inside your head and start focusing with Better Help. Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions today and you will get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com/deepquestions. Following this along on this medical theme, I also wanna talk about our longtime sponsor, ZocDoc, a free app and website where you can search and compare highly rated in-network doctors near you and instantly book appointments with them online.

This is the right way to find healthcare providers. You say, okay, I'm looking for this type of healthcare provider, let me start narrowing my search. I want one nearby. I want one that takes my insurance. I want one who's taking new patients. Let me look at these, great. Now let me look at the reviews in the ZocDoc app or on the ZocDoc website.

So I can see, what do people think? Oh, they really like this doctor. They really like the service, this doctor's office, great. Now let me book my first appointment. Oh, I'll likely be able to do that online straight from the app or website as well. It really just makes sense.

It is the right way to find healthcare providers when you need them. The typical wait time to see a doctor booked on ZocDoc is only between 24 and 72 hours, that's it. There are even some same day appointments. You could, whatever that problem is, stop procrastinating and get the ZocDoc app.

It is also an excuse to use the phrase ZocDoc all the time. People can say, where'd you find that doctor? And you say, oh, ZocDoc.com. Your doctor could ask you, how did you find out about me? And you could say, hey doc, ZocDoc.com is how I got the scoop on the doc.

That's not quite right, Jesse, let's see. Doc, hey doc, ZocDoc.com. And if you looked it up on the doc, if you use the app on a doc and your doctor asks you how you heard about them, you say, hey doc, ZocDoc.com on the doc, et cetera. All right, so anyways, ZocDoc is great.

I have used ZocDoc. I have used it to find healthcare providers. I also have healthcare providers who use it. And so like I can do the paperwork for them online using ZocDoc and it makes them easier. So it is a part of my life too. So go to ZocDoc.com/deep and download the ZocDoc app for free.

You can find a book, a top rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep, ZocDoc.com/deep. Do you remember, Jesse, when we had that competition and people would send in the best ZocDoc taglines? - Yeah. - Like who could have like the longest collection describing, so they had the longest collection of things that rhymed with doc or Zoc and got pretty good.

- Yeah, in the early days too, you used to talk a lot about Greek mythology. - I know, I know. We did elaborate ZocDoc reads and talked a lot about Greek mythology. And we also, it's funny, the reporter or the photographer who was here today was like, why is there a skeleton?

Why is there a skeleton in your office? And I had to explain to them Jesse's skeleton. And this is true story, as I was explaining that, I could see the reporter just ripping the pages from the interview out of his notebook and just crumpling them up and putting them in the garbage can.

Just, the more I explained about Jesse's skeleton, the more I could see, and you know, it was weird. The photographer actually just was pulling the film out of his camera. I mean, it felt a little aggressively unnecessary. He was like, uh-huh, uh-huh, just exposing it to light, just like clearly ruining it.

Now, the article is going to be the full page picture, Jesse's skeleton, and that's going to be like the focus of it. All right, that's enough of this nonsense. Let's do some questions. All right, who do we have? - All right, first question's from Ben. How would you update your book, "How to Win a College," adapted to the challenges of modern day tech, distractibility, email nonsense, et cetera?

Are there new rules you would add? How might you update some of the old rules? - Well, certainly, "How to Win a College" and "How to Become a Straight-A Student" were written in a different time. When I went to college, I arrived without a cell phone and without a laptop.

I ended up with both of those things by the time I left, but that wasn't necessarily normal. I had the laptop because I was doing some computer programming for an optical film company that was sort of one of my jobs to make money, and I had the cell phone because of my business, but it was a different time for sure.

That's what I'm trying to say. So if you read those books, there's not a lot of talk about digital distraction. It just wasn't a big part of college life. There was a time where I thought about doing a revised version of "How to Become a Straight-A Student" in particular, 'cause that's the book that has the most sort of hardcore study advice.

So I thought about doing that, and we actually talked to the publisher about it at the time, and it sort of fell through. I wanted to do a big revised edition, and they didn't really wanna pay a lot of money, and I was like, "Well, I don't know why.

"I don't wanna just do this on spec." And so we kind of let it drop. Now, years later, that was years ago, years later, I'm kind of glad that the book just exists at this moment of time right before this big digital revolution, because it almost gives it a sort of historical feel, like you're getting wisdom from a time past.

I think actually somehow it helps it. Like if I had updated this book to be relevant to like circa 2013, it's just gonna seem dated in a weird way. So I kinda like right now that the book just exists at this pre, you see like how did people study back before there was things like smartphones, and you can get some inspiration out of it.

But what do I tell people today? Like what advice would I change for students? Well, I would say more than ever before, your mind is your greatest tool and differentiator. Most of your peers are very distracted, and this is reducing both the quality of what they're able to produce with their mind, but more importantly, the time it requires them to produce this work.

So if you explicitly cultivate your ability to concentrate, you are gonna have a huge competitive advantage. I didn't have access to that advantage in the early 2000s, 'cause people weren't nearly as distracted as they are today. So there's a huge advance there. A couple of ways to do that.

Never study with your phone. Leave your phone in your dorm, go somewhere else to study. It's like the number one thing I tell the modern students. Your friends will survive not being in touch with you for a couple hours, they'll get used to it. Do not have your phone with you.

Turn the internet off on your laptop if you're using your laptop. Force yourself to study disconnected. This will mean at first that your study sessions are shorter, that's fine. 20 minutes and then you can go use the public computer, or 20 minutes and you go back and get your phone and then come back and do another 20 minutes.

As you get more comfortable, you can make that 30 minutes, then 40 minutes, and eventually you wanna be able to do 90 minutes to two hours fully disconnected. Studying disconnected. Really disconnected. Not trying to not look at your phone, but really disconnected. Night and day difference than studying with connectivity.

The contact shifting is just not there. It will feel uncomfortable, but your brain is gonna be like you're on the limitless pill. At least as compared to what it's like when you have to keep glancing at unrelated text messages, social media, and internet posts. So study without the internet.

Don't even have your phone in the same building as where you're studying. Embrace boredom on a regular basis. Get used to walking between classes, going and getting lunch, without putting anything in your ear or anything in front of your eyes. You don't have to be bored all the time, but you have to be very comfortable with being alone with your own thoughts.

Because what is studying? What is trying to write? What is trying to come up with something original on a test? You alone with your own thoughts, making sense of them. You have to be comfortable with your interior cognitive space. So practice that specifically. Outside of studying, practice just being alone with your own thoughts.

Do it at least once every day. I would recommend do not use ultra-processed content. You don't need to be on TikTok. It's not, it's very popular among college kids, but it's not, from what I understand from the course I taught last summer, it's not like heavily integrated into your social interactions.

Don't use TikTok. Don't use Instagram. Don't be super plugged into the ultra-processed content world. 'Cause look, you're a cognitive athlete when you're in college. You're trying to make your way to the majors. The baseball analogy would be, college is like you're in A-ball. You're trying to get up to speed, learn how to hit a major league fastball, get in shape so you have a shot at the majors.

When you're in A-ball as a baseball player, you're not gonna eat a bunch of junk food. Well, when you're in cognitive A-ball, don't consume a bunch of junk media. So be very wary about ultra-processed content. People might think it's weird at first you're not doing that, but actually it will probably differentiate you later from someone who's interesting.

And read as much as you can. Outside of your school assignments, read, read, read, read. This is gonna be the equivalent of just jogging and doing a lot of pull-ups as an athlete. It's really important. All right, so I'll do a quick summary of everything I just said. Your mind's your greatest tool.

There's never been a bigger chance for you to have a comparative advantage compared to your peers. So let's take it seriously. How do we do that? Study with your phone in a different building and the internet turned off. Full no exceptions. Studying is disconnected. Don't give me this. I have to go to the internet to get access to my, access to materials on the internet first.

Download it, print it, and then go somewhere and study from it. I don't like these exceptions of like once, three years ago. There was a teacher who had a program for flashcards that you had to go to the web to use it. Therefore, I shall forevermore be fully connected to 17 social services and text messaging while I study.

I get that so much from kids. What if my homework, my homework's online? I have to, it's online. So I must be on TikTok. Come on, download your work. All right. Embrace boredom every day. Don't use ultra process content if at all possible and read as much as you can.

All right, so that's my, those are my missing chapters, Jesse. Who do we got next? - All right, next question is from Gemma. I have no social media. I don't have a smartphone. However, I'm obsessed with my work. As I'm young and without a family, I can craft my own work schedule.

However, I eventually want to meet someone and start a family. How can I bring more balance in my life and not be addicted to my work? - Well, this is where, you know, I recommend lifestyle-centric planning, right? And so before I get into what lifestyle-centric planning is, which I'll do briefly because I talk about it a lot, let's just remind ourselves of what the opposite is.

What is the preferred alternative approach to lifestyle, life crafting, is what I call the grand goal approach. I'm going to have some grand goal that I'm all in on. And the idea is this will kind of align all of the parts of my life around something, a common goal, and that will give me a sense of like intentionality in my life and direction in my life, and it'll end up somewhere interesting.

So focusing on your work is like a classic grand goal strategy. I'm going to try to just crush it at work, and that'll just be something to orient my life around. The problem with the grand goal strategy is that when you focus exclusively on one area of your life, you tend to either neglect or actively harm other areas of your life that are important and play a big role in your day-to-day subjective wellbeing.

So where you end up living, that your connection to other people, the sort of rhythm of your life, like these other things that might be important to you get squashed or actively hurt when you focus on just one thing. But here's the thing, the day-to-day experience, the subjective experience of your life is determined by all these different parts of your life.

So if only one of them is going really well, these other ones are going poorly, overall you're not going to be as happy than if like more of these things were doing well. So instead of just having one singular grand goal you focus on, I suggest lifestyle-centric planning, which is where you work backwards from a broad vision of your life.

You identify the different areas of your life that might be important. You identify what's important to you in these lives. I call this the master narrative. And then you begin figuring out configurations of your life that support as many of these as once, right? So work is a big driver of this, but now you're seeing work through the lens of not just like what you want out of your work, but like what type of place you want to live and what type of rhythm between work and non-work you want and what type of connection to other people you have and what your typical day works out.

Work is now an engine to try to support as many of these things as possible, which is different than work being a game in which you're trying to get the highest score. Now, it may turn out that the particular lifestyle broad vision you have is best served at killing it in like your work in a particular way, or at least for a particular amount of time, but you need that to be part of this broader vision.

So you got to figure out your broader master narrative here, all parts of your life. It's good to be visual here. One of the things I recommend people do is like actually have a cultural or like concrete reference for each of the parts of these lives. So you're trying to think about like, what's it like where I live?

Like point to a particular like film or TV reference, like the way it is in this show or movie, you know. Friends, if, you know, they're kind of like in a city and it's kind of, but a lot of people, the friends all live near each other and they kind of like hang out a lot and there's like an energy to it and like interesting stuff happening.

Or you might be like, no, no, Gilmore Girls. I went like a small but quirky town and it's like tightly enmeshed, but it's kind of quiet. And, you know, use specific references. Like specific visual references, like each of the areas, and you can have a couple of notes below each, kind of like specifying what properties of these images you like.

And then the whole game is trying to serve as many of these areas as possible. So again, your work is the biggest tool you have to try to satisfy your lifestyle vision, but it's different. There's a difference between trying to succeed as much as possible in work, do the most impressive thing possible in work versus using work as effectively as possible to get closer to this broader vision.

So now is a perfect time to start doing lifestyle centric planning. This will begin introducing other parts of your life into your life. By the way, many of the non-work parts of people think about, especially when they're young, end up being, connecting them to other people and activities, which is a good way to actually, you know, find someone to settle down with.

So it could work out there. Lifestyle centric planning. I'm really just beginning to, I have to start really articulating the details and the specificity of lifestyle centric planning 'cause for the deep life book that I'm working on, I have to start getting more specific. I'll tell you, I got about 2,500 words in that book and threw it out because I had a realization, it's like, that's not the way I wanna structure these.

This is not the right structure for the chapters. This is gonna be better. Shoot, this is gonna be harder. I have to kind of throw out what I did, but I did. So it's like, I wasn't feeling my first swing at it. - I get a lot of questions and inquiries about updates to the stack.

- Yeah, okay, that's interesting. I don't use the exact stack metaphor right now in my thinking but it's definitely, I mean, I've definitely broken down the sort of get your act together part. Like, you gotta prepare. Get your act together before you transform your life. Like, we often skip that part and go right to the like, I'm gonna move to Rotonga.

You gotta get your act together first, right? Then planning. And this is where this lifestyle-centric planning versus the singular grand goal thinking comes up, right? Why lifestyle-centric planning's gonna be more effective than just having a singular grand goal and how do you actually build and build these master narratives, right?

Then there's like the execution, the art. The art of like, I wanna work backwards from this broad vision and figure out configurations of things that's going to advance as much of these as possible. Like, there's an art to that and you have to get into, how do you research your opportunities and figure out what might work and be more flexible?

And there's a whole navigating, like, how you actually, these plans, how you shape your plan to move closer to your ideal vision. So like, that's a big part of it. That's kind of like part three as well. And then there's these other ideas. I don't know where they integrate about looking for the remarkable opportunities.

Like, these come up typically once you're like, really locked into what matters to you and you're working very systematically towards it. Really cool opportunities, that's when the cool radical stuff emerges. So how to identify that and pursue that if that's what you wanna do. Evolving these things over time.

Like, there's these other loose pieces too. But these pieces I think are big. The prepare, the planning, and then the actual execution is sort of like layer one, layer two, layer three. But as I'm still working on it. The big change I've been making recently is I decide, I'm toying with, it's very technical, not technical before, but very like dense and idea-y.

And I'm thinking I actually wanna have some journalism in it. Like, I wanna go some places, talk to some people, and do some things. And have that as a spine for each of these sections. It's harder, but I think it might inject some more life into it. - Yeah.

- So I'm thinking about that. In case people are wondering. All right, let's keep rolling. - Next question is from Gabriella. Once I finish my deep work, I do other shallower work, like audio books, podcasts, while playing Candy Crush. I really can't consume any of this content without it.

Is this okay? - Not really. Not really, I'd be worried about that. So your mind has created one of these dopamine traps where it wants the potential rewards of the Candy Crush game. It's associated that with these other activities. And now you get flooded with the dopamine when it's like you're putting on the podcast of I gotta get out Candy Crush and play this thing.

This is gonna hit all of these buttons for me. I think it's a little bit dysregulated. Like you should be able to do other things without having that particular kind of highly addictive engineered content with you. So I kind of hear this like, look, I have to have a cigarette when I'm watching TV.

And it's like, you should probably not be smoking, right? Or like you have all these occasions where you have to have a drink because you just like, I just associate, I need a drink to do this, I need a drink to do that, I need a drink to do this.

And I was like, eh, I think you're getting these like addictive loops, it's slightly dysregulated. So I think this is a good wake up call to sort of do a dopamine detox here on this particular behavior. Otherwise your mind stimulation requirements are gonna be too high. So a couple of things here that might help because it's gonna be a hard habit to break.

You mentioned particularly podcasts and audio books. So listen to those while you're doing other things, things that would eliminate your ability to also play Candy Crush. So like you're doing chores, you're mowing the yard, you're driving. So you can start to build an association with these, you can build an association with these listening activities but not actually also playing the game, right?

And it won't be too hard to do because you're listening to these things in situations where it's just impossible to play the game. Then I would work on building up tolerance. There's a couple of things you could do. Build up, do reading, build up your reading tolerance. So when you're reading, you have to give something your attention and you can't play Candy Crush at the same time.

So try to build up reading sessions. That's gonna be good calisthenics for your brain and wean it off of that particular need for distraction. I would use the phone foyer method when watching TV or movies. So don't have your phone with you but have it plugged in in a different room.

Again, this is gonna give you practice avoiding that knee jerk, like let me pull something out while I'm watching this and play it. So you're trying to break these associations between the passive consumption of content and needing to do this other thing as well. Give this about three weeks.

So about three weeks of being uncomfortable and then you'll readjust and then you'll find like it's not a big deal not to have this game in your life. But yeah, I very much worry about the games that are built along slot machine principles. It screws with your stimulation requirements.

They're addictive. It could lead to dysregulated behavior and that's what this feels like. So I would wean off that. So use the advice I have there to help do that. All right, who do we got next? - Next question is from Nina. I'm a homeschooling mom and I struggle to find the time where I have enough energy without getting distracted by urgent kid needs and household tasks to actually do my house school prep and planning.

What should I do? - So Nina, you have to give some priority to the energy and depth required to do the homeschool prep. Don't give it the lowest priority. So like what might be happening here, I hear this a lot with a lot of types of cognitive work that there's deep components and then lots of also shallow stuff that has to be done.

Is that the shallow stuff is often given priority because the deep stuff, it feels like, well, I'll do this when I get time. It's not like necessary it happens right now, but I'll do this when I get time. And then it gets shunted off to when you don't have any energy.

I would prioritize this as like the most important thing you do. So probably first thing in the morning, right? When your energy is high, you can build this into your homeschooling day structure. All right, what do we do first thing? We do quiet reading and then like reflection questions and math worksheets.

And this is the first 45 minutes of every day. It kind of gets us in the school mindset. And that's when me as the homeschooling teacher does my prep because I'm at my highest energy state there. So like be willing to change how your schedule, to change what you're asking of other people, to prioritize this critical deep work task.

The other thing I would say, this comes from experience knowing people who homeschool. You have to treat homeschooling from a family perspective as a very demanding job. You're like a litigator. And therefore you have to treat what happens after the homeschool day, like the way you treat it when the litigator gets back from like the hard day at the law firm.

A lot of what happens in these situations is maybe one person is doing homeschooling and their partner has like a job outside the house. And they sort of don't treat the homeschooling as if it's like a super draining job. So like you're still doing a bunch of other kind of related work all evening as well.

Like hardcore childcare, which is very similar difficulties to what you were doing all day during the homeschooling. So it's as if the litigator comes back from the law firm and their partner is like, I have all these legal documents I want you to like review and file tonight, right?

You'd be like, well, this is, I just did this all day. I'm exhausted. I don't want to sit here. Can't you do the legal documents or file? That's all I've been doing all day. But we don't think that way when the work is inside the home. So like, well, you were home and it was autonomous and the, you know, it's kids said you should do the childcare and you're the mom and this and that.

So we underplay, this happens a lot in these partnerships that the homeschooling is like one of the most draining things you can do. And if you have to do a bunch of like household work and childcare on top of it, it really can be draining. So you have to figure this out.

Where I've seen things be successful is actually if someone is homeschooling, the other partner is going to do a disproportionate amount of like household work after work, right? Because that's very different. If I've been at the law firm all day, it's not going to exhaust me to have to do chores.

It's very different than what I was doing. It's not going to exhaust me to have to be with my kids. It's very different than what I was doing. But if I was homeschooling all day and it's right into like household chores and childcare, there's no relief there. It's the litigator has to come home and do contracts.

So make sure like your partner knows, this is really, really hard what I do. I need to like have my equivalent of the 1950s. Where's my cocktail? I'm going to put my feet up. We get confused about that sometimes. Like the location, maybe this is better now that we do remote work.

People don't have these weird associations anymore where if like effort is in the house, it's somehow different than if it's at an office. I think now maybe we've dispelled that because we all work at home more. Anyways, that's a common thing I'm going to throw in there. So talk to your partner about that.

All right. Ooh, do we have another Slow Productivity Corner? - We do. - All right. As people know or don't know, we try to have one question per week based on ideas for my new book, "Slow Productivity." Check out that book if you haven't read it. More importantly, we have cool theme music for the Slow Productivity Corner.

So let's hear that now. (soft music) All right, Jesse. I always talk smoother when we're doing the Slow Productivity Corner. What is today's Slow Productivity question? - Our question is from Seth. I've run across a problem while trying to follow the three criteria of slow productivity. I'm a project manager and all the work that I do is shallow.

I'm doing things like making sure other people are working or planning other people's work. There are very few places to apply quality or depth. What do I do? How should I slowly get deeper in this shallow pond? - Well, that's a good question. I think the slow productivity principle being referred to here is the principle of obsessing over quality.

It's one of the big ideas in slow productivity is the more you care about the quality of what you do, the more fed up you will become with meaningless busyness and the better you will get at what you do, which will give you more leverage to try to do less of the busyness.

So it all works like a good flywheel. - All right, so this question comes from a product manager who's saying, what do I get good at? Everything feels shallow. It's all like dealing with people and other things. So I have two pieces of advice here. One, there are good product managers and there's bad product managers.

There are very competitive product manager positions at certain firms, and then there's like less competitive, less impressive positions at other firms. So there's something that differentiates good product managers from bad product managers or great product managers from okay product managers. You have to figure that out, all right? Because you want to be, whatever the core skill is at what you do, you want to identify that and get better at it so that you get more leverage and you get more fed up with nonsense.

And it might not look like a physicist at a chalkboard for seven hours, right? It might have to do with being really good at anticipating the needs of team members, being really good at reaching consensus on like the key decision points, but not allowing the conversations to go on too long and derail the process.

Maybe it's being very good at organizational systems that backstop the product being developed. Maybe it has something to do with client relationships. I don't know, but there is a difference because there's different calibers of these jobs. I was actually just talking the other day at our swim club with a product manager and he walked me through, coincidentally, walked me through that whole industry, especially tech product managers and sort of like the different types of product managers and the elite positions.

So there is a difference between good and bad. Figure out that difference. You can isolate a skill to get better at. The other thing I want to say here is be wary about the necessity of communication you have to do at your job, convincing you of the necessity of that communication happening in a very distracting, haphazard way.

All right, so what I mean by this, this comes up a lot when I talk to managers. They will often say, look at this emails and Slack and online meetings that are filling my day and are constantly grabbing my attention, which we know is a cognitive disaster. It makes you miserable.

You can't think straight. We know there's research on managers that says the more time they spend doing this, sort of the worse they get at actual leadership activities. We know it's bad, but the managers will say, I can point to the things that are in these emails and in these chat messages and they're important.

And if I didn't have these conversations, bad things would happen, right? It's necessary conversations. This person needs approval to do this. If I don't give them approval, the project is stuck. This is necessary communication, but then they transfer the necessity of that communication to the necessity of how that communication unfolds.

I have to be distracted all day because the communication that's distracting me is necessary. It's not necessarily the case. I get into these ideas in "Slow Productivity." I also get into these ideas in my book "A World Without Email." There's dozens of ways to structure how this necessary information gets communicated, including ways that are gonna generate many fewer unscheduled messages that require responses, the things that create the productivity poison, the things required to have to constantly check in inboxes.

It's hard work, but it's exactly the hard work a product manager should do. Let's figure out how we collaborate on things. Where are we keeping track of information? When and how do we ask questions of each other? Are there office hours? Are there docket clearing meetings? These are both laid out in my book "Slow Productivity." Do we have a set process for how certain things we do regularly unfolds that doesn't require on-demand communication?

Like I will send this to you at some point. You have to be checking so that you get the file when it's ready. Can we replace that with a system where it goes into this shared document by three o'clock on Tuesdays? There is no me checking an inbox. I just go after three o'clock on Tuesdays to get the file out of that shared document.

These type of processes and structures, which you as the product manager can help lead the charge towards, doesn't change the things that get communicated, but changes how that communication happens. And that can make a big difference and make your day feel much less fragmented and much less frenetic. So don't let the necessity of communication trick you into the necessity of a chaotic mode for that communication to actually unfold.

All right, so that's my two pieces of advice just to summarize again. There's good product managers, bad product managers. Figure out the difference. Get good at what separates the former from the latter. Two, you have more control than you think to work with your team to restructure collaboration to be less arbitrary, ad hoc, distractive, and interruptive.

And it'll make a big difference if you do that. You'll be a better, whatever you figure out's gonna be important to be a good product manager, that's gonna help you accomplish that. All right, so all hope is not lost. And more importantly, we get to hear the theme music one more time.

(gentle music) So I think that book crossed the 100,000 sales this last week, I think, or the last few days. - Are you happy about that? - Yeah, to me, that's an important threshold. It's arbitrary, but I think to me, it's an important threshold. Of my eight books now, only two have not crossed that threshold.

So I do have two books that have kind of got stuck in the 60,000 sales perspective. - Which ones? - "A World Without Email," "Pandemic Release," kind of slowed down and got stuck around 65, and "How to Be a High School Superstar." Those are the only ones that have not crossed 100,000.

So I don't know, it's arbitrary, but it's hard to sell 100,000 books. So I'm always happy when that's been done. So there we go. We did an analysis of the publisher. They did a chart of what's responsible for sales, how responsible different things were, like here's Amazon Marketing had a sliver here, and Podcast had a big sliver.

But the 80%, like the majority of the pie was labeled slow productivity corner theme music. So that's been like the primary driver. They're like, probably like 17, 18,000 sales were from everything else. All the rest is slow productivity theme music. - That's great. And we got it from Kieron.

- Kieron, shout out. You're selling books. All right, do we have a call this week? - We do. - All right, let's hear this. - Hey Cal, this is Josh. I'm a middle school teacher and a lot of my summer is spent planning for the upcoming year. But oftentimes I find myself distracted.

I end up getting in a rut where I can only put in maybe an hour or two each day, and sometimes even less than that, planning for the upcoming year. So my question for you is how do you use extended time off to plan for the future while not getting stuck in a rut because you have so much time off?

Thanks so much. - That's a great question, Josh. Common for a lot of open-ended pursuits where you have a lot of time to work on it. The key is constraints. Give yourself a lot of constraints, obey those constraints, and a lot more is gonna get done. So like I would tell you nine to 11 Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I want you at a coffee shop nine to 11 Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, all in on planning.

Like you gotta fill that time, get your energy up, you start the day excited. And then you have this sort of like Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, this four-day weekend where you're kind of free from thinking about it. You have all your afternoons too, so like you can go like exercise and go do other things.

But it's like those mornings, three days a week, you're all, you get all, you get in, you go all in. You'll plan like a really good next year. You'll probably like the basic stuff will get done after a few weeks and you can start doing cool stuff. In general, I find this to be useful.

Constraints can be useful. Regular time with high intensity applied over a long time period moves mountains. Like this is how I write books. It's two hours, one hour, three hour, no hours, four hours, three hours, one hour, two hours, 100 words here, 500 words here. My eyes are down on the road in front of me.

This few paragraphs is what I care about. And you just keep doing this. And you look up after a few months and you're like, oh, I have a couple of chapters here. These are pretty good. And you keep doing it for a while longer. Oh, there's another chapter here.

Like that's how cool stuff gets made. My book, "Slow Productivity" is a good quote in the conclusion from John McPhee about this. And I'll paraphrase it, but basically he talks about how intense but not too long, just like intense writing for reasonable periods of time done day after day after day can over time generate a really impressive collection of work.

And he had this quote about, put a drop of water in a bucket every day. You'll look up after, I forgot the time period, look up after a year, I think he said, and that bucket's gonna be pretty full. So constraints are great because you get high quality work, but it's sustainable and stuff builds up.

Just trust the power of compound productivity. Stuff builds up. If you keep giving it good attention and you do that again and again and again, good stuff will build up. All right, we got a case study here. That's where someone sends in their own personal account of working with the advice we talk about.

So we can see what this type of advice is like out in the wild. Today's case study comes from Logan. So Logan says, I've spent the last 12 years living with an extreme spinal condition. Three months ago, I finally got a big promotion. It changed nothing. I now had the promotion and related pay raise, but I'd lost lots of time with family and friends.

My physical health had stalled out. So while on paternity leave, I took time to sit down and write out my deep life vision. I also rated my areas by importance, health, relationships, enjoyment, and finally craft. I immediately saw that I had sacrificed all other areas for the benefit of work.

Coincidentally, this was also the longest I've had away from a desk in a decade or more, became undeniably clear how much damage simply sitting all day was doing to my physical health and my mental health. During this time, I've been working with a trainer for my back and I began thinking that a career switch might be best.

I talked to the trainers and considered moving into that field. I've listened to your show long enough to know not to just quit the day job until I have a proven path elsewhere. I approached my manager about going part-time and keeping only the work where I am the expert, cashing in my career capital for autonomy and accountability.

She agreed almost immediately, particularly since we've discussed my health issues in the past. Going part-time has been something my wife and I had in our long-time vision for quite a while, so this simply accelerated the timeline. It works well for the family anyways, because my wife is eager to return to work sooner than we initially planned after being a stay-at-home mom for three years.

I'm on my second week of being part-time. I've been fitting in way more workouts than I ever would have been able to in the past, and I'm working my way through the necessary certifications to be a personal trainer. I can't speak to the financial success of this idea yet, but my health is better than ever, and I'm able to be there for my family more.

Here are some takeaways from going through this. One, your deep work and slow productivity strategies are invaluable for managing a chronic illness. Two, when it comes to creating a deep life vision, having a little bit of space to think is important, whether it's a few days or several long nights of holding a newborn.

I was unable to think in this way while working long days and balancing multiple commitments. Three, look for opportunities that aren't where you expect. I'd never thought of being a personal trainer, but at least three of the people I spoke to reached a conclusion before I did. And four, in addition to my deep life areas, I first wrote out a quick four-sentence blurb about what my values and attitudes I wanted to live my life by.

This helped tremendously. IEA won't be governed by fear or pain and I'll default to action. It's a great case study. There's a lot of good stuff in there, a lot of good ideas being put into action. I wanna underscore the lifestyle-centric planning approach. See, again, when you're just thinking about your job and maximizing whatever arbitrary scale of success in that job happens to exist in your industry, it doesn't mean your life's gonna be better.

So for this person, Logan, sorry, Logan, for Logan, by focusing just on the job, almost every other area of his life that he cared about got much worse. Well, here's the thing, all those other areas affect your wellbeing every single day. So if they're not going well, the fact that you have a higher title and pay raise is not going to, on a day-to-day basis, balance out what you're losing from these other areas of your life.

Like part of the problem with the grand goal approach, the life design, is that you really front load the benefit you get from accomplishing these goals. Logan probably felt awesome for a day about I won this promotion and it was competitive and I make more money and I kind of wish I had a way of kind of telling people that I made more money.

And then you've got that reward. You don't get that reward again, but every day you're missing all the stuff, the other things you care about that are being diminished. You're paying that price every day, but the reward for accomplishing the goal is already dissipated. So actually having these other areas of your life, like it's more time with his family, his health feeling better, allowing his wife to go back and do these other ideas, go back to work and being like, I'm able to make that happen.

Like these other things that are important, you're getting benefits from those every day. Net, net, that's going to balance out better. So lifestyle centric planning is really important. And again, it's not about saying your job is not important or is important. It's just knowing what you're using this as an engine for.

So he was so good at his job that him going down part time was still financially viable. Hey, and by the way, it made his job much better because he's only doing the work that he's an expert on and then B or C it opened up all these other things.

So a classic lifestyle centric planning case study. So Logan, I appreciate that. And the personal trader stuff could be, hey, I see this a lot. People who have a chronic health issue really care a lot about physical health. And so a job like being a trainer, like as a part-time job is really meaningful to them.

It's not arbitrary to be really meaningful. So I could imagine a world in which you're doing this part-time job, high salary work, and then you're doing some of this training work and it helps keep you really healthy. And it's really interesting and it balances out that other job. And you have more time with your family and this flexibility.

All of this seems like a great lifestyle centric planning scenario. So Logan, thanks for sending that in. All right, so we've got a final segment coming up where I'll talk about Jon Haidt, but first hear from another sponsor. So I wanna talk about our friends at Element LMNT. You've heard me talk about their drink mix before, a mix that gives you those electrolytes you need to replace the salts you lose when you exercise or like this last weekend in DC in which, I don't know if you got the temperature reading, Jesse, but I think it was roughly 118 degrees.

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I also wanna talk about our friends at Ladder. I don't typically procrastinate on things. In fact, this interview I did today with a reporter, he asked point blank, "Do you ever procrastinate?" There are some things, however, that I do procrastinate on, and they typically are things where I don't really know how to take action.

I don't really know what to do. I'm just gonna put that aside. Well, for a lot of people, something that satisfies that condition is gonna be life insurance. You know you need more. You know you wanna protect those who depend and care on you, but because you don't know how to actually make progress on how do I get life insurance, you procrastinate on it.

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Go there today, and you can see if you're instantly approved. That's L-A-D-D-E-R life.com/deep, ladderlife.com/deep. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. All right, so a lot of people, I guess, right, Jesse, have been writing in. - Yeah. - You get most of these messages. They've been writing in and asking for my thoughts on John Haidt's most recent book, which I've loaded up here on the screen for people who are listening.

The book is called "The Anxious Generation, "How the Great Rewiring of Childhood "is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness." Let me just point out, by the way, this book is just killing it. Number three on Amazon charts. I just checked, number seven on the Amazon rankings at the moment.

This book came out in March, right? It's killing it because John was the leading thinker and proponent for the research about kids and phones, and people really started caring about this, and he had the book on it. Like, if you have kids and you worry about, "What should I do with them and phones?" This is the book you read.

Everyone at our school is talking about it. Just perfect timing, perfect topic. It's a writer's dream. So, John, like, congratulations to you. All right, what do I feel about this? I agree with basically everything John says. Why? Well, I've known John for a while. I've known his research for a while.

You know, I interviewed him for a "New Yorker" piece back in 2021, and he gave me access to this sprawling annotated bibliography of all of the research on kids and phones, and they would grow it. He worked on this with Gene Twenge, or Gene Twenge, sorry, Gene, and they would add and add to this, and they had conversations in this.

Like, someone would publish a critical, a critique of another article, and then the authors of the original article would respond, and the critique authors would respond to that. I mean, it was a living, breathing document of everything that was being published, and it became clear to me following this research, talking to John about it, but following this research, that a clear signal was emerging.

Smartphones are harmful for teenagers on average, right? There was harm here. Like, all of these research fields, at first, it's, you know, I don't know. Like, we have this, but other people are saying this, but what happened is we got more and more clarity. As you got different instruments of measurement, as you got more refined data, more refined studies, more different ways of looking at this question, all of the arrows started pointing in the same direction.

That's how you know a real signal is emerging in the literature. Those who are still out there saying we're not quite sure yet, there was, for example, I think a intellectually vacuous and somewhat mean-spirited review of the book, I think it was in Nature, that was still trotting out this circa 2019 argument about like, we don't even, we don't know for, you know, it's correlation, and we're not even sure if they cause problems.

The literature is way past that. I know that by reading these research bibliographies. So, I think John's summary of this is good. I think his conclusions are also good. You wanna wait until a kid is probably post-puberty before they get unrestricted access to the internet through a smartphone. It's gonna be somewhere around 15 to 16.

At the very least, you'd wanna wait till high school, but probably even 15 or 16 is like what is going to be most recommended. I've been saying that for multiple years now because of John's work. It still is right. I still think that's the right answer. I still think that's right.

I think this book is killing it now because everyone else is catching up to where he was. If you want a shareable summary of these conclusions in this research to show like parents at your schools or like parents of friends or what have you, I did a podcast episode last May of 2023.

This was episode 246 called "Kids and Phones." And in that episode, I basically gave the talk I had prepared for my kids' school where I went through all of the research and conclusions about kids and phones, drawing heavily from John Haidt's work. So, if you want a video or an audio episode that's shareable, that gets to the core argument about what do we know about this?

How has our understanding of phones changed? What's the best recommendation? Check out episode 246, "Kids and Phones." And again, that's from May of 2023. But yes, John is the real deal. He's been on this. His meta-analysis here I think is right. I've been saying this for a while now on the show, Jesse, that five or six years from now, we're gonna look back at giving phones to kids under 15 or 16 as crazy.

And I think now we're finally seeing, people are catching up with this literature. We're beginning to see those shifts. And I think it's a good thing. Doesn't make me popular at my kids' school, but I think it's a good thing. We can't keep saying, "Kids these days, "they gotta have the phone.

"They're 12 now and they're friends of," and trust me, the research is not pretty. - Did you ever listen to the Tyler Cohn/Haidt interview? - Some of it. Yeah, that was pretty aggressive. - Yeah, it seemed to be. But then I think Tyler was asking him, "What's your concrete advice?" Like, "Do you want government intervention," stuff like that.

- I honestly think, I think John was very, here's my, I don't know, I haven't talked about this. It read to me like an early cycle interview where John hadn't finished his media prep yet. Like, so people don't know the process of doing these media tours like I just did for slow productivity, but you get your ducks in a row.

Like, you know what, you know your ideas, you know your advice, you know the scenarios, you just have this down, right? Like, you know how to navigate and then you're ready to go out there and do a bunch of interviews. Early cycle, you're still trying to get these things together.

So I'll often, for example, I'll record my first interviews pretty early. I recorded my first interviews about two months before the book came out. And I did 'em typically with like mid-tier podcasts with smaller audiences just to sort of get my legs under myself, okay, to be released later.

But just to like get my ducks in a row. And then by the time I'm on Huberman or like I'm going back and forth with Sam Harris, I've really got all my things down and I know how I feel about things and I have really tight responses to things.

The Tyler Cowen just felt like, I mean, it was early cycle for John and he was doing a big show. And so Tyler's like, what about this, what about this? And John was like, hold on, I haven't like fully worked through these answers and I wasn't expecting to be like asked about my politics.

But then he just sharpened up and I think he's like a phantom. If you listen to like Hype Now, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like he's fully, 'cause he got a, there's a lot of attacks that came. He got some attacks, not as much as I feared. He got some attacks because his past book, "The Coddling of the American Mind" was in a very, I think, very like fair and centrist and low-key way was still like pushing back against what it sounds like progressive cancel culture and some of the excesses of wokeness.

So that put him on the hit list a little bit of especially, the memo wasn't really going around. So do we not like this guy or not? And so he kind of got a variety. There were some sort of scurrilous attacks. By scurrilous, I mean, I just got the memo, we're supposed to take this person down.

I'll sort of figure out how to do it on the fly. And you could sort of tell that. But he didn't get as much as that as you would have expected. Like the New York Times book review was very positive that look, erudite, engaging, combative, crusading. So I think he didn't get as much of that.

I do think one of my New Yorker colleagues sort of casually was like, well, you know, he's racist, but there's some things in this book that are good. So there's like some of that going on. But he, you know, so he's, I'll try to say he's had to toughen up.

And then I think now he's like (imitates punching) He knows what he's doing. - It's not a lot of books. - My God. I think this book is gonna do-- - Atomic Habits? - It's not gonna Atomic Habits. But he is gonna do, man, let me try to predict this.

'Cause I've already done 100,000 copies. So he's probably, I think he's gonna pass a million copies in his first year. And then I don't know what the, I think a book like this has a long half-life because it's like the reference. Like this is the book you buy when you have a question on the phone.

So I think this is gonna be a like three to five million copy seller. - Really? - Yeah. Maybe more, probably not. I don't know. Could be. Good for John. All right, well, anyways, that's all the time we have. We weren't sure if I was even gonna be able to do this episode in studio because I'm leaving imminently for undisclosed locations for the month of July.

But we got this one in under the wire. So there'll be a couple episodes coming up that Jess and I will record remotely, but the show will go on more or less as it always has, just from a different location. I'll see this time, Jesse, if I can get a scenic locale for my filming.

We kind of failed at that at Dartmouth 'cause the thing would overheat and we had all these problems, but I have a new beefy laptop, like a brand new MacBook Pro. And it's got a good camera and it can handle higher quality streaming. I got a good light for it.

I got my mic. I'm gonna try again to see if we can have like a scenic location. It probably won't be, but you know, we'll mess around with it. So anyways, next time you hear me, I'll be in my undisclosed location, but the show will go on and I'm looking forward to it.

So we'll be back. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you liked today's discussion of ultra process content, and you wanna find out more about what about kids and this type of content, especially kids using phones, check out episode 246, where I get into the research on kids and phones.

Check it out. So that's the deep dive we wanna do today. Today's deep question is, are smartphones bad for kids? And if so, how do we know that?