So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is are smartphones bad for kids? And if so, how do we know that? I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. The show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ joined once again by my producer Jesse.

We had a week off of recording together. It's good to have you back. It's good to be back. This is a little known fact about when I solo record. Jesse you will attest that when we record we one take it. Yeah, just go live. We just rock and roll warts and all.

Whenever you're not here It's always two takes. Really? I usually will go about five minutes and then stop and then go back and like take another Run at it. I don't know why. What did you do back in the day? Trying to think back in the very like the deep day When I was early in the podcast I would often When it was all audio, I would off I would stop all the time because it was easy I mean I would just go for a while but if I get to a question, it would be really common and I start answering a question and Say I don't really like that and I could just there's just one track and the software was just me It was just audio.

I could just go back and like let me take another run at that So the trade-off was I didn't prep I would just list out a bunch of questions and rock and roll But if I didn't like an answer, I might go back and take another run at it Once we started doing video I swapped out around and said well Why don't I actually do a little bit of work up front the prep more the questions?

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 I do it all you know in one take except for I always have to start twice 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 And I always start over interesting. Yeah, I don't know what it is. It's not three though. It's never three takes Two takes Jesse's not here. It's two takes So, you know I gave a talk the other day at my kids school Or that it's me and some parents from the middle school.

They asked if I would come give a talk about Kids and technology in particular kids and smartphones What do we know about it? How do we know what we know about it and what? Conclusions should we take away in terms of what the school policy should be what should be recommended to parents?

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 research and build all these slides and Only really deliver this information to a one room full of parents. So because I've had this question a lot What is my take on kids and phones and when they should have phones and is it really dangerous?

I thought we could talk a little bit about that in the show today Yeah, I know that you mentioned it in prior episodes and some fans have been asking for it. Yeah Yeah, and then we'll also we can record this and there'll be a YouTube version of this discussion So if you want to share it with other people who maybe don't listen to the show, but worry about this problem Now this information will be out there.

We can point to that video when people ask about it So I thought it would be good. So that's the deep dive we want to do today. Today's deep question is our smartphones bad for kids and If so, how do we know that? That's what I want to get into so I have some of my slides here from my talk So, you know if you're listening you might want to consider watching.

This is episode 246 you can find it at youtube.com slash Cal Newport media or at the deep life Calm if you don't like YouTube's episode 246, I'll explain what I'm saying You don't have to watch it, but I'm just saying if you want to see some of these graphs.

I'm referencing Watching the video version of this might be suggested So as I looked into this question of when did researchers become concerned? About kids and phones and why the whole story seemed to break up into three acts That's why I called this in my talk a saga in three acts the first act we can start I'm gonna call it roughly 2012 to 2017 that's the first act of the story.

I call it an alarm is Sounded so this is the period where people first began to notice Warning signs. This was actually the period in which the potential issues with smartphones young people was first brought to my attention So I remember as a young professor at Georgetown. This would have been in 2012 I was given a talk somewhere on campus and I was walking to the talk with someone who is involved with the student Mental Health Center at Dartmouth is called cat or not Dartmouth Georgetown It's called caps And I it's if you're watching on the screen you see a picture of the the counseling center And I remember smartphones and tech in general was not in my portfolio in 2012 as a writer So we were just having conversation and this person mentioned to me.

She said, you know, there's been a big change recently the number of students that we are now treating With mental health counseling here at Georgetown has jumped up and not only has it jumped up but it is Disproportionately jumped up to be anxiety or anxiety related disorders So we're seeing a lot more overall students and a much bigger proportion of the students.

We see are here for Anxiety, that was interesting. So what's going on? She didn't skip a beat. She said smartphones And that caught me off guard at the time Smartphones, what do you mean? She said? Oh, it's really clear to me anecdotally that the first group of students to arrive on campus having had Smartphones during their adolescence were showing up way more anxious than we'd ever seen before We can now look back retrospectively and see that this was not an isolated Anecdote happening at just one University.

I have a chart on the screen here for those who are watching This is from the American College Health Association annual survey. It's showing percentage of US undergraduates Diagnosed with a mental illness and what do we see? at 2012 Forward a very sharp uptick in anxiety and depression which are of course quite interlinked by Anxiety to the dark vertical line if you're watching this online It's 2012 So what this one person at Georgetown was noticing was actually a nationwide trend that something changed around 2012 keep that date in mind.

It's going to come up again. I Think the issue got brought to the public's attention writ large so it expanded from Individual educators and mental health professionals being worried to the culture writ large being worried about maybe smartphones are causing an issue I think Jean Twenge really helped make this a national issue in her 2017 cover article for the Atlantic that was titled have smartphones destroyed a generation The thing about Twenge is that her expertise is in studying Differences between demographic generations.

That's what she does How is this generation different than that generation? 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 As well, she'd been doing this for 25 years And she says typically the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually and along a continuum But then I began studying Gen Z around 2012 I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states the gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep Mountains and sheer cliffs and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation begin to disappear in All of my analyses of generational data some reaching back to the 1930s.

I had never seen anything like it So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in 2012 She began to make the connection that I think this has to do with smartphones Here's another I think culture defining moment This was also 2017 a big article in the New York Times magazine written by Ben Wadson is that lose?

The article is titled. Why are more American teenagers than ever suffering from? 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 very hospitable to the technology hypothesis He was seen this as a standard moral panic type argument the same thing We always say rock and roll music is going to corrupt the teens brains video games are going to corrupt teens brains And he came into it with that frame, but there's a key point in this article where he talks to actual anxious teenagers and I'm quoting him here to my surprise anxious teenagers tended to agree They didn't say hey old man, leave our phones alone.

They said yeah, these things are a problem so by 2017 we've gone from Spot reports of wait a second something is changing here these young people. There's something different going on and by 2017 we were openly debating is It phones causing these issues All right, this brings us to the second act the data wars this takes place roughly between 2017 and 2020 this is when researchers began to seriously try to gather or study the data to get a stronger more data-driven Conclusion on this question of a smartphone somehow involved in these increases in anxiety that we're seeing This was a period of both proposals and critiques, which is good This is how new sciences emerge, especially in social psychology, which is by definition a complicated field That rarely has super strong signals There was proposals and critiques or responses to the critiques.

And so that's why I call this the data wars This was the period in which almost any New York Times article on this issue would say with big caveats There is some data, but it's it's contested. It's because this data war period is when the science was actually happening Let me talk about two troubling streams of data that came out of this period the critiques and the responses to the critiques So the first bit of troubling evidence that emerged as we got more serious about this question was simply the timing that 2012 that was a Really?

It's a circumstantial evidence, but a really strong pointer towards smartphones at play and here's why There's lots of different reasons you could come up for come up with for why young people between 2012 and 2020 We're becoming more anxious the world felt like an anxious place. We had the financial crisis We had the financial insecurity that that caused we had the extreme partisanship and unrest that followed in the in the Trump era And so it did seem like a period of lots that were going on.

The problem is none of this fit 2012 in particular The financial crisis was 2006 to 2009. The financial insecurity was felt strongly by the millennial generation We were entering the job force then not Gen Z. By the time Gen Z was entering a job force That was largely in the rearview mirror There was a lot of political partisanship and unrest that that arose later in the 2010s, but that was after 2012 2012 was the Barack Obama Mitt Romney election 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 in that movement Compared to the contract with for America Newt Gingrich in the Clinton era that type of partisanship There wasn't something new that happened in 2012 that wasn't also there in 2009 wasn't also there in 1999 The populist revolutions of Trump etc.

That didn't really pick up speed until 15 or 16, right? So that explanation doesn't quite fit it Also as we got more data, we saw these anxiety rises among young people happening in many many countries So we could not pin this on particular American Dynamics. So what did fit this?

Well, here's Jean. Let me just show a couple graphs here These are just a couple other graphs that are showing 2012 being a big deal So we see female especially with female reports of sadness and hopelessness between 2011 and 2021 we see a significant increase from 36% to 57% I'm also showing US teens with major depression, especially with girls.

We see a hundred forty five percent increase as we move from 2012 to 2020. So these are just examples of lots of things were pivoting on 2012 Here's Jean Twenge She said okay, what does match 2012? It was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone suppressed 50% That's what's changed in after that point You were much more likely as an adolescent to have a smartphone before that point.

It was much less likely None of these other potentially anxiety producing trends match that date nearly as well All right. So this was the first bit of troubling evidence to emerge right is it's circumstantial and there's critiques I would say one of the big critiques I'm showing this on the screen an example now was this idea that no no We agree with you that there's not world events or cultural events that match the 2012 outside of smartphones But the thing that really changed in 2012 was not smartphones This critique says it was that this new generation was coming of age and they're more comfortable Talking about mental health.

They're like that. So this was a big critique in the early part of the data wars You see rises in depression anxiety Because more people are willing to say I'm anxious or I have depression This quote from the New York Times of 2018 is sort of typical of this period.

Here's Richard Friedman writing the Times He says look there are a few surveys reporting increased anxiety in adolescents But there's self-reported measures from kids or their parents and they're over Estimating rates of discords because they're detecting mild symptoms not clinically significant syndromes This was claimed a lot during the early period of the data wars.

So as good science does it said well, how can we? Look into this Counter hypothesis and the right way to look into this counter hypothesis is to say let's find Stronger proxies for anxiety that have nothing to do with self-reporting And in particular I put two charts on the screen here and these are both tragic But they also give us deep insight.

The first chart is US teens admitted to hospitals for non-fatal self-harm ages 10 to 14 This gets around the self-reporting process. These are people who tried to harm themselves due to anxiety and these are from hospital records Look at girls 188 percent increase between 2010 to 2020 with the increase getting particularly stark around 2012 Even more tragically we look to the right we see suicides among US teens 2012 jumps up 134 percent increase among girls starting around that 2012 point So it was a reasonable hypothesis that well, maybe Around 2012.

We just got more comfortable talking about anxiety. We were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms Unfortunately, the hospital records show these indications rose at the exact same rate. So there really was an increase here kids are and Starting around this period having worse mental health The second strand of troubling evidence was to correlational studies 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 thousands of people and ask them about everything and Then after the fact you can come back as a researcher and look for all sorts of connections within this data if you want to know if People who like the color red is their favorite color or more likely to have had 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 So they did this they said let's start looking at this data We'll look at young people and we'll look at correlations between these Technologies and negative outcomes and they began to find lots of strong connections Here's just one of many many graphs that were produced in this period This particularly one looked at UK adolescents with clinically relevant depressive symptoms the x-axis is number of hours per weekday on social media the y-axis is percentage of teens who used that much social media that were Diagnosed as depressed and as you see when you increase from no time on social media to five plus hours You get a significant increase in percentage of teens that are depressed this is particularly high for girls where you go from a 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 social media All right, so we saw a lot of studies of this type this generated critiques So other researchers came along and said yeah, you're finding these correlations, but you know You could it's easy to find correlations between things the effect sizes are small and perhaps the most famous of these papers was published in 2019 by Przbylski and Amy Orbin.

This is known by researchers in the field colloquially as the potato Study they went in and looked at one of these big data sets and said and I'll read them here The connection is negative, but teeny Indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero That it is roughly the same size as they find for the association of mental health with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses So they said look we looked and found these these yet you use more digital technology You're less happy, but the effect is the same we found for Eating potatoes on your happiness or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness their point being these are so small that they're basically arbitrary You're finding artifacts in the data this article the potato article was cited a lot Even until very recently you would see major Newspapers like the New York Times often saying because this was very influential You know studies show a potential connection between these technologies and negative mental health, but the effects are small This is the type of paper that caused that So as good science does we looked at this now?

Here's a response to the potato paper co-authored by Gene Twenge and John Haidt It was published in nature human behavior, and it was called Overestimating digital media harm in this article height looked at Przbylski and Orban and said well wait a second Wait a second, and I'm gonna read his words here the first issue to note is that the potatoes comparison?

Was what they reported for all digital media use? Not for social media use specifically digital media includes all screen based activities including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling Which are not harmful activities in their own published report when you zoom in on social media Only the relationship is between two and six times larger than for digital media Also crucial is that Orban and Przbylski loop lump together all teens boys and girls while many studies have found that the correlations With harm are larger for girls so height is saying it's almost like you're intentionally trying to reduce the negative impact 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 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 Data set and just looked at social media And you had a much much bigger Response a response that especially if you break out girls was six times worse than eating potatoes a very significant response So I say here on the slide this is John Haidt being polite because When you really read this critique you're wondering How is there any other explanation for the potato paper other than a set of researchers who are saying?

We want to report. There's not really a difference here. It's otherwise hard to explain why they would 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 here All right, so let's get to the third act of this story this research story on smartphones and kids I call this third act a consensus begins to emerge this covers the period of 2020 to 2023 so until today essentially what has happened in the past two or three years is The critiques have largely fallen away and a consensus is emerging in the field that yes, especially for girls There is a strong negative connection between these technologies and mental health The reason why this consensus emerges first of all the critiques as we talked about before the main critiques during the data war Were pretty thoroughly debunked, you know after the potato paper It's not like there was a lot of more stronger papers 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 The people who are worried about smartphones so that happened But then what we began to get and this is how a lot of emerging literatures begin to coalesce around a consensus We began to get multiple other Independent sources of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion When you have multiple different types of threads that all begin to weave around the same answer 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 So one of the threads it was natural experiments.

Here's a cool paper written by an economist Elaine Gu and She looked at in Canada I believe the arrival of high-speed wireless internet in a given province from town to town when high-speed wireless internet arrived Heavy social media use became possible. Then you could have a smartphone and you could use it on the app And so she looked at if we have nearby towns demographically and culturally very similar But we end up in this natural experiment situation where one town gets wireless high-speed internet between before the other Can we compare what's happening with teenage mental health in these two towns and see if there's a change?

Yes, there was Girl teen girl severe mental health diagnoses increased by 90% When the wireless internet arrived so it was a nice natural experiment We also had some direct randomized control trials experiments. Here's a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al They just took 143 undergraduates and randomly Assigned them to either stop using social media or keep using it as normal.

So it's a randomized Perspective control trial. What did they find the group that was told to limit their social media use showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression as compared to the control groups So that's interesting. I Think maybe one of the strongest Forces and helping a consensus come together was self-reporting Just talking to teenagers themselves So when Francis Hagan leaked all of those data from meta a couple years ago What was known as the Facebook files as what the Wall Street Journal called it one of the big interesting?

findings in these leaked documents from meta was the fact that they had done survey on teens and Had found that I'm quoting here Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups. So the teenagers themselves are saying yeah This is why we're more anxious and depressed this app these phones 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 Australia these are Australian teens By far the number one reason they give for why they think youth mental health is getting worse is social media. I Think this was the final smoking gun is the teens themselves are saying this is hurting me This is causing a problem.

It is really hard to be a potato study style skeptic in the face of the teens themselves saying Yes, this is causing me harm. We're not teasing out subtle epidemiological effects a 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 Have no way of detecting this change.

This is not that this is a huge loud Self-observable macro signal this thing is making me uncomfortable that ultimately is the big difference between this and past moral panics around youths and technologies When my grandparents let's say they were upset that my mom was listening to the Beatles in the late 1960s if they went to my mom and said stop listening to those Beatles It's going to warp your mind.

My mom would have said, you know, get out of here What she would not have said is I agree These records are making me and my friends incredibly anxious. I wish I didn't have to listen to them That would have been a very different situation So this is why I think this analogy to past concerns about youth technology Really begins to fall apart data aside the teens tell you yeah, I know this is making me anxious I don't like that.

I have to be on it So, why does it do this So let's look in particular at social media first and then we'll broaden out the smartphones Why do researchers think social media is causing these negative? Impacts on mental health. There's a few reasons to come up. One is loneliness Now readers of my book digital minimalism.

This will sound familiar because I talk about this in digital minimalism It's paradoxical at first but using these social technologies more will actually lead you to feel less social And what's going on here is young people replace in-person interaction with texting and social media back and forth but this purely linguistic communication just sending text back and forth to each other or commenting on each other's post is Not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain as being all that social There's no voice modulation.

There's no body language. You're not in the presence of another person in the same room So you're in your room as a 14 year old all day on text messages and you tell yourself wow I'm so social because all I've been doing is talking to people but as far as your brain is concerned You're incredibly lonely because you haven't seen anyone all day and Social psychologists call this social snacking Lightweight easy digital socialization we do that instead of having the real meal and we end up more lonely We see this in the data.

I have two charts up on the screen now One shows loneliness among teenagers and you see again 2012 Goes right up. The other chart says shows daily average time spent with friends Starting in 2012 for the ages 15 and 24 Go straight down more time on the phone Meant less time interacting in person meant loneliness went up There's an interesting observation by the way that John height makes this got underway around 2012 and it was so pronounced by the time the pandemic came along the change wasn't even that big And we can see this on this chart I mean certainly we can we continue to have a steep we have a steep fall from 2000 in 2020 But we were having a steep fall from 2018 to 19 as well.

So he pointed this out in a newsletter article He wrote earlier this spring these effects of isolation were already so pronounced because of smartphones among American teens that the difference of adding a Isolation through lockdowns actually didn't even make that big of a difference. We were already on that trajectory Another issue here is performativity Especially with social media, especially with girls.

Let me read something here from Jean Twenge Girls use social media more often Giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes So you're constantly worried about what other people are doing and how people are perceiving you combine that with a teenage brain Come on, no way.

That's gonna be positive The final thing I want to mention here is the amplification of harmful behaviors Online communities for all their good also have the dark side of it allows especially vulnerable Teenagers who are trying to find themselves and are open to suggestions and are feeling vulnerable and full of all these different chemicals It's very easy to get caught in on line communities that will then amplify Harmful behaviors that will directly reduce your mental health and a lot of cases also your physical health We're beginning to see more lawsuits along these lines I have a headline up here right now about a family suing meta because they blame Instagram for encouraging their daughters eating disorder and Self-harm, there's all sorts of cases like this.

So this is another source of this connection between reduced mental health and Social media use is there's a lot of traps on there You end up in a community that is cheering on something that in the end is going to make you feel much worse All right Social media is not the whole story a Lot of this data is looking at social media.

Some of it's looking at smartphones in general I want to just briefly mention that even if you aren't using social media on a smartphone if you're a teenager There's other harms we know are there Impeded thinking skills is critical. I talked about this in a somewhat recent episode of the podcast It's talking about Marianne Wolfe's work on the development of young minds when they spend more times on screens the short version of this is deep critical thinking skills require training 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 moving on training requires Self-reflection the ability to hold thoughts and your working memories and work on it having that time alone and that familiarity with it Smartphones get in the way of that training Because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick Look like a L-shaped skim for things that are going to give you in text a quick hit of dopamine or excitement flee boredom if you have any moments of downtime have a Something right on your screen.

I was watching Jesse I was watching this on the flight There's not my flight to San Francisco is my flight to Utah a few weeks ago Maybe like a 20 year old guy sitting a row up in the aisle. I was watching him use tik-tok. I Mean it was crazy.

It's like cuz he had his phone out. They'll just be like some weird video 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 That's just all he was doing the whole time. Well, I don't know the whole time before a while Yeah, I was watching over his shoulder man, glad I'm reading my Ellen Lightman book about transcendentalism and the human brain made me feel good.

But you know, the point is is it's so Rewarding the moment that you don't do the activities that would otherwise give you critical thinking skills And so you're just not good at thinking deeply and that's a huge Harm sleep deprivation is a big deal for teenagers and these smartphones.

Look you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone They're gonna YouTube until 4 in the morning 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 About how all of her friends who have these smartphones are on them all night and then they come in the class 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 It's hard to turn it off. So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue. It's a YouTube video games and social media scrolling Solitude deprivation is another issue.

I talked about this in digital minimalism as well Our mind is not meant to constantly be processing information generated by another mind We need time alone with our own thoughts to recharge and that makes sense of our world Smartphones can eliminate that entirely from your existence because any moment where before you might have just been alone with your own thoughts You can now pull out the thing Over time that makes us anxious.

It also harms self-development at an age where we need it 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 Your brain needs it And finally we have this issue that smartphones in general minimize quality leisure So the thing you're doing on the phone gets in the way of the things you should be doing 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 Your community or build skills or give you confidence.

It's easier just to look at the phone and to watch twitch and So it gets in the way of something that could be better This is often missed when we think about smartphones and teens will hone in on the exact activity And say well my son isn't on social media.

He's not doing performativity doesn't have to worry about online bullying He's the thing he's looking at is really harmless In fact, maybe there's like some science content in it The issue there is not that what he's looking at is a problem is that because he's looking at all day He's not doing the things to be good so we've got harms with Unrestricted smartphone access for young people that go beyond just the specific stuff that social media can do All right, so where is this all headed at the national scale it's an interesting question Is there going to be some sort of legislative shift?

That's going to come out of this data. Now that the consensus has emerged. It's clear that this consensus has been Understood and intaked by Legislative bodies and policymakers. I think it's now accepted that unrestricted smartphone use especially for prepubescent kids, especially for prepubescent girls is very Dangerous, I think this has all been accepted now.

So where's this gonna head? I'm not quite sure But here's one thing I would keep an eye on Here's the surgeon general earlier this year He said wait until your kids are 16 to let them use social media 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 That as well if you've made it through puberty 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 Before you then get unrestricted access to the internet and social media You're in a much better position to succeed 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 And now if you get exposed to this it's gonna have a much less negative impact than if you get it at 12 Or you get it at 13 So if you can wait till 16 this seems to be an emerging consensus This might possibly be made in the legislation One of the relevant things to keep an eye on here is the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA this act implicitly already in codes 13 as The minimum age that you can sign up for a social media service Now, of course these social media services didn't exist in 1998 The actual wording here is 13 is the minimum age at which you can consent to give up your data privacy, which of course You do when you sign up for an attention economy platform like social media.

The original version of this act had 16 in there Tech lobbyist in DC got that pushed down to 13. There's calls now to amend it back to 16 So that could happen. There's other legislative avenues that are being pursued. It's tricky 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 Really hard for individual young people to get access to social media, right? It's not super enforceable. But what it would give is a 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 Friends have this I want this.

Why can't I have it all my friends have this I want it Why can't I have it for the parent to be able to say because it's illegal is a very strong defense and You're not putting your these parents in the situation of having to be social psychology researchers and understand this literature They can say it's against the law.

I'm not gonna break the law 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 So something like that may happen Now, where do I what do I conclude from all of this? I mean to me I Would say that 16 age limit is a smart one I Think this is good.

I think the data is pointing towards your safest bet especially if we're talking about young girls is 16 is the age Below which you do not want to give a child unrestricted access to the Internet If you give a young person a smartphone you are giving them unrestricted access to the Internet.

You can do some parental controls They'll get around them. They're better at it than you. This is the thing about kids, right? Like if we ever went to war cyber war with China and we needed in a sort of enders game Style brilliant kids that like help save us.

Here's how we would win the cyber hacking war Just tell a bunch of 13 year olds that if you bring down China's whatever infrastructure you will get unlimited access to mr beast videos because these kids become Dennis Nidry style hackers when it comes to trying to get access To these things the same kids that can't even 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 All right 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 they become Expert computer hackers if there's a video game they can access or snapchat lays just beyond those protections So you give a smartphone to a kid you're giving an unrestricted Internet access You can money restrict to Internet access.

They can use social media Even the definition of social media is getting a little bit hazy now a lot of the actual performance Socialization has shifted from social media on to group text messages 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 deprivation the solitude deprivation so it really seems like 16 is the safe time to say okay, you can just have a phone and I'm not gonna Care too much what you're doing anymore Does that mean that's the only age where you can have any type of device like this?

well, can I actually ask John Hyde about this as well and and his thought was When you functionally need a phone Okay, because I don't know I'm commuting the school on the city buses like a lot of kids do at my kids school and You need an ability to maybe text your parents if there's an emergency or call your parents if you know 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 So when you get to an age where I'm independent enough That having communication ability with me is going to enable this independence then get them some sort of communication device, but one without Internet 16 is what you can give them a smartphone has everything that seems to be the emerging consensus I think five to ten years from now that will just be accepted If you have if your oldest you have a child right now and your oldest child is two You're not going to have to think about this when they become 12 the cultural have shifted You won't be giving an iPhone to your 12 12 year old that will just be accepted We're right now in this 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 When it becomes they're independent enough the function of communication give them a phone like a light phone Which looks great and can text well, but has no internet wait till 16 to give them unrestricted access So you can't have your own iPad or your own smartphone till you're 16 They will yell and gnash their teeth But come on 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 It you have to give it to me.

This is not necessarily different. So I think that's where we're heading Obviously, there's lots of caveats here. Some kids have a much easier experience with these technologies than others Parents clearly know their own kids 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 my book is often sort of Socially elite people have this storyline that less socially elite or less economically elite people Need the need these technologies and it's somehow Classist the talk about this that somehow Having a 14 year old not use a smartphone is it's like a yoga thing It's like a luxury thing and I can say having worked with lots of different groups from lots of different Backgrounds on this issue.

They would say nonsense to that 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 So I don't think this is a yoga issue. This is like a teen smoking issue No teen should smoke.

So we said you should wait till you're 18 to do it 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 So we'll see 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 So we're getting close to a point where parents aren't gonna have to figure this all out on their own anymore There'll be some more of these consensus ease, but I think that like you're 12.

Here's your smartphone Give us another five years. That's gonna be considered something. Oh, wow. Don't do that. So will they still go on? Social media on their desktop. Well, yeah, but desktops are controlled Here's the family laptop you use it in the kitchen. I can see what you're doing Much different situation.

I mean, there's a lot of great stuff to do on the Internet, but doing it through the family laptop You know, we know we know a kid who's really into sports and So their family got him a subscription to the athletic like this is great Like if I was really in the sports and I was 13 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 Sports coverage.

That's great It's feeding an interest that the kid really has and another kid is really in the chess and they can do you know These chess games online all that's great. But if all that's done through the family computer, it's like watching TV You can't watch TV all the time Right, the parents say no TV now TV's in the living room 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 For a 13 year old there's all these cool things on here That you can do just like there's cool TV shows you could watch but you can do them During times when it's appropriate on a machine where we kind of see what's going on.

Yep And even if they have school-issued laptops that like some of the private schools around here 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 we had a Six one of the neighbors who's always over one of the neighbors is I think?

seven, maybe eight hacked into YouTube on the Chromebook I'm telling you these kids That'll like stare at you for an hour if you ask him to do a fraction If they could get access to YouTube They are you know building a quantum processor to break the encryption, you know based on whatever like good news I have a hundred eight twenty eight qubit quantum processor.

I Packed together in the playground and we're able to break the public key encryption that was keeping us out of Mark Rober videos they become hackers 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 All right.

So Jesse what I want to do is we're gonna move on to some questions. I Found questions that roughly orbit this I don't want to do all questions about kids and smartphones. So and so instead I I increased the Topic that I felt this show was covering and we're gonna talk in general about distractions and technologies and dealing with distractions and the quest to build a deep life So we'll be a little bit more general and then at the end of the show, we'll do books Books I read in March.

We never did that because I was traveling and technically we're still recording this episode in April Even though it's coming out in May. So I don't know I feel like It counts so into the show. We'll get to the five books. I read in March first however, I want to talk about a sponsor that makes this show possible and that is Grammarly go Now this is a very interesting new product offering from our good friends at Grammarly Grammarly So ironic I can't I'm struggling to say Grammarly Grammarly I've been saying this for two years now For some reason my grammar is wrong on Grammarly Grammarly go is very Interesting because what's working on here?

Is that it uses? generative AI To help improve the writing you're already doing in the apps in which you already write now for people who are heard my podcast episode recently on these technologies on GPT in particular know that I'm not a big believer in the storylines that somehow these technologies have Changed the entire world and they're Intelligent or they're they're going to right away get rid of all jobs what I argued in those past episodes is know what these technologies are really good at is taking in text and Producing new text based on your intentions or things you want So this Grammarly go is a perfect case study of exactly where?

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Can you make this sound more professional? Can you make this sound more inspirational? This is the sweet spot of generative AI This is what it can do So well that it spins your head and so kudos to Grammarly to integrate this into their into their product line where it makes so much sense So you can not only produce stuff you can work into your writing It's also a way to just improve the sound or the tone of your writing it's kind of a cool step forward and It's this is again.

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So you'll be amazed at what you can do with Grammarly go go to Grammarly.com/go To download and learn more about Grammarly go that's a g-r-a-m-m-a-r-l-y dot-com Go also want to talk about our old friends at Blinkist Blinkist is a subscription service that gives you short summaries that you can either read or listen to they take about 15 minutes to read or listen to of over 5,500 non-fiction books Now what I like about Blinkist is that it gives you an ability to triage your reading life We're a big believer here on the deep questions podcast that reading is critical.

It's how you engage ideas It's how you increase your understanding of the world is how you get smarter The question is how do you figure out what books to read what Jesse and I do is we use Blinkist? We hear about a book. We'll add it to a list.

We want to buy a new book We'll take books off those lists and we will listen to or read the blinks for that book By getting the main ideas in just 15 minutes. You can assess pretty quickly 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?

Point it really helps you decide which books are gonna make the big impact and which books you're okay Just getting the summary from there's a lot of ways to use Blinkist But that's the way we like to use it as our sidekick for helping to support the reading life They also have ways to help you discover books.

I'd like the they have collections were themed collections of books Hey read all these blinks and see which ones you want to buy. It's a cool tool They have a new feature that I want to talk about too called Blinkist Connect It allows you to get two for the price of one If you set up a premium subscription, you can give a subscription to a friend who you think would also Enjoy it.

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You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one All right, Jesse I think it's time to get to some questions what do we got first All right, first questions from Jeremy since I recently became a father I find myself procrastinating on work and even at the office I could spend all day on reddit looking for that one stimulus so my brain could be satisfied same for books I read more books since I've been listening to your show, but always feels like there's something missing Living in living a more deeper simple life seems to be a bit dull and I can't shake that feeling Well, Jeremy have a couple things to say here One is there is a transient period transient duration To what you're feeling.

This is a common effect. I felt this as well when you become a new father It's a there's a weird combination of things that happen. So one of course you're tired More tired than normal more exhausted normal because you're helping to care for a newborn. You also feel there's this sudden reduction of Activity stuff you might have otherwise done now.

You're not gonna you're at your home 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 But the kid is just napping or the kid is just feeding and there is this sense of a sudden reduction in activity 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 the baby and my wife are napping I'm like sort of not doing other things and I Feel just like you're saying here It's like things are dull or a little gray or there's just like a Cap your affect is cap because you don't have those things going on that that maybe give you hits of anticipation or excitement That's transient and it goes away.

The kid gets a little bit bigger you fall back into a routine If you have later kids, you don't feel that anymore because then it's just chaos 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 So it's really a first kid Phenomenon and it does go away.

I always used to think it takes about four months before You feel like a routine has returned after having a kid and I be I learned over the many kids I've we've had over the years is just to treat that first four months differently Like this is like an all-hands-on-deck Unusual period don't extrapolate from this 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 Reduction and aspirational our professional activities for the rest of your life It's four months and usually after four months you fall back into a routine and then you you're mentally freed up So that's one part of it the other part of it is Your vision of the deep life might be too dull right, I mean if you're You if you're the way you've structured your life is you feel like this is just dull.

I don't know I'm just I read books sometimes and nothing's exciting to me Construct a lifestyle vision that's more exciting I mean this is how VBL CCP values based lifestyle center career planning works You start with this vision of a lifestyle that resonates with you and for you. It sounds like this will be a lifestyle vision That has some definition of excitement.

I don't know what that means. It could be excitement. It might have to do with Non-professional projects or activities or hobbies or skills that you're trying to build it might be excitement in terms of a radical move to a new location 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 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 shifting over to a Combination freelance whatever but if that excitement is something that resonates with you You need a vision that resonates that vision should include that excitement and then you start working backwards What are the moves I can begin making given the capital I have right now Career and otherwise that move me closer to that vision and now you have something you're looking at now You're making progress and now you're moving towards something that's going to resonate more.

So we have the transient effect It's going to be four months your new father don't extrapolate from these four months any aspects of your life Don't extrapolate to what your life is going to be like, but as you leave that phase If you feel like your life is dull You're living the wrong vision.

It's not your vision. It's a different vision. So build one that's more exciting All Right, who do we got next? Next question is from Jeff in the absence of having a known activity to do next I often get trapped doom scrolling in some way or the other for example 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 Well Jeff what we need to do here is work on your cognitive wiring right now Your cognitive wiring has learned Looking at this screen Seeing reddit comments gives me this little bit of hit of something and that's what you're jonesing for So anything that's not that is taking a lot of energy and intention from you 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 You know, this is my when I'm stressed I pick up a cigarette When I'm sad, I pick up a drink right? There's there's all of these addictive Behaviors that historically you build these Connections in your brain that when you feel a certain way you go to the behavior and when you look at these solutions to addiction from the addiction community often they're built around replacement activities 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 How to make that habit Replace the original right this is why 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 They're replacing the activity with something else They can go to or carrot sticks used to be a big one Are you see a lot of people leaving a substance addiction who get really fit because their exercise is replacing?

They have to have a replacement activity these connections get really strong now The behavioral addictions created by things like doom scrolling reddit are not nearly as strong as substance addictions There's no chemical here that's crossing the blood-brain barrier and messing around with your actual neurotransmitter Uptake so our Challenge here is not as hard as stopping smoking when you get stressed, but we have the same principles so what I would do is a Look at replacement activities high quality leisure activities at all different levels of energy Requirements that you pursue and build in the habit and find enjoyment on some that require very little energy at all Some that require more energy and then to add some obstacles to the current addictive behavior I would say practice the phone for your method when you come home you plugged up phone in in your foyer of your house It's there if you need to go look something up But it's not right there in their pocket when you're in the armchair You're at the dinner table.

You're trying to watch a TV show You would have to get up and go find it To go to read it and you would have to read read it standing up in the foyer And you're like, I'm not gonna do that So you have a little bit of an obstacle and then you invest in trying to find these other activities It could be moving to fun books paperback books Finding you know 1970s era pocket paperbacks of spy thrillers things that don't take energy to read that you get used to thinking they're fun Could be listening to the radio or sports on the radio yard work or craft magazine reading TV watching walking with an audiobook different types of exercise all sorts of activities you can through practice and intention 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 out of it so you got to go find and cultivate the alternatives and make the Behavior you're trying to get away from a little bit more difficult and then give it two weeks Takes about two weeks and you will find I have very little interest in doom scrolling But I do I put on the baseball game on the radio and if it's a little earlier I like to go for a walk and listen to a funny podcast It's not that hard to get these alternatives, but you do have to do a little bit of work 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 Is it a guy with a J name? Next question is from Shelly. Actually, there we go You have talked about unrestricted smartphone usage not being a good idea for kids Do you think heavy smartphone usage by retirees can worsen their cognitive skills?

My mother is 65 and their smartphone usage has really shot up since they retired It's really common you you hear about this a lot people's parents of our generation their parents retire and For the first time really begin using a smartphone. They don't have nearly as much to do There's not as much structure to their activities and they get really caught up with Online all the time hitting that dopamine It's like the kid who is raised without having access to sugar And when they first get to college and have a meal plan card are buying Twinkies every day at the convenience store 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 I hear about it a lot Um, if you're retiring that I was like, yeah, keep that in mind You need to more so than you had to when you were working and raising kids and doing all this other stuff You have to more than you did back then really structure your leisure time.

What do I want to do with my time? I think using the deep life buckets are a great way forward. Here's the aspects of my life now that I'm retired Let me work on each but keystone habits and rules in place and then overhaul 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 Move to support that bucket.

You should always have at least one where you're doing that 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 You might get very seriously involved in your church or whatever it is, right? 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 Whether you're 65 or you're 16 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 Gently tell them about digital minimalism and etc. But you know, what? Was Dave Ramsey calls it? 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 So it's very hard Look if you're 70, you know, someone who's 75 and is on their phone all the time Now you can also say they've earned whatever they want to do.

I mean if they've had a long life They've done a lot of things and if that's what they want to do I'm not gonna stop them. But if I myself was retiring I wouldn't want to end up I think that's a in some sense a waste of these years.

So if it's yourself getting older Really focus on structuring building around the buckets 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 You can tell them about this type of stuff, but I just wouldn't expect much changes Alright who Dave Ramsey gets these calls all the time by the way, yeah parents like my parents are yeah 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 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 Their parents aren't gonna listen to you Hey, did you see by the way speaking of Dave Ramsey My old friend Ramit Sethi has his new finance show out on a Netflix I saw he came out with a book and I listened to a podcast on the divine So he has a new he has a new show how to be rich sort of a big splashy Netflix show It's like a net Dave Ramsey type thing He goes and sits down with couples who are having financial issues and like helps him with it That's what this podcast is about - yeah, so there's a TV version.

It's kind of stressful. I 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 You know, I'm not extroverted and they have to like work with all these really tense situations We're like that he hasn't told her about the money he spent on this and they're also upset 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 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 Yeah, he's my I've known him since like 2004 2005 I 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 It's really gonna be big and I think you should read it.

I remember that he was buddies with Tim back then His brother is cool to Manish Entrepreneur Cool family. Oh and I wrote about Manish's in one of my books. So it's all yeah all connected. Oh connected All right. Let's say let's do another question. What do we got? All right.

Next question is from Ryan 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 Could you give some guidelines on how to think about adopting new technology or software? It's like Ryan my default approach is just to avoid new things If I can avoid it, I will if I can kludge together something.

I'm already working. That's what I'll do And then if I finally decide to use something Very likely to stop using it 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 Or to stop using it.

I'm not a big believer in the techno utopian vision of cybernetic productivity That with the right combination of tools and human you unlock these new levels of production I often feel that the chore of organizing information and action and making plans, you know, it's a Militarian chore. It's a rote chore.

It's not that interesting You need some sort of system that can keep track of this stuff But simplicity and low friction is what's really important. That's something you can just do repeatedly You don't have too much friction to get in the way The difference between a good system and a bad system is a difference of four minutes in your daily planning It doesn't really matter and so the overhead of trying to optimize Technology tools is often worse than just you have something that works good enough I got an email the other day.

I forgot exactly what the wording was, but they're talking about like how could you 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 technology systems of my when I track my tasks that I have Trello and Google Docs and Whatever a Google Calendar and other thing you could have a seamless 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?

Here's what that's giving up The difference between I spend three minutes or six minutes on Monday morning making my plan for the day. It doesn't matter What matters is like the 60 minutes I spend actually trying to do something good Do I give it my full attention and don't context which that makes a difference whether it takes me 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 thousands of minutes that happen in the week, so To me new stuff is annoying 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 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 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 Probably the writing software Scrivener had enough advantages over just using Microsoft Word that it's stuck I came into it tentatively, but I've now written a Full book in it and probably a dozen New Yorker articles using it and it's stuck So it really earned its keep by doing something nothing else was doing in a way that consistently made my life better 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 Yeah, I got some pushback from we did that notebook fallacy piece Yeah, where I said like looks professional idea people Don't spend very much time managing or tracking or building systems to control their ideas the the Proper organization and controlling and categorization and linking of ideas and digital systems It's just not something that professional thinkers actually spend much time doing and there's sort of like a correlation between that It's a lot of people who like to do that and did not like that claim.

Mm-hmm. That's true Professional thinkers have plenty of ideas that they know it all it's all down to Execution. Yeah. Yeah, in fact not having a system could be an advantage because if an idea sticks around I Didn't write it down anywhere, but it won't go away That's how I finally convinced myself All right 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 Actually is what they're looking for to see if an idea is good 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 the point Mm-hmm 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 I got a note by my doctoral supervisor handling me handing me a world without email Which changed my life now, I feel more intentional about my choices than ever before.

Here's my question What advice do you have on staying deep when traveling to academic conferences? So there's a little bit more background on here Patrick is He's a PhD student maybe a postdoc now and he's starting to travel I guess his timing was such that a lot of his Education had been during the pandemic where things were virtual now.

He's traveling again. So he's wondering about it I traveled a lot in my academic career, especially as a grad student all throughout grad school into my postdoc years traveled the world Because what happens is advisors don't want to go to all of these places to present papers because it's a pain That's what grad students are for and so I I spent my 20s Traveling all over Europe and South America and Canada in the US presenting papers and traveling on the cheap, etc So I have a big experience with it.

I would say Patrick don't worry about being deep while traveling for conferences Here's my advice Wander whatever city you get to wander the city. I've spent a lot of time wandering a lot of cities around the world Meet people at your conference socialize learn who people are relationship building.

It makes it a much more interesting experience Bring along what I call optional deep work something you can work on if you have time, but it's not necessary It's not my productivity depends on me finishing this while I'm at conferences I would sometimes find myself in that situation like a grant deadline and I had to finish at the conference But I prefer to have it be optional and if you do do deep work while at a conference Find a really cool place to do it This was a big challenge of mine.

I loved finding really cool places to write when I was traveling around the world You know off the beaten path I can sit on a bench Overlooking the the river in Paris. I remember riding on a rooftop bar in Bologna And that's what I really enjoyed this trying to find interesting places to work And then finally my whole thing when I was traveling Patrick for conferences bring books You're excited to read you got the plane ride.

You have this downtime. You're waiting the airport Bring a new book. This fun. Like I can't wait to read this and enjoy it Academic travel can be fun. So don't don't over productivity a size it you have plenty of time for that All right. So speaking of books Jesse.

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Click the microphone At the top of the page and enter that code deep To get all of those promotions. I also want to talk about our good friends at my body tutor. I Have known Adam Gilbert the founder of my body tutor since 2007 when he used to be the fitness advice guy for my study hot hacks blog.

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I want to be fit. I actually wanted to stick My body tutor is what's going to help you get there So if you're serious about getting fit Adam is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join And if you have questions Adam wants you to call or text you can find his personal Cellphone number at the top of every page on my body tutor comm that's my body tutor TUTOR.com mention deep questions to get $50 off All right, Jesse, let's do some books Let's do it.

All right. So these are the five books I read in March 2023 We're recording this in April. So it still counts, even though you're gonna hear this in May the first book a short novel by Stephen King called the Colorado kid You know, I found this was a drugstore in Clearwater, Florida I was looking for another book to read I wanted something more fun as in a CVS in Clearwater Beach in Clearwater, Florida And they had a small book section Which was all Daniel Steele and then for some reason They had a hard case crime Edition of the Colorado kid by Stephen King.

So it's this cool sort of short 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 it's sort of postmodern and 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 And there's these two hard-nosed old newspaper men and they're telling it to their intern this young woman They're kind of walking through the story and these clues kind of pile up And no resolutions reached and so it's an anti-mystery.

It's kind of deconstructing mystery. I love that hard case crime They did use beautiful cover art They re-released all of Michael Crichton's books. He wrote under a pseudonym in Med school they call them the med school files the med school books all with cool covers. Anyways, it was fun I read it on the beach and Enjoyed it nice, but just felt serendipitous.

Why would that book? this 2003 release from hard case crime. Why would that show up in this random CVS? But it was there and so I felt like it was a sign But I also read the unsettlers by Mark Sundin this one of these books where you have a sort of Very literate Harper style writer who sets out on sort of a personal quest and in this case He goes and spends times with people who lived very unconventional lives 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 So it's part memoir part observation and I was it was kind of interesting Yeah, you know, I bought this book a long time ago and then I just took it off my library shelf and read it I enjoyed it.

He spent time with some people living very simply in Missouri and some urban farmers in Detroit among some others That's good does it uh Motivate you to get your cabin You know the weird thing about it 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 They kind of annoyed you you know, but when he was talking about the the generation before who had like Moved to these farms or whatever in the 70s.

It was fine. Like yeah, these people are doing what they're doing But when it was like other young people It made me feel a little curmudgeonly. I mean, I'm mr. Deep life There were there were cases from like I think you need a good job You know 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 Awareness about bringing together the earth and then and you know it some of it felt like there's people super far adrift Yeah, not like okay.

Here's what some they didn't go through a deep life Systematic exercise I'd say it's there's a lot of like big swings happening and So it's just like you feel like some of the young people I know people like that They always have a big idea and it's kind of weird and it's it's you know But then some of the people are really cool, but Mark's a great writer and it was interesting It really got me thinking but it was that book that led me to my next book Which was living the good life by Helen Scott nearing which we did a whole deep dive on a few weeks ago I Forgot exactly what we called it simple life or something like that 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 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 With an objective remove and it's much more easy to sort of find aspiration and and draw example out of them So anyways, that book was cool.

It was written in the 50s and I I did a whole deep dive on it So living the simple life or something like that. Yeah, so look for that episode if you want to find out more about it I bought an old version of that. I Felt like I needed a I got the 1974 edition Those type of books like to read in the original editions.

I read a novel CJ box Had a somewhat recent novel called shadows real. I think I bought this in an airport somewhere I like CJ box he's his whole series is a game warden in Wyoming Joe Pickett and It's it's cool. I like the Wyoming stuff. This one's got a lot going on Stolen Falcons black lives matter protest murderous henchmen seeking stolen Nazi memorabilia 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 That's fine So stolen Nazi memorabilia that stuff that the Nazis stole like while they were in power and then no GI American GI took when they raided the Eagle's Nest Hitler's whatever and I guess there was something I don't want to spoil too much But there was a photo album that a GI brought home To Wyoming to where Joe Pickett lives and it got passed down to his son and there's something incriminating in there for I guess a political leader now in Eastern Europe and so he sends These henchmen the big sleep County to go get it back And they're kind of murderers and kill a bunch of people and but anyways someone drops it off at the library Joe Pickett's wife is a librarian 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 You know, it's interesting CJ box has got into some Twitter con Twitter countries aren't real controversies, but he's He's moved more.

There's like more politics in his book Like not super right-wing politics, but like right-of-center politics, you know And then he's getting pushback like why is this it's just like why is this so right wing or something? And he says that's Joe. He's like these are the for a what's he trying to say?

He's saying these are the politics of this makes sense. If you were a game ward in Wyoming. This is not my politics This is the politics of the world of the book. So he's in this interesting Back and forth. I was like, wow, this is interesting. There's a whole plot line in here about Antifa and in the book it's all Really overprivileged white kids from rich households who are like dressing up and stuff and Are like completely hopeless and are being manipulated by this evil guy who stole the Falcons So it's like the whole plot line this whole like anti-antifa It's like pro black life matter anti-antifa like all this stuff is in CJ box when I think of CJ box is typically like Joe Pickett is You know, there's been a murder in the woods and he's in the game board And so I don't know CJ is going in interesting places When was it written that's pretty recent because it's all I mean it takes place during the like It must take place during the when we're all those those protests and riots and stuff was 2020, right?

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 detective books or these type of books and I just I never really get into I never really have gotten into a series like the last genre writer I really just read everything was Michael Crichton when I was when I was young But these new ones were like here's here's the character You know, it's like Hieronymus Bosch and Connelly or Joe Pickett and CJ box and here's the character and every year There's a new book and it's this character.

I 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 You know Connelly is much better like Michael Connelly is great at this, but I just can't get into I've read some 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 I have a hard time And I blame Brandon Sanderson Somehow his fault like I should be a fantasy book fan But you know, I don't I get bored. It's too much like Thou is the wizard staff will smite the dwarf or whatever and I should love that stuff and I don't know Maybe it's just fiction.

I'm just not a accomplished fiction writer. How many of the Stephen King books have you read? I have a hard time with King Because they're so long and he you know, he all of his good books He wrote on coke and it's all like stream of content just like boom.

It's all over the place It's really interesting approach, but it's like not my style So I like the short ones like the Colorado kid is like great King 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 it's very accessible and 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 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 I mean, I'm telling you there's all these books. I should like I did read name of the wind I did actually read all of name of the wind and I did enjoy it.

So kudos Brandon Sanderson 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 Lost steam. I think it's an issue I have with fiction But my last book was also fiction. So I have three Three novels on my list.

Mm-hmm. The last one was Haven by Emma Donahue and it's just a novel about The monks who Inhabited Skellig Island off of the west coast of Ireland So there's this like desolate rock Where there's a real monastery that was built on there during the medieval period and I saw it.

I was out there Years ago. I spent some time in Dingle on the west coast of Ireland Which is real near real near to there and it's a real place a real monastery. They used it the film scenes from The rise of Skywalker. So like the place where Luke Skywalker is like hiding away on that island That's Skellig Island.

And so this is a fictionalizes historical fiction. So it's a fictionalized account of like the original monks and it just starts inland in Ireland and they sort of make their way out there and they try to They try to tame it and inhabit and that's the book. That was pretty good.

Gotta be cold out there on that island Yeah, it's not optimal Not optimal. I looked up the reality. So in reality They used it seasonally for a while like the actual way it turns out is they would they raise sheep on it And they would use it seasonally. It's not far from land 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 But they wouldn't live there full-time.

They wouldn't live there in the winter 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 stuff and then the Vikings just You know how the Vikings do It was good. I give it like a 7 out of 10.

It was like fine writing not great writing. That's pretty good Yeah, not like a great novel but also better than shadows real by CJ box. So like on the on the scale it's a it's There is no Falcons being stolen or murderous Nazi Nazi henchmen That's pretty good book, but it wasn't my I'm not thinking I got to recommend this to everybody But I'm proud of myself for reading three novels.

Yeah, like for me the uncharacteristic All right. Well anyways speaking of Novels, I'll just do with novels, but we should wrap it up Thank you everyone for listening. Today's episode. We'll be back with another episode next week and Until then as always stay deep