All right, let's do one last question. This one comes from Glenn. Glenn asks, "How do you think about thinking?" Glenn goes on to elaborate, "I was intrigued by a recent podcast "where you described how, when COVID started, "you sent out daily emails to your family, "helping them think about "what you and they were experiencing.

"You mentioned a couple of reliable sources "for news about COVID, people you had learned to trust. "Selfishly, I'd be interested in hearing "who your trusted sources are. "But for the purposes of your podcast, "I would love to hear about how you think about thinking. "What I mean is, how did you decide "what was and was not a trusted source?

"How do you distinguish between conspiratorial thinking "and good thinking? "When do you trust the science "and when is it proper to have some skepticism?" Well, it's a good question, Glenn. So I did do that newsletter for my family. It was positive news surrounding the COVID pandemic. It was trying to counteract all of the negativity out there.

I stopped that after vaccines. So after my family had been vaccinated, after it was clear from the statistics that our risk was small, comparable to other things that we face on a daily basis and don't care about, I wanted to shift my focus away from COVID. And the reason is, of course, I mean, life is a gift and you don't wanna waste it, right?

You don't wanna waste parts of your life that you could avoid not wasting. And it seemed to me that an excessive concentration on COVID as a unique threat, once we knew statistically that it wasn't a unique threat for us compared to other things, was in some sense, felt like we were dismissing the beauty that was life.

To remain, I think, stuck and obsessed and anxious about just this one thing longer than we had to. And it was completely reasonable at some point, but to do that any minute longer than was necessary seemed like it was wasting this resource that we had been gifted. We wanted to see people experience art, enjoy experiences, like get back to the things that make human life human.

So once we were no longer in that period of acute threat, I stopped that newsletter. You know, and I see it, I would say the bubbles in which people are excessively anxious about COVID have really shrunk as it was everyone, and then it shrunk. This is very crude. At some point it shrunk to, I guess, just blue states, and now it has shrunk to certain like metropolitan areas.

And there's only a handful of them left. Our Deep Work HQ is in one of those areas. There's like a surprising amount of sort of people walking by themselves with high filtration mask on. And I just have a lot of empathy. I mean, I understand anxiety and something about viruses can tap something primal and create a really hard loop to break.

And I am fortunate enough that we were able to break out of that loop and be able to go and basically live the best life we can in whatever the constraints were at the moment. But let's get to the bigger question here. How did I convince myself of that?

How did I navigate the sea of COVID information? And more generally, how should people find good sources when it comes to any sort of issue that is important to you? How do we burst out of the filter bubbles that can put us into some sort of intellectual isolation and in doing so, perhaps lead to a narrowing of options or a dimming of what's possible in life?

My big recommendation here is to luxuriate in the dialectic. You have to clash smart, convincing, good people on different sides of issues together. You have to do that. As soon as you stop doing that, you're in great danger of falling into a filter bubble where this is super true and this is super wrong.

And I can't even believe those people can wake up in the morning knowing how wrong they are. And I just think as soon as you fall into a filter bubble, life narrows, options constrict, anger and anxiety raises, and you can fall into these negative loops like the people who like right now could be embracing what is good about life and still is very nervous about having someone into their home.

And so filter bubbles can be a problem. So the dialectic is how you get out of this. Let me get someone who's convincing on the other side of this thing that kind of feels like right or what I've been hearing. Let's put them together. Let's collide them. Every time you do that, you get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what's true.

I did that all throughout COVID and you know what? The experts shifted. Like there was a time very early in COVID where there were certain commentators who were coming more from the conservative end of the spectrum that had critiques of lockdown policies. And I would steel man them and steel man their lockdown policy justifications.

And I'd hit them together. And I'd come away and be like, "Hmm, there's something a little bit weird going on here." I think, and it's a complicated issue. But I was like, "Let me keep some of these sources in my queue of things I'm listening to." Because I think the front page of the New York Times or the Washington Post, there was things that was, there was angles that were being purposefully ignored.

Information has been emphasized. I was like, "Okay, this is kind of, there's something interesting going on here." Those same sources that maybe I was looking at as the convincing counter examples to the lockdown policies later on became much less convincing when it came to things like vaccines. There's certain specific sources I can think about who they, for whatever reason, had a particular thought on vaccines.

And when I would steel man that against the best other thought, they were just blown out of the water. It's like, "Oh, this is incredibly non-convincing and selective. And I can see you're ignoring this. And I'm reading the other side." And so it was the same people. Then they were no longer that trusted for me.

Then there were sources that I thought were very useful early in vaccination that were very good about immunity and the immune system. These were often sources that came out of HIV medicine. People that came out of HIV were very useful in this sort of immediate post-vaccine moment because they, first of all, HIV knows a lot about harm reduction policies, which is quite different than what we were doing with COVID, which was more about risk elimination policies.

And they knew a lot about the immune system. So here's what's gonna happen with a vaccine or prior infection. And that felt really useful. And when I was pushing them against other people who had different views on the vaccine, it's like, "Oh, I really understand more about immunity. That was very useful." And now there's other doctors who, I don't follow the news on COVID as much anymore now, because again, I'm trying to live life.

And I think I can not think as much about it. But the point is dialectic, collision, collision, collision. And you get this nuanced view. And so early on, it's like, I see what's going on with the lockdowns, but I have these points of skepticism. And it's because I was putting these two things together.

And if you looked at either of those sides in isolation, you'd be in a real extreme. You'd be either in the extreme of like, why can't we do what China's doing? If we could do that, COVID would go away. Or you're on this other extreme that was like, this is all a plot to, I don't know, some great reset plot.

And there's no reason to be doing any of this. But you'd nail the most convincing people from both sides together, you get nuance. And you feel settled, you feel confident. With immunity, with all these different issues, always hit them together. And here's my, the big point I wanna make about this general filter bubble bursting approach is that you're not gonna be tricked.

Exposing yourself to the other side of an idea, the other side of what seems instinctually right or what your tribe supports is not gonna trick you into the wrong information. As I talked about just multiple times here in these COVID specific examples, there is people that I was once kind of listening to that wilted, wilted under this exercise as time went on.

I mean, it is a great identifier of true intellectual depth, intellectual honesty, accuracy. It really works very well. And it's not, you're not gonna be tricked into some weird conspiracy. It's actually gonna make your beliefs and the things you believe in stronger. It's gonna give you more confidence. It's probably why today I'm an extreme moderate with COVID because I've been doing this the whole time.

And I feel confident in my risk assessments. I'm not super alarmist, I'm not super dismissive. And I think we've done the right things to keep our family risk low, but also I'm living life. And I think it's statistically valid that I am. And it's because I kept hitting these things against each other.

And I didn't get captured by either side. I actually ended up in a sort of alt middle position that would end up, I think, being pretty useful. So I think that's what we need to do in this age of information abundance. When everyone is going through the same homogenized interface platforms like Twitter, Instagram.

And so the crazy guy down the street, his tweet looks the same as the scholar of 50 years. And we're trying to sift through this and figure out what makes sense and what doesn't. That's the best thing you can do. Take the thing that sounds most convincing, take the thing that sounds most convincing on the other side, hit them together and repeat.

That is how you burst out of filter bubbles. That's how you find what you really believe in. It's how you find nuance. I really think it's the way to go. And in doing that, the final thing I would say is be very wary of complete tribal allegiance. If you see in someone you're looking at as a source of information, an incredible, consistent, whatever that tribe says on the opposite.

And even if it contradicts itself down the line, you see that going on, then don't even bother with that person in a dialectical collision. When I say convincing, you want someone who looks like they at least appear to be intellectually honest. If you see complete tribal allegiance, like I will keep, what does my team believe?

That's what's right. What does that team believe? We're the opposite. That should be, you could filter those people out right away. But for the people who remain, dialectic, dialectic, dialectic, I think we all should be doing that. And if you do that, I don't know, you get a much more sophisticated, nuanced view of life.

You won't end up at extreme, you won't end up tricked, and you'll probably end up in a better place. All right, well, a better place for us in this episode, I think, is to wrap it up as we went a little bit long here. I thank everyone who sent in their questions.

As I like to say, if you like what you heard, you will like what you see at the show's YouTube channel, youtube.com/calnewportmedia. Full episodes and clips of every question and segment done on the show can be found there. You'll also like what you read at my long running newsletter.

You can subscribe at calnewport.com. We'll be back on Thursday with a Listener Calls episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. (upbeat music)