Just the other day, Australia passed a law, the first in the world of its kind, to ban social media for children under 16 and to offer stiff fines to social media companies if they don't put in the right safeguards to make this ban possible. I'm going to get into this law today.

I'm going to go through the main arguments from both sides. So I will quote a key player both for and against this law, and we will go through these arguments together piece by piece, and then we will conclude where I stand on this or similar types of legislative action.

The final part of this deep dive, I will then connect what's going on in Australia with all of our general struggles to control the role of technology for better or for worse in our lives. All right, let's start with some details. I'm going to read a couple of quotes from a recent CNN article about the law, just so that we are all starting from the same page with information about what's going on.

So let me read here. Australia's parliament has passed a world first law banning social media for children under 16, putting tech companies on notice to tighten security before a cutoff date that's yet to be set. Under the new law, tech companies must take reasonable steps to prevent underage users from accessing social media services or face fines of nearly 50 million Australian dollars, which is about 32 million US.

It's the world's toughest response yet to a problem that has seen other countries impose restrictions but not hold companies accountable for breaches of a nationwide ban. The ban is expected to apply to Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and X, but that list could expand. All right, so that's just a quick summary.

A couple other points. The bill was backed by most members of Australia's main opposition party, which is the Liberal Party. It does have some opposition, including some fierce opposition from independents and some of the smaller parties, including the Greens. And in terms of the Australian public, it has pretty large majority support.

All right, so a strong social media ban for users under 16. Let's start for the arguments in favor. So the best summary I could find about the arguments in favor of this bill came from a quote from the prime minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, who in that same CNN article I mentioned before said the following, "We know that social media can be a weapon for bullies, a platform for peer pressure, a driver of anxiety, a vehicle for scammers, and worst of all, a tool for online predators." This sentence packs in a lot of different arguments, so it's worth briefly unpacking into its constituent parts.

So first of all, he's talking about social media being a weapon for bullies. So what's being captured here is that there is something about the pseudonymous communication that happens through these platforms, where you're talking to sort of visual, digital abstractions of individuals, typically just through text, not actually interacting with real flesh and blood individuals who are in front of you, who you can see and read their body language, feel the full force of social capital cost of what you're saying.

It's pseudonymous. It's abstracted. It's digital. And as anyone who has spent any time looking at, say, political discussion online knows, this leads to a lack of the standard interpersonal inhibitions that typically structure our interactions with other humans. And it can really lead to extreme behaviors. It can lead to behaviors that in person be considered really antisocial.

And among adolescents, the young adolescents and pre-adolescents who are very sensitive to social interactions, social media-based platforms, online interactions can really lead to bullying or all sorts of, think of it as verbal, I don't want to say violence, but negative outcomes. It's a platform for peer pressure, he says.

I believe what he's alluding here is the fact that pre-adolescents and adolescents are very vulnerable to groups and peer pressures, and there is a lot of niche online communities that can be very persuasive. Their brains aren't used to the persuasiveness of these online communities, and it can push them into weird or destructive behaviors.

What we have to think about about these online communities is that you have this sort of digital competition that is being mediated by curation algorithms and engagement-driven metrics, which it's as if you have hundreds of thousands of small, weird, cultish niche groups all competing in some giant American Idol-style competition.

And those are the most compelling win. So now, when you're the 13-year-old and you're on TikTok and kind of browsing things, you're on Instagram sort of browsing things, it's not just that you're going to find yourself in the niche communities that are going to sort of suck you in and maybe change your behavior in drastic ways, but you're being subjected to the A-team, the all-star team of niche cultish communities, because just the fact that you are being shown them in your feed means that they have survived these algorithmically-mediated tournaments.

So it used to be, hey, maybe you ran into a weird crowd or a cult at the airport when you were growing up. Now it's like, no, we've scoured the country to find niche communities that are most effective at grabbing people's attention, and this can cause lots of problems.

One of the issues that these niche communities have exacerbated in pre-adolescence and adolescence we know is eating disorders. You can fall into these communities that are very compelling and very much glamorize very dangerous disordered eating behavior. Some of the small number of very powerful lawsuits right now that have been waged against META are specifically aimed at the damage caused by eating disorder communities online and what it did to kids.

There's a lot of other things as well. All right, a driver of anxiety. The evidence here is clear. I've read the evidence. I've read the counter evidence. I've read the counter to the counter evidence. I've read the counter to the counter to the counter evidence. We have multiple independent streams of data that exactly matches self-reports.

You cannot ignore self-reports. That's probably the strongest signal of all. That heavy social media use among young people makes them more anxious, and there's a lot of drivers for that, including these other issues that we're mentioning here. The scammers and online predators. This seems to be a real focus if you read the press coverage in Australia around the bill because it's the most concrete.

When you put people on a pseudo-anonymous, open-access, global conversation platform, bad people are going to find the kids on there. It's like letting your kids free at 2 a.m. at the port authority. Most people there are probably pretty normal, but there's the weirdos, and they're probably going to find you, especially if you're walking around looking a little bit clueless.

Because of this, online predators is kind of obvious. The scamming thing is becoming a real issue. There's been a slate of suicides, for example, recently that comes from these sexploitation scams where the scammer will meet you online and get you through various platforms to send them compromising or embarrassing video or photos, and then they say, "Yeah, we're going to send this to your parents unless you give us like $60,000." Kids can't handle that, and they feel trapped, and terrible things happen.

It's very dangerous to put people who are young into, again, an open-access, global, pseudo-anonymous conversation platform. Everything that the prime minister is arguing here, I think every one of these is actually a real valid point and a real valid concern. There's some histrionics sometimes when we're talking about technology and kids.

This seems not that. This list of issues, I'm like, "Yeah, this is a solid list of real issues that have real harms that come from kids or young adolescents using social media." All right, so what is the opposition saying? So we have some quotes here. I'm going to pull from, I found the best summary of the opposition came from an AP article I found that's sort of summarizing what the various opposition said.

All right, so let me quote this, "Critics of the legislation fear that banning young children from social media will impact the privacy of all users who must establish their older than 16. Opponents also argue the ban would isolate children, deprive them of the positive aspects of social media, drive them to the dark web, discourage children too young for social media to report harm, and reduce incentives for platforms to improve online safety." All right, there's some legitimate arguments here.

I'm going to take these one by one, not necessarily in that order, but let's take these one by one. So the first issue here is with the age-gating mechanism. How do we know who kids are? All right, there's a couple arguments surrounding this. One is this a technical argument.

This is really what the social media companies are pushing. They're saying this is too hard. It's not really our responsibility. We don't know how to do this. You're not being clear enough. I would say this is the main lobbying pressure point they applied in Australia, which was the companies, "We don't want to argue about the harms or lack of harms, but we need more time and more studies," basically trying to slow walk the bill, because we don't know technically how to do this.

And so don't give us these technical demands and just say, "Do it or we're going to fine you $50 million Australian dollars." So they're trying to slow walk it. I think this is a general response that the social media companies are having right now to this style of legislation, including COSA in the US, which is slow walk bills that have regulatory teeth, until you can do enough type of controls or options on your own that people will feel like, "I think they have enough stuff in place now.

We don't need laws." Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. The other concern about this is the privacy concerns. It's a little confusing. In the US, some of the advocacy groups that are pushing these concerns are also heavily connected to the social media companies themselves.

There's a lot of complicated backstory when it comes to who's arguing what, but let's just take the concerns in abstract and separate them from who's pushing them. There's a privacy concern. Forget the kids. I now, as an adult, have to prove that I'm 16 or older, and that's a privacy concern.

Do I have to upload my license and show a social media company? Now a social media company knows who I am, and now I guess they can track what I'm saying or they can punish me in the real world for things I'm saying online, so there's privacy concerns around it.

Ultimately, I think these are solvable issues. There's a couple of different ways to think about it. One is, and this is what the Australian legislatures are doing, it's a rip-the-band-it, like, look, you got a year, figure something out good enough. That often tends to work. I think there's many examples of regulation of this general flavor that have some sort of technical complexity that is eventually solved, where you say, look, you have to do it, and something is solved.

It's imperfect, but something is solved. It should be said, there are, in the American context, there are other web-based services that have to do things like this, so notably in multiple U.S. states, pornographic websites have to do various types of age verification. It has not led to as big of privacy arguments because I think there's not as big of a lobbying effort to protect those sites.

Let me tell you my preferred solution here. I do think, from a technologist's standpoint, the approach of saying the sites and apps need to age-gate, I actually don't think that's right. I don't think that's the right way to do this. There is privacy and technical concerns. Those are fair points.

I actually think the right way to do this is at the operating system level. Here's my proposal, and I've talked about this before in various forums. My proposal is, what is something we know someone under 16 can't do? They can't go and buy an iPhone and set up cellular service for that iPhone, right?

That we know an adult does. These 13-year-olds who have phones and they're using the phones to go on Instagram or to go on TikTok, the one thing we know is their parents set up that phone for them. You can't sign contracts. You don't have the money for it. You can't have a cellular contract.

So I think that is actually the choke point for age verification, and I think it is as simple as this. When you buy a phone and set up a plan or add a phone to your plan, as the owner of this plan, the person who the plan's name is in, you just specify this is an under-16 or above-16 phone, a single bit.

We trust you. Yeah, you can lie, fine. We're not doing any more verification. There's no government. There's no government documents. There's no photos. There's no looking at your behavior. Just parents say this phone is for a kid, this phone is for an adult, and then if that kid gets older, they can change that.

The same place they change the credit card you use for your billing. Now the operating system just has a single bit. Any service who wants can query the phone and say, is this someone who is 16 and older or not, and they get one bit yes or no. I think that's going to solve.

That gives you like 90% there. There's no privacy concerns here. Technically it's pretty straightforward. From an effectiveness standpoint, it largely works. Yes, like adults can lie, but so they can do that with any of these bans, just set up an account and give it to their kid, give them their password to use.

But this is simple. It gets rid of privacy issues. It gets rid of technical concerns, right? Now all these websites have to do is just access, make an OS call, is this an adult or not. And it simplifies a lot of things. So I do think it's a solvable problem.

I don't want to dismiss it, but it's not a showstopper. And I am very suspicious of slow walking. Like eventually with these things, you have to just push something through. This has been, I think, more or less the approach with some of the US state laws that have age-related restrictions for various technologies.

They're kind of saying, just figure it out. Ultimately, you do have to do something like that, but I like my OS solution. All right. Another argument, social media will become worse without the excuse of protecting kids. And kids will sneak in and not tell anyone because they're not supposed to be there.

I don't buy this at all. This idea that the only thing keeping TikTok, Instagram, X, whatever, these are whatever services are being targeted here. The only thing keeping them from 8chan, just like straight up chaos, is the fact that we worry about kids being on there. That's nonsense. These companies don't care about kids.

They haven't been doing almost anything for kids other than adding some privacy controls that parents can control. We are not, I do not buy this concept that our current social media experience is mediated by these companies being worried about kids. They're mediated by trying to keep their customers. What will our customers bear?

If Instagram turns themselves into 8chan, most adults won't want to use Instagram. We see X decided we are going to get less content moderatedly, and then Blue Sky came along and said we'll get more content moderation. These found different audiences. People are carefully trying to titrate what their content's like.

Threads are saying they're going to turn down political content, and we're going to turn up this type of content. Anyway, so I don't buy this idea that, oh, we know the kids aren't here. Let's bring out the Klu Klux Klan memes or whatever, because you're going to lose all your customers.

I'm also not that convinced by the argument that, well, now kids will sneak in and not report what's going on because they're not supposed to be there. They're not reporting what's going on now that they're seeing that's bad. That's not compelling to me. I think the craziest argument against is this idea of, well, if kids can't use social media, they'll turn to the dark web.

This is a canard, not just a canard, it's like a complete factual inaccuracy that I have been railing against for a long time. Social media is not the internet. Social media is a small number of services that essentially run their own private version of the internet that are accessed through internet protocols.

But a lot of commentators, especially people who grew up on this or the companies themselves, like to equate social media with internet themselves. So they say if you're not on a social media platform, what's left? The dark web. That's crazy. The dark web is a very specific thing. It's sites and services that don't publicly have domain names that are accessible through standard DNS services or so that you only can get to them if someone has told you specifically how to log into them so that they can have less scrutiny from law enforcement.

It's like this very small corner of the internet that's used for hiring hit men and drug trafficking and child pornography. You have all of the internet outside of social media that's not the dark web. I've never had a social media account. I use the internet a lot. I'm not on the dark web.

So I do not like this idea that the internet is social media, and if you're not on social media, you're on some dark website ordering hit men. All right, the final argument is kids will isolate and lose the positive benefits of social media. I think this is the point that's most worth arguing.

It's the point that's most relevant when it comes to concerns about social media bans. It's not one that should be dismissed. Now the key to this, let's get fine tuned. The key to this argument is discerning between two different subgroups of kids. And this is why I think it's confusing for people when they hear this argument on either side of it is because they're mixing together two different groups of kids.

For most kids, losing access to internet-based community is not a problem. For most kids, actually, the moving more sociality to digital communication itself is causing more harms. For most kids, if you move them back to a more localized in-person sociality, that's actually really healthy for kids, because it's very complicated to build up your social skills to mature as a social being.

It takes lots of practice, and you need all of the sources of information we're evolved to take in. We need to see people in front of us. We need to see their body language. We need to struggle. We need the friction of trying to navigate complicated in-person social interactions to get that practice that's going to make us better at it.

So for most kids, it's kind of what you need, actually, is like what I had in the 1990s as a junior, as a high school student. It's actually fine. Most kids are going to be fine. There is, however, certain kids who perhaps are in a marginalized group living in an area where there really is very little support.

Maybe there's just not very many other people like them. They really do feel isolated. In-person sociality is not going well. Traditionally, they would have had a very hard childhood. They would have felt very isolated, and maybe on social media they can find other people to support them, find other people who are of a similar community that shows that they're not alone.

All of this could be really useful for that group. So that's the group, I think, for which that's true. That's where you need to be worried about when it comes to this particular type of argument. One thing I'll say here, and one way we can think about this, is asking the question of whether social media platforms are inherent in Internet-based support communities.

There are Internet-based support communities that come through social media. Social media kind of makes them easier to find, and typically it's a good interface. It's easy to use. You can find your particular—maybe you're on TikTok pretty quickly, for example. Just automatically find you want to see videos from these type of people, and you'll see them a lot.

You don't have to do much. Or you can find a Facebook group or a Reddit thread that's of a particular community, and the interface is there, and you have a nice app, and so it could be really useful. But there is a lot of Internet, like we just argued, that's not through these global conversation platforms.

There's a lot of Internet that can be leveraged successfully to help young people find support communities. You have, for example, the whole world of things like newsletters and podcasts, which often spawn their own communities. If you belong to a sub-stack newsletter about something you really care about, you're probably familiar with the fact that there's a comment section on the newsletter post, there's chats that happen back and forth with the author of it, and they're niche communities.

It's people who are interested in this very thing. It's a small group of people. It's much more cohesive. There's no algorithmic curation. There's no engagement. It's not 100,000 people talking about this and the most outrageous stuff being curated for what you see. It's there's 600 people here. We're kind of on the same page.

We set up our own community norms, right? You can have a very strong community. There's communities run by teens themselves. These are based around discussion boards or chat channels, et cetera, that just don't happen to live in a social media ecosystem. Community groups themselves could run their own online services, be it web or app-based, where people could come together and chat and share resources and have appropriate moderation for exactly what this community is.

Moderation is not a bad thing. Moderation is hard when you're trying to apply rules to 600 million Twitter users. Moderation is much easier. This is a group for teens from this background, and there's a few hundred of us on here. That's a very easy community to moderate compared to we need rules for 600 million people.

So my argument there is that is a fair point. We need to think about groups that are finding support in the internet and make sure that we don't wrench them away from that, but we should start thinking about finding that support in ways that does not necessarily involve global conversation platforms, these social platforms.

All right. So there's the arguments for and the arguments against. I've gone through each of those. What's my take? I would say I'm generally in favor of legislation like this at this moment. Not because I think it solves all the problems, like put a law like this in place and then we can all go home.

Our kids will be safe and we don't have to think about it. What's good about this type of legislation is the signal it sends, and it is a signal that is fundamentally techno-selectionist, to use a piece of terminology that I like and that I introduced. It shows that we can notice that something that we embraced and had many good attributes is having unexpected negative side effects in certain instances or certain groups, and it's perfectly appropriate to say, "Well, great.

Maybe we should pull it back there," that the arrow of the future with technology is not unvaryingly straight. It's like a meandering river. It's generally heading towards some sort of proverbial future sea, but it takes turns and has oxbows, and we can say, "This technology is great. Let's try it out.

That service didn't work. Kids shouldn't use this. Actually, if we change it to this, this works better." We can edit and reflect and curate and change our relationship to technologies that already exist, even technologies that are already widely used. I also like that legislation like this sends a message to parents, right?

It's okay to say, "I worry about this. I don't like my kids using this." When you have a law that's like, "Kids shouldn't use this," it makes it so much easier to actually tell your kids, "I don't want to use it." It makes it so much easier for your kids not to feel alone when they don't use it.

This is something that opponents often don't understand about these type of laws, is they say, "Well, wait a second. So many kids will get around this. It's not that hard to get around if they really want to." That's not the point. I think the point is not trying to get 100% compliance.

It's trying to make the lives of families and parents who are really worried about this 100% easier. Because now it's not, "I will be the only one in my class who's not on Snapchat and my life's going to be terrible," to now the kid has to argue to a parent, "Will you break the law for me?" That's a much easier place for parents to be.

So I think that's fine. I'm also generally not in favor of the approach of, "Why don't we just instead make social media safer for everyone?" I just think that's an impossible thing to do. It's somewhat techno-utopian. It gets very vague. It runs into all sorts of issues. I just have not, I don't have a lot of confidence that there's a way legislatively to make social media good for everyone.

It ends up being like having extra long filters on the cigarettes you sell the kids. Sometimes something is just not appropriate for one group that's better for another. Yeah, we do our best. This social media is an interesting thing. It's entertaining. It's also kind of dangerous. So maybe just kids shouldn't be there.

That's often easier than somehow trying to go through. We tried this with movies and then we figured out it's better just to have ratings and say, you have to be older than 16 to go to the R-rated movies. It was easier than trying to have the Hays Codes or whatever that was trying to make all movies appropriate for all people.

We didn't get as good of movies with those in place and it was just easier to say, "Well, if we want to be really violent or whatever, maybe just young people shouldn't go there unless a parent really wants them to see it and the parent can make that choice and that's the R-rated movie system." All right.

But I want to emphasize two things here. What's talked about in these type of bills does not capture all the harm of the internet facing kids. Much of the digital bullying that's happening right now with kids is happening on group text messaging apps, not in social media platforms. Snapchat is where this used to happen, but that's really just a glorified text messaging service that kids like to use.

So if you really want to help the bullying issue, this is where having a culture of kids aren't just on their own phones all the time makes more of a difference. This also ignores online games. Online games are a huge source of the sort of predation, online exploitation, predation issues.

You know, a lot of parents who maybe would not give their kid a phone thinks it's fine that their kid is playing Minecraft on a server on their iPad, not realize they're playing that with unknown adults who are able to interact with them. So it's sort of missing out other sources of predation.

But mainly this is missing out on this type of bill, this type of discussion is missing out on the fact that these types of devices and the content accessible to these devices is hugely distracting and addicting for young people. It's digital fentanyl for a young person. Think about any 14-year-old you've ever known or have ever seen who's been given a smartphone.

It is glued to their eyeball. The ultra processed content, be it coming through a social media platform or through online games or through like hyper addictive web content or video, you know, hyper addictive video content, whatever it is, the growing kid brain can't handle this. Like we thought this was bad enough in the 70s when latchkey kids like got glued to TV.

This is like a hundred times worse. Now this is not something that these type of bills are trying to handle, but it is one of the largest issues. We're going to see it in the questions that we're about to answer here. This causes real issues for people. It causes real issues to sort of all out distraction and addiction of these devices.

So honestly, if you want to know what I think is most appropriate, it comes back to my main suggestion, which is it's not just social media, it's unrestricted internet access. That is a problem when you're younger than 16. So no, you shouldn't have a smartphone or a tablet with unrestricted internet access.

I mean, you can just do what you want on this without supervision until you're 16. That's really the move here that if I'm a parent or I'm a community group, that's really the move here that probably matters. That's not something that I think could be easily legislated and I don't think it necessarily needs to.

This could be a cultural shift. So again, laws like Australia is fine for signaling that it's fine to make different choices in your family, but the lack of unrestricted internet access for kids before 16 is probably like the bigger choice that's going to make a bigger difference. All right.

So how do we connect this to all of us? Well, what we are seeing here is techno-selectionism in play. This idea that it's okay to try, watch, and change. Try, watch, and change. The introduction of a technology doesn't mean it always has to be used. Your prior use of a technology doesn't dictate your future use of a technology.

Be aware of the impact of technologies. Make assessments of this impact of technology and make changes accordingly. That's what all of us should be thinking about. There's probably a technology in all of our lives that needs the equivalent of the Australian ban. Someone to come along and say, "Hey, just stop using this.

Maybe it was good before, but it's causing more trouble than it's worth." We should be comfortable with moving backwards in this sense without thinking it's progress turning backwards. So I think there's a general message here of techno-selectionism. All right. That's enough on what's going on in Australia. Let's get to some questions about these general topics.

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No questions asked. But don't worry. They have a very low return rate and high reorder rate because people like me love us some Element. All right. Let's get back to the show. All right. We're back. Let's do some questions. Without Jesse here, I'm going to have to read these questions myself.

This is no fun. All right. Our first question comes from EM. EM says, "I recently lost my iPhone and my life has gotten exponentially better as a result. I easily keep up with my graduate school work and research goals. I'm spending more time reading and immersed in my hobbies and am taking better care of myself by sleeping enough and eating well.

I spend maybe an hour a week on social media on my laptop, but here's the problem. I've realized that I am profoundly lonely. I moved across the country away from all my friends from graduate school and now that I'm not spending hours every day fake socializing on Instagram, I'm actually noticing that loneliness.

Any advice?" Well, I like this because there's also a little case study hidden in here. Notice all the fantastic stuff that happened to EM when he lost his iPhone and then later just changed his social media to something he just does on his laptop one hour a week, which by the way, you're allowed to do.

And by the way, I make this argument in digital minimalism, but when I talk to adults who give me a case that they need to be using social media, 95% of the time the things they say they need to use social media for could be handled in one hour a week on their laptop.

So they use that small number of things. I need to be on the Facebook group for my running club to justify five hours a day of scrolling on their phone. So I really love seeing that. I love, and I'm going to emphasize what EM got out of this, he easily keeps up with his work now, makes progress on his research goals.

He reads, he's in hobbies, he sleeps. All this good stuff happened when he got rid of the phone addiction. Okay, the loneliness. Well, this is important because it underscores one of the more insidious side effects or attractions maybe I should say of our current digital world. It simulates, these services and apps and devices simulate deep human needs.

Now not in a sort of deep way where it's actually going to satisfy those needs, but just enough to be alluring, right? It's like they have evolved to say if we can offer a satisfaction of deep human needs, that will make us particularly alluring to people and we can become a real part of their life and therefore harvest their date and eyeballs.

So fake socializing as he talks about it, so being on social media and talking with people with digital typing back and forth on these various sort of global conversation platforms, draws on our deep human need for sociality and sort of makes us feel vaguely speaking like, okay, I guess we're social.

Like in a rational way, we're social, we're talking to people all the time. But the problem is, and I argue this in detail in Digital Minimalism, it's not actually fulfilling our need for sociality because the deep parts of our brain isn't seeing another person. Where is this person? What do they look like?

When are we sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on their behalf? So the deep part of our brain is not seeing real human relations. It's just the rational part of our brain saying, "I'm very social, I'm very social." And so we're actually very lonely but don't realize it. And so what we see here is once EM actually took away the fake socialization, he realized, "Oh, I have been really lonely.

There's not real people in my lives. I was papering it over. I was papering it over with this." There's other needs these fulfill where they do similar things. For example, we have this drive for competency, to be good at things, because it increases our status in the community tribe as someone who's useful and valuable, and we build a lot of meaning on it.

Video games can get in there and toy with that. "Oh, you're leveling up. You just killed all the Nazis in this base in Call of Duty. It plays with that." So you're like, "Yeah, that's fine. I'm okay. I feel like I'm doing enough to feel competent." But you're not actually doing anything that's building real competence.

There's no real friction. You're not building up real hard skills in a way that our body recognizes, our communities recognize. That comes to haunt you. And at some point you're like, "Why do I feel so hollow and angry or adrift or isolated?" It's because I wasn't actually building up a tangible skill that's valuable to the community.

I was pretending to build up a skill. It simulates that. It gives you numbers. You're level six, and you do some button pressing, and now you're level seven. It sort of simulates it, but it's not really giving you what you need. So Ian, what should you do? You have to do old-fashioned, the old-fashioned work of actually building connections.

So join communities and be useful in those communities. Over time, try to get a leadership position in those communities. That's a great way to be around people, to feel useful, to feel less lonely, and to feel connected. You'll meet people that way as well. You also have to think about taking regular doses of what I call "vitamin people." Being around real people in person is necessary for your health.

So it's not about, "Am I in the mood to be social this week?" Especially if you've been fake socializing, you might have lost that muscle and might feel very uncomfortable. It's, "Have I gotten a sufficiently large dose of vitamin people this week?" You go and you do things, or you invite someone you know or go to something you know to get that dose of vitamin people, and then over time, as the rewards come from forming these connections, it's less something you have to sort of force yourself to do, and it's something that you're really going to want to do.

So yeah, it can be hard work to rebuild your social connection, but it's important, and I appreciate you highlighting the degree to which social media in particular can obfuscate the idea that you actually are very lonely. You just don't realize it. Let's move on with Fahad. Fahad says, "You mentioned the following Arnold Bennett quote in some of your books.

One of the chief things which my typical man has to learn is that the mental faculties are capable of a continuous hard activity. They do not tire like an arm or a leg. All they want is change, not rest except in sleep." Fahad continues his question, "Do you still agree with what it says?

Do we really not need a rest? Can we work all the time like robots?" Well, no, we can't work all the time like robots. That is exhausting. I talk about this in my book, Slow Productivity. Particular principle two, work at a natural pace. We need great variations in effort over different timescales.

But Bennett isn't talking about professional work here. The argument he's making, and this comes from his book, How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, the argument he's basically making is you don't need as much like veg-out resting as you think. That's what sleep is for. Sleep is for the restorative, "I'm doing nothing and my body is like recharging for the next day." He's saying, "With your other time, do stuff that matters, like do interesting high-quality stuff." Now, Bennett is actually pretty dismissive of work itself because he was addressing the sort of newly enlarged London middle class.

They worked downtown and they would take the trains back to their suburbs. He was like, "Yeah, you got your job, do your job. All right, when you get home, you have eight hours until you go to bed." And what he's saying is like, "Don't veg-out. Do good stuff, like intentional, meaningful stuff at that time.

It's going to energize you instead of exhausting you." Now his version of vegging out, if you read the book, because this is the early 20th century, is like drinking. Like, "Ah, I'm going to drink." I think he had like playing cards and drinking. I guess that's their equivalent of like vaping and scrolling social media.

He's like, "No, do meaningful stuff. Read poetry and think big thoughts and have grand conversations or whatever." And I think there's truth to that. I think intentional activity is something that we crave. It doesn't have to be hard activity. It doesn't have to be like a real strain. But being intentional versus, "I'm now going to spend two hours on my phone while Netflix is playing," he's saying being intentional is going to be better.

It's not going to exhaust you. It's going to give you energy. I think that's true. I think a softer way of thinking about this is in your time outside of work to embrace what I call the PIG, P-I-G, which is an acronym that stands for being present, being intentional, and seeking gratitude.

So moment by moment in your after-work time, when you're deciding what to do next, be intentional about what you choose. Don't just stumble into something. Be present while you're doing it. Don't also be on your phone or only half pay attention. And seek gratitude. "Isn't this great? I really enjoy this.

This is really good." PIG activities do not have to be mentally trying. It could be, for example, like watching a dumb movie with your kids. But if you chose to watch this movie, like we're all going to get together to watch it, you're present with them and the movie and what's going on.

You find gratitude in being able to watch this movie that you remember from your childhood and your kids are there and it's like a nice night or whatever. That is a meaningful activity. It's not draining. It's not hard. You're not getting after it or crushing it. But it's different than, "I'm just kind of vegging with my phone." So maybe that's a softer way to think about Bennett is presence, intentionality, and gratitude.

Live on purpose at most times. Even if what you're doing on purpose is something that's not particularly mentally trying or difficult. So anyways, thanks for bringing that up. And I like that book, actually. It's one of the first self-help books, "How to Live on 24 Hours a Day." And we've got a question here from Heather.

"How do you do your research for books and articles? I find it challenging to sort through all of the information online. How do you write your books in terms of tools and organizing your thoughts?" I thought this was an interesting question. The main point I wanted to respond to here is the reality that the world of available information is vast.

So like you want to write an article, you want to write a book. Between other books and other articles and the world of online information, it's endless. The idea that I'm going to master everything relevant to this topic and somehow organize it and present it back in my books or my articles is hopeless.

It's quixotic. So the way a lot of idea writers like myself or critical commentators like myself—so I write critical commentary and I write idea books—the way we often operate is trying to create a coherent path through this world. It's like pattern matching. These four or five things I've encountered seem to connect together, and if we connect together right, it makes a coherent path here, or a coherent structure, if you want to use that metaphor, for one way of seeing some part of our life that allows us to take useful action or make useful critique.

And the landscape in which this path or structure is built is massive. The landscape of all relevant ideas and information is massive, and we don't have to get our arms around all that. Just here is a coherent path that'll take you from one place to somewhere else useful. So we often think about that.

You're building a coherent path instead of trying to be comprehensive—coherency over being comprehensive. One of the ways we see this violated is you get people that become encyclopedic when they tackle issues. Well, there's 15 relevant main issues to this issue that we're trying to face here, and if we go into sub-issue number three, sub-point four, sub-sub-point A, we see this particular argument, and then we can contrast that with point seven, sub-point six.

You can get this complicated hierarchy of information that in most instances is just overwhelming and doesn't help. The other issue we see when we ignore the reality of coherence versus comprehensiveness is that people get petrified. If I build a path over here, what about the landscape over here and over here and over here and over here, and what if someone is over in that landscape and they will be upset that my path over here doesn't speak to their particular landscape?

The problem is that's also a quixotic approach as well, because the landscape is vast. The number of ways to think about it is vast. The number of different things that people care about most when it comes to a particular issue is vast, and to try to address or handle everyone, to build a map that covers the entire space, you're probably not equipped to build that map because most of these other spaces you've never been to before, so it's not a useful map, and it's much more boring.

I want to go—I'm stretching this metaphor—but I want to go on a nice nature walk now. I don't need a topographic map of the whole state, right? So that's the other thing that happens. This can lead to a sort of incomprehensibility because it's just you're trying to do too much.

So it's my approach, and a lot of commentators are doing the same. In this vast space of issues and information and ideas, here is a coherent path that for a lot of people hopefully is useful. Add it to your list of particular outings, and that's a huge elaboration of a metaphor beyond its actual usefulness, but I just want to make that point, Heather, that sometimes it's okay to just find something useful to say, and then let people integrate that into the much broader maps they're creating.

All right. We got a case study here, but I'm going to put an asterisk in front of this. It's a case study, but it's also a plea for advice. So it's a useful case study. It's kind of at first a sad case study, but we're going to at the end give some advice to help this person.

So we're going to both see an issue be illuminated in detail, and then we can talk about some advice. All right. Our modified case study today comes from Shane. Shane says, "I'm turning 25 soon, and the reality is starting to hit me. I have wasted the past eight years of my life scrolling through TikTok and Instagram and binge-watching Netflix.

My daily social media usage is 15 plus hours, and I'm sleep-deprived due to this. The longest I can go without scrolling through social media is two days. I had no goals when I was young. I just went along with what my friends at the time chose to study in university.

Now they all have successful careers and are getting married. I fell behind in life. I dropped out of university two times, but due to my parents forcing me to study, I somehow managed to complete my degree. But even when I was in university, I barely attended classes, and teachers called me a daydreamer because I never focused in class, and I always zoned out.

As for getting a job, I prefer roles that don't necessitate daily attendance in an office or any consistent regular work schedule. My introverted personality has led me to isolation as I do not like talking to people, and I'm also ashamed to meet anyone as I haven't achieved anything. So I've tried learning various skills in the past three years, such as coding, copywriting, graphic design, web design, and animation, so I can do freelancing but never succeed at anything.

When something gets difficult, I just drop it and continue scrolling through social media. The most I can focus is 10 minutes, or sometimes I go into a flow state for hours, but most of the time, my mind just goes blank when I try to learn something. I've watched over hundreds of self-help videos and tried everything I saw on the videos.

From daily planning and specific goals to every piece of advice out there, nothing works. I know what to learn and the exact steps I need to learn these skills and how I will use them, but after creating a schedule, I barely follow through, and as I said, my mind just goes blank when I try to study.

Now I have no idea how to get myself to do something and achieve something. All right, well, let's start here with a little bit of empathy. This is sort of the worst-case scenario or a crystallization of people's fears when it comes to smartphones and social media and young people.

It is not for some people benign. It is not for some people a way to check on sports rumors and a community that's really supportive to them as part of an otherwise rich lives. These devices with these types of services can be incredibly addicting and have damage to people's lives that counters or is comparable to the damage of any of the more sort of well-known addictions, and we see that here in this case study.

Now why do they do this? Well, we have the distraction component, right? So, like, how does this damage happen? There's the distraction component. You're using your phone instead of doing other things that are more valuable, but there's a deeper issue going on, and I alluded to this earlier in the show, but I'm going to detail it here more.

These phones simulate deep human needs that were designed to actually drive humans to do the hard work of becoming a successful, sustainable, proud human being. It is hard work to become a respectable adult who feels satisfied in life and has a sustainable, meaningful life. That is hard work. Evolution set us up to help us do that hard work by giving us a collection of fundamental human needs, and they're so compelling that in the pursuit of satisfying these needs, we will do the hard stuff necessary to become a successful adult.

So these needs include connection, a sense of competency, community standing, and curiosity slash fear of boredom, among others. Those needs are very strong. Trying to satisfy those needs, we end up learning how to socialize, doing the hard work of getting good at things, trying to become a leader in our community, seeking out interesting information or productive activity because we really hate being bored, etc.

Modern phones and the apps and services that are on them can simulate fulfilling these human needs just enough to short-circuit us from actually going after them. They make us feel just enough connected, just enough competent, just enough part of a community, and just enough not bored that we don't actually get up off of the couch and do the stuff needed to become a successful adult.

So by short-circuiting those fundamental human drives, we lose the carrot and the stick that evolution granted us to prevent what is happening here with Shane from happening in our lives. That really is the fundamental danger of just unrestricted phone access to a kid, that if it's satisfying these drives as they gain autonomy as they go through their young adulthood, they never do the work necessary.

That's really the insidious part, more so than the distraction or the addictiveness. Because part of the reason why they're so addicting is it becomes our only outlet. This is Shane's only outlet for satisfying these drives. We're miserable if our human drives aren't satisfied. This is his only outlet now because he never developed the hard adult skills necessary to do this in the way that we're really meant to do it.

So now all he's left with is the devices. The good news is, Shane, it's recoverable. Those drives are there. You just have to learn how to satisfy them in the real-world way that evolution intended. Your phone will then become less compelling because it's not necessary anymore. So this is very recoverable.

Now how do we actually do this? The big argument in part one of the book I'm writing now on the deep life, part one is called "Prepare." The big argument is, we jump too quickly into making the big changes in our life. I want to be like, "Let's get out there, I'm going to be super social and get really good at things." But we skip the first part, which is just preparing ourselves to be an eminently qualified human being.

Just the hard work of learning how to be someone who can do hard things. Until you've practiced and created yourself into someone who can tackle hard things in a consistent way, any attempt to just go do something hard is going to fail. So I'm going to recommend a three-part solution here.

Let's start with discipline. The ability to do hard things that are valuable that you don't want to in the moment is the fundamental ability if you're going to transform your life. You were very bad at this now, that's fine, because it's practiced. To say you were bad at discipline now is like saying also you're bad at the banjo.

The latter thing wouldn't upset you, because you're like, "Yeah, I've never played the banjo, but I'm sure I could get better if I practiced." Well, the same is for discipline. I would use the discipline ladder technique I talked about in a recent episode where you start with a really small thing that you do daily, but it's easy, and then you ladder up to something slightly harder, and then once you get used to that, you ladder up to something harder.

So you work your way up to increasingly demanding versions of whatever you're working on. I would run two discipline ladders, one involving health and physical fitness, and one involving the intellect. This is probably around working your way up to being able to read interesting, hard books. So have a ladder you build up towards, which will lead to you getting in good shape, and a ladder that will lead up to you being able to use your mind and apply it in a consistent, sustained way, and be exposed to interesting ideas.

Run those ladders concurrently. This could take three to six months, but it's going to give you a base of discipline we can now use going forward. All right, next you've got to organize your life. Start with capture systems. Just have a place where you write down all the different stuff you have to do, broken up by role and status.

Then put away to lightweight morning shutdown routines, so just every morning, a very lightweight thing you do. I'm going to glance at these lists and sketch out a plan, put a couple notes down, and a shutdown routine you do, this should be really centered on, I just want to make sure anything that came up gets put in those lists, so I'm not remembering anything in my head.

Once you get used to that, ladder that up to something like multi-scale planning. Then you'll be ready at this point to do something like multi-scale planning. All right, step three. Now we're pretty far into 2025 right now, and now we're going to reclaim your brain from the phone. I don't want you doing this yet.

Before you have discipline, before you have some organization over your time and obligations, I don't want you going cold turkey on your phone yet, because it's going to be like going cold turkey on an alcohol dependency. You're going to get the DTs, it's going to be dangerous. But as a third step, you're ready to reclaim your brain, and this is where you're going to take a 30-day break from optional digital technologies.

I kind of walked through this in my book, Digital Minimalism. You're going to aggressively explore in-person community opportunities, you're going to aggressively explore a hobby or skill that teaches you the joys of real competency, you're going to aggressively look into the world of ideas outside of your phone, it's going to be like reading or documentaries, and in whatever work you're doing, you're going to aggressively look at how do I get better at this job, not what do I want this job to offer me, what can I offer this job, I want to become indispensable so that later I can take control of my career.

You have to get good first before your job gets good. Journal throughout this whole thing, reflect what's working, what's not. You'll be ready then to sort of get used to going after these fundamental human needs without your device. After 30 days, make very specific rules about what comes back into your digital world and why and what rules you have for using it.

You'll probably have to repeat this a couple times a year for a while. So you can come back from all this. This is not destiny, but it's going to take hard work. Work your way up slowly. You're going to have some setbacks, but I absolutely believe in you, Shane, and that's the advice I would give.

I just pointed to multiple books and multiple past episodes. You're going to have to dive into all of those as well to really understand what I'm saying. But I will say clearly, this is recoverable. You can figure out how to actually be an eminently qualified human being. This is going to take some work.

Now is a good time to do it. All right. And now we're at the Slow Productivity Corner question. The Slow Productivity Corner question. We do one question a week that relates to my new book, "Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout." All right. Today's Slow Productivity Corner question of the week comes from...

Oh, I don't have a name. That's a cool question. All right. It says, "How does Faustina Lente compare to the Tanias Longer Shorter Way? Sounds quite similar, and I like finding a source for the essence of this wisdom in Torah." All right. So we got to do a little bit of scholarship here.

Faustina Lente is this Roman phrase, "Make haste slowly," which I talk about in my book, "Slow Productivity," because it ties to the second principle of slow productivity, which is to work at a natural pace. So make haste slowly. What it's capturing is you're sort of relentlessly and systematically moving towards a goal, but doing it carefully and slowly.

All right. The Longer Short Way, which is a Jewish concept, I didn't know about until this question, so I did a little bit of research, and as anyone who knows anything about serious Talmudic study knows, 20 minutes of Internet research is all it takes to master these concepts. I'm being sarcastic.

I'm apologizing in advance to all of the rabbis who are about to say, "Oh, you're getting this completely wrong." But let me give you my understanding of the Longer Short Way concept. It comes from a story from Talmud. For those who don't know, Talmud is the combination of the Mishnah, the oral law of Judaism, combined with commentary known as the Gemara in just sort of one book, etc., etc.

It's old, and it's something that is studied in Judaism. So I found, using Internet searches, the story from Talmud from which this concept comes from, and then we're going to say, "Does this give us more insight on slow productivity?" Here's the story. Said Rabbi Yeshua ben Shania, "Once a child got the better of me.

I was traveling, and I met with a child at a crossroads. I asked him, 'Which way to the city?' And he answered, 'This way is short and long, and this way is long and short.' I took the short and long way. I soon reached the city, but found my approach obstructed by gardens and orchards.

So I retraced my steps and said to the child, 'My son, did you not tell me that this is the short way?' Answered the child, 'Did I not tell you that it is also long?'" All right, so this story has a lot of interpretations, in particular, I believe, maybe in Hasidic tradition.

There's a book about it. There's a rabbi that's done a lot of glosses on it. But the simple version, as best as I could tell from my 20 minutes of internet searching, what's being said here is the long-short way, so the path pointed out by the child that is long but short, is sometimes the most direct way to get to an important goal.

It is a long path of intentional steady effort is sometimes the shortest way, the best way overall to get to a goal. By contrast, a short-long way where you think you're taking a shortcut, but it ends up being very long. So in Jewish tradition, as far as I understand, this is often applied to Torah study, to get to the goal of connection to God.

Actually the shortest path there is a long commitment to studying Torah. Long path of steady intentional effort is sometimes the shortest way to a goal. That's a cool concept. I think that is very similar to Festina Lente, and I think it's a nice way of capturing some of the core ideas of working at a natural pace.

The shortest path somewhere is sometimes long. That's okay because once you recognize that, you can chill out and start doing the daily or weekly or whatever pace you're working at. Do the stuff that matters and let it pile up. The path is long. So to make it sustainable, do the right stuff at a reasonable pace, so the long, the longer short way.

I like that phrase. I'm going to add that to my lexicon of slow productivity related ancient wisdom. So thank you for sending that in. All right, speaking of wisdom, I want to go over the books I read in November. But first, let's hear from some of our sponsors. So I want to talk in particular about our friends at Cozy Earth.

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I love them. Cozy Earth is not just about sheets as well. They have other things such as pajamas. My wife has the Cozy Earth pajamas. I have the Cozy Earth sweatshirt. We have the Cozy Earth towels. They just make really comfortable stuff. And once we became addicts for the sheets, we began, "Oh, we have the duvet cover." It's comfortable stuff.

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That's CozyEarth.com/Deep. If you get a post-purchase survey, this is like a request from me, say you heard about Cozy Earth from Deep Questions podcast. If you select it from the list in that survey, if one comes up, it really helps me. I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tutor.

We come out of the holidays. We have Thanksgiving. We got like Christmas or all the other holidays in December, and you sometimes feel as if you've been eating a lot. You've been sitting around on the couch a lot. It's dark. You're not outside enough. You're not feeling healthy. You have your New Year's resolutions pending.

I want to get in better shape. Well, let me tell you how to do it. My Body Tutor. My Body Tutor, which is founded by Adam Gilbert, who I've known forever, is a 100% online coaching problem that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency.

They do this by simplifying the process of getting healthier in the practical sustainable behaviors and then letting you check in and work with your coach online every day to actually be accountable and to make the sort of flexible changes you need as life comes at you. That's why My Body Tutor works, because you're working with someone else.

They help you come up with your diet plan, help you come up with your exercise plan, and then you check in with them about how it's going. They hold you accountable. When you travel for Christmas, they say, "What changes are we going to make, for example, so that you don't fall too much off your plan?

You don't have a gym. What exercises should you do?" So they help you adapt as well, and because it's 100% online, it is much cheaper than having to work with a nutritionist or a trainer in your gym in person. So now is the time to finally fulfill your wish of getting healthier, and I recommend My Body Tutor as a great way to do that.

Just go to MyBodyTutor.com, T-U-T-O-R. Mention deep questions when you sign up, and Adam will give you $50 off your first month. MyBodyTutor.com and mention deep questions. All right, let's move on now to books. All right, I try to read five books a month and then report back at the first or second podcast of each month what I read the month before.

So we're in December now. What books did I read in November 2024? First I read Gaining Ground by Forrest Pritchard. It's a cool memoir. It's a memoir of Forrest, went back to his family farm and took it over. He's over in Shenandoah, not far from here. He sells at the Tacoma Park Farmer's Market, so I love crossing paths with him.

And I enjoyed it. It's like a good memoir of someone learning and embracing the farming life. Another memoir I read—I guess I was in a memoir mood this month, I'm realizing this—I read Little Chapel on the River by Gwendolyn Bounds. I like Gwendolyn Bounds' writing. Earlier this year I read that great book she wrote about not too late, about people in middle age taking on difficult physical goals.

Little Chapel on the River is about her moving from New York in the wake of 9/11 to a small town on the Hudson River Valley and how she got really involved in this old, small pub on the river in this town and getting involved in the life of the people at the pub.

And she's a great writer and it's a great book. It wasn't what I thought it was. This is my fault, not Gwendolyn's. I came into this thinking, "I really want to hear about what it's like moving upstate from a city, the life in the countryside and the slowness," because that's very aspirational.

It really was about this bar and the people in the bar, and it's very touching, the relationships she made with these people, but it was like the vignettes of this. It ended up being a very affecting book. It wasn't what I thought, but I ended up enjoying it. I also read Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz.

This I thought was going to be a memoir. She studied at St. John's in Annapolis, the great books program there, and was a successful academic but left the track and went to what was essentially a monastery. I thought this book was going to be about her recommitting to a life of the mind.

It's not really about her, though, after the beginning. It's just more of a polemic about the value of the life of the mind, the sort of standalone value of a life that's dedicated to embracing and engaging thoughts. So once I adjusted that that's what this was really about, there are some really good arguments in there.

I read it because I'm thinking about one day writing this book in defense of thinking, and she's kind of doing something like that. So if you want a sort of muscular argument in favor of hard books and ideas as having intrinsic value, Lost in Thought will give that to you.

I then was, I guess, the last person left to read Outlived by Peter Atiyah. I had done an event with Peter and he had given me a copy of his book, and I read it on the way home. It was much better than I thought. It's interesting because there's a lot of Peter in this book, and basically his trajectory was "I used to be super fiddly optimized, like exactly this diet and exactly this supplement," and he sort of matured and was like, "No, no, no.

Different people respond to things differently. Let's get to the big ideas that really matter." I mean, it was a more medically rigorous and less bro-science-y than you're going to expect. It's a really good argument for what matters for longevity and what it looks like to actually prioritize in your life.

It's affected me in various ways. It's well written. No wonder it sold, and I'm checking the official list here, all the copies because it's a very good book. And again, it's more general and less in the weeds than you might imagine. So I'm glad I read that. Finally I read We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi, who's an assistant professor sociologist at Stony Brook.

That's probably my favorite book of the month. I love books like this where you have a young academic throwing bombs. He just comes into the building. He looks at the people around him and is like, "I've got something to say," and he's making a big argument, and it's a bold argument, and he does it confidently, and it is very timely and very convincing.

It's not saying something like, "Oh, we all are thinking this." He's just taking his term saying it. It's surprising. It's the type of intellectual books I love. It's an intellectual experience, and I thought it was an exciting, fun book to read. Man, he's got some courage, too. He's basically looking around at all of his fellow academics and other what he calls the symbolic capitalists, but sort of the technocratic elite of U.S.

culture, and just saying, "Hey, all this woke stuff, this is like you guys playing internal status games. It's about you trying to justify yourselves and your position, and it allows you to ignore or put down people who have it worse off than you and still feel good about it." He's pretty compelling about it, and it's a fantastic, exciting intellectual journey.

You might not agree with all of it, but you'll learn a lot, and there's an energy to it which you don't always see in these books. All right, so that's all I've got for today. We'll be back next week, hopefully, if everything goes well with what I'm up to, with Jesse.

I promise. Jesse's coming back. I can't wait for that. Until then, as always, stay deep.