← Deep Questions with Cal Newport
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- [00:01]
Cal Newport
It's become fashionable when thinking about our
- [00:03]
Jesse
phones to joke around about being hooked on these devices.
- [00:07]
Cal Newport
Oh man, I'm so addicted to my
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Jesse
Insta, we say with a grin on our faces.
- [00:14]
Cal Newport
But should we be taking this possibility more seriously? What is the line between using our phones too much and suffering from an actual psychopathology? And if we are addicted, what would it mean to treat it? Not just half hearted tweaks here and there, but to actually try to find real freedom from this problematic behavior? Well, it's Monday, so that means it's time for an advice episode of this show. It seems like the perfect opportunity to
- [00:41]
Jesse
dive deeper into this issue.
- [00:42]
Cal Newport
Now, to help me, I'm bringing on a guest that I've long been trying to book, Dr. Anna Lemke. Anna is a Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual diagnosis clinic. In 2016, she published a book titled Drug Dealer MD about the opioid epidemic. But if her name sounds familiar, it's probably because of her 2021 bestseller Dopamine Nation, which looks at how addiction functions in the brain and takes particular aim at the potential for digital devices to become addictive. Now, you may have seen Anna on her popular appearances on the Joe Rogan Podcast, the Andrew Huberman Podcast, and the Oprah Podcast.
- [01:24]
Jesse
You may have also seen her featured in the Netflix documentary the Social Dilemma.
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Cal Newport
Now I crossed paths with Anna recently because we both just recorded a masterclass course. So if you like what you hear today, you should definitely check out her
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Jesse
class, which is called Dopamine Take back your brain.
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Cal Newport
Now, in this interview, Anna and I discuss how addiction works in our minds, how digital addictions compare to substance addictions, how to tell if you have a problem, and the best ways to get help if you do, and including the recent rise in a technology related 12
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Jesse
step program called ITAA.
- [01:59]
Cal Newport
We also talk about kids and why the problem with devices in young people is worse than we thought, as well as possibilities for making all of this better. So if you've ever worried about the role of your phone in your life or the lives of your kids or other people you care about, then you need to listen to this conversation. It's scary, but it's important. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this
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Jesse
is Deep Questions the show for people
- [02:27]
Cal Newport
seeking depth in a distracted world.
- [02:37]
Jesse
Well Anna, it's a pleasure to have you here. I've read your work so long it is almost a surreal experience to actually be talking to you in real time. Thank you for joining us on the show today.
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Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, thank you for having me. And likewise, I've been reading your work for many years now and I'm an admirer of your work. So I'm honored to be here.
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Cal Newport
Here's one place I wanted to start.
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Jesse
It's something I heard you say in an interview, I think about a year ago.
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Cal Newport
And you summarize part of what you've
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Jesse
been seeing in your work on addiction, especially in the clinical setting. You've described it as a diffuse addiction to the Internet, that this has been what you've been encountering.
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Cal Newport
Can you flesh out a little bit
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Jesse
what you meant by that and what you've been seeing?
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Dr. Anna Lemke
Sure. So the earliest signal was really the early 2000s when we were seeing middle aged men coming in addicted to pornography and compulsive masturbation. And many of them reported using pornography without a whole lot of problems through most of their adult lives. But with the advent of the Internet and then especially the mobile phone in 2007, smartphone in 2007, that's where their lives became unmanageable. So that was the earliest signal. And then we saw mostly teenage boys and video games coming in, having a lot of excessive video game use, up all night, up all day, not going to school, not taking care of their bodies. And then the next signal some years later was young girls and social media. And then we entered this period which I call diffuse Internet addiction, which was just people, sort of all of it. You know, when they're not on social media, they're buying stuff online. When they're not buying stuff online, they're gambling or playing video games, or both at the same time. Since those are now converging ecosystems, or they're watching pornography or they're watching Netflix, it just all kind of mushed together. And indeed, Pew Charitable Trust has done surveys on adolescent Internet use and found that at this point, about 50% of teenagers, US teenagers, report being continuously online. So they're never not online. And I think that's where we're headed.
- [05:06]
Jesse
Before we get into the details of what is unifying those digital examples, there's this other bigger question I'm always wondering about. Maybe you can help me out here, is that often when we look at this type of landscape, there's both a mechanical explanation and then there's a cultural, contextual explanation. We have, at the same time as everything you talked about there, the opioid addiction crisis that sort of morphed into the fentanyl addiction crisis and continues to this day, but certainly spike five, ten years ago. a really high point, completely different mechanisms. And so then my question, what I'm trying to understand is to what degree are we dealing with some sort of common cultural cause that is making people susceptible for addictive behavior? And to what degree are we looking at. No, no, it's the mechanisms that matter. It's the mechanisms of what was in those drugs that help spur that opioid crisis. And there's a mechanism in what's happening on those phones, and that's spurring the digital crisis. How do you think about the balance between mechanism and context?
- [06:12]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Yeah, interesting question. My answer to that would be, this is definitely a contextual problem whereby we have drugified our environment and our ecosystem, making everything that's reinforcing more potently, reinforcing more bountiful, more accessible and more novel. But it's also a common biological mechanism. All reinforcing substances and behaviors work on the same brain reward pathway. They all release dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. The more dopamine that's released, and the faster that it's released, the more likely is that substance or behavior to be something that our brains want us to do again and again. I would say it's common. Common. It's both a common cultural ecosystem etiology and it's a common biological neurological mechanism. Because really, whether the addiction is to a substance we ingest or to a behavior we're engaging in, the pathophysiology, it's the same final common pathway for all of it.
- [07:23]
Cal Newport
Can we get into that a little bit?
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Jesse
I often try to summarize this sort of pathophysiology, and I do it popular, poorly.
- [07:31]
Cal Newport
So you could do a service for
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Jesse
my entire audience by maybe walking us through a little bit about what actually happens in the brain with these reinforcing addictive behaviors.
- [07:41]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Yeah. So, I mean, I simplify it maybe to the point of being oversimplified, but for me, it's very helpful, and it's helpful for my patients when I explain the sort of fundamental mechanism of what we call neuroadaptation. Imagine that in our brain's reward pathway, there's something like a teeter totter in a kid's playground that very crudely represents how we process pleasure and pain. And they work through what's called an opponent process mechanism. That is to say, when we experience pleasure, that teeter totter tips one way, and when we experience pain, it tips the other. There are certain rules governing this balance. And the first and most important rule is that it wants to remain level with the brain. And this is what neuroscientists call homeostasis. Homeostasis is those finite number of physiologic states that an organism must preserve in order to survive. For example, if you think about temperature, we can get colder and we can get hotter, but if we're too cold or too hot for too long a period of time, we die. The same thing applies to the way that we process pleasure and pain. We can experience pleasure, we can experience pain, but if it's too much, our brains just simply cannot survive in the face of that. The way that our brains maintain homeostasis is by working very hard to restore a level balance with any deviation from neutrality. Imagine something that's reinforcing, rewarding, intoxicating, that releases dopamine, our reward neurotransmitter in the nucleus accumbens, part of our brain's reward pathway that feels good, combined with other endogenous neurotransmitters like our endogenous opioid system, our endogenous cannabinoid system, serotonin, norepinephrine, you name it. And that pleasure pain balance tilts to the side of pleasure. But no sooner has that happened than our brain will adapt to that increased level of dopamine firing by down regulating dopamine transmission. And I like to imagine that as these neuroadaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But the gremlins like it on the balance, so they don't get off as soon as it's level. They stay on until it's tilted and equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That is the come down, the hangover, the blue Monday, or even just that state of wanting to have one more drink, smoke one more joint, watch one more TikTok video. Now, if we resist that urge to consume again, which by the way, is really hard to do when we're presented with an environment where we have endless access to a high quantity of cheap drug. But let's say we somehow manage to reserve, you know, to resist the urge. Well, those gremlins get the message that their job is done. They hop off and homeostasis is restored. But if we continue to consume our drug of choice over days to weeks, to months, to years, those gremlins get bigger and stronger. We've got Arnold Schwarzenegger gremlins on the pain side of the balance. And eventually we change our hedonic or joy set point. Those gremlins are camped out on the pain side of the balance. We've now entered into addicted brain, which means now we need more of our drug in more potent forms. Not to get high and feel good, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And importantly, when we're not using or walking around with a balance tilted to the side of pain, experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance or behavior, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and craving. The reason that this is so important, especially in the context of psychiatry and dual diagnosis, where we're also targeting symptoms of depression, anxiety, inattention, insomnia, is that patients will come in and say they're self medicating with their addictive behaviors, a substance or behavior, and if we could just treat the underlying depression, they wouldn't engage in those behaviors anymore. But what we need to educate them about is that it may feel like you're just self medicating, but really all you're doing is adding more gremlins to the pain side of the balance. When you use again, you temporarily restore homeostasis. And so of course it feels like, oh, this is the answer to my anxiety. But really you're just digging a deeper and deeper hole as those gremlins multiply and you sink further into that chronic dopamine deficit state. What we know from neuroimaging studies is that people with addiction, you would think they would have more dopamine transmission in their reward pathway, but they actually have less dopamine transmission in the reward pathway because again, their brain has adapted to this constant external source transfer, triggering dopamine in the brain by actually down regulating production of their own dopamine.
- [12:27]
Cal Newport
Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors now that the semester is over and I don't have to dress up to go teach. I literally said the following thing to
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Jesse
my wife earlier this week.
- [12:40]
Cal Newport
I think it's been two days since I've worn anything except sweatpants.
- [12:45]
Jesse
Right?
- [12:46]
Cal Newport
So what I'm trying to say is being a professor and a writer during the summer is a good gig. But this helps explain why I'm excited
- [12:53]
Jesse
about today's sponsor, Cozy Earth.
- [12:55]
Cal Newport
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- [15:31]
Jesse
All right, let's get back to the show. So what's the importance of the reward being something that you have a substance that's crossed the blood brain barrier. So you have nicotine, you have an opioid chemical versus a behavioral based reward.
- [15:47]
Cal Newport
Do we understand it as reward is
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Jesse
reward that causes this misbalance? Now rewards that are caused with actual chemicals can sometimes be more intense and they can Maybe much more quickly create these misbalances. But is it ultimately, from the point of view of these gremlins and the teeter totter and that metaphor, does it matter, or what does matter in that difference between substance and behavioral addictive behaviors?
- [16:12]
Dr. Anna Lemke
In my clinical experience, and this is also supported by the neuroscience, there are more similarities than differences between drug and alcohol addiction, on the one hand, and behavioral addictions to things like sex, video games, online shopping, social media on the other hand. So what we see phenomenologically in clinic is that people start out using whatever their drug of choice is for one of two large reasons. Either, number one, to have fun or number two, to solve a problem. And that problem can be very wide, ranging from depression, anxiety, loneliness, to just simple boredom. If the drug, and I'm using the term drug here very loosely to also encompass reinforcing behaviors, if the drug works for them, they'll continue to seek out and consume that drug, and over time, their brain will adapt. They'll get this dopamine insensitivity. They'll ultimately end up in this dopamine deficit state. And now they'll be committing all of their available resources to getting the drug, using the drug, paying for the drug, hiding drug use, and starting all over again. Until now, they've crossed over into addiction, which is broadly defined, the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and or others. So phenomenologically, in clinical care, whether you're addicted to methamphetamine or you're addicted to sex, it doesn't look any different biologically. What we see from animal studies and also neuroscience studies, neuroimaging studies, studies in humans and other types of studies, is that reinforcers that are behaviorally mediated, like gambling and sex and social media, activate the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. They release dopamine. The more dopamine that's released, and the faster that it's released, the more that substance or behavior is to be potentially reinforcing for that individual. And interestingly, now there are studies emerging showing that for people who get addicted to, like the Internet, for example, they show the same type of downregulation of postsynaptic D2 receptors as we find in when people get addicted to drugs and alcohol. So the pathophysiology looks to be quite similar. I think really what we're dealing here with is just simple differences in terms of drug of choice. You know, what's really reinforcing for one person may not be for another, and vice versa. You Know, for me personally, for example, you know, my dad was a pretty high functioning alcoholic and I just thought, you know, when I first tried alcohol, like it did absolutely nothing for me. Nothing at all. In fact gave me a headache, kind of made me tired. Nothing that I would want to do, do again, not reinforcing. So I, so I thought, oh, that addiction gene just kind of skipped me. But really the truth was I just hadn't yet met my drug of choice, which turned out to be be socially sanctioned pornography for women in the form of romance novels, which I did develop a mild addiction to. It wasn't a life threatening addiction, but it was certainly compulsive continued use despite harm. So my point is that if you haven't encountered your drug yet, it's coming soon to a website near you.
- [19:28]
Jesse
So this is fascinating and terrifying. So I'll put that both out there.
- [19:34]
Cal Newport
You use the term mild.
- [19:35]
Jesse
This came up a lot like in the early 2000 and tens when I was trying to understand the literature for a book I was writing on phones and phone use. There's a lot of use of this dichotomy between substance addiction and mild behavioral addiction.
- [19:50]
Cal Newport
Are there rate limiters of the descent
- [19:53]
Jesse
into this sort of psychopathology based on the type of stimuli? So a romance novel is going to be a much slower descent or maybe a limit on how strong addictions get, depending on the stimuli. So maybe stuff you're doing on your phone is gonna leave you in a different place than heroin or is.
- [20:11]
Cal Newport
I mean, so what's the difference, right? Is it the speed of descent?
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Jesse
Is it how far you can fall into it? How do we understand that difference based on what type of reward stimuli we're talking about?
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Dr. Anna Lemke
Great question, really big question. So I'm gonna try to unpack it. So. So addiction is definitely a spectrum disorder. And how addicted we get to something, it depends on a lot of different factors. It does depend, and I like to distinguish those factors as nature, nurture and neighborhood. So nature has to do with our inherited risk for addiction. And we do know that people come into this world with different innate vulnerability to addiction. If you have a biological parent or grandparent with an alcohol addiction, you are at about four times increased risk compared to the general population of becoming addicted to alcohol yourself, just based on genetics alone. And that also includes quite a few studies of people adopted out of, you know, from biological parents, raised in teetotaler homes. So where there's no alcohol at all, still having increased risk. So we know that there's this innate component, it's probably partially mediated by things like impulsivity and emotion dysregulation and who knows what other types of character traits. You know, that innate character traits may be contributing to that, but there's definitely that genetic component. We also know that if you have a co occurring psychiatric disorder, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, you're at increased risk to get addicted. And the theory of that varies. It might be some kind of early self medication that then blossoms into its own independent, you know, addiction problem. Or there might be some third mediating factor that, that relates to both addiction and other co occurring psychiatric disorders. But anyway, there's this nature component, then there's this nurture component. We know that early childhood trauma, multigenerational trauma, can contribute to addictive vulnerability. We know that if you have a parent with whom you have or caregivers with him, you have an unhealthy relationship who also don't know where you are, who your friends are, what you're doing, you're at increased risk for addiction. Inversely, in this case, helicopter parents tend to be protective. So parents who know where their kids are, who they're hanging out with, and what's in their backpack and under the bed, that tends to be decreased risk of addiction. But anyway, the point is that your psychological development matters. But then we get into neighborhood, and neighborhood has to do not with the individual, but their ecosystem. And one of the biggest risk factors for addiction that we almost never talk about, but we need to talk about now, is simple access to our drug of choice. If you live in a neighborhood where drugs are sold on the street corner, you're more likely to try them and more likely to get addicted. If you go see a doctor who's free with their prescription pad for opioids or benzos or stimulants, you're more likely to be exposed to those drugs and more likely to get addicted. And my point in Dopamine Nation is that we now live in a drugified world where we've taken everything and we've made it more accessible, more abundant, more potently reinforcing, more novel, more uncertain. And that uncertainty has to do with the way that our brain responds more strongly to unpredictable rather than predictable awards. And we've learned to engineer unpredictability. Right? We know how to do that. So it's really, it is those specific features unique to the drug, interacting with the specific features of our unique brains. It's really like a lock and a key. And once our brain meets that perfect key, I personally think we're all pretty Helpless to the problem of compulsive over consumption. Now, whether or not that stays at the level of, you know, oh, gee, I regret the way I used that drug or that behavior to like, oh, wow, I've lost everything. I now have legal consequences. I've lost my health. I've lost my family. I think that has mostly to do with whether or not our unique brain encountered our unique drug of choice with enough access to cheap and large quantities of our drug of choice, minus the other protective factors that keep us away from really descending into severe addiction. And of course, what are those protective factors? Exactly what you would think they are. Meaningful work. Otherwise, good mental health, People who care about us and who hold us accountable and are there for us when we're struggling, you know, a place to live, all those things that we. Clean air, that we know are good for mental health.
- [24:58]
Jesse
How do we know? I mean, if we're thinking about, like our own phone behavior, it is a spectrum. What are the right indicators to look at to measure how concerned an individual should be with their relationship with their phone?
- [25:12]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, the classic things we look for in clinical care are the four Cs plus tolerance and withdrawal. So what are the four Cs? Control, compulsion, craving and consequences. Out of control use. I meant to, you know, go on social media for half an hour and six hours later, I'm still on compulsive use. Even when I planned not to use and I was doing something else, I found myself grabbing my phone and almost in a dissociated state, starting to scroll. A craving. When I can't have my phone with me or I'm going to go through a period of time without my phone, I start to feel anxious, I'm irritable, I'm experiencing intrusive thoughts of wanting to use my phone or why it's absolutely justified that I need to check my phone right now, even though I said I wasn't going to. Because craving is not necessarily just in the form of I want my phone like I have the desire. It's very often these long rationalizations or narratives to justify the use and against our intention not to use, and then consequences. And that's all the types of different consequences that we can have. And there are a lot when it comes to smartphones, the biggest of which you've talked a lot about in your New York Times article recently about cognitive consequences. And those are huge. But they're also. It can be a big contributor to things like depression, anxiety, loneliness, which is so ironic because we have the illusion that we're connecting with people and we're really separating ourselves further. Eating disorder, body dysmorphia, cyber bullying, exploitation, you know, fraud and other monetary forms of loss. And then the biggest of all, just opportunity costs. Right? So, like all the other things that we're not doing because we're spending so much time on our phones and it's amazing. We do something when we're doing screening called the timeline fallback method, where we ask people just to, you know, plot out every day in the last week how much time they spent on their phones. And you do it starting from today and going backwards to yesterday, the day before, the day before. And it can feel really innocuous on any given day. Oh, I only, you know, I was only online watching YouTube videos or whatever it was for two hours. That's no big deal. But you add it all up, two hours a day is 14 hours. 14 hours is a whole day. Wow. I spent a whole day in my lived week on my phone. I don't want to live like that. I don't want to give away a whole day. So I think, you know, these types of reckonings are really important. The other thing that you won't find in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for screening, but which I think is really important and we use a lot in clinical care, is whether or not people are getting into the lying habit. So am I lying about not only, you know, how much time I'm spending, but what I'm actually doing online? And if we find that we're lying about the time and where we're spending our time, and that we wouldn't feel comfortable having somebody else look through what we just looked through. To me, that's a really important indicator that we're straying from, you know, you know, the kind of thriving life that I think we're all aiming for.
- [28:23]
Jesse
Anecdotally, it often seems like teenagers or younger people get. We're more likely to see them with intense versions of this. And this might not actually be true quantitatively, but anecdotally, certainly what we saw with the video game addiction crisis in like the 2010s with a lot of the body dysmorphia, as we see a lot of it with really phone overuse.
- [28:46]
Cal Newport
Assuming that's somewhat true, how much of
- [28:49]
Jesse
that comes down to. People often think it's the unique brain development process when you're that age. How much of it comes down to the unique sort of social, cultural context of being that age. And how much of it comes down to, I guess, the other option would be just access. You have less things to do, you have more access to it. Why does this seem like these digital addictions are often really bad for teenagers?
- [29:16]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, I would start by saying that these digital platforms are inherently really addictive. I mean, they just are addictive. We've sort of turned our brains inside out and kind of created this platform that is inherently deeply reinforcing. And I think we're all struggling. I think we often point to teenagers, but really, I just think we're all struggling. And there's kind of like a hidden digidemic among older people, too, because they're very isolated, they can't do a lot physically. And a lot of folks who kind of, let's say, go into retirement homes to sort of have more social contact, like what you find is a honeycomb phenomenon where they're all in their individual hives and not talking to each other. But with teenagers with were more concerned because their brains are still developing. They have this incredible plasticity. They're pruning back neurons they're not using. They're myelinating the neurons they use most often. And essentially, by age 25, we have that neurological scaffolding that will serve us for the rest of our adult lives. The kinds of habits and patterns that we evolve as teenagers will really get concretized in, in a way, for the rest of our lives. And kids are especially vulnerable to all forms of addiction. Not just digital media, but all forms of addiction. We see, you know, in epidemiologic curves. That's where you get your huge spike, starting in teenage years up till about age 25. Although, again, that's changing with older people experiencing more addiction than ever before. But with teenagers, especially, anything related to social media or social validation. Why? Because we evolved to, once we turn about age 13, go out and meet other people. Why? Because that's really important for perpetuating the species. Finding mates. Teenagers are exquisitely sensitive to social validation, peer reputation, and social reputation enhancement. The equation between this is an adventure and this is risky psyche is very different for teenagers. They tend to underestimate risk and overestimate benefit in almost everything they do. So they're not really able to delay gratification as well or appreciate future consequences. So you've got this kind of perfect storm of this intense sensitivity to peer validation, plus increased risk taking, plus this developing immature brain, and all of that combined means you're going to have kids who are going to encounter a lot more potential harm and have a much higher risk for addiction, not just with digital media, but all reinforcers.
- [32:04]
Jesse
And I know you've talked about this. I think your kids were featured right in the Social Dilemma documentary. And I don't know if your thoughts have evolved, but what do I do? I'm a parent. I have a 13 year old's my oldest. What's your rules of the road?
- [32:19]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Yeah, so I mean, I don't like to come down as like super judgmental. You know, parenting is hard and especially in this day and age. But my general recommendations are that kids not have their own personal devices with access to the Internet before age 13. And I would include iPads, smartphones, and even watches, frankly, because I'm not sure that, you know, these smart watches. I think that probably primes kids to sort of always be on constant alert for these sort of notifications and to be attached to the Internet in a way that I just think is really insidious and ultimately pernicious for kids. That 0 to 13 has got to be the time where we're really encouraging kids to move their bodies, do things in real life, learn the social skills that will serve them for the rest of their adult lives, participate actively in family life and, and family chores and all of the effortful things that it takes to make real deep human connections. And you know, this is also why, you know, parents and advocates and clinicians need to make sure that we're not just doing this at home, but they're doing it in schools, right, that they're not giving iPads to kindergarteners, which unfortunately is happening. So unwinding all of that in the schools and really giving kids an opportunity to learn and grow without being constantly primed and shaped by the Internet and the devices and these inherently addictive platforms. Now, once a kid turns 13, that's not my preferred age for giving a kid their own device, but many kids by then will go out and just acquire their own device. And it's very hard for us as parents to even know that they're doing that.
- [33:57]
Jesse
But what's your perfect world age?
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Dr. Anna Lemke
Okay, A perfect world, frankly, in my opinion, perfect, perfect world is not until they hit high school. And then it depends on the kid, you know, because some kids will be able to handle it and others won't. And you give a device to take it away, you give it to take it away. It comes with guidelines, road maps, ground rules. And if you break the rules, we're taking the device away. And it just, it has to be like that because, you know, we have, we have four kids and full disclosure, some of our kids you know, all of our, none of our kids had devices before age 16. They all went and got their own phones when they were 16, paid for them themselves, bought them themselves. We didn't do that because we weren't supportive of it. We got them their, you know, their laptops, which unfortunately they still needed for every single class assignment. But some of our kids could handle their smartphones. And I'm just going to say some of our kids couldn't and started failing in school. We were hearing the kid was on the device constantly during class, in between class for that kid who was vulnerable, just got sucked in. So that kid had had their device taken away until they were more mature and better able to handle it. So. And you know, and frankly, you know, again, a lot of empathy for parents because even the most conscientious, most well informed, most, you know, well intentioned parent out there can have a kid for whom digital media is their drug of choice. And that's potentially a kid who maybe can't have a device at all or needs so many guardrails and so much more support in order to navigate this really crazy reinforcing medium.
- [35:38]
Jesse
Yeah, I think that's an important point you added about kids are different. The baseline should be more aggressive than people think. I'm with you on 16. I know John Haidt points to that age too. From a developmental standpoint is you've really gotten through a lot of both neurological and social psychological development by then. So you're at least at somewhat of a more sturdy platform. But I think it's really important what you're saying because I've seen this, for some kids it's fine, great. And then I'm 16 and I get my phone and I'm studious and I look up some baseball scores on here and isn't that nice? And they move on with life. And other kids, it's put it in my veins, right. Like this is all I want to do. And feeling empowered to say this is a potent, potent substance and we're going to introduce it with care later than you might like. And it's going to be tentative because we got to see what it's going to do to you because it is pretty powerful. I think that's a very useful thing to add to it.
- [36:40]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Oh good, I'm glad. And I would also say that that sort of this can't happen in a vacuum. Right. You can't have a home where parents are constantly on their devices. You've got screens in every bedroom and you know, the smart house or whatever they're calling it now. And then you ask a kid or you tell a kid you can't be on your device. Right. I mean, that's just cruel. It's got to be. If you, especially if you have a vulnerable kid, the whole family has to kind of come together and support the kid by making it a safer zone, a place where that kid's not having to constantly rely on willpower or feeling ostracized in some way.
- [37:22]
Jesse
It's a piece of advice I've been giving to my audience recently that I think you'll probably approve of, which is,
- [37:26]
Cal Newport
yeah, what you need to do as parents, the whole family.
- [37:29]
Jesse
Once you get a phone, we're all joining this compact which is when we're at home, the phones are plugged in in the kitchen. And one of my listeners dubbed this land lining. So that's his. You tell your friends, like, oh, you'll have to call me, I'm landlining tonight. So I'm not going to see a text message if you send it right away.
- [37:45]
Cal Newport
But it's a way to ensure that
- [37:47]
Jesse
in the house, if we're eating dinner or watching TV together, you're working on homework or you're reading a book, you don't have the device right there. Activating those short term reward networks that's doing all the voting for like pick me up, pick me up, pick me up. And it sort of sets a culture.
- [38:03]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Yes, absolutely agreed. And I like to recommend an even lower tech approach which is just actually keeping your landline in the home. So having your landline, you know those, you can still get those, we still have ours and just powering the devices off, like literally turning them off. Because there's something about a phone that's off that also doesn't command as much of our attention. We, when it's on and we know it's transmitting and receiving, I think there's always this part of our brain that wants to check it, like what came in, what came in. But something about it just being like dead, like, just like a rock. Not alive in this way that it seems sentient even though it's not. I think can be really, really good for our brains.
- [38:48]
Jesse
Should we be using social media at all anymore?
- [38:52]
Dr. Anna Lemke
I mean, if you're talking about the really addictive forms of social media, I mean, I, you know, tick tock, etc. Yeah, I mean I'm, I'm sort of generally not in favor. I think those mediums are so addictive that we all become slaves to the platform. And I generally don't Recommend them. I mean, I know that a lot of people feel like it's mandatory for their job now when kids. Well, I have to be on to be cool or to have friends or be in the in crowd. All I can tell you is what we find in clinical care is that when those kids get off, they feel that they have better social connections, better friendships, more intimacy. So I think that it's. It's this illusion that I think we need to be especially alert to this sensation that we have that we're connecting or that we're productive and getting stuff done when it's really just this colossal waste of time.
- [39:49]
Jesse
What about what Australia did with the ban on social media under 16? I've heard that justified in part, which makes sense to me. It gives ammo to parents.
- [40:00]
Cal Newport
It just makes it easier to deal
- [40:02]
Jesse
with the question of. But everyone is doing it. If you can say, no, it's illegal. That's why you can't do it.
- [40:07]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Right.
- [40:08]
Jesse
Are you generally in favor of that in the US Congress context? Should we do something similar?
- [40:13]
Dr. Anna Lemke
You know, I am in favor of trying things. Right? I mean, so I really applaud the Australian initiative because they're, they're getting, you know, they're rolling up their sleeves and they're getting in there and, and trying something. We have to try something. And maybe it'll turn out that that's not the right solution or the best solution, or it has unintended consequences and we have to tweak it. But bottom line, we can't just sit back and be like, this is all okay or this is how it is now, or this is normal. I just really think that the mental health harms are so clear. And not to mention, again, also the diffuse harms, the kind of insidious dissolution of the social compact. Even if we're not looking at, you know, individual harms, just the social harms on a collective level, I think are enormous and we have to do something about it. The technology is not going away. And there are a lot of good things, but there are clearly a lot of bad things too. So I think getting in there with policies and legislation and giving it a try and seeing what happens.
- [41:17]
Jesse
Have you seen anything else interesting from a legislative perspective? There seems to be not a wide variety of ideas. There's bans for youth, maybe like Section 230 reform, but that gets pretty wonky, like what that means.
- [41:34]
Cal Newport
Is there anything else in all the
- [41:35]
Jesse
work you've done on this, anything else you've come across? You say that's an Interesting idea for a law that could be passed at least to see what happens.
- [41:43]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, I think that there is definitely a role for laws, but I think we also have to bring and incentivize the technology to make it feel feasible and practical. So to me, one of the most interesting ideas that I heard a couple of years ago talking to some Yale law students was the idea of airplane wi fi. So this idea of airplane mode where we would collectively agree in certain spaces, I guess with an app on the phone or some shared technology that we wouldn't be connecting to wi fi. So it wouldn't be this cumbersome having to like give up your phone. But it would be be entering into this collective bubble where we say this is, this is a space where we're not going to be connected to the Internet. Right. Or we're only going to. So I think those types of nuanced, types of intervention are really what we need. Likewise with like you hear a lot about and I think this is appropriate. I'm hugely in favor and have been advocating getting smartphones out of schools bell to bell to get the slot machine out of kids pockets. But kids have these laptops, right. And they're texting each other and watching YouTube video. So we need better technology to make a laptop that really does reinforce learning and not these other activities. Right. So these are, I mean I'm not, you know, I'm not a computer scientist. You are. But, but surely we can harness all of the wonderful creatures creativity and energy and know how in the realm of computer science to make better devices as well as better software so that we can protect ourselves from these constant addictive distractions. I mean that top down legislation should incentivize institutions like schools. Right. So it's not just oh, you guys should get rid of smartphones in classroom, it's like hey, we, we'll pay you to do that. Right. Just like we did with changing drinking laws. Federal legislators said hey, we'll give you money to build better highways if you raise the age of what's legal to drink in your state. That was very successful. Everybody ended up raising the drinking age to age 21 because they wanted the money to build better highways. So those types of, of ideas, I
- [44:05]
Jesse
like all those ideas. Yeah, I mean it feels like we need to be thinking about.
- [44:10]
Cal Newport
It's becoming harder to avoid the fact
- [44:12]
Jesse
that this is very potent and this really is an issue what's going on.
- [44:18]
Cal Newport
And as long as you have an
- [44:19]
Jesse
attention economy that's based off of free engagement, this is free and the more you use it, the more money we make. And the device is ubiquitous and just let the market speak. It just seems like just a normal case study. And what's going to happen in that unregulated capitalist instance? They are going to get very, very, very, very good at getting you to look just like with substances, if you had no restrictions on sell whatever you want and make them as addictive as you want, we would have heroin and apples. Right? So if you have a market, yeah,
- [44:52]
Dr. Anna Lemke
I mean let kids go and buy heroin and. Yeah, I mean it's crazy. Yeah, we would never do that.
- [44:59]
Cal Newport
Want to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors? Now look, starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast. But here's what I learned. Don't reinvent the wheel. Trust industry leaders where you can. And this is where Shopify enters the scene. If you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from big names like Allbirds and Mattel to new brands just getting started. Want to sell online? Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. Do you need help spreading the word? Shopify can help you easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. If we ever start selling products related to this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use. Shopify. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com deep go to shopify.com deep that's shopify.com deep I also want to talk about our friends at ExpressVPN. Going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Most of the time you're probably fine, but what if one day you come back and a laptop is gone? Well, when you connect to the Internet without a vpn, it's almost like this is what you're doing. Because your data is not secure. See, if you're on WI Fi, anybody nearby can read your data packets out of the air and figure out exactly what sites and services you're using. And if you're at home, your Internet service provider can be doing the same thing with your traffic going through the wires. And guess what? They probably are going to do this because they can sell information about your Internet activity to marketers. This is where a VPN enters the scene. It protects your traffic in encrypted bundles that cannot be read by nearby hackers or your isp. Your Internet behavior once again becomes private. If you're going to use a VPN, I recommend that you use ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN plans start at just $3.49 a month, which is only 12 cents a day. It's also really easy to use. You just click a button on your laptop or your phone or your tablet and the VPN is activated and you just go use your normal browser apps as you normally would. It's no wonder that ExpressVPN is rated number one by Top Tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com deep that's E X P R E S s v p n.com deep to figure out how you can get up to four extra months expressvpn.com deep all right, let's get back to the show. What about the role of. So based on what you said in a model I've also heard is there
- [47:57]
Jesse
seems like, okay, there's two different factors going on when it comes to these addictive behaviors that both feed into the intensity of the reward. So the way I understand is the bigger reward you're getting, kind of the more bigger impact it's going to have on all these neurological mechanisms. And so then there's two parts to the rewards.
- [48:17]
Cal Newport
One of the parts you mentioned is
- [48:19]
Jesse
it just depends what the activity is. And this is maybe why a drug that can get in there and mess with your neurotransmitters like opioids or whatever, that can really pump up the reward. But the other aspect I want to ask you about this, this is like Yoan Harari in Chasing the Scream talks a lot about. The other aspect is the emotional or psychological reward that it's giving you. So, like, the alcohol might physiologically give you this sort of buzz that feels good, but when that really gets powerful is when that buzz that feels good is how you're escaping emotional trauma. Now that reward has just gotten five times as valuable. And he would say, this is why you can inject heroin into little old ladies in England, which they get when they get hip surgery. You're getting Demerol and, and they're not addicted. But if you're taking that same pain drug after an injury has subsided because you've lost your job and it just makes you feel better and then you're much more likely to get addicted. So is there an aspect, it's a long question. Is there an aspect when it comes to these digital distractions, it's also asking the question of is there an emotional need that this is serving? Is there a hole that this is filling? And I might want to also think about addressing that need or filling that hole as aggressively as possible with other means so that I'm getting less reward from using the sort of low quality stimulus like the device that I should. I need to be more social, I need to feel better about myself. I need to whatever it is. Like, what's the aspect of making the offline part of your life better when it comes to avoiding online addiction?
- [49:54]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Yeah. So key to recovery is not just what we're going to avoid, but also what we're going to approach. Right. So it can't just be, well, don't, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. It's like, what am I going to do instead? You know, what are the healthy adaptive coping mechanisms, the healthy adaptive behaviors, also frankly, the healthy adaptive sources of dopamine. Because we are the ultimate seekers, right? We're not people who really want to have a pleasure pain balance that's just constantly at our phasic dopamine level. We like those dopamine spikes. So how can we get them in a healthy and adaptive way? And what I talk about in Dopamine Nation is that the best way to get our dopamine is actually to pay for it up front by doing hard things. Because it turns out that when we intentionally press on the pain side of the balance, those gremlins will go to the pleasure side of the balance and we can get our dopamine indirectly. Perfect examples of that are the runner's high. Right. Turns out that exercise is actually toxic to cells. But we know it's good for us. Why? Because our body senses injury and then starts to upregulate our own feel good endogenous production of endogenous dopamine, opioids, cannabinoids, serotonin, et cetera. Of course, we can get addicted to exercise too, so you have to be a little bit careful. But we live in this world of ultimate convenience where we feel for no upfront work. We are now flooding our brains with dopamine. So we have to really turn that on its head at the same time too. We are deeply social creatures and to me, what chasing the scream really gets at and what's like sort of the heart of recovery is that addiction is isolation. And the opposite of addiction is connection. And that is really true. But, but I always like to emphasize that you can actually have the best family and the best friends and the best job and live in the best place in the world. And you can still get addicted if you happen to meet your drug of choice in large quantity, at little expense, in large abundance. So I always like to say that because when we have this sort of question, well, is it supply or is it demand? It's both, it's both. And they each feed the other. But the problem is that with more supply, we have more demand. And I think that's a key piece that people maybe are sometimes missing. And again, because I work in mental health and psychiatry, we get a lot of people saying, well, this is wrong with my life and that's wrong with my life. And I have depression, I have anxiety, and that's why I'm addicted. And the truth is that that might be part of the story, but it's also perfectly possible that you feel that way about your life first because you are addicted and your addiction has changed your hedonic set point. It's leached your other rewards of their salience. It's given you this victim mentality where now you're blaming everybody else for your problems and you're isolating and replacing human connection with your drug so that now you've got this vicious feed forward cycle where your life actually wasn't that bad, but your addiction made it look bad. Right?
- [53:05]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [53:05]
Dr. Anna Lemke
And there's the real truth too, that the most vulnerable humans in the United States when it comes to addiction are people who are living in poverty, people who are traumatized, people who are unemployed, you know, single family homes. You know, when you think about digital media, like, sure, it's great to say, well, don't give your kid a device, but you know, a lot of parents rely on that as babysitters while they're working multiple jobs. So, you know, it's. It's people living in poverty who also have incredible access to these highly reinforcing, sort of processed, cheap drugs in all their myriad forms that are at highest risk. So it's a complicated, complicated phenomenon, this supply and demand, and both play a really big role.
- [53:54]
Jesse
All right, well, I have two final questions. The first is going to be about what we can do to sort of prevent ourselves from getting farther down a digital addiction rabbit hole. And the second is going to be about what do we do if we're there and we're struggling. So to clarify the first question, I want to give a game plan to my audience and I'm hearing, for example, do hard things be very social and probably in like a sort of sacrificial sense that is like sacrifice time and attention on behalf of others. Right. Like real sociality and be very, very wary of the digital junk food. Right. Like just don't use TikTok, don't you, you're a grown up, like you don't need to be, you probably don't need to be on Instagram. Like just, you got to start thinking about that as this is low, low, low value calories. I don't want those in my life. And then maybe do something like language landlining or keeping your phone completely off when you're at home as well. Okay, what else am I missing or what else would you recommend from the how do I stop myself from getting into a worse situation perspective?
- [54:52]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, I really like those because those were very actionable and also big. You know, they're not like minor tweaks. I like that they're just like, they just say, hey, this is a drug. If you're going to use it, know you're using a drug, use it in my moderation, leave enough time in between to sort of reset those reward pathways and be very mindful and accountable around your use and then do other healthy things. But I talk a lot about too about what's called self binding strategies. So don't rely on willpower alone. Put in both literal and metacognitive barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we don't. So that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption and aren't relying on willpower alone. So that, that's things like, you know, these sort of accountability software and you know, they're covenant eyes and many different ones where other people can see what we're doing because we massively co regulate based on the people around us. It's things like committing to what I call radical honesty, which is telling the truth about all things large and small. Because what happens in addiction is we get in the lying habit and then we're lying. Not just other people, but also ourselves. Whereas if we're being truthful. Yeah, I really did watch TikTok or YouTube or whatever it was for six hours last night until one in the morning, you know, I got, that's what I did. That's how I spent my time. And that kind of wakes up our frontal lobe and like, you know, then we're dealing with a truthful narrative. And if we don't have that truthful narrative, we don't have the information we need to make better choices. So embracing radical honesty, self finding strategies which you know, again can be like literal things like get it out of the bedroom, delete the app, use a blocker, you know, so we're not just relying on that. And then you know, all the other things that people talk about, like making it less potent by let's say, going grayscale. That really works for some people, not others. One of the things that I do, because I tend to use more YouTube than I want, because you don't need an account for it, it's so accessible. But if you delete your history and you have to actually type in what you're looking for, boy, that's really helped me because now I'm not just getting this algorithmic feed that's tailored it to my preferences, but I have to go looking for it. And that's just enough to sort of again, sort of remind me or alert me. Oh yeah. And I, I'm doing this pain in the butt thing of typing in, you know, what I want to, what I think I want to watch because I know that if I leave it up to the algorithmic thing feed, I'm going to find myself caught in the vortex.
- [57:22]
Jesse
Well, that's a good final one because this will be on YouTube as well. YouTube is a complicated one because I think video is important. We're democratizing tv but man, that recommendation feed, it's brutal. That's why I tell my listeners is I actually don't use it on your phone, do it on a computer, have the blockers that gets rid of the recommendation feed and then it's just like your DVR 15 years ago, you just have better. That's how I do with my boys. We have five channels. They're largely like makers like Mark Rober type channels and we have to manually type it into the Apple remote, the name of the channel, to see if there is a new video.
- [58:03]
Cal Newport
And it's like television. It's like, oh, once there's a new
- [58:06]
Jesse
video this week and then that's exactly, exactly.
- [58:09]
Dr. Anna Lemke
And you know what I often say to, to patients with addiction of any form? I said, you know, the solution is not going to be one pill or one particular psychotherapy or you know, one supplement or whatever it is. It's a lot of little things that accumulated over days to weeks, to months to years will make a huge, huge difference in your life. So that's what I tell people. It's all these little things. It's. It's the concatenation of all these little things.
- [58:37]
Jesse
But then the final question is, I'm sure you're the same way. I really dislike all the shame that surrounds this topic. So I really want to speak to members of my audience that are in a bad way when it comes to this. They know the four Cs apply and they're worried about it. And it's beyond the point where the types of interventions we just talked about are likely going to stick. So what is someone in that situation first we can reassure them this is okay.
- [59:02]
Cal Newport
People have this problem.
- [59:03]
Jesse
It is very common and it's not a failure on your part. What do they do next?
- [59:11]
Dr. Anna Lemke
So if you're someone who feels like you've really crossed over into the threshold of compulsive addictive use, I recommend seeking out an addiction professional with expertise in this area. Getting an evaluation. You're not committing to even weeks of treatment, but you're just getting an evaluation to talking to somebody. What's really important there is, I think, talking to somebody with addiction expertise. If you just go see a general mental health care provider, they're usually not that well trained in addiction, honestly, because it's not that well done in medical schools or, you know, other types of mental health training. So I really, that's an important piece of it. And just kind of talking to someone, you know, reaching out for help, getting some advice or getting some, some guidance. The other thing that I would recommend is seeking out a 12 step group. And there are lots of wonderful 12 step groups. They're modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. They've been around for 100 years and they really work when people actively participate. We're living in an age where 12 step groups are really kind of. There's a lot of bashing of them in the media and I don't know why that is. I mean, they're not for everybody. But again, they can be incredibly helpful. They're free, know they're everywhere. And there are Even now specific 12 step groups for Internet and technology. So there's something called itaa. If you Google that, you can find Internet and technology Addicts Anonymous, which is a 12 step group that just grew up from a, you know, collection of individuals who realized, hey, I'm not living the life that I want to live and it's because I'm addicted to my device in some shape or form. So those are just two possibilities right there for folks who are maybe struggling or on the deeper end of this type of Problem.
- [60:55]
Jesse
Well, and I appreciate you coming on. I think this was a phenomenally important discussion for my audience. We talk a lot about autonomy in the digital world, meaning in a digital world, expressing your full life and not being controlled by the whims of other sorts of devices. And I think this is like the foundation on what a lot of these issues are built or against which they tumble. So thank you very much and thank
- [61:20]
Cal Newport
you for your work.
- [61:22]
Jesse
Dopamine Nation, of course, is the book everyone knows. Is there anywhere else you would like to direct people to find out more about what you're up to?
- [61:30]
Dr. Anna Lemke
Well, not surprisingly, I'm not on social media, so I would just say read the book, watch this podcast, and thanks for your kind words. That means a lot to me. It was a pleasure talking to you.
- [61:40]
Jesse
All right, thank you very much.
- [61:42]
Cal Newport
All right, so there we go.
- [61:43]
Jesse
That was my conversation with Dr. Anna Lemke.
- [61:48]
Cal Newport
Jesse, she really didn't sugarcoat it, right? Because she actually deals with patients with addictions. And it's just saying we're seeing a lot of it.
- [61:58]
Jesse
We have been seeing a lot of it. Phones have made it worse. This really compelling social media has made it worse.
- [62:03]
Cal Newport
And I mean, I thought this was
- [62:05]
Jesse
scary, but basically she's saying if you
- [62:08]
Cal Newport
really are addicted, which you might be,
- [62:09]
Jesse
and a lot of people are, you have to treat it like an addiction.
- [62:12]
Cal Newport
The one thing I wanted to load up because she mentioned this, ITAA, Internet
- [62:18]
Jesse
and technology, addicts anonymous, like a 12
- [62:20]
Cal Newport
step program like alcoholics Anonymous, but for
- [62:22]
Jesse
people who are addicted to their phone.
- [62:24]
Cal Newport
It intrigued me. I want to take a quick look
- [62:26]
Jesse
at it here to get a sense
- [62:28]
Cal Newport
of what would it mean if you
- [62:29]
Jesse
actually went to itaa?
- [62:31]
Cal Newport
So I found this guide for newcomers and it goes through what you would do. Several suggestions they would suggest, okay, if
- [62:40]
Jesse
you were to join an ITAA group, and I thought I'd go through some of these quickly.
- [62:44]
Cal Newport
They said at first you would attend daily meetings. So they think you should attend six meetings in a short timeframe to help
- [62:52]
Jesse
decide whether this program may be helpful.
- [62:55]
Cal Newport
Second, they push abstention. They said you identify and abstain from the specific behaviors which trigger addiction. They call these terms bottom lines to describe the compl.
- [63:05]
Jesse
Compulsive behaviors that once we start, we can't stop, and once we stop, we can't stay stopped. So they actually are going to have, if you join something like ita, these
- [63:13]
Cal Newport
really strict lines of like, you're just
- [63:15]
Jesse
not doing this particular digital behavior before.
- [63:18]
Cal Newport
They then say they focus on taking one day at a time Recovery is a gentle process. Don't even bother counting the days. Just get through the current day. You will get called daily, daily outreach calls, and then they talk about finding sponsors and learning more about the recovery process. So it's interesting, straight up, like you would do with alcohol or narcotics.
- [63:38]
Inbox Reader
Yeah.
- [63:39]
Cal Newport
And Anna would say, there's a lot
- [63:42]
Jesse
more people than you think.
- [63:43]
Cal Newport
The other interesting thing is she said
- [63:44]
Jesse
there's a lot of things we use
- [63:46]
Cal Newport
the device to medicate. There's a lot of things the device can deliver that makes you addicted. Your drug of choice might be social
- [63:52]
Jesse
media, it might be TikTok, it might be Instagram. You said Internet gambling, boom, can do it. Online shopping, boom, that can do it as well, right? Compulsive YouTube watching, that can do it as well.
- [64:02]
Cal Newport
So it's like you're in a casino
- [64:04]
Jesse
of sorts and every single game is flashing their lights at you.
- [64:08]
Cal Newport
So anyways, that was a good conversation.
- [64:10]
Jesse
Definitely.
- [64:10]
Cal Newport
Check out Dopamine Nation or Anna's Masterclass course to find out more. All right, well, that's enough about Anna and my thoughts. Now let's hear what you have to say. As is our tradition in these Monday advice episodes, we like to open the show's inbox to read some some of your messages. Now remember, if you have a question, comment, or interesting resource to share, you can always reach us@podcastalnewport.com all right, Jesse, what do we have first in our inbox?
- [64:39]
Inbox Reader
Today we received an anonymous question about digital minimalism and what counts as good and bad uses of your phone.
- [64:47]
Jesse
All right, let's see what we got here.
- [64:48]
Cal Newport
It's a classic type of question. I have a question for you about digital minimalism. I feel that I use my smartphone quite a lot, but my screen time is mostly spent on Chess.com, playing active games, the Kindle app, reading books, but only if I cannot use my actual Kindle or a physical book. YouTube, watching informative videos on matters that interest me, not shorts, podcasts, listening to long form content. I usually do this during my commute or during free hours at work. My question is, is this okay under the philosophy of digital minimalism, or should I still try to minimize this specific screen time activity as well?
- [65:27]
Jesse
Jesse, I should sell my own screen time app and it only lets you watch my YouTube channel and it only lets you listen to my podcast. And when you play chess, you're always playing against a virtual version of me and it always wins.
- [65:42]
Cal Newport
So I think people need to know,
- [65:44]
Guest or Co-host
they need to have that relationship with me.
- [65:46]
Jesse
You'll just cheat. Just your pieces disappear.
- [65:48]
Guest or Co-host
I can make two moves at a time.
- [65:50]
Cal Newport
All right, this is a good question because it allows us to very quickly react.
- [65:53]
Jesse
Visit the Digital Minimalism Philosophy this is the philosophy I first laid out in
- [65:57]
Cal Newport
my eponymous 2019 book for how you
- [65:59]
Jesse
should be approaching technology in the smartphone era.
- [66:03]
Cal Newport
The key to digital minimalism is there is no master list of good and bad technology I got to look at. The formulation of this question is leading me to believe that the person asking this question has a slightly different model
- [66:18]
Guest or Co-host
of digital minimalism that's different than mine.
- [66:20]
Jesse
It's a model that says the more
- [66:23]
Cal Newport
you minimize use of technology, the better. That's not what I mean by digital minimalism, if that is what you mean.
- [66:28]
Jesse
These are a good question.
- [66:28]
Cal Newport
You're like, well, I know you're saying I should minimize all technology use, but here's some technology uses I like. Are you sure that's not okay? This is not the way I think about technology use. The actual philosophy of digital minimalism does
- [66:40]
Jesse
not have a list of good or
- [66:41]
Cal Newport
bad technologies, and it certainly doesn't try to minimize overall technology use. It says technology use should be driven by your values. If a particular usage of a technology supports things that you care about, then that's something that's good in your life. If it doesn't, or causes more cost than it does benefits, then it shouldn't
- [66:59]
Guest or Co-host
be in your life.
- [67:00]
Cal Newport
And for the technology that passes this bar, and therefore you keep in your life, once you know why you're using a technology, it's much easier to put tight fences around that usage to make sure that you're maximizing that benefit and avoid avoiding as many of the superfluous cost as possible. So it allows you to, when you're focused intentional about technology usage, you can constrain it much more easily. And this is why, for example, for a lot of people, if they look
- [67:26]
Jesse
at this was a big example back
- [67:28]
Cal Newport
in 2019, but they look at Instagram in their life. For a lot of people it's a super diversion. It's actually a worse problem now than
- [67:36]
Jesse
it was back then.
- [67:36]
Cal Newport
Back then you are still largely seeing posts from people that you explicitly followed. Today, Instagram is pushing more of a TikTok style Algorithmic curation model where half the stuff you see you have no idea what it is. You're like, I followed a couple authors
- [67:52]
Jesse
and now I've just cut to a video of Cal Network ripping a phone book in half using his toes. I mean that's awesome. And of course you're going to watch
- [68:02]
Cal Newport
it, but it wasn't what you signed up for. So for a lot of people, this, yeah, Instagram, it's not really supporting a massive value and the little benefits I
- [68:09]
Jesse
get out of it aren't huge and
- [68:11]
Cal Newport
they have a lot of cost, so I don't need it. But maybe you're a visual artist. You're like, no, no, no. Instagram, I use to follow some other artist in my general genre and it gives me inspiration. They post photos of their work in
- [68:23]
Guest or Co-host
process and it helps my creative process.
- [68:25]
Cal Newport
Oh, I have a real value.
- [68:26]
Jesse
I get out of Instagram.
- [68:27]
Cal Newport
But if I know that's why I'm using it, I can put rules.
- [68:29]
Jesse
It doesn't need to be on my phone.
- [68:30]
Cal Newport
I don't need to put.
- [68:31]
Guest or Co-host
It could be on my computer. These artists don't post very often, so
- [68:34]
Jesse
this could be a Friday afternoon activity.
- [68:36]
Cal Newport
It takes 20 minutes to see what they're doing. Boom.
- [68:38]
Jesse
Benefit preserved, cost eliminated. That's digital minimalism.
- [68:42]
Guest or Co-host
You use a technology if it supports something you really care about, and you put fences that protect the benefit and try to eliminate as many costs as possible. Let's go back to the list from the question here.
- [68:52]
Cal Newport
Chess.com? if playing chess is important to you,
- [68:56]
Guest or Co-host
it's a real value. It helps you stretch your mind. I see no problem with that. If it's become like an addictive thing, you're using it to get away from things or to escape other things that are more useful, then put better fences around it. Maybe don't do it on your phone, where it can be a default behavior, but do it on your computer and set aside certain times and conditions in which you play.
- [69:14]
Cal Newport
Kindle app. Just bring your Kindle with you. Just have the Kindle with you.
- [69:19]
Guest or Co-host
Or bring paperback books.
- [69:20]
Cal Newport
I mean, it's not the worst thing
- [69:21]
Guest or Co-host
in the world, but reading on an actual backlit screen like that, where it's actually pixels that are glowing, as opposed
- [69:28]
Jesse
to like a Kindle or a book,
- [69:29]
Guest or Co-host
where it's the physical surface that light is reflecting off of.
- [69:32]
Cal Newport
It just, we treat it differently with
- [69:33]
Guest or Co-host
our brain, when we're scrolling with our finger, when we're in a different type of cognitive context and you have all of those distractions right there, one tap away.
- [69:44]
Cal Newport
It really is like being in college
- [69:45]
Guest or Co-host
when you're reading a book on your phone as opposed to a Kindle or a hardcover book.
- [69:49]
Cal Newport
It's really like being at college and you're like, I'm going to go study
- [69:53]
Guest or Co-host
for my O Chem final in this
- [69:56]
Cal Newport
part of the library where there's like
- [69:59]
Guest or Co-host
topless co EDS doing conga lines around me.
- [70:01]
Jesse
I'm like, I'm not going to pay attention to that.
- [70:03]
Cal Newport
I'm going to study. It's like, why don't you go study
- [70:04]
Guest or Co-host
in the quiet part of the library?
- [70:06]
Cal Newport
You're in the part of the library
- [70:07]
Guest or Co-host
where there's like a bear on a
- [70:09]
Cal Newport
unicycle with a keg that's filling up
- [70:11]
Guest or Co-host
beers for people and growling as he goes by.
- [70:13]
Jesse
And you're like, I'm not going to pay attention to that.
- [70:15]
Cal Newport
I'm just going to do my o
- [70:15]
Guest or Co-host
Kim, why not just go to the
- [70:17]
Cal Newport
part of the library without that?
- [70:18]
Guest or Co-host
That's what it's like trying to read
- [70:19]
Cal Newport
a book on the world's most fantastically
- [70:23]
Guest or Co-host
effective distraction machine that's ever been created. So I'm not a a big believer in the Kindle app, except for in
- [70:28]
Cal Newport
like extreme circumstances, it's not the worst thing.
- [70:30]
Guest or Co-host
But try to read the Kindle when you can.
- [70:32]
Cal Newport
YouTube. Here's the YouTube is a.
- [70:36]
Guest or Co-host
It's like a dialectic. You got these two things that are clashing together. DIY video is important, right? The whole promise of the Internet, or at least a big part of the promise of the Internet, is the democratizing of content production and consumption that anyone can create content that anyone else can access.
- [70:54]
Cal Newport
This doesn't mean that anyone can be
- [70:55]
Guest or Co-host
read or viewed or popular. It's very hard to make good content. But innovation happens when you take down the logistical barriers to producing content, right? So podcasts mean you can listen to audio content from almost anyone. Most podcasts are terrible. Most podcasts are not successful. But by getting rid of the barrier of I have to be in a
- [71:16]
Jesse
building that's literally connected to an antenna
- [71:19]
Guest or Co-host
that has a permit from the government to broadcast during certain times of days on certain frequency bands allowed a lot more people to try. And the stuff that percolated up is interesting and innovative. Video is incredibly compelling. This is why Television 8 radios launch as soon as it was invented. Even though all the things we say about audio today on podcast, you could say about radio in the 1940s, it's portable, you can do it. While you do other things, it's much closer. Like you could just a voice in radio sounds like someone right there where TV was on these small little screens, it didn't matter. We'll stare at a 6 inch black and white screen of a poorly lit stage of Charlie McCarthy puppet mouth being moved because we're very compelled by vision. So it's important that this democratized media, independent media movement that the Internet enabled. It has to include video. And YouTube has the best technology. It's the only game in town right now. The problem with it is the auto recommendations. You can rabbit hole on it in a way that doesn't happen on say a television where it's like what about this, what about that, what about this? And when it's an algorithm suggesting stuff and learning what to suggest to you so you'll click on things and get you more likely to click and watch you end up in weird places. Just like on TikTok. Right? Algorithms bring you to weird places and there's people that are willing to provide to weird if there's a crowd that's going to come. And so you have to be. I mean I think you have to think of YouTube as a combination of a reference library and a television. Maybe if we want to be a little bit more 20, 25, 2005, 2005
- [72:52]
Jesse
like a television with a TiVo look
- [72:54]
Guest or Co-host
up specific things you need to know. How do I change the oil in my car? I'll look it up on YouTube useful for that or treat it like your TiVo in 2005. There are certain shows I like and I go and I search for that person to see if they have a new episode of the show and if it is, I watch it. This is for example how I do YouTube with my kids. We have it on the TV only on the one I can control. So they're not allowed to use it by themselves. And we have a collection of channels that we like to watch. They produce shows once a month or every couple of weeks and we like, oh, there's a new stuff made here. Episode great maker we like to watch Electrical engineer does really cool stuff.
- [73:36]
Cal Newport
Great.
- [73:36]
Guest or Co-host
We can sit down and watch it just like you would wait for your television show. Ironically Jesse, most of the channels we watch are bears on unicycles with kegs filling up beer in libraries.
- [73:48]
Cal Newport
So that's a good use of YouTube.
- [73:50]
Guest or Co-host
So it's this dialectic. If you're on your phone using just getting lost on the auto scroll it can be really terrible. But if you're sitting on the couch with your kids and you're like hey, we can watch a maker video and it's like really interesting content. Or we've been watching these artists Technica Channel called War Stories where they will do extended interviews with the developers of classic video games and they just walk through like what were the challenges making this game? What happened? How do we make it work? That's great content that's better than most of the stuff that's going to be on cable. So you have to be careful about YouTube, but it has advantages. And podcasts, I don't know.
- [74:25]
Cal Newport
It's radio.
- [74:25]
Guest or Co-host
I like podcasts. I'm not worried about it. All right, enough digital minimalism. What else do we have today?
- [74:31]
Inbox Reader
Jesse, we also got a lot of good feedback about your newsletter last week about the use of AI in academic publishing.
- [74:39]
Jesse
Oh yes.
- [74:39]
Cal Newport
So if you don't subscribe to my newsletter@calnewport.com, you should. It's basically dispatches from this battle between depth and distraction that we talk about here on this podcast. Sometimes I go more deeply into the type of things we talk about on the show, and sometimes it's completely unrelated dispatches that I didn't have room for in the show. Last week I took something we mentioned in the show during the inbox segment and I expanded on it. So it was this task force for a academic journal that was studying the impact of AI on publishing and what they found is AI caused in particular LLM based tools in the Gender of AI Revolution. So the last three years has caused an explosion in submissions to this academic journal. The problem is the quality of these submissions is very low. They have a much higher chance of ending up desk rejected. They have a much, much higher chance of not ending up actually accepted for publication with revisions. But they still all have to be looked at. And so it creates a huge backlog and it actually is slowing down the publication of good science and stressing everyone, exhausting everyone involved. And so it's a sign where AI making some things easier doesn't necessarily make it easier to produce good results. Anyways, we had all sorts of thoughts, both sent in to my email address here at the show and also comments on the blog version of the newsletter calnewport.com blog I'm just going to read a few of these Jesse, just as people had interesting observations. All right, Shauna said. I was so relieved when my tenure as an academic journal editor ended a couple months ago. The situation is getting quite bad and is taxing our already stretched volunteer resources. Mostly the AI produced papers are still very obvious. They look great at a glance, but when you read them there's nothing there. Nevertheless, it is a great waste of everybody's time. I'm hoping the situation will hit a breaking point and then calm down before I have to take up any more editorial roles. Mary said. I also see these AI assisted papers in peer reviewed reports deciphering the gist of the recommendation and commentary is difficult because of the frequency of nonsense synonyms and vapid vocabulary. I would much rather have poor grammar and medical jargon to sort the through, Abigail said. I am a non profit professional and I built my career writing grants to secure funding for a variety of organizations. Your work seems like the only sane voice out there right now as I watch nearly all of my colleagues rave about AI and offload all of their critical thinking skills and years of experience with these machines, praising the results it spits out. I was recently on a webinar for a grant opportunity and the funders asked potential grantees to be careful of their use of AI in their grant applications applications because they have been finding that it actually does a disservice to the organization. Applying that the AI creates a more flattened narrative and instead weakens the nonprofit's arguments for why they are positioned to best use the funding. I find this encouraging and I find your newsletter equally encouraging that hopefully people will start to move away from the utter obsession and fascination with this technology. I couldn't agree more with your line that quote making things faster or easier is not the same as is making things better. End quote. Finally, Travy says there's a similar trend going on for HR teams in charge of hiring. We are receiving hundreds more applications and resumes and they are increasingly hard to read. They're often filled with large filler words and don't add value and leave me feeling like I don't know what they're trying to convey. In hiring team conversations, it repeatedly comes up how the submissions that were clearly written without AI or the minimal use of AI have a different feel. Even even mistakes are seen in a different light because we know the person created it largely on their own. This has changed the landscape of hiring and interviewing, and in my personal experience,
- [78:15]
Jesse
not for the better.
- [78:16]
Cal Newport
So there we go. What is the moral of this story? Don't write with AI. I think we should just say it's not good to write with AI. I know we're all futurists out there. We're all sort of now X risk transhumanist adjacent and get super excited about like oh my God, all these things are going to change.
- [78:32]
Jesse
Or maybe you were excited about something you saw in AI and now you
- [78:36]
Cal Newport
take any sort of critique of it as a critique of yourself. It makes you embarrassed. You double down on being super booster whatever's going on in your mind. I think we should be able to just say writing with AI isn't helping. Writing is supposed to be hard. It's how we organize our thoughts. It's how we communicate clearly. It's one human mind trying to convey a cognitive state information to another human mind. It's lazy to use AI to write. It's avoiding pain. It's speeding up something that doesn't need to be sped up. It's not the bottleneck to doing good things. When you're writing a grant that is going to fund you for five years, it's five years of continuous effort. Does it really matter that you saved a couple hours writing the grant on some Saturday? Just do the hard work if you're going to. You want money, you want to do five years of it? Use your own words. I just think there is a fraud, an implicit fraud to having machine communication play it off as if it's your own. Communication plays a privileged role, written and spoken in communication plays a privileged role in the modern, post neolithic human experience. And we shouldn't take that lightly and just say, well, machines talk on our behalf. We're hearing more and more of these reports. I think it's okay to say that's a bad use of AI. Hey, AI companies stop enabling that. Build more specific products, products that matter, products that don't degrade our humanity.
- [79:56]
Jesse
I don't know.
- [79:57]
Cal Newport
I'm on a soapbox, Jesse. But writing with AI to the degree that people are doing it, this is not. Where's our cure for cancer? Where's our flying cars?
- [80:06]
Jesse
Where's our much more efficient way of getting resources to people that need them?
- [80:10]
Cal Newport
Where are the type of inventions that actually make the world better? Where's our electricity?
- [80:15]
Jesse
Where is our federal safety regulations for cars?
- [80:18]
Cal Newport
Like stuff that improves the lives of many. Instead, you're just throwing these tools at us. We don't even know what to do with them except for find these sort of vapid conveniences that we weren't even clamoring for, intend to make things worse. So anyways, I'm getting fed up with
- [80:29]
Jesse
some of these use cases.
- [80:31]
Cal Newport
All right, let's end as we like to do on Mondays, by catching up with what I have been up to. We should start with reading. I keep forgetting what to make of a Life is a book title that I've forgotten. Why am I forgetting this book title so much? It's a perfectly interesting book title.
- [80:50]
Inbox Reader
It's got a long subtitle.
- [80:51]
Cal Newport
I've already asked you about it today. I just had to look it up again. I like the book, but anyways, I
- [80:56]
Jesse
read a book called what to make of a Life.
- [80:58]
Cal Newport
This is Jim Collins's new book.
- [81:01]
Jesse
I keep forgetting the name, but I
- [81:02]
Cal Newport
actually enjoyed the book itself. It's sort of in the vein of the Deep Life, right? I mean, it's how do you build a meaningful, interesting life? I like Jim's approach. He called it the paired cliff approach. He'll take two people with similar paths in their lives up to a certain
- [81:17]
Jesse
moment in which there was a big
- [81:19]
Cal Newport
change or disruption in their life. And then he compares the different ways
- [81:22]
Jesse
that they reacted to it to help
- [81:24]
Cal Newport
try to understand the different ways to
- [81:25]
Jesse
navigate cliffs in your life.
- [81:26]
Cal Newport
And it just had like a lot of really interesting stories and a lot of, you know, a lot of interesting
- [81:32]
Jesse
good ideas in there.
- [81:34]
Cal Newport
Jim is now his upper 60s, I
- [81:37]
Jesse
think, so there's a big emphasis on the second half of your life is where a lot of cool stuff can happen. Which reminds me of David Brooks book the Second Mountain. It reminds me Arthur Brooks book from. Was it Tree to Tree?
- [81:47]
Cal Newport
Is that right? That feels, man, I'm not doing great books. Is that possibly the name? From Tree to Tree, From Strength to
- [81:58]
Jesse
Strength with a picture of trees behind it.
- [82:00]
Cal Newport
Arthur, you should have named your book from Tree to Tree.
- [82:03]
Jesse
And it could have been about swinging on tree branches.
- [82:07]
Inbox Reader
Any idea how Collins's book is selling?
- [82:10]
Jesse
Well, let's find out.
- [82:12]
Cal Newport
It was New York Times bestseller. It came out recently. I actually had a. He sent me an advanced copy. I had a good phone conversation with him at some point. He gave me some really good advice. He's a really interesting guy and I write about him to some degree in my new book on the Deep Life. All right, so it's the Kindle edition. It's always riveting audio when you're looking something up on a computer. The hardcover of what to make of a Life as of the day we are recording, this has an Amazon rank520. Came out in April, came out a month ago. That's fine. Your top 1000amonth after you came out. That means you are getting after it. So if we go to like success, self help category, you know, there it is, top 10. What's number one right now? Let them theory, man.
- [83:06]
Jesse
Mel.
- [83:07]
Cal Newport
Mel is going. And then it's Start with yourself, which
- [83:11]
Jesse
is Emma Greed's book, which has an interesting cover.
- [83:15]
Cal Newport
Then Mark Manson's book. All right, people whose podcast I've done. Mel Robbins. Yes. Mark Manson's. Yes. Then It's Admiral William McRaven. Haven't met him. Robert Greene. Haven't met him. Morgan Housel. Haven't read him. Future rich person The Four Agreements. I've read then what to make of a life. Number 10 is Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich. I've known Ramit forever. I like Ramit a lot.
- [83:37]
Inbox Reader
I think the four agreements got to be really big because McAfee had it on his book club and Aaron Rodgers talked about it during COVID or something.
- [83:44]
Jesse
Oh, interesting.
- [83:45]
Inbox Reader
Yeah.
- [83:45]
Cal Newport
Yeah, it's weird. I'll be honest.
- [83:47]
Jesse
It's kind of weird.
- [83:49]
Cal Newport
Deep work's not doing Great. It's number 30. Sometimes it's in the top 10, but right now it's number 30. Well, there you go. Okay, so what else is going on? I will say if we're talking about books, I'm not going to mention I
- [84:03]
Jesse
told Jesse about this, but I aborted another book.
- [84:07]
Cal Newport
I won't say what it was. Someone sent it to me.
- [84:11]
Jesse
I like the topic. I thought it'd be quick to read.
- [84:14]
Cal Newport
Gonna get through it. I. I went 60 pages in and I just. I, yeah, I couldn't go.
- [84:21]
Inbox Reader
Fans are gonna know what it is.
- [84:25]
Jesse
All right. It was east of Eden by John Steibek.
- [84:28]
Cal Newport
Terrible book hack.
- [84:31]
Jesse
No, I can tell you what it
- [84:32]
Cal Newport
is, but I'll tell you what the issue was, because I think it's an issue for non fiction writers in general.
- [84:36]
Jesse
It was conversational, unstructured.
- [84:38]
Cal Newport
So the biggest sin in my mind, an idea. Nonfiction writing is what I call writing
- [84:42]
Jesse
for the sake of writing.
- [84:44]
Cal Newport
I have my outline of the topics that this is a reasonable outline of topics for this chapter. And then I'm just going to kind of riff to fill up each of these sections. And I'm just sort of riffing ideas mainly, like kind of ideas that people have heard before. No real cited sources. I might just mention an idea I had or an experience I had when
- [85:01]
Jesse
I was younger that I probably made up a little bit.
- [85:03]
Cal Newport
And I'm just kind of rock and rolling, just kind of going through good idea. Nonfiction. You have a very structured, original new thought. You have a structure that you're bringing people through this. You're using compelling stories as needed to try to implant new insights and twist them around. Read a Malcolm Gladwell book. He's taking you on a very carefully constructed narrative journey through both an idea space and a real world story space. And they merge together, and it's a real experience. You can't just riff. Well, here's some thoughts I'm having about this. And, you know, I don't know.
- [85:32]
Jesse
Anyway, so when you taught your class
- [85:34]
Inbox Reader
up at Dartmouth a couple summers ago, is that all the stuff you were teaching them?
- [85:37]
Cal Newport
Well, the Dartmouth class I taught was writing about technology. So we were looking at all the different ways that people write about technology. And we broke it down by, like, all these different styles. And it was, like, really interesting. Like, there was, like, the essay memoristic style. There was a very, like, technical explainer type style. There's the sort of narrative investigative journalist style. And I was trying to show them there's, like, a great art form to write about technology and, like, trying to argue.
- [86:03]
Jesse
Trying to argue that it was. It was really important. All right, I'll tell you what the book was. It's a Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant.
- [86:12]
Cal Newport
Just rambling.
- [86:13]
Jesse
Come on.
- [86:15]
Cal Newport
Want more stories? All right, enough of that nonsense. That's all the time we have for today. We have a. I'm sure we'll have a AI Reality Check episode on Thursday, so stay tuned for that then. We'll be back next Monday with an advice episode. I've got a good one planned. So until then, as always, stay deep.