Digital Detox: How To Quit Social Media & Free Your Brain From Modern Distractions | Cal Newport

Why is social media use seem to correlate directly with rises in anxiety, [music] depression, and self-harm? There seems to be from the most recent research literature, sort of one distinctly positive thing from social media and two distinctly negative. So, the two distinctly negative things is one, uh, they call it social snacking, but essentially you replace actual high-quality [music] face-to-face interaction, the type of connections that you need to thrive as a social being. You replace it with a low-friction interaction online, and it's not [music] a fair trade. Uh, the second issue is social comparison. So, it's just not healthy for us to constantly be looking at these carefully curated positive portrayals of everyone's life. That's not We're not wired for it. [music] And so, that also makes us less happy. So, it's it's it's the social comparison which directly makes us less happy, and the social snacking which keeps us away from the type of actual interactions that would make us more happy. Welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-selling author who earned his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. He's the author of six books. His work has been published in more than 20 languages, and he's written 60 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited more than 3,500 times. He's a Provost Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, but ironically, he's most famous for his views on digital minimalism. His TED Talk on why you should quit social media has been viewed over 5 million times, and his work on this topic and related topics such as doing deep work and avoiding a life of distraction have been read by millions of people around the world. His insights and expertise have made him one of the most sought-after minds on the subject, and he's been featured in most major publications, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Economist, to name but a few. So, please help me in welcoming the man who, true to his core philosophy, has never had a social media account, the best-selling author of So Good They Can't Ignore You and Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport. [applause] What's up, man? How you doing? Welcome to the show, man. Of course. I'm super excited to have you because I have been beyond obsessed with you since you changed my entire view on passion. Yes. So, I was the passion guy, talked about passion all the time, have to have it in your life, and it's the answer. Uh-oh, yeah. And then, a friend was like, "Dude, you have to read this book. It's all about how passion, following your passion, is actually bad advice." Yes. So, walk us through why is following your passion bad advice. Yeah. Well, I mean, I wrote that book in 2012, uh because I was going through a career transition. So, I was finishing up grad school. I was in sort of a post-doc year. Going onto the job market to to be an academic, which if you do right, means you're going to do your first and last job interviews your whole life. And so, I had this idea that if there was ever a time I was going to get leverage out of understanding how do people end up really loving their careers, this was the point in my life where I'd get the most leverage. And so, since I'd written a couple of books, I figured instead of just looking into this on my own, I can write a book about it. It's an excuse to interview some people. So, I went out there, looked at the research literature, talked to a lot of people who seem to love what they do, and try to get to the bottom of it. How do people get there? And the first thing you discover if you research this topic is, especially at the time, the most common advice is follow your passion. Right? That's what everyone was saying. You got to get after it. You got to crush it. Just get after your passion. Just figure that out, and everything else will will work out. But you spend a little bit of time looking at the research literature, you know, a little bit of time talking to people who are actually passionate and asking their story and you see this advice really isn't that good. If anything, actually telling someone follow your passion might reduce the probability that they end up passionate about their work. That's interesting. Why? Yeah. Well, there's a couple issues. So, one, that advice presupposes that most people have an intrinsic passion that they can identify through introspection and then use as the basis of their career choices. We don't have a lot of evidence that's true. In fact, most people probably don't have a clearly identifiable passion. This is especially probably true of young people, people coming where where this type of thinking becomes very important. So, you tell someone who doesn't have this clear passion, "Oh, you've got to follow your passion." [laughter] You're setting them up, right, for failure. It's already they're going to be really worried. And then second, we don't have a lot of evidence that connecting a job to a pre-existing interest plays a big role in whether or not you get deep satisfaction out of that job. That's really surprising. Yeah. So, so we have decades of research on what leads people to actually feel sort of motivation towards their job, what leads them to be satisfied, and it turns out that the traits have very little to do with this intrinsic match. It has more to do with things like impact, mastery, connection with people, doing something worthwhile, getting better at a skill that's valued. Mhm. You know, if you get these generic traits, you tend to enjoy your job more and more. In fact, research shows that if you can take a a group of people who all had the same job and then they interviewed them to try to understand how they felt about it. The main differentiating factor on what separates someone from feeling like the job was a calling versus just a job was how long they'd been doing it. That is very surprising. longer they'd been doing it, the better they got at it, the bigger sense of impact they had, the more connection they had to people. And so, in my in my book, what I basically flipped the script and said, "What I'm actually observing out there is that maybe eight times out of 10, if you interview someone who really loves what they're doing, they probably started without a clear-cut vision that this is what I'm meant to do. But what they did commit to is getting very good. Getting very good at skills, becoming very impactful, building mastery. And that for this eight out of 10 cases, the passion follows the mastery. [snorts] Yeah, that that to me is it was one of those as soon as I was reading what you were talking about, I was like, "Oh my god, this makes so much sense." And I'm so glad that I read it when I did because as I stepped in front of the camera and and started talking to people about how to build success in their life, the the like outpouring of crushing anxiety that I got from people that that like, "Yo, I don't have a passion. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like, you're so lucky. You you you know, you have this passion." And I thought, "It's interesting though cuz it didn't start as a passion. It actually started as what I'll call a minor area of interest." Yeah. And then tracing that back through the framework of your book and realizing, "Whoa. Like, this was a process." It made me want to package it up in a way that I could give people and say, "You're misconstruing my own story and let me tell you what I actually did to get here." Do you have like a package that you give people that says, "All right, step one, do this. Step two, do this if you really want to end up being passionate." Well, you can you can shrink it all the way down to Steve Martin's advice, which is where I got the title for the book, which was be so good they can't ignore you. And so like that's what Martin used to tell aspiring entertainers. And what he said was, "Well, they always were hoping there was going to be some secret or here's how you get noticed or here's how you get the right agent." What he would always tell them is, "Be so good they can't ignore you." If you do that, lots of other good things will come. And so I ended up naming that book so good they can't ignore you is because that advice basically turns out to be incredibly applicable. Especially if you're new. Let's say you're new to the job market, you're right out of school. You want to be passionate about what you do. By far, probably the most important thing you can do, the most important step you can take if you want to maximize the probability that you have a fantastic working life, is put your head down and go into apprentice mode. You're going to master something that's unambiguously valuable. You do that, on that foundation, all sorts of really good things come. Good things that include real satisfaction and passion for your work. But I want to go back and and really wrap everything up around the passion idea. So, are you saying that somebody could take something that intrinsically they have zero interest or maybe even negative interest, and simply by getting good that they will develop passion for it? And do you think there's anything automatic in there about mastery equals passion in a sort of one-to-one way, or is it you do need to start with something that you find intrinsically interesting, it's just not necessarily going to be anything that feels like it could one day be a passion? Yeah, the the latter is the right way to think about it. And basically, we have to lower the bar. So, we have to lower the bar from this impossible height where we put it, which is you have a one true passion, and if you figure it out, you're going to love your work starting the next day. And if you get it wrong, you're destined for a life of misery. Like, we have to lower that bar down to there are many different things upon which you could build a life of real fulfillment and passion. But it's not just dart throwing, right? I mean, it has to be something that you have an interest in, it has to be something that you think would reward you with more flexibility and options as you got better at it, right? So, so it's not just arbitrary, but most people could probably pretty quickly identify six or seven directions that pass those qualifiers. And so, a lot of what I'm saying is that's enough. That's enough for it to pass the bar. I like this, maybe it matches some of my skills, I like the options it would open up if I did it well, it seems to resonate in some sort of ill-defined or ambiguous way. That's all enough for something to be the foundation of a passionate career. And there's probably a lot of things that that pass that criteria, that's okay. So now going to the idea of apprenticeship, um there was an article written recently that I found really interesting and it brought out in me a rant. So let's see how wonderfully [snorts] um inflammatory we can be here while being very honest. This woman wrote an article saying, "Whoa, I have this business. I used to get interns all the time. Like people would constantly be asking me if they could be an intern." And she was like somewhere around 6 or 7 years ago, it just stopped. And now people today are like um unwilling to do or uninterested I think she may have even said they're uninterested in doing. Not meaning like I'm out here clamoring for people. She was just like surprised that people didn't want to be an intern anymore. And then the feedback on the article, they were skewering this woman and saying, "Oh, can you believe that people don't want to be enslaved? Oh, can you believe that people don't want to work for free?" And I was like, "Whoa." If I had one piece of advice for myself going back in time. In fact, the cameraman on this camera right here is leaving this company because he's taking my advice. Because the advice I gave him was, "Go Who Who is like living your idealized life? The The very life that you couldn't imagine. Like, "Oh my god, if I have that, I will have everything." Go offer to work for them for free in exchange for knowledge and connections. Like, if I can't give you that, then you should immediately leave because you're in this beautiful part of your life where poverty's okay. Yeah. You can still get laid while being poor. It's not so cute when you're 40. But like in your early 20s, hey, it's not like this big knock on on who you are and your your value in the world. And so he literally was like, "I'm going to go do exactly that." And so that to me is brilliant. So the fact that they're like skewering this woman for deigning to suggest that somebody basically be an apprentice, I find scandalous for their sake, not mine, but for their sake. Yeah. Well, I don't think we we think enough about how hard it is to actually do interesting and successful things. And so this this is a real issue that I got into in that original book where young people in particular would write their own script for this is how I want the world to work. This is how, you know, I want to run this thing and I want it to be really successful and I want X, Y, and Z and here's what I want to be important for this that it that I'm on social media a lot's going to be key and the fact that I'm just a young go-getter and this will all work out in about a year. But like the reality is everything that is worthwhile is really really hard and it's often really really specific. And so I'm always telling young people something very similar. Before you make your plan for how you're going to execute, you know, becoming a book author, for example, which a lot of people ask me about. Go talk to authors. Figure it out. Figure out what the actual reality is of what matters and how people succeed. Don't write your own script that with the answers that you want it to be because often there's a real conflict. It is easy to come up with some plan where you're like, "I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. I'm going to write 20 pages a day and something that's kind of hard but not too hard and you think it's going to be fun and it might have nothing to do with how that industry works. But on the other hand, if you can get the intelligence, maybe by by interning with someone who can actually teach you about the field you really care about and you understand, uh this is what's involved. Then you know where to put your energy. You know where to get the leverage point. It's why in academia, for for example, uh why the people who write papers for star venues tend to train with other stars. Because you just learn, right? If you're at MIT in the sciences, you're going to learn from people that this is what they do. They write papers for the top places. They know how to do it. The mindset's all built around it. You can see what they pay attention to and what they don't pay what they don't pay attention to and that type of apprenticeship actually matters. So, the the intoxication I felt at getting a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, um which is certainly your credo in life, is definitely mine. How do people do that? How do they become so good they can't be ignored? Well, I mean I say you should look to let's say professional musicians, professional athletes, professional chess players, people who have to get good in a world that has a well-defined competence hierarchy where you have a chess ranking and you can't run away from it. You have a batting average, right? You don't like you can't you can't get away from it. Watch how they train. Cuz in their world there's a lot of effort that has gone into how do you systematically improve. And what you see is that they deliberately practice. And there's really no shortcut to deliberate practice to gaining mastery in almost any field, but in knowledge work in particular, so in this sort of whole array of sort of various creative and other types of of professions, we don't think that way and people don't actually do a lot of the sort of systematic practice. And so that's why in So Good They Can't Ignore You, I go and I hang hang out with the professional guitar player. And I say, "Okay, I want to watch you practice." And in this case there's actually a good reason to do so because this is someone who started playing guitar at the same time that I started playing guitar. And at the age where like I was not that great, I played in a rock band and we were like, "Okay." Um he was being had a record deal and was being heralded as like this talent, right? In in new acoustic guitar playing. So I said, "Great, I want to understand why did he become really really good?" And I didn't. Watching him practice in this sort of musician's frat house he lived in in Boston with all these other musicians answered the question 100%. He was so intense when he was practicing the guitar that he would forget to breathe, right? [laughter] So he'd be doing this. He's He was trying to get a lick faster. So the way he got the lick faster is let me play it about 10% faster than I can comfortably play it. And he was so concentrated that he'd forget to breathe. And so he would do these ragged gasps every once in a while when his body would force him to take in take in air. That's the whole difference. I never did that. That's stretching. You're like, "What I need to do is be better at this lick." And so I'm going to push myself beyond where I'm comfortable. I remember you saying with that example that you were for him practice something that um wasn't necessarily fun for him. He didn't know how to do it. So, it was constantly facing his inadequacy. And you said, "What I like to do was pick up my guitar and jam and play a song that I'm good at and you know, you some Hendrix and like wail away a little bit. Yeah. Right. So, now help people understand. So, you've said that there's a big difference between repetition and deliberate practice. So, how And even I like a lot of what I do is probably a little too close to just repetition. And it's the far too rare moment where I really stop and think about wait, what piece of this can I break off and do until I'm good at that piece and then reinsert it back into the whole so I'm not just repeating it. Yeah. Um so, how can people conceptualize the difference between repetition and actual deliberate practice? Right, because repetition after an initial point when you're completely new to something, repetition does not make you better. And this is not it's not obvious, right? I mean, there there's actually this interesting performance psychology literature that started in the '70s that was trying to really understand how do people become masters at things? And repetition was one of the the hypotheses. Maybe you do it a lot. Turns out that's not the case. Um other people thought it was understanding the world, maybe building up the right mental models. That's not the case. It's deliberate practice. And so, what's the difference? Deliberate practice stretches you. You you stretch yourself past where you're comfortable with the just like you do with a muscle, right? You have to tire out the muscle, exhaust it if you're going to if you're going to get growth, right? But it's very uncomfortable. Stretching is uncomfortable. Uh and that's why people don't do it. But like when I was trying to upgrade my writing, so I my first three books I wrote as a student. And they were student advice books uh paperback. And I wanted to be an idea book hardcover idea book writer. Um I kind of went out to the wilderness for a while and said, "I have to get better at writing." And what I was discovering was like just writing on my blog, for example, wasn't stretching me enough. And so, I said, "I'm going to write for magazines." I found a magazine where, you know, they paid for commissions and there was an editor who was going to accept or reject it. So now I could deliberately practice. I had to stretch to try to get my my assignments accepted and published, you know, by this magazine, right? It wasn't just repeating what I was doing before. Now I was trying to stretch myself and I did that for a year. Uh and it made a big difference. And so that's deliberate practice. I love the way that your work really um weaves into itself and reinforces everything. So So Good They Can't Ignore You obviously really helps people understand how they become passionate, how they become extraordinary, that it's a process. And then Deep Work talking about, well now let's talk about how you make that process efficient by getting rid of all the clutter. Um how do people get good at Deep Work itself? Yeah. And your early books were a lot about like how to be effective at studying and you were saying you thought it was just so bizarre that people don't try to optimize their ability to study. Yeah. So one, how do we optimize our ability to do that? And then how do we begin to carve out that space to really be successful at going deep? Yeah, so so Deep Work, which is just my term for concentrating very intensely, right? When you you give something intense focus without distractions, you don't glance at things. No phone, no browser tabs, you're you're you're you're just focused in. This skill is essentially the answer to the question that my readers had about So Good They Can't Ignore You, which was, okay, how do I become so good I can't be ignored. And in in a lot of fields, this ability to concentrate very intensely, first of all, that's necessary for deliberate practice. Deliberate practice requires you to be in a state of Deep Work. Uh and Deep Work is also just what allows you to produce very effectively. If you want to use your skills to produce high-quality work, you want to produce it uh at a high quantity per time spent, very concentrated effort uh is what's important. But But what I discovered working on that book is that it's a skill that has to be trained. So it's a little bit circular. If you're good at deep work, you can pick up skills very quickly, but deep work itself is a skill that has to be trained. Which a lot of people think of it more like a habit, like flossing their teeth, right? I know how to do deep work, I just don't do enough of it, but it really is trained. It really is much more like playing the guitar that if you haven't been practicing, you shouldn't expect that's going to sound very good. And so, it Why is that? Like when I really think about it, like I hear you and I know you've thought a lot more about this than I have, but it does feel like flossing your teeth. It does feel like I just need to not pick up my phone and look at it. I just need to focus. So, is it kind of like meditation where I'm learning to extend those periods of time where I'm able to focus or what is at work? Right. Well, it's a very unnatural activity, actually. So, so giving sustained concentration doing deep thinking, uh it's not something that has a long evolutionary history. Uh and so, it's actually really the invention of the rented word in particular that helped to make the ability to think deeply more widespread. Did you say the rented word? The written word. Written, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah. Well, because reading itself, right, is also a very unnatural activity. And it requires an incredible amount of training to basically get your brain able to do this activity that we didn't evolve to do. But what you get out of doing reading is that your mind becomes comfortable with this very unnatural activity of keeping intense focus on something, right? So, so in some sense, it's not something that we are evolved to do. And so, if we don't practice it, our mind wants to do what it did in the the Paleolithic Savannah. What's going on? Like I want to survey. Is there Is there like a mastodon over there? Is there like my tribe member in trouble over there? Except for now, it's Is there someone on Twitter? Is there someone? But it's the same That's that same instinct. And so, it's something that has to be practiced. Uh we used to get this practice sort of in our schooling, right? Because when you're going through college, for example, before we had, let's say, wireless internet or or cell phones, there was a lot of time in the library. And it was you and a book and and there was no distractions around you. You would have to walk all the way back to your dorm or something. So like we would get hours and hours of just sort of practicing reading deeply, concentrating. But we've lost a lot of that now because, you know, even in like the college environment, you're you're constantly doing this and you're constantly doing this while you're looking at things. And so we actually are missing a lot of the necessary training that I think you need if you're going to be comfortable. But I argue it's really worth it. Because so few people are actually training their ability to concentrate that if you're one of the few to do so, you have a huge competitive advantage. That's really interesting. In the book you talk about solitude deprivation, which I found really interesting. So one define solitude, which I thought was interesting that you took the time to do that, um and then why it matters. Yeah, so we think about solitude in different ways, um but the definition I liked came from another book. It was called Lead Yourself First. It was a book about solitude and leadership. But the definition they used in this book was that solitude is freedom from input from other minds. So it has nothing to do with physical isolation. I mean, in this room, you could certainly be in solitude if you were just alone with your own thoughts. But if you're up on a mountain top, completely isolated, but have earbuds in, right? You're not in solitude. So it's nothing to do with physical isolation. It's what mode your brain is in. So if your if your brain is processing input that was generated from another mind, you're not in solitude. And if it's not, it's just observing or thinking its own thoughts, you are in a state of solitude. And what we know is that solitude is crucial. I mean, you have to have this on a regular basis in your life if you're going to flourish and thrive as a human being. Now this wasn't a problem until about 7 years ago because it was unavoidable that you were going to have solitude just going about your day-to-day business, right? You would just you'd be in the car, you didn't like what was on the radio, solitude. You're in line at the drugstore uh and you have to wait 10 minutes, it's solitude, right? You're just alone with your own thoughts. But for the first time in human history, we've created the technology that makes it possible to banish every last moment of solitude from your life because now you have ubiquitous high-speed wireless internet and the supercomputer in your pocket. And there's big back-end algorithms that will feed up to you a sort of optimized selection of nuggets at any moment. The problem with that is it gets all solitude out of your life, creating a syndrome called solitude deprivation syndrome, which we're not really wired for. And it makes us anxious, it impedes our development, it impedes our creative and professional insights. It's not good. How do we build it back into our life and what are the consequences? Some of the things you talk about in the book in terms of the consequences of of the way that we're interacting with our digital devices, it's um if you're right about the cause, it's pretty terrifying. And I I don't think anyone's going to argue the uh sort of realities about mental health issues, about attempted or hospitalizations due to attempted suicide. I mean, it's it's pretty crazy. Yeah. It It really is. I mean, I think it's getting stark that having this thing as a constant companion is not good for us. And what's important about this to understand is that it's also not fundamental. So, this behavior of constantly looking at the phone, it's not intrinsic to this technology. In fact, we had both social media and smartphones for years before it became normal to look at your phone all the time. The reason we do that, and this is the behavior that's causing all these issues, the reason we do that is that around the point when the major social media platforms were preparing for their IPOs, they completely re-engineered the social media experience. So, instead of it being about posting and reading your friends' posts, it became about this steady incoming stream of social approval indicators, like likes and retweets and photo tags and comments. And so, now you had a reason to keep going back to the phone. Because every time you hit this, there might be another reward there, another indication of social approval. None of that was in the original social media model. But they added it because it changed it from something you checked every once in a while to something that you checked all the time. And it was really hard to resist. And in that changed our entire relationship with these devices. And so now we think about it something we look at all the time. It's sort of trained us to to think of it like this constant companion that we always need to be looking at in every downtime. But that's very recent and it's very contrived and it's causing a lot of trouble. So [snorts] how do we begin to carve out that space for solitude? Are there things that we can do? I know you've talked about walking. Like what are some things that people can do to train themselves? Cuz obviously now most people are in a a very, like you said, Pavlovian response cycle where it's not going to happen by accident for them to stop. So how do they break out of that and what can they do to reintroduce solitude? Well, just for the issue of solitude, it's pretty easy to get it back. All you have to do is on a regular basis do something without your phone. You basically go back to about 10 years ago. Not all the time, but just occasionally, right? So maybe one you walk the dog at some point like I'm not going to bring my phone. You're going to the drugstore. I'm not going to bring my phone. Like just have some activity you do most days without your phone, even if it's 20 minutes. There you're already getting little doses of solitude. You're breaking the solitude complete solitude deprivation syndrome. So now how do we build in You talk a lot about detoxing from technology. You have a method for sort of stripping everything down and then reintroducing it. What does that process look like? Yeah, so this is the This is the bigger answer, right? And and so the question is how do we improve our relationship more generally with technology in our personal life. And so the philosophy that I teach is digital minimalism. Which just takes minimalism, which has been around forever, and it's an ancient idea, and it applies to all sorts of different parts of the human experience. An idea that says, you should focus on the things that are really, really valuable, to the exclusion of other things that are much less valuable. So, by putting your attention on the things that you know for sure give you big wins, and concentrating intensely on them, you can do better than taking that same attention and trying to spread it over many more things that that also give you smaller wins. So, if you apply this to your digital life, uh what you get is a a a approach to the apps and the services and and the the gadgets that says, "I only want to use digital tools that give me really big returns on a small number of things I really care about, and I'm happy missing out on everything else." Which is a completely different way of thinking about it than I think most people have thought about their personal digital life, which is much more of a maximalist mindset. Hey, this thing might bring me some value or some convenience, and I don't want to miss out on that. So, I might as well try it out. I might as well download that app. I might as well sign up for it. This sort of more haphazard approach. The digital minimalist say, "No, no, no. I know what I'm all about. I know what I want to do with my time. I know what's important to me, and I put tech to work incredibly strategically to help those things I really care about, and then everything else that's out there I just ignore." So, what is attention residue? How do we make sure that we don't find ourselves in that death loop? Yeah. Well, I mean, attention residue is the the killer for almost any creative endeavor. And it comes out of the psychology literature. Uh this term actually comes from a a psychology researcher named Sophie Leroy. Um basically, what it says is, if you're if you're focused on something difficult, and then you shift your attention over to something else, and even if it's for 1 minute, right? Like you shift over to look at an email or whatever, and then you come back to the original hard thing, there's a residue left from that context switch. And that residue takes a while to clear out. And until it clears out, your cognitive performance has declined. So, it's like you've taken some reverse nootropic and you're dumber, right? And so, the problem is is the way that a lot of us work today when we bring on more and more demands or that we're really plugged into the email or or or social media or what have you is that we're constantly doing these quick checks. And we feel like, "Hey, we're single We're doing the right thing. I don't have this window open at the same time as this window. I'm not multitasking anymore. I've got it all figured out." But what what we're not realizing is the context switch of each of these quick checks is creating attention residue and reducing our cognitive performance. And actually, what a lot of knowledge workers do is like every 10 minutes is this quick glance, right? So, now they're in a state of persistent attention residue. And so, they're performing at a much reduced capacity. And they don't even realize this, which is one of the reasons why people who really prioritize long stretches without any of the breaks, one of the reasons why they do so well is that they're just avoiding the attention residue. They're avoiding the artificial lowering of their capacity. How can people get into flow assuming that they like carve out They're They're not doing quick checks. Residue isn't the problem. How can they get themselves into a state of flow? Yeah. Well, I mean, in general, we're really bad at figuring out how to get a good return on human brains. And one of the reasons why we're so bad is that we've adopted this workflow. When when we had low-friction communication, electronic communication tools come along, we adopted this workflow of let's just have constant unstructured conversation. Like, let's just do what we would do when it's the three of us in the savanna hunting the mastodon and we're just, you know, talking as needed on the mat. Hey, you go there. Go there. What do you see over there? We've tried to scale this into our companies. The problem is that requires that the service this ongoing unstructured conversation, you have to be constantly checking in on these communication channels. And everyone is feeling the same fingers on the blackboard that you're feeling because it You can't do anything else with your brain if you have to service these conversations. So so so to go to your your follow-up question, so let's say you've you've somehow been able to find some space from this. Like how do you actually then make the most of these deep work sessions? Well, something I noticed is a lot of people who are good at this have rituals. Mhm. So they always have a ritual about how they get started. Well, like for Darwin for example. Like D. Darwin? D. Darwin, Charles Darwin. Uh he built this path through his uh estate, the Down House outside of London, right? And he called it a sandwalk because it was paved with sand and and he had it go past the most scenic parts of his property. And the way that he would get ready to do his work on The Origin of Species every day is that he did a certain number of laps of this. And in fact, so he would start doing the laps and this would start easing his brain into like look, okay, let me get it in the thinking mode. Let me clear out the other Let me clear out the residue. Let me start loading up into my RAM like what it was I was thinking about. And he had a set number of laps he wanted to do. And so he would lay out that many rocks on the path so that he wouldn't have to waste mental resources keeping track of the count. And every time he would pass by the rocks, he'd kick another one off. And so when he kicked the last rock off, he would then detour into the study. Mhm. And now I'm doing my whatever, doing my writing, doing my reading or whatever. That's actually really common. A lot of deep workers have some sort of ritual like that, something they do. Do you have one? Uh yeah, I mean it depends on what type of deep work I'm doing, like what location I'm I'm using. But like in my in my house for example, I have a study where I do my work and it's different than where I keep my computer. Um and so I had a a library table made. Uh because I've spent a lot of time in university. So I have an old-fashioned library table with library lights and my my books in the mahogany bookcase next to it. And so when I work in there, there's a whole ritual of clearing everything off and getting the lights right. Making it seem like it seemed back in the day when you're in the the room in the libraries as an undergraduate studying or something like that. To me that puts me in the mindset. Let's start doing deep work. And so those type of rituals are important. You've got a concept you call productive meditation. Yeah. What is that? So it's one of these training exercises if you want to be better better at focusing. And what you do is you go for a walk. While you're walking, you try to make progress on a professional problem just in your head. So you're just whatever it is, figuring out a strategy or or or outlining a chapter or whatever it is. Just in your head while you walk. And as in mindfulness meditation, when you notice that your attention wanders off of this and starts writing emails or whatever it is you and your attention do, you notice that and you bring it back to the problem. You know, I just have to think and try to hold all the variables in my head and make progress on the problem just in my head. Uh you do this, it's very very difficult. You'll find it at first to be very hard to keep your concentration just in your head on something that's hard because you have to hold you have to hold the variables steady and try to make progress on it. If you're writing, you have to remember the whole outline. But you get better at it. And so it's very intense, but you get better really quick. It's like doing pull-ups, right? Like they're really hard when when you first do pull-ups, but if you keep doing pull-ups every day, you start to to really get stronger. Uh there seems to be from the most recent research literature sort of one distinctly positive thing from social media and two distinctly negative. So the two distinctly negative things is one, uh they call it social snacking, but essentially you replace actual high-quality face-to-face interaction, the type of connections that you need to thrive as a social being, you replace it with a low-friction interaction online. And it's not a fair trade. And so if all you're doing is talking to people on Twitter and on Facebook and on Instagram and Snapchat, and you're not actually sacrificing your time and energy to be there for friends, uh close friends, family, and community, you feel much much more lonely, much more anxious. Uh the second issue is social comparison. So, it's just not healthy for us to constantly be looking at these carefully curated positive portrayals of everyone's life. That's not we're not wired for it. And so, that also makes us less happy. So, it's it's it's the social comparison which directly makes us less happy and the social snacking which keeps us away from the type of actual interactions that would make us more happy. Those are probably the two leading drivers for why we see these correlations with increased social media use uh and less happiness and less sociality. So, they were um part of your argument on this I thought was really made powerful by the things that they were like, "Well, maybe it's not that. Maybe it's this and maybe it's this." And they ended up seeing that actually those don't line up. Walk us through those cuz I think it really adds punch to to your takeaway. Well, I mean, a a lot of these studies are correlational. You're looking at uh different generations. You're looking at different birth years. And you're trying to understand in general, why is that population different? So, when it came to teenagers and mental health, there was this sort of off-the-charts moment where the demographers that measure different properties of different generations, when they got to this Generation Z, the first generation to have ubiquitous access to smartphone starting their adolescence, uh these mental health issues increased more rapidly than anything they'd ever seen before increase between any generation. Wow. So, it was literally off the charts. Like, they don't see changes It usually the changes between generations is much more gradual. And so, they're trying to figure out why. what exactly are they measuring? In this case, we're looking at Think about it as like birth year versus like per capita incidences of anxiety and anxiety-related disorders, right? And so, you get to this birth year in the '90s that puts you at the smartphone era in your early adolescence. And that goes up. Wow. Right? And so, they're trying to figure out why. But, like any good demographers, you you see there could be a lot of different issues. So, there could be a lot of different conjectures. Uh and so, they explored a lot of different things. But, the timing wasn't working out for other things. They thought, "Well, maybe it has to do with, you know, the Great Recession and economic anxiety, but that started earlier. And and this didn't start till a little bit later. And they're like, well, maybe it's like political stuff and everyone's stressed out, but no, no, that's much later. Uh that that comes much later. So, they're they're really trying to figure this out. And they said, well, maybe it's self-reporting. Okay, so maybe yes, it's true that starting at this birth year, people report anxiety and anxiety-related disorders, but we've just become more used to that. And so, maybe just people are more comfortable. But then they looked at the hospitalization data. And hospitalizations for self-harm went right up with it, right? So, it's not a reporting error. And so, what you see is this sort of narrowing of consensus around the idea that there's really no other explanation that fits the data as well as giving social media to adolescents. That's what's causing it. You've made some pretty bold statements about how people are going to look back on social media. Um what's the analogy that you use? Well, I think the cigarette analogy is one that that caught some attention. But then the actual analogy is, if this research literature does end up in a place that says it's causing this much harm for adolescents, I said, this was in a GQ interview, um we'll probably look back then at giving a 13-year-old social media the same way that we look today at giving a 13-year-old a pack of cigarettes. Cuz we're learning that the brain at that point really can't handle the [snorts] forces that are unleashed by these sort of highly optimized tools, which are built to exploit psychological vulnerabilities in order to get a lot of usage, just like we uh artificially increased the nicotine content in the tobacco in cigarettes because we wanted people to smoke more. I mean, these things have been tuned up to a high degree. Like we talked about before, it had to tune up this sort of uh psychological exploitations if we were going to get people to look at it as much as we needed people to look at it if the revenue numbers were going to go up. So, these things are really tuned to play on sort of psychological vulnerabilities involving social approval and connection. You give that to a teenage brain, which is obsessed with that, right? It's very, very volatile. Now, what I love about all of your work is that it really feeds into one super powerful notion, which is what you said was the reason that I write about this stuff, the reason that I think this matters is it stops people from leading basically the good life. And you talk about how we've been trying to define the good life for a very long time or an interesting life. Um I'd love for you to define that. Like what Why does this matter? What are we missing out on? What What is a good life? What should people be striving for? Well, I mean, I'm a big advocate of what I sometimes call the deep life, but basically doing a small number of valuable things really well. We know that is uh incredibly fulfilling. So, I think that's Define fulfillment for me. Human flourishing. I think Aristotle got it right with his concept of eudaimonia, which is not about happiness, and it's not about good things happening or avoiding bad things. Eudaimonia was you're reaching a point of human flourishing. So, you're sort of taking the potential you have as a human and you're making good on it. Right? So, you you you feel like you're you're making the most of what you're capable of doing. And I think he was right writing all the way back then that this is what for the ancient Greeks, you know, this is what you were looking for. Uh is eudaimonia. And so, the deep life is very much uh complimentary to that. But it's not just about what you do professionally. It turns out sort of this this depth, right? Doing the the the important things well is very important in your social life as well. And so, this is why, you know, in digital minimalism, I'm so concerned about people being very blithe about how they're going to change what sociality means. Like I'm just I'm going to do things on my phone now. I'm going to be doing streaks on Snapchat and and and selfies. And like let's just completely change, you know, what it means to be social. Um that has big impacts because we know, we've known since the ancients that what do you need to also feel like flourishing thriving human being is you have to take responsibility for and sacrifice on behalf of family close friends and community. Can't just do that. Like it has to be um I am connected and serving the people in my immediate orbit. We need that as well to flourish. So in your work focusing to do really good things. And in your social life focusing to actually be there and serve and sacrifice for family close friends and community. This is like an ancient formula for flourishing as a human being. A lot of recent tech has inadvertently pushed us away from those things. Yeah, service and sacrifice. That's actually really pretty interesting. Um why do you think those two, especially the sacrifice, like doing something for others? Why is that so meaningful, do you think? Well, we're wired for it. I mean, we're we're we're an intensely social species, which is why we're so successful. We can band together and you know, make a TV show, right? I mean, we can we can work together and and actually solve problems. How are we able to do that? Well, we're we're wired to be very very good at social dynamics and working together towards a common goal. In order for that to work, you have to be willing to actually make sacrifices on behalf of other people. And this doesn't necessarily mean like jumping on a hand grenade, but like calling someone or or or someone's having a hard time and like I'm going to take an afternoon, I'm going to go over there. And I'm going to be there and I'm going to be with you. I'm going to be a source of comfort, right? That's a that's a sacrifice of of time and energy, which is much harder than just, you know, where you at on on, you know, Facebook or something like that, right? Um but I think the reason why we're wired to find great meaning and fulfillment in that is because if we're doing that, we can build much stronger, much more cohesive social structure. So it's sort of in our Homo Sapien DNA that we want to have these very strong responsibility sacrifice based connections with people in our immediate orbit. Mhm. Your next book, which I am just enthralled with the title. So, probably about five or six years ago, I started saying that email would be the downfall of Western civilization. And I'm only sort of joking. Yes. Um a world without email. How is that big enough for a book? What's the the themes that you're going to be tackling there? And why do you think it's important enough? Well, I think we're terrible at knowledge work. Right? Uh especially knowledge work in the age of digital technology and digital networks. And so, if you look back historically, whenever you have these intersections of technology and commerce, it takes a while to figure it out. So, you get the steam engine and rail infrastructure, the Industrial Revolution starts. It takes a long time for us to really figure out how to effectively build industrial goods in a factory. So, we're in the early stages of knowledge work in the age of digital technology. I think we're just really bad at it. And I think it's it's literally holding back the economic productivity of the world at this point. I mean, non-industrial productivity metrics have been stagnant for over a decade. Oh. Well, all of this sort of technological innovation was going on. And I think it's because the way that we are working right now uh is naive and simplistic and incredibly ineffective. And in particular, what I mean is we have, in general, adopted a workflow that I call the hyperactive hive mind, which is let's just take the three Paleolithic hunter model and let's just scale it up to our whole organization. We'll all have an inbox or a Slack channel, and we'll just keep the conversation going all day. We'll figure things out on the fly. We'll just rock and roll. Like, "Hey, I need this from you, Tom. Did you get that?" And we'll just have this ongoing conversation happen all day. Just like we would do on the savanna. Like, we just keep talking in an unstructured manner. We'll kind of figure things out. So, it makes sense because it's sort of our instincts, and it's incredibly convenient, and it's incredibly flexible. But it's at direct odds with what we know from psychology and neuroscience about how you actually use a human brain and create value. And our entire economy is increasingly based on taking human brains, having those brains think about information and produce new information that's valuable. This is entirely at odds with how we're working. Because we should be going deep and instead we're constantly distracted. in order to do the hyperactive hive mind, you have to constantly service the conversation. And if you have to constantly service the conversation, you can't get anywhere near your cognitive capacity. And so we're just leaving productivity on the shelf. So what do you think the world without email actually looks like? Like I'm the CEO. If I right now said, "Don't ever [ __ ] send another email." They'd be like, "Yo, yo, I got email, bro." Like they would they would deal it like drug dealers. Like I know they'd still do it. So what I think is going to happen is that we're going to take the hyperactive hive mind and we're going to have to replace it with something that's much more well thought through. And it might be very industry specific. But like if I ran Google, there's no way I'm going to spend 500k a year on a 10X programmer and give them an email address. So I can hire Look, I'll hire you know, 22-year-old whose whole job is to sit there with 19 monitors open and and communicate with the HR department and the parking and whatever and go to the meeting whatever, but I want this person with their team, you know, coding and giving it their full attention because I'm going to get so much more value out of this person than if instead I say, "Well, you should also be on email and Slack so that everyone can bother you about everything, right?" Now that latter scenario is very convenient for everyone, but but business is not about convenience, it's about value production. And so my my example from the industrial world is the assembly line. Right? The assembly line is a giant pain in the ass. If you're building cars, like the easiest thing to do, their equivalent of the hyperactive hive mind is like we have a team of five guys here and they're building a car right here. And if we want to scale this up, we get five more guys and they work on their car over there and we get five more guys and they build their car over there. And we just took what was natural and we scaled it up. And then Henry Ford at some point said, "Wait a second, the assembly line is going to produce cars much faster." But it was a huge pain in the ass. I mean, it's really hard to get an assembly line to work. It's incredibly inconvenient. If you don't get it just right, the whole thing falls apart because, you know, this thing is coming too fast and these workers aren't ready for it. You have to spend more money, you have to put in more overhead, you need more managers. It was like 10 to 100x more cars. And so, that's the type of thinking I think we need in knowledge work is I'm willing to be radical. I'm willing to make things really inconvenient for everyone, but what I really want to focus on is taking our core resource, which is these human brains, and setting up an environment where those brains can produce value at their peak and do so in a way that's really sustainable and rewarding to the brains. And doing this all day, I just think it's a it's a incredibly naive and ineffective way. So, yeah, a world without email, the email protocol might still be around. We might actually use email for certain purposes. We might use Slack for certain purposes. But the workflow is going to change. And it's going to be focused on how do we get the most value out of brains, not just how can we take our Paleolithic hunter conversation and just scale it up. I want to lock you in my basement until you come up with the answer. I am so I'm so desperate for this. Yeah. Like, oh man, this this is going to be big. If you can anyway like paint the picture of how each industry moves forward. Yeah. Um yeah, that that is definitely uh an itch that I am particularly desperate for somebody to scratch. So, I'm super excited to see that one, man. And the way that your books have all stacked on each other is as a a consumer and somebody who puts your work to immediate and voracious use. Um ferocious probably would have been a better choice of words there, but thanks for letting it slide. Um thank you. It's amazing. Um tell these guys where they can find you online. Well, not on social media. Yes. That is very clear. Yeah. Uh calnewport.com Nice and simple. Yeah. All right. What is the impact that you want to have on the world? [snorts] Um I think I want to help people live deeper, more meaningful lives. And I want to do so from the perspective of figuring out how to put all this technological miracles that computer scientists like me help invent, how to put them to work for you. And prevent them from just getting in your way from reaching that state of eudaimonia. I love that. All right, guys. You will You will be changed by the gestalt of everything that he's working on. If you really want to be extraordinary, pick up his books, read them, do as they say. It will make your life better. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Cal, thank you so much for doing this. That was amazing. If you found value in Cal's interview, be sure to check out Ryan Holiday and Robert Greene. Click either of the links below. Enjoy, and I'll see you there. I want to influence them. I want to get inside your skin, inside your brain, and alter how you look at the world.