Ep. 374: This is Your Brain on Phones | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

I've been talking recently about the idea that making your life deeper will make your devices less appealing.

And this is true, but it's not always enough for some people.

The constant allure of their phone is so strong.

It's so inescapable that it can seem impossible to find any sort of freedom.

This is what I want to talk about today how to create relief from your phone overuse, to gain enough breathing room that you can actually pay attention to making the other parts of your life more meaningful.

Now, I have a very particular approach that I want to take here.

I'm going to start inside your skull, deep within the folds of your brain.

Because I think, by identifying exactly what is happening among your neurons when you find yourself picking up that device more than you want to, will help us come up with specific responses that are more likely to actually work.

I understand how the brain works.

When you look at your phone, we're also going to discover why so much of the common advice you hear about phone overload doesn't help.

So we'll figure out what does work and what doesn't work.

So if you're sick and tired of being distracted from everything that matters, looking at your phone more than you want, to trying again and again to stop this and not having any success, then this is an episode you need to hear.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

Today's episode, the real reason you can't put down your phone and what to do about it.

All right, so here's what I want to do.

I want to summarize the neuroscience of why you feel the urge to pick up your phone, but I'm going to do this in a way that is going to avoid naming specific brain regions or going down long lists of neurotransmitters.

In fact, I guarantee I'm only going to mention one neurotransmitter and no brain regions, because I want to get to the core of this without having to get bogged down with too much of the details of the science.

So this is going to be a sort of high-level view of what's happening low down, deep within your brain.

So here's the basic way I want you to think about what's going on in your head, sort of moment to moment.

There are numerous groups of neurons in what we can call the short-term motivation system.

These are neurons that have learned over time to recognize different situations as cues to take certain actions.

So we have situations that are acting as cues. for taking certain actions.

I'm going to draw you a picture here.

God help us all.

But I want to try to illustrate what I'm talking about, right?

So let's start with.

I have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.

I'm going to draw a person here.

It's going to be very clear exactly what they're doing.

Is it clear what this person is doing here, Jesse?

Yeah, baseball player, right?

Perfectly drawn baseball player.

All right, so let's say it's a baseball player.

It's a baseball game.

You're playing baseball.

It's a hot day.

The inning break is over.

This is based off of recent experience.

I was coaching a little league game down in Anacostia and the field Jesse, was all artificial turf but it was just baking in the sun.

There didn't happen to be any shade.

Oh, my God.

So this is coming from recent experience.

But basically, let's say this.

You're the baseball player.

All right, you are coming off the field, you're really thirsty, and there's the water cooler.

Okay, so what is happening in your head?

You see that cold water cooler, you're really thirsty.

Well, there's a group of neurons that are going to fire in response to the situation.

It's a group of neurons that are pattern recognizers and they're going to recognize the situation, both the internal part of the state, which is that you're feeling very thirsty, and some external cues, like I see a water cooler that is nearby and it's in my dugout.

So they're going to fire in response to that situation because they have learned through experience that drinking water, in this situation, is going to give you a big reward the satisfaction you feel when you drink, when you're thirsty.

You can imagine that group of neurons is essentially creating a vote Like okay, we're making a vote for you, the person to take the action of going to drink the water from that water cooler.

Here's the only technical term I'll throw into this neuroscience discussion.

This is where the neurotransmitter dopamine enters the scene.

Dopamine is often misunderstood when people talk about it.

It plays many roles in the brain, but it's often simplified to some notion of the pleasure chemical.

Like you do something because you want the dopamine, it will release, it will make you feel good.

That's not quite right.

No actually, the role of dopamine in this situation is that that particular group of neurons that recognize this situation the water cooler and you're thirsty include dopamine neurons.

So when that pattern fires, it activates those neurons and those neurons release dopamine.

That dopamine is going to go down a pathway connected to that situation, a pathway that is going to connect to the action of going to get the water.

You will experience the cascade of dopamine down that particular pathway as a sense of motivation.

I feel motivated like that is something I want to do.

Now, here's what's interesting about the brain is that there's often many different situations going on that are cueing potential action.

So if we go back to this picture again, this beautifully drawn picture and no, it's not Norman Rockwell, Jesse.

I just drew that myself.

I know you were thinking about it.

In the same picture, maybe over on the dugout wall.

Over here you have your bat and your helmet are over there, perfectly drawn.

So another possible action that you could take is maybe also you know that you are up the bat soon.

You're coming in off of the field.

And so you also have neurons, a group of neurons that might recognize that situation.

It recognizes the internal knowledge of I'm first up, you know, at the bottom of the inning.

And we're heading back to the dugout and I see my batting equipment.

You know, that's down here.

And so the relevant action that cues is well, maybe I should go get my helmet on and get my bat ready, right?

But now we have competing things you could do next.

So what's going to happen is the bundle of neurons is associated with getting the bat in the helmet and getting ready to play.

They're going to make their own vote.

And they'll flood some dopamine.

The dopamine neurons will activate.

They'll flood some dopamine down the relevant action pathway to try to make you motivated to like oh, maybe I should go get my equipment ready to bat.

So you have different votes going on for different possible actions.

In general, the vote's going to win is going to be the vote that's associated with the largest expected reward.

And it knows this through experience.

So the expected reward for drinking the water has been built up in that circuit through learning by drinking water in the past.

And what was the reward like?

There's a whole mechanism that dopamine is also involved in.

I won't go into the details where it adjusts that reward.

So if you think like oh, it'll be kind of nice to drink water when I'm thirsty, and then you do, and it's great, there's a gap between what happened to expectation.

You'll actually use dopamine to mediate a change to that circuit so that next time it'll fire even stronger when it sees the water there.

These circuits have learned through experience what reward to imagine.

Very roughly speaking, the loudest vote in the situation wins.

And in this situation, if you're really thirsty, that's going to win.

You're going to you're probably going to drink the water and then you can.

Then you can vote the vote for saying get ready to bet might be stronger.

All right.

So something like that is sort of happening.

Now, neuroscientists, I know already you're really upset.

You're saying I'm simplifying too much.

I'm not talking about things like the ventral tegmental area or the nucleus acubinus or the incentive salience that dopamine types increases.

But I think we get too bogged down in that.

I don't want to Huberman this all.

Let's just say this is what's happening here.

Different parts of your brain.

The short-term motivation system recognize situations.

Their cue is like a vote.

The strongest vote based on the strongest suspected reward tends to win, and that's the action you do.

All right.

Brain lecture over.

Now let's talk about what happens then with our phones.

So, if you want to be precise, a big part of the problem we face when we look at our phones too much is is that they overwhelm this particular short-term motivation system.

There's three things at play here that lead phones to so effectively overwhelm this system.

First, many of the things we do on our phones generate very clean and effective reward experiences.

So when we're learning about the reward from different activities, The reward of many of the apps we look at our phone are designed to be very pure and to generate like a very strong association in our head and really make that circuit associated with the action looking at your phone generate a very strong reward.

And we know why this happens, right?

We talked about this a few episodes ago.

On apps like TikTok, for example, you have these machine learning algorithms.

And what do machine learning algorithms do?

They try to estimate, build an approximation of some sort of unknown process that generates rewards in response to different types of inputs.

And it might not know in advance how that process works, but it learns by observing how to approximate that so it can get the biggest reward.

So what's really happening here with one of these machine learning algorithms is that it's basically building an approximation of the reward, generating circuits in your head.

And then it's selecting things to show you that are going to generate the strongest, cleanest rewards from that system.

So we're getting these really pure reward signals when we're looking at our phones because if we're looking at algorithmic curated content, they are devised to give you much stronger, sort of like artificially stronger consistent rewards in a way that you might not actually encounter in the real world.

Now there's a couple different types of reward signals you get from algorithms.

Social media style apps on your phone.

One is the pleasant surprise signal.

So this is why like funny things or unexpected things happening in TikTok videos are popular.

Because, pleasant surprise these machine learning algorithms curating the content.

Learn is something that generates like a very strong reward signal for humans.

Sometimes it's negative.

There's a negative reward.

So what you're getting, what I mean by negative is you're escaping the negative state of boredom.

Of course, this is another really positive, consistent reward you get from a phone is because you're often able to use it in a situation where you're otherwise bored.

This is not the case with a lot of other rewards.

I like watching movies but by the time I'm sitting down in a movie theater and I'm there with my wife and we got some popcorn and I'm excited about the movie.

I'm not bored when that movie starts.

But our phone is something we can pull out at moments of boredom.

The alleviation of boredom is a very strong, positive signal.

You take a negative state and get rid of it, your mind feels very strongly about it.

So this is why interesting tidbits or things that give you emotional arousal, like really outraging stuff this frees you from the negative state of boredom in a really strong way.

And that's a very positive signal for our brain as well.

The other piece of this.

OK, so I'll leave that there for now.

That's the first thing I want to say.

OK, so we get very clean, consistent reward signals are almost artificially good.

Our brain is like, my God, we get messy rewards in the real world.

Sometimes things are good.

Sometimes they're bad.

Not looking at this little screen here.

Good, good, good, good. and we're adjusting that circuitry every time.

Oh, we should expect a reward almost always.

We're getting a very strong expected reward associated with looking at the phone.

All right.

The second reason why phones overwhelm the system in our brain is that, in addition to having a very clean and consistent positive reward, the expected reward is good.

They occasionally deliver big rewards, especially again when we're using things like social apps.

Really, really positive rewards.

The really big rewards they can't offer all the time, but they can offer them occasionally.

What do I mean by that?

Well, this would be like social approval indicators is one.

This was part of the power of like Facebook's early rise, after they switched to mobile and added the like button.

The idea that sometimes when I go on and check and I click that, that's the cue.

When I click that F app, I could see unexpectedly that a post of mine got a lot of likes.

That's a big reward because we care a lot about social approval.

TikTok has this as well with like views or favorites.

You're posting videos with your friends.

You're doing dances.

And you're like, you know, most of the time no one cares.

But every once in a while, 10,000 views.

That's a big reward.

In fact TikTok knows that and will just artificially sometimes pump up those numbers to give you that experience from every once in a while.

Or like if you're someone like me, forget even social media.

Like me during baseball trade season, the closest I get to what like a gambler addiction feels like is the MLB trade rumor site.

You know this one Jesse well, just from you.

Yeah right, I mean.

So they track trade rumors coming up to the trade deadline in MLB.

Most of the time you go to that website it's nothing's there for you, but occasionally it's.

We just traded for Max Scherzer and it's a huge reward.

If you're a baseball fan okay, here's a problem.

There's really big rewards are delivered intermittently.

That also really messes with this type of system.

Intermittent rewards.

We know this, of course.

It's why slot machines are so effective, and they're all over Las Vegas casinos.

Big rewards that might come but might not.

That plays into our expected reward system in a way where we're like well, we got to check because it could be this time, it could be next time, it could be next time.

The hunting for the big reward, the way that generates an expected reward calculation.

That really gets us wanting to check things a lot.

The third reason why phones overwhelm these brain systems is that the cue, unlike many other things we encounter in life, is ubiquitous.

There are certain things that I have very strong expected rewards with and I'm going to get a really strong incentive salience, to use a technical term with dopamine cascading down the action pathway.

There are certain things where that's really going to be the case.

If I'm super hungry And I come home and there's like a big pizza out there that, like my kids, just started eating.

It would be very hard for me not to grab, you know, a piece of that pizza, right?

But it's pretty rare that I'm hungry and they're like, someone's putting a pizza in front of me.

It would be a problem, right?

If there's someone like an Italian pizza chef who followed me.

And he kind of just waited until I was hungry and then was like, hey, here you go, pizza.

I imagine it was Mario.

I would eat too much pizza, right?

That would be a problem.

But how often does it come up?

It's okay.

The problem with phone is the queue is ubiquitous because it's in your pocket.

So that means that circuit that's looking at the situation and saying is there a pattern in this situation that matches my circuit.

That means I have to calculate, reward and maybe incentivize action.

It's always firing off because the phone is always with you.

And it has a nice good expected reward signal because you get this clean reward and intermittent big rewards.

So it's always voting.

Those brain clusters that are associated with picking up your phone.

This is like the neuronal equivalent of like Obama's campaign infrastructure.

It's really well organized.

They get the vote out.

And so you got a good, clean, solid vote from the pick up your phone circuit all the time.

Now, other things outweigh it all the time.

There's many things that will outweigh it throughout the day.

But if it's there voting all the time, it's going to win so often.

Basically, yeah, it's not winning every election.

It's like, you know, I have a bigger thing I want to do here.

I want to go talk to this person.

This is urgent or this or that.

But man, it's every moment it's voting.

And a lot of these elections if we're going to keep this metaphor going.

There's not much else, not many other good candidates running, if you know what I mean.

And so it's there and it's winning.

This is the way I think about the short-term motivation system.

Being overwhelmed is that we're not used to getting such a clean, consistent reward from an action, but machine learning algorithms on algorithmic curation ensure that's the case.

Intermittent big rewards is incredibly compelling.

It's so powerful that the few places we used to see this in our world before we had smartphones really was just casinos.

Now we have that effect and a watered-down effect.

And then we have the queue being ubiquitous.

This is why we look at our phone all the time.

It's not really a fair fight once we recognize how things have been rewired.

All right, so now the question is, once we understand this, what should we do about it?

In other words, if we know what's happening in our brain, which we do now, how does that help us better understand why certain types of responses about phone overuse work and why certain other things that people talk about a lot don't work?

So I think what I'm going to do here is I want to start with, Things that don't work.

All right?

I want to go through common advice that people give to stop looking at your phone so much.

And then, using this frame of understanding about what happens in your brain, we can go through each and understand why.

That rarely actually works.

All right, so let's start with the idea of adding friction.

So I have this on the screen here.

So if you're watching instead of just listen, you can see it's on the screen here.

Okay, so let's start with the idea of adding friction.

This is this notion of for example, I'm going to move my TikTok or Instagram apps to a folder within a folder on the third screen of my phone, so it's harder to get at.

This might mean using one of these tools where you have to look at a picture of a tree before you click on it, or maybe even one of these things where you have to have a physical fob that you have to hold to your phone to unlock it.

Or maybe you've taken the apps off for some of these social media, so to access them you have to go through your browser, and that's less convenient.

So we think like, yeah, adding friction, maybe then I'm less likely to do it.

This doesn't make much of a difference.

And why does it not make much of a difference?

Because, again, those brain bundles that are voting, they're making an expected value calculation.

And they have a really big value they think is going to happen.

If you add friction, they weigh that friction that's integrated into the expected value.

So it reduces the value some.

The value of picking up this phone is a little bit lower because there's some extra action I have to do.

But that friction, the cost of that friction is minor from the brain's perspective compared to that like massive neurochemical change to your subjective state that you're going to get by seeing the good content or potentially getting the big reward.

So the difference it makes is minor.

In order for friction to be powerful enough to actually outweigh that reward to the place where you don't even want to pick up your phone, it would have to be way more severe.

Way more severe friction than like I have to click through a few screens or I have to touch a fob to my phone before I can unlock it.

It would literally have to be something like if I look at Instagram, you know someone's going to kick me in the groin.

That would be a case where you're like, you know what?

I'm not going to look at Instagram.

But you really have to have something kind of that powerful.

Actually, there's a...

My friend Ramit Sethi, his brother, who I also know, Manish Sethi, had a viral video once years ago.

And it was a stunt, but he hired someone to sit next to him and slap him every time he loaded Facebook.

It became like this big thing.

I mean, he was kind of making a point about it.

But honestly, that is the level of net cost you would need.

Before you're going to outweigh the reward that your brain has learned from these phones to actually have a major change to your behavior.

All right, let's look back at this list of things that people suggest.

Another one is mindset change.

Change the way you think about these devices, right?

Like, let's think about social media and I'll tell you why it's bad from like, a societal point of view.

Let me tell you why it's bad because of the people who run it.

And these are like fair arguments, right?

Like is it really that important to you that you're donating a lot of your time to quote, like one of my recent newsletters toiling for free in an attention factory so that, like Mark Zuckerberg, can buy the second half of Kauai?

But those mindset shifts aren't likely on their own again to make a major change to your behavior, because we go within your school.

We look at your brain.

There's the bundle of neurons that are recognizing the situation, that here's the phone and I could pick it up, and they have a high expected value.

I'm going to get this reward if I do it.

Let's do it, right?

That mindset shift does not have a major disinhibiting effect on this much more simpler short-term motivation circuit, which says we have a good chance of getting a good expected reward in terms of how we feel, believing in the negative state of boredom or pleasant surprise, if we pick this thing up.

So again, this makes sense on paper, but not once we understand your brain.

All right, what about moderation?

Telling yourself, okay, what I just need to do is have better rules, right?

I'm only going to use Instagram for 30 minutes a day.

TikTok, I'll have a limit of like 30 minutes at TikTok total or whatever.

Again, those brain bundles don't know about your time limits.

They don't care about your time limits.

What they care about is your phone is here.

And if I pick it up and I touch on that icon, that's a clear cue.

It's like pulling the lever on the slot machine handle.

My expected reward in terms of the positive impact on my subjective affect is high.

So let's do that.

It's like going to someone who's addicted to a slot machine and be like, okay, here's the thing.

You should have a rule about how much you play it and say, I'm not going to play it more than that.

That's no match for what's happening in a short-term motivation system.

Same thing with eglification.

Yeah, you can make your phone black and white.

That reduces the expected value of looking at one of these services a teeny bit.

That's not nearly enough to make a difference.

Let me cross that one off as well.

Detoxing, by far the most common.

I got a break.

You know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to, you know, my internet Shabbat.

I don't.

I'm going to follow the Jewish tradition and I'm not going to on Saturdays.

I'm not going to use technology and I'm not going to use my phone.

And that has benefits for sure, right?

Like it feels good that day. you have a better day that day not being on your phone.

But one day without your phone is not nearly enough to change anything about those circuits.

Now maybe if you detoxed for eight months without your phone, the lack of use on those circuits, eventually the expected reward would come down and your phone would seem less appealing.

But taking a day off or going on a week-long meditation retreat once a year lots of benefits, but one benefit you're not going to get out of there.

Once we understand the neuroscience of phone use, you're not going to get a notable reduction in your urge to check your phone.

All right, the final thing that people think about is escape.

What if I just get rid of my phone altogether?

Well, that does work.

In the sense that if you get rid of your phone altogether and you replace it with something like a dumb phone, the cue is not there.

And you will.

People talk about this.

Because I meet these people all the time because of what I write and talk about.

People talk about this feeling of freedom when their smartphone goes away.

Well, what that really is neurologically is that circuit that is voting all the time phone phone, phone.

Placards up to put them in the sky.

Vote for phone, vote for phone.

They quiet.

And you're like, oh, everything else seems more interesting to me.

My brain seems clearer.

I'm not constantly fighting that.

So it can work.

But the problem is, as a long-term general solution, is it's not sustainable for a lot of people.

There's just too many things happening. that you need the smartphone to do that are logistical.

So escape gets you away from those circuits, but escape is hard to maintain.

So by itself, it doesn't end up being a general solution, right?

So we struggle.

But now we know why we struggle.

It's because we're doing the wrong thing for the brain.

So given that, let's do the flip side.

This is what becomes interesting.

If we know how the brain works...

And we know why those other things aren't helping us out because it's not going to solve the way our brain activates.

What will work?

So how can this knowledge of the brain help point us towards fixes that will help us use our phone less often?

That is what I want to get to next, the advice that actually will work.

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All right, Jesse, let's get back to our deep dive.

All right.

So before we took a quick break, we talked about the common advice for using your phone unless it doesn't work, and we used our new understanding of the short-term motivation system to explain why it doesn't work.

Now I want to do the opposite and I want to look at a few ideas that do work, And now we can understand why they work, based on our understanding of the brain.

The first idea I want to mention here that I think actually does work is eliminate the strongest reward signals.

One of the things you can do is prevent the brain circuit that recognizes the pattern of your phone being nearby from being exposed to such a constant stream of highly purified reward signals.

We want to reduce the expected reward that that brain circuit associates with looking at your phone.

The easiest way to do that is basically stop using on your phone algorithmically curated content.

The best rewards come from content that is selected using a machine learning algorithm that uses your engagement as input.

They're building an approximation of your reward estimator in your brain and they're going to give you a very clear signal.

So just stop using.

I know this sounds both simple and impossible, but it's what I'm telling you.

Stop using on your phone things like TikTok or Instagram or X or Or anything, that you have an algorithm trying to choose things that's going to free you from boredom real easily or give you pleasant surprise.

When you reduce that reward signal over time, the power of the vote of the pick up the phone circuit is reduced.

And it goes from being like a really well organized campaign to a sort of haphazard campaign.

And that's good.

And now the urge is lower.

You still need to use these apps for like work or this or that.

Great.

You do it on a computer or whatever.

And that's not like what's the difference.

It's all the difference.

Because now you're getting those reward signals over on your computer.

It's not being associated with the pick up your phone circuit.

And the phone is the thing you have with you all the time.

So that matters.

All right.

Speaking of having it with you all the time.

We understand the brain.

The second category of advice that we think will actually work is reduce the ubiquity of the cues.

So if you don't have your phone right with you all the time, then the amount of time during your day where the pick up the phone pattern fires is reduced, because the phone actually has to be accessible for that pattern to fire.

So, even if the expected reward is really high for looking at your phone, if the phone is not there, the pattern that's going to generate that vote is not going to fire.

Now the easiest way to do this.

I've been now saying this for a while now.

People don't like this advice, but I'm telling you you need to do this.

When you're at home, Your phone is plugged in in your kitchen.

Plug in your charger, whatever.

That is where your phone lives.

If you need to check on like a text message conversation, you go to the kitchen and you check on it.

If there's a call you're expecting, you put on the ringer like an old-fashioned phone.

And if it rings, you go in there and you check on it.

If you want to listen to a podcast while you do the dishes, you use earbuds.

You use wireless earphones so that the phone can stay where it is plugged in.

So importantly.

If you're reading, if you're at the dinner table, if you're watching TV, You're brushing your teeth like whatever it is.

The phone isn't actually there for you to grab.

So it makes this the easiest thing you can do to make the cue non-ubiquitous.

And if the cue is not there, the pattern won't fire and you don't have to fight that vote.

All right.

The third thing that actually works once we understand the brain is strengthening competing systems.

So the short-term motivation system is really good at like yeah, go get that water, go pick up this phone, because that's like most of what we do during the day.

But there are other brain systems that can overwhelm or overwrite the short-term reward system because, like of course, there are.

If there weren't, things would get pretty primal pretty quickly.

So one of the systems that can overwhelm the vote from the short-term system is our long-term motivation system.

The system that does a better job of simulating the long-term future of certain activities, right?

So we don't just have a direct connection.

The short-term system is like I can associate the immediate reward we'll get by doing this.

When I eat the cookie, it will feel like this.

When I pick up the phone, almost immediately we'll get something like this type of reward.

The long-term system is thinking about.

For example, when you're picking up a weight, it's looking down the line for you being in shape.

Or when you're working on a book chapter, it's looking down the line towards the book being done.

And it's doing more of a complex simulation.

So instead of it just being an association, this cue with this reward, it actually does a whole simulation.

There's a fascinating literature about how these simulations work.

I've talked about them before on previous episodes, but it uses stored memories about experiences from the past.

It has a logical simulator that then takes those memories.

They try to figure out possible futures, and based on those memories, what can it expect?

Anyway, the reward signals from that system can easily overwhelm those from the short-term system.

This is why we do boring hard stuff at our jobs, even though there's more fun things nearby we could be doing, because the long-term reward of keeping our job and having this thing that my boss is asking me for is swamping the short-term reward.

Like, well, don't we want to go to the snack machine right now?

Wouldn't that be fun?

So you can strengthen this long-term reward system by practicing and introducing discipline into your life.

And by discipline I mean getting used to the long-term pursuit of goals that require consistent action over time and then have really good, rewarding outcomes on the other end.

The more of these you have, the more power you're giving to your long-term reward system.

And the more comfortable it is saying, hey, short-term system, I don't care about your vote.

The reward that really feels good is when these big long-term projects succeed.

Let's go work on that type of thing.

And so the more your brain gets used to discipline, it gets used to working on long-term projects and reaping big rewards down the line, the easier time you'll have basically pushing aside the incentive salience that you're getting from the short-term system and turn your attention to efforts that maybe in the moment aren't as pleasurable.

But your brain's like I know where this story ends and that's the real stuff.

And the long-term reward system, of course, is like how the human species has really differentiated itself, as part of, at least, how we really differentiate ourselves from other animals.

Because we can overcome these sort of short-term impulses to work on, you know, building fire, inventing language or mathematics, or building like massive structures.

And there's so many things we do that differentiate us from other animals, because our long-term reward systems got hyperdrive.

So you practice strengthening your competing systems and practicing disciplined pursuit of long-term important goals really begins to shift the balance of power within your brain and the short-term reward system grows, gets much less, much less play, all right.

So there we go.

Those are, once we understand the brain, the things that we know don't work and the things that i think actually will work.

They're not as sexy, by the way right, they're annoying.

The things that do work.

It's like take the fun stuff off your phone, keep your phone plugged in when you're in the kitchen and be disciplined.

That's not fun.

I want to have like a fun detox every week and make my phone grayscale and rail against like Mark Zuckerberg being bad.

Like all that stuff is more fun.

This stuff is not fun.

But it works because it's actually compatible with our brain.

All right.

So, Jesse, let's do some takeaways.

We have some takeaway music.

All right, so here's how I feel about this.

There was a time when talking about spending too much time on your phone sort of sounded like a kids these days type of old man yelling from his porch type of advice.

But we're past that time.

No one is happy about how much of their life is punctuated by that little glowing piece of glass.

Nor are they happy about the impact this is having not just on their ability to live deeply, but on our society and our ability for, like our political system to function, the mental health of our kids, the freedom from random, nihilistic violence.

So eliminating that sense of needing to constantly look at your phone, that addictive sense to look at your phone, has never been something that people care more about.

And the message I'm hoping to deliver today is that not all advice about this goal is made equal.

It's not enough to just say, let me go try some stuff.

Different advice works better than others.

And if you study how the brain actually works and how it actually creates the sense of motivation and what circuits are firing and why, to get you to keep looking back at that device again and again, when you understand that it becomes much clearer that most things that you might try to fix that problem are ineffective.

But there are a few things that we can expect to work really well.

And again, as I just said, they're not sexy.

It's taking apps like TikTok off your phone.

Just get rid of that super clean reward signal associated with your phone.

It's about putting your phone in the kitchen when you're at home or going for a walk without it.

Get rid of the cue.

The pattern doesn't fire.

If it doesn't fire, it begins to weaken.

And finally, strengthening the other systems.

The systems that really make us human and that can overwhelm the short-term motivation system.

The systems like long-term motivation based on the discipline pursuit of stuff that you care about.

Focus on those, so that the balance of power shifts in your brain and the short-term motivation system doesn't have so much say.

None of that is easy.

None of it is fun.

But once we understand how strong those reward loops are in our brain, we see how far we really have to push ourselves if we want to get free.

The little stuff isn't going to matter.

It's the big uncool but effective stuff that we have to focus on and we have to push on that hard.

So we can tame our phones.

It just requires understanding what really we're trying to do when we set out to accomplish that goal.

There we go.

That's my, this is your phone on your brains on phone.

Is that the way we go?

This is your brains on phones.

That's my, that's my analysis, Jesse.

Um, have you seen those fob things?

No, I saw them.

I was doing a doc.

They're filming a documentary.

They're filming at my house and some of the crew was showing them to me.

They were using them.

You, you have to touch it to your phone to unlock it.

So the idea is you put that, you know, you're like, Oh, there's this like friction step.

It seems like kind of a weird thing, but the reason why that became a big product is that Apple, they make it hard.

They really don't want third-party apps to have control over other apps on their phone.

They changed this.

There used to be a lot of apps you could buy on your phone that restrict your phone use.

But those are hard to make now because they're new terms of service.

Your app can't affect someone else's app.

You want to control your phone time, you have to use screen time.

But, as we talked about on the show over the summer, screen time is great if you're trying to control your kid's phone.

But if you're in control of the screen time, you can just turn it off.

Yeah.

But one thing you can do is just locking and unlocking can be very strong.

But that's what the fob thing is.

It's just like an unlock mechanism.

Your phone is – anything goes when you turn it on.

So I thought those were cool.

But they're not going to be enough because that is not enough.

That friction is not enough to change the expected rewards.

There we go.

All right.

We've got a lot of good show coming up on this topic.

We have questions from listeners about their own struggles with both them and their kids trying to deal with their phones, including a mom of an 11-year-old who I think really is looking for permission from me to say get that 11-year-old your phone.

It's going to go the way she thinks, I think.

We also have, coming up a little bit later, my reading list from last month, where I talk about the five books I read in September.

I think that's really well-suited for today's episode.

Because what could be more contrary to looking at your phone all the time than reading?

I kind of like that.

I mean, I try to do this early each month, but I think going over the books I read is like a really good sort of in-cap to the discussion we're having today.

But before we get into all that, let's do a little housekeeping.

Jesse, do we have any housekeeping about the show we need to get to this week?

Yes, we do.

We need some more calls specifically about phone usage, social media, that sort of thing.

How do people call into the show and, and leave calls to be featured on the show?

Uh, they just go to the deep life.com slash listen.

And there's a link right there at the top.

Right.

So you can do this right from your, uh, phone or your computer from your web browser.

We need more calls.

Uh, uh, The calls we have are all pretty deep worky, pretty productivity.

So what we really need is calls about other types of struggles you have with technology in your life and questions about technology.

Questions about technology in your life, questions about creating a life that is more Internet proof.

We're really looking for that.

So you have a good chance of getting featured.

What else do we got?

If you're interested in the newsletter, which is revamped and awesome.

It comes out every Monday morning.

They can go to calnewport.com and sign up, and they can also go to thedeeplife.com and sign up.

Yeah, you got to sign up for that.

I mean, basically...

I guess the way I would say it recently Jesse, is really like the newsletter has been in conversation with the podcast.

So, like often – like the newsletter that came out today, the day this episode is coming out is taking one of the ideas from the podcast and actually running with it.

So there's a lot of that going on or I'll get a reaction to the podcast by newsletter.

So really like the newsletter plus the podcast together –

Really gets you into these ideas a lot better than one on their own.

All right.

Anything else?

Did you see that Paramount's buying the free press for $150 million?

I did see that.

Yeah.

I think that's a good sign, I guess, for those of us doing independent media.

Here's what I want you to put on your list.

Call NBC and tell them hey look, we're reasonable.

They can have deep questions for like a hundred.

Right.

Cause I, they don't need, cause I guess that's what they're doing now.

Does that mean I get a host of the today show?

Like how's this work?

If they buy us, we could do four hours in the morning.

I think it's politically oriented as well, based on, you know, the politics of the current.

The one thing there's.

It seems to be like a lot of people reacting, who are like online, who are upset or very jealous about the money.

I do want to just make a like, here's my business PSA.

Barry Weiss did not just get handed $150 million.

I think people read that and they're like, oh, someone just gave $150 million to Barry Weiss.

No, no, no.

There's an agreement to buy the free press which unfolds over many years, and much of that has to do with stocks and stock swaps.

So there's like a certain amount of stock the free press is going to get every year.

So the actual amount that in the end the purchase will depend on what the paramount stock does.

Barry Weiss doesn't own a hundred percent of the free press they've taken on.

I mean, they have many partners when they started, they've taken on a lot of venture capital.

So, you know, yeah, she made a lot of money.

I don't want to downplay it, but she didn't just get $150 million.

I think people don't always.

Speaking of the free press, you need to have Neil Ferguson on the show.

I was a smart guy.

Niall Niall Ferguson.

Did you read something of his recently?

Um, yeah, but, and then I signed up for the free press and I get alerts when he writes stuff.

He's a cool guy.

Now, Neil Ferguson, people say Neil, but it's N I a L L. Yeah.

Um, he was uh, his door is at Harvard before he went to the Hoover and he was a historical economist.

Or an economic historian, I guess.

Like.

The thing is like he was a historian but would use the tools of economics to do his history right.

So it would be like one of these things where like oh, we want to learn more about like the medieval Florence in, like the early Renaissance period.

And that type of historian would be like, hey, we're going to go read all the – like the ledgers.

And we're going to like reconstruct like how the money was moving through the economy.

And it was really cool.

I think that type of – he's a really smart guy.

He writes a lot of books.

Yeah.

But then he left.

He's conservative-ish.

I mean it's all relative.

But then he went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Yeah, I think he's a smart guy.

We should have him on.

And he has an accent, right?

Yeah.

And he's going to sound so much smarter.

Here's what we're going to do.

All right.

Here's how we're going to count.

We're going to have Neil Ferguson on.

I'm afraid his English accent is going to make him seem smarter than me.

You can speak in your French accent.

Well, no, here's a solution from last week's episodes.

Even better.

When I speak, we put the Jordan Peterson violin music behind me.

Just like really.

So then I'm going to sound more profound than I can counteract his his English accent.

And when he speaks, I'm thinking like someone playing the spoons or, like you know, you can play the jug, where you blow into the moonshine jug with the triple X's on it as part of like an old time band from the depression.

We're going to play that behind him to kind of reduce the impact of his English accent.

And then for me, it's going to be like really emotional violin music.

And I'm going to talk real slowly.

All right.

That's housekeeping for today.

Let's move on to some questions.

Who do we got first, Jesse?

First question's from Andy.

My 11-year-old son is the only one in his class without a smartphone.

He gets bullied and he feels left out of trends.

Smartphones aren't allowed at the school, but that doesn't change the fact that he's clearly missing out.

Well, I mean, first of all, I'll say I recognize the issues here.

And I recognize that it's really hard, and it's also not really fair...

For my generation of parents, and especially the people in my generation who are a little bit older, like whose kids are in high school or just going to college now, because we didn't sign up to have to be part of this experiment of let's take this incredibly powerful new technology.

Let's give it to our kids.

Like, let's see what happens.

Like, let's just make it socially ubiquitous.

And then leave it on individual parents to like okay, you got to go read like John Hite's 700-page annotated bibliography online about mental health impacts of smartphones and make a decision that's going to make you like a complete outlier in your community.

It is really – we really put a really big burden on parents.

So I have a lot of empathy.

This is a really hard time.

A couple of things I want to say here.

It's probably not true that your 11-year-old is the only kid in your class not without a smartphone, but it can really feel that way.

And at some schools, that is more true than others.

That's changing now, which I think is good, but that hasn't completely changed yet.

I would also say if he's being bullied, the phone is not going to help.

So one of the big concerns, and I did a talk recently at my kid's school where I went through and said why are the experts actually concerned about these things?

And I broke those concerns in the four categories, and I talked about the four categories.

And one of the categories was the sort of negative externalities of digital sociality which, by the way Jesse, is exactly the way to talk when you're trying to impress a bunch of seventh graders.

They really like that.

It was funny because we were doing it for the students and their parents.

But there's these negative externalities of digital sociality, and one of them is –

There's whole parts of our brain that give us interpersonal guardrails.

That prevents me from trying to club Jesse when I'm upset about an ad transition or something.

We have all these interpersonal guardrails that makes us more reasonable people.

We need that to survive as a community-oriented species.

A lot of them turn off when social interactions become purely linguistic.

So when I am just sending text to you on Snapchat or on WhatsApp?

Yes, if you ask my prefrontal cortex, is there a person like.

Am I talking to Jesse over WhatsApp?

It knows it, right?

It's not confused about it.

But many of these other deeper social circuits aren't seeing a person.

They're not hearing a person.

So they are turned off.

The guardrails get turned off, which means in purely linguistic interaction we're basically like worse people.

We're much more likely to be mean or to bully.

I mean, obviously we see this among adults on social media all the time, just like the stuff they say on X.

It's crazy, right.

Like how enraged or outraged or how mean or how terrible they get.

It's because the stuff that stops us from saying that in person is turned off when it's linguistic.

So anyways, bullying goes up when you move more conversation digital.

And then if you're in a compromised social situation in school and, by the way, tell your 11-year-old that it does get, you know it will get better.

Middle school is not great necessarily, but like keep doing what you're doing.

You know you have interest, develop skills, develop discipline, start doing stuff that's like really hard and following through.

It will get better.

But if you're having to struggle socially, then the other thing that happens when I have a smartphone again man, such a burden is your relief goes away.

So those interactions are happening all the time, not just at school, at home.

You're doing your homework when you're at dinner.

You're going upstairs to bed.

It's right there on your phone all the time.

So you get no cognitive relief from high-stakes social interaction, which is exhausting.

And if you're in a socially compromised situation, they're also really negative potentially.

And so that's like even worse.

So this is not – a solution.

If you're upset about your social situation in middle school, like in a classic social middle school, like I'm not fitting into this bullying situation.

Hey, here's a phone that people can be like bigger jerks and you have to be in touch with them all the time.

That's not necessarily going to make that better.

There's a couple of things that can help with this collective action problem.

I'm a fan of things like the wait for eighth pledge, where you get parents in your grade to sign up and you use the wait for eight website to Onto this pledge.

If I'm not going to give a phone to my kid until after eighth grade, which is like roughly when like John Haidt recommends when the Surgeon General recommends the last Surgeon General.

It's sort of like an emerging consensus.

Wait till high school to have your first smartphone.

And it gives you statistics, and that's where it's powerful.

And then you can say, you know what?

You're not the only kid not to have a phone.

33 of your grade has signed on to a pledge saying that their kids aren't going to get a phone until high school anyways.

So that social evidence of you're not the only one is very effective, because you do not need 99 of your class to not have a phone before you feel comfortable with that.

You need roughly like 15% to 20% before that becomes a socially acceptable option.

So I'm a big fan of those.

You can help organize one of those pledges.

The way this works is it's really parents and grades at individual schools say I want to pledge for our grade.

And they get together with a couple of parents and you put together an email and you tell the school and the school gives you the email addresses and you send it out.

That's all it is.

And grade by grade, you begin to create these pledges, which I think are very powerful.

We should start those as early as third or fourth grade.

So you have different options there.

OK, and then you have lots of logistical things.

Like you know, if there's group chats you want to be a part of, you can set up group chat on a family iPad.

You have certain time set aside where you can.

You can look at the iPad and do the group text and stuff like that.

But I really want to add friction to the idea of like, wouldn't it all just be easier if I just gave him the phone.

I wouldn't have to be dealing with this.

It's really so bad.

And I really want to emphasize it is.

That is not going to be the solution to these things, the social things.

You worry about his social things?

There's so much bad that comes with it.

What I want to do here – I don't know if we have this, Jesse.

Do we have that clip?

Yeah.

I want to play – here's an ad that's been going around the internet.

It's from Smartphone Free Childhood.

It's a nonprofit organization.

They did an ad.

We only have the audio here, but you can kind of imagine the visuals here, which I think does a good job of –.

Making you confront the reality of what happens if you give you know your 11 year old a smartphone.

So we're going to hear the audio that so just to set the visual of this ad there's like 11 year old kid.

I think it's like a 10 or 11 year old looking kid, like a young looking kid that age.

And a dad is in bed and his dad is like at the doorway, like saying goodnight to him.

All right, let's hear this audio, Jesse.

Hey kiddo, it's about time for bed.

Okay.

Well remember, there's a box in the corner over there with all the pornographic material that's ever been made in the world.

Even the really weird stuff that could scar you for life.

I'm trusting you not to look in there, okay?

Okay.

Feelings are for losers.

Oh, and this guy's going to be in your corner all night just randomly spewing out hateful things.

Just ignore him, okay?

While I'm thinking of it, there's an order form on your desk where you can purchase illegal drugs.

The mean girls from your school are going to be standing there talking about you all night.

And this Russian hacker is going to keep asking for your password.

I'm not a hacker.

Amazon customer service.

Just need you to ignore him, okay?

Love you, buddy.

We ask too much of our kids when we give them a smartphone.

Let's change the norm.

Together.

Maybe we go around Rome and share social security numbers.

Join the movement at smartphonefreechildhoodus.com.

I'll get it anyway.

We try to hide that reality, but it's the truth.

Would you ever, with your 11-year-old, be like, look, I'm going to put... pornography and bullies and sort of like weird interest group like these these influencers that have these like really weird agendas there's gonna be a bunch of hackers let's put in there like catfishers too that are gonna try to pretend that they're like young women on text messages then try to like exploit you out of money which has been causing like a very large like trend and self-harm like all this stuff oh and like a lot of addictions like let me just put in like constant video games and TVs are always on and like addictive stuff in here and And just like I trust you and just like handle it, you know, it's an incredible thing to ask of a kid.

And that's what happens to give the smartphone.

So it's hard, but stand strong is what I would say.

I think norms are changing and your kid will thank you not to have to deal with all that at their current age.

All right.

Who do we got next?

Next up is Natasha.

I want to quit social media.

However, I sometimes get an irrational urge to show off.

I think everybody feels this to some extent.

They want to brag about their looks, their lifestyle, body, wealth, job, intelligence, whatever.

I was often the weird loner at school.

And as an adult, I still have that chip on my shoulder.

How should I overcome this?

Right.

Well, the main thing I want to say is the urge is not irrational.

So like the deep down, the urge you're feeling is like a very human urge.

The thing that is abnormal here is the technology medium in which that urge is being expressed.

That is what sort of perverts things and creates the negative outcomes.

So what is the natural, so to speak, outlet for this urge to want to show off?

Well, the real natural outlet for that is that I want to have respect and be in a position of leadership in my communities.

That is where that's going.

I want in the communities.

I'm involved in real world communities where I know what the people look like and I see them in person.

In those communities.

I want to, over time, through sacrifice, service and demonstration of competency, build up like increasing levels of respect and leadership that people look to me.

They're impressed by me and they want me to like be in charge of thing or be involved or someone they can count on.

That is actually what we crave.

The social media just takes that craving and perverts it.

This is like what happens with a lot of the attention economy-based engagement technology is they take completely normal human impulses or urges that actually can lead to very positive outcomes.

That's why we evolved to have them, and they hijack them.

They hijack them, right?

It's just like boredom is like a very strong urge that is meant to try to push humans to not just lay in the sun like cats can do and are perfectly happy to do.

But to get up and actually go, try to see intentions made manifest concretely in the world in positive ways.

That leads to invention.

That leads to innovation.

That leads to protection.

I'm going to go build fences around our paleolithic camp.

I'm going to try to build a better flint axe that's going to help us better do whatever.

It's a very human thing.

But social media hijacks that.

They're like, oh, boredom's bad.

It feels good when it goes away.

Scroll endlessly on TikTok.

It's hijacking it, right?

Just like procreation is good, pornography hijacks that.

Like, oh, that's there.

We can hijack that over here.

Like junk food hijacks our hunger urge.

So that's what's being hijacked here by the social validation that's built into as an engagement mechanism in social media.

So take that urge.

Don't push it away, but find a natural, healthy outlet for it, which is becoming a leader and someone who is respected within actual, real world communities.

And I'll tell you what when you match these urges, people feel this all the time to what they're really meant to drive you towards.

It's a completely different feeling.

It is a completely different feeling knowing like, Hey, I was here for my community.

I stood up and people look up to me.

That gives you a sense of satisfaction that lasts so much more than Then.

I did like an Instagram filter on my face when I was taking a picture at the beach and it got 50 of those hearts.

I don't know what that means.

And someone in broken English was like, you hot.

That's like a short term.

It's a little simulacrum of what that urge is actually driving you towards.

So nothing you're doing is irrational, but the technology is screwing with a very healthy natural urge.

Go be a leader.

Go earn respect among real people.

It's the real deal.

It's 10x better than what you get on those screens.

All right, who do we got next?

Next up is Carl.

You talk a lot about phones and social media.

I don't actually spend that much time on my phone.

My issue is video games.

How do I stop playing these so much?

Well, if we go through our model of how the brain works, there's a lot of these same brain mechanisms at play.

Games are designed to give you.

It's going to be a pretty consistent reward, because it's such an artificial environment.

And it's calibrated to be difficult but not too difficult.

So the reward you get is one of both novelty of your scene stuff.

You get a little bit of adrenaline if it's like an action game.

And most importantly, you get sort of progress.

And so it fits roughly in that model.

Like, oh, I see my video game is here.

I'm at home.

I could go to the gym.

I could read a book or I could pick up the controller.

The cue is right there.

The controller is right there.

And because it's this artificial environment, it can give me like a really clean reward.

So it does build up like a strong association.

There's a certain type of game that really messes with the system even more than our phones do, and that is massive online games.

If you talk to people within technology, overuse type related fields and research, the real things they fear are massively online games because they add in some extra elements to make their attraction even more powerful.

They have an endless increase in score.

If you're playing World of Warcraft or something like this, you're going to get this steady leveling.

They do a little bit of effort in level.

That's simulating like in real world, building up competency and getting more respect for it, which is a very powerful driver.

They simulate it in those games.

Now, of course, you get this when you're just playing like Mario a little bit, because you're making progress.

But in the online multiplayer games, your mind is like, no, no, no.

Other people know what level I'm at and they see it.

So that's much more powerful.

It's simulating like I am in a real community of people and I am earning their respect.

I just talked about that in my answer to Natasha that that's a strong urge.

This thing grabs it way stronger than like getting hearts on Instagram and like really twist it.

So that is super compelling.

Also the sense of – it hijacks this sense of like I have – this is my tribe, because I hear them in my headset.

We're on like a Discord server while we play or whatever, and I'm with them all the time and we're doing stuff that kind of pushes the buttons of like adventures and trials.

It's not the real thing, so it's not nearly as strong as like I'm actually in battle with people.

But it simulates that sort of Band of Brothers type connection.

This is super, super addictive on top of all the other, just standard like we have nice positive reward signals to get associated with it.

That's where we have the most problems.

It's where, like if you look to South Korea, where they're sort of – they 5X all the problems we have with technology here, because it's like a much more technology-focused culture.

They have detox centers there for these video games.

Not for phones, but for massively online video games.

They have cases over there of people dying because they played the game so long that it was like dehydration and they had heart issues.

So you got to be worried.

Probably the most addictive consumer facing technology we have are some of these massively online player games.

I'd be really worried about it.

Like my advice about those games is like a game where a lot of people are playing at the same time.

Just don't play them.

Just don't use it.

Just I would just stay away from it.

Right.

It's like don't get, you know, you might be like a marijuana user.

Don't get near the stuff that might have fentanyl in it.

Like why even like play with that?

Okay.

So I am very wary.

I am very wary of those games.

What would I would recommend if you're playing video games?

AAA games are usually the best that are non-multiplayer.

A AAA game, it costs 60 bucks.

It has about 50 hours of gameplay programmed into it.

It's supposed to be stretched out.

It's challenging.

I'm going to want to take breaks because it's hard.

I'm not leveling up in a way that, like, someone's watching me.

And, like, yeah, that's, like, your equivalent of, like, me watching a lot of movies.

I'm not so worried about that.

But I worry about the massively online player games.

So to give you actual advice, Carl, don't play those.

Just stop playing those.

You know, just grown-ups shouldn't play those games.

Stop playing those games.

If you like other video games like work of art that are single player and triple a, then like yeah, you could treat it like TV.

You know?

Like yeah.

Instead of watching a movie on on, when I get home on Friday night, I'm going to play the video game for two or three hours.

I guess that's okay.

I'm not as worried about that.

All right.

Who do we got next?

Next up is Carissa.

I spend most of my time on my phone text messaging.

I don't really think I'm addicted, but feel there's a ton of stuff to figure out and people's questions to answer.

What do I do about this?

Yeah, that's a complicated question.

We did an episode about this earlier in the summer about text messaging actually being a major driver of phone use, especially when you get a little bit older and you have more responsibilities and maybe you're doing logistics for kids or you just have like a complicated social life or work slash social life you're trying to navigate.

And this really complicates the picture, because when we're talking about something like TikTok, that's purely optional.

Like.

It gives you a nice reward signal, but you do not need that particular reward signal to function in any way.

And no one notices or cares if you stop using TikTok.

People do notice if you stop becoming available on the messaging services.

So the hard thing with these is trying to differentiate between logistical necessity and social-driven addiction cues.

And so here's the issue.

You might be using this a lot, mainly because I'm just involved in six threads that are all relevant, because they're all logistics and timing and I have to figure it out.

But there's also a really strong cue here that a short-term reward center is going to really care about, which is there might be people waiting for me to respond.

And the negative affect they have towards me will increase the longer I'm not responding.

That catches our attention.

People are getting madder every minute.

I don't look at my phone potentially makes you really want to look at your phone.

And for obvious reasons, right?

So these two things together can make this really powerful.

The best solutions here, as we talked about in the episode of the summer are, is not just to abstain I just don't use my phone anymore but to try to reroute the actual, necessary communication more out of these text messages and or to reprogram over time the expectations of people who communicate to you through these apps.

So that your mind is not so worried that people are upset.

Like, you know, we have different ways of organizing different logistics, ways we check in.

I'll call someone once a day or we figure out a plan in advance.

So there's like less stuff that's probably coming in urgent.

And also people have learned in my circles my phone's in my kitchen and so I come and I check it, maybe once an hour, but there might be a two-hour break and they can call if there's something really time-urgent.

That tells your brain, like, they're not just sitting there upset and stewing.

They know and understand the way you use your phone.

You basically have to change your relationship to communication.

So that frequent, time-sensitive communication coming through text messages is not that common anymore.

That people understand you're not always checking it.

And because of that you have the backup phone calls and other types of logistical types of things you do.

That's all a pain.

What I'm saying is do that pain.

It's worth the pain.

Because the cost, on the other hand, is to almost addictively have to check that phone all the time.

And that has so many negative impacts. it's worth the pain of like, I have a kind of janky way.

I deal with like logistics and communication.

It's worth, it's worth the effort.

All right, let's see.

Do we have one more question?

Yep.

Next up is Robert.

I have newspaper apps on my phone, like the Washington post and New York times and New York posts.

I also have these on my iPad where I normally read my news.

Is it fine that I occasionally read these apps on my phone?

I don't go on social media sites when doing so.

Um, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Uh, What I would recommend, if you're going to look at like the New York Times app, is treat it like a newspaper and just say like yeah, this is when I sit down, like with my morning coffee or something.

And I go through because it's not super dynamic.

They kind of set it for each day and then have some minor changes throughout the day based on what's happening.

Let me go through and like see which articles I read and maybe one of the opinion pieces I read.

And then you're kind of like done with the New York Times for the day, just like you would have done in a day where you had the newspaper and you would read it over breakfast, and that's it, and now you're done reading the newspaper.

If you treat it that way, it doesn't really matter what medium you're reading it on.

An interesting thing about the New York Times in particular is in their app design And in the way that they're now thinking about news stories.

They're highly influenced by the success of other news bearing social media, which they see as their competitors.

And it's reflected in the way they actually cover news now.

So you'll notice two things they do to try to prevent you from bypassing them and going straight to something like Twitter when there's breaking news.

The first thing they do is the live updates.

That is a direct response to social media.

So they want to give you a sense, if there's some sort of breaking thing happening, that if you're on the app there will be updates.

It'll keep updating and you can click the thing, show me the new updates or whatever, because they know people have now learned through social media.

It's not enough of like something happened.

I'm going to wait till we know more about it.

Then I'll read an article that summarizes what we know.

And then maybe later that day or the next day, I'll get like this.

Okay.

A day later.

Now, what do we know?

I need to be like collecting information, right?

That's what social media taught us.

I have to be like Woodward and Bernstein and all the president's men trying to put together all the pieces.

You want to have just information coming at you.

So they try to simulate this by like, oh, we'll do these breaking reports.

The other thing they do, which is very conscious reaction to social media, is they'll do five articles on an issue.

Instead of just like, okay, here's what happened.

Here's what's going on.

And here's our article where we explain what's going on.

We'll do five articles on it.

Here's what's happening.

Here's another take on it.

Here's a news analysis on it.

Here's looking at the other side of it.

Because they want you to feel like we're flooding the box.

I have lots of things I can read about this thing I care about.

Again, 15 years ago, this would be weird.

Just have a good article on it that you put in what you know.

But social media trained people, again, they want to be reading lots of stuff.

I want to read this and that and this, and I kind of want to immerse myself in what's happening.

So they do that now.

So they'll generate five articles on something right away as opposed to one.

So it's interesting.

So they've had to respond.

They've had to respond to social media to try to be attractive.

But it's fine.

You can read it on your phone.

Just do it once a day.

I mean, again, they don't update those apps that much because it's a newspaper model.

So there's not that much for you to see there, even if you check it all the time.

All right.

We still have a lot of more cool stuff on this topic to come, including a case study from one of my listeners where they talk about what happened when they as a parent.

I'm going to have to gasp here.

Changed their mind and took a piece of technology they had given their kid back again.

Turns out you can do that.

So we'll see what actually happened there.

Hint, it involves a double murder.

Not really.

That would be funny if that's how it ended up.

Like, and she killed me and my wife.

No.

All right.

And we also have a phone call about Instagram.

What's our phone call about?

Yeah, we got a phone call from a listener about Instagram.

And of course...

I get to reveal the five books I read in September.

So we've got a lot of cool content coming forward on this topic.

But first, stay tuned because we just have to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

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All right, Jesse, let's get back into it.

So we'll do a case study here.

This is where listeners write in to talk about how the ideas we talk about on the show have actually impacted their lives.

We've got a good one today, but we can't do a case study until we get our mind in the right context.

And the best way to do that, Jesse, is playing our case study theme music.

All right, our case study today comes from John.

John says, Then her grades began suffering.

So, after a few attempts to work around the tech, we took the watch away permanently, locked up the TV remotes until 5 pm during the week and allowed unlimited books.

Last month she tested into eighth grade math and achieved the highest score in her grade on an end of year literature exam.

Her social life certainly hasn't suffered either.

She now has a flip phone for calls and emergencies, but the novelty wore off quickly and it lacks the intense stimulus of the watch.

We otherwise do our best to favor in-person interaction through hangout sports and scouting.

So surprise, surprise, Jesse.

You give these technologies that completely overwhelm the short-term motivation centers in our brain and you give it to a fourth grader and their brain goes haywire.

And I feel like we pretend, like this is not true, but it's like that commercial that we just played for.

You're giving all these capabilities to someone who's nine years.

And you're like, OK, we just like trust you to use this well.

So well done, John, realizing that like, yeah, you can change your mind.

I get this all the time at talks where people are like, man, I wish I hadn't.

I wish I hadn't given like this phone to like my kid.

Like, what can I do?

You know, and it's like, well, you are the parent.

Like you can change your mind.

And if you're not willing to fully change your mind, the thing I've been recommending that people do say okay yeah, you have a phone.

It's not yours.

It's ours.

We pay for it.

It's not your property.

You have no right to it.

I always joke in my talks that these kids who talk monosyllabically when it comes to like you try to take their phone away become like Burkean private property scholars.

Like this is –

Liberty is built on the private possession of property, and you may not trot on my freedom.

It's your phone.

And so you just say like, okay, at home, my phone lives in the kitchen.

So when you're home, we plug it in there.

And you can go there if you need to text your friends or you need to check in on things, but you don't have it at the dinner table and you don't have it at the couch and you certainly don't have it upstairs in your room with the sheets over your head.

The phone lives here.

None of this.

I really don't like when I hear the parents like I wish please please, stop using your phone.

We're trying to eat dinner.

Oh, please stop using your phone.

What can you do kids these days?

I don't know.

It's your phone.

You're paying for it.

It lives in the kitchen, so you can go back.

All right.

What I do with my kids, so people do ask what we do.

None of my kids have phones.

We own a couple family flip phones, not a kid's phones, family phones.

It's like the phone we leave.

If one of our kids is at home and we're out going for a walk, like that's our equivalent of the old fashioned phone.

If you need to, like there's an emergency or whatever.

Um, and if you're going somewhere, like taking the public bus to baseball practice um, where it would be good to have a backup, or you could tell us something went wrong.

You can basically like check out one of the family flip phones, which are terrible to use.

And it's like really bad technology.

You can check one out to bring with you to have in case there's a problem.

When you get back, we take it back.

And just like John was talking about, there's something interesting on these phones.

They don't actually want to use them.

That's what we do.

When I was worried about location tracking for my second grader, what I, what I innovated instead I think this is a really good idea is that I actually integrated into his backpack a a 150 decibel fire siren.

And what I have it do is just at random intervals, it just wails for 30 seconds at a time.

So I can kind of just see where he is around town.

It's like, oh, I hear the fire siren over by the library.

So that works.

You got to innovate.

That's the idea.

All right.

So good way to go, John.

And don't give her a smartphone until high school and have it super locked down.

And don't give her a less locked down smartphone with social media until she's 16.

That's my advice.

All right.

Do we have a call this week?

We do.

All right.

Let's hear this.

Hi, Cal.

Thank you so much for your content and writing.

It's been a great help for me and countless others.

A question today is around Instagram.

As an aspiring photographer, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on if I need a growing presence on Instagram to make a success in the photography, or do you think I can do it without it?

It feels like in today's world, it'd be difficult to be successful in fields like this without a social media presence.

I appreciate you, mate.

Thank you.

All right.

It's a good question.

I don't know that it's vital for you to be successful, but let's say you're worried about it and we want to alleviate this worry.

Understanding what we now know about how the brain works and creating that urge to look at your phone that we talked about in the beginning of the show.

This gives us some options here that can give us a little bit more confidence.

And the clear option that comes to mind for your situation is if you need an Instagram presence for your photography, it should have nothing to do with your phone.

Do it from your laptop.

Now, this is going to be easier for you, by the way, because if you're a professional photographer, your photos are not being taken on your phone.

So you're going to have to be like uploading them onto your computer anyways, before you post them.

One of the reasons why Instagram is so successful is is you had to, it was mobile native.

Because for most people, the photos they were posting were taken on their phone.

And so it was mobile native.

And the reason why it took off ahead of Facebook at the time when it really began to take off in the second, the 2010s, is because Facebook was just moving on the mobile but people didn't yet have that ingrained habit of like oh, I want to go to Facebook on my phone.

They were used to this like something they did at work when they were bored.

It was like a website they went to.

But Instagram was mobile native because the whole idea was I took a picture on my phone and now I can go over into Instagram and post it.

And so it got this really big user growth.

But it wasn't just the user growth.

It was the engagement that really made Facebook perk up.

Oh, wow.

Instagram users use it a lot because the camera was on your phone.

And so it was the first real social app where people associated it with like oh, I do this on my phone.

And then they built up that...

The reward signal got really strong and they built up that pattern recognizer and their short-term motivation system and they started picking up their phone all the time.

So Instagram more than Facebook actually got people looking at their phone more than they planned.

Okay, so do your photography Instagram on your computer.

Don't have it on your phone.

Don't log into Instagram on Safari on your phone.

Have a bad password and never type it in on your phone, so it's not something you can do impulsively.

By bad, I mean good, like in the sense of it would be complicated to remember.

It kind of confusing here.

Bad, like cool.

You know what I'm talking about?

Right.

And so now, and then this could be like, you know, have a plan.

Think about your Instagram for photography is like one of the boring things that you have to do.

It's like sending out your stupid invoices and like the invoice reminders.

Like I got to go into like quick books.

And like click these buttons and I hate it.

And no one ever really knows what's happening in QuickBooks.

And you just press these buttons.

You're like, I think this kind of worked right.

Like it treat it like that.

I got to log it on my computer.

I got to import the photos and I'm going to change the format and make it more of this.

I go on my Instagram account.

I load it in and I have this copy and I post that.

And then I log out again and you do it three times a week.

And that's how your stuff gets up there.

Your brain never builds up the queue of your phone being involved.

You're not really without your phone.

You're not going to consume a lot of Instagram.

So you're not going to have that strong reward signal associated with it.

And so you're not going to get that like strong vote being fired up in your brain all the time.

And it's not going to lead the technology over you.

It's unless like, you work at your computer all the time and maybe you could learn that queue if I want to go over the Instagram website.

So do it that way.

But the other thing I would recommend, this is an idea from my book, Deep Work.

At some point, either before you do this or after you've done it for a while, take a 30-day break where you don't do anything on social media and see, does anyone matter?

Does anyone notice and does it make any difference?

Because a lot of times you might realize like okay, my 75 subscribers on Instagram and that one photo that went viral is like not making a big difference.

That's not where the action is.

Where I really need to be is like on Thumbtack as a preferred contractor on LinkedIn, or it has nothing to do with the internet.

It has to do with like shows at whatever.

So, you know, test it out.

Don't just assume it's vital, but do it on your computer and it won't be that addictive.

All right.

Final part of our show.

We get a sound effect for this one.

Yeah.

Well, we have a transition.

Oh, do we have a, yeah, let's do transitions.

Okay.

Part three.

Let's hear a sound here.

Final part of the show.

It's the early in the new month.

So I'm going to talk about the books I read in the last month.

So I, my goal is always to read five books a month.

Reading reading, reading is the best way to internet proof your brain, the best way to become smarter, the best way to be able to think better the best way to – everything good in a cognitive society comes from reading.

It's like saying you should be like walking in your physical health.

All right.

So I try to read five books a month.

I want to talk about the five books I read in September 2025.

A quick shout out.

I like to shout out the friends of the show that have new books out.

A friend of the show, Robert Glazer, I've been on his podcast several times, the Elevate podcast.

Cool new book out this week.

It's called The Compass Within, a little stories about the value that guide us.

It's about how do we find authenticity and fulfillment in every areas of our lives.

It's built around a parable.

Check that out, The Compass Within.

All right, so what are the books I actually read?

Three novels.

Let me look here.

Three novels this month.

Unusual for me.

First novel was a novel from my childhood. that I saw in a little free library around Tacoma park.

And I grabbed it and read it.

The ice limit by Lincoln child and Douglas Preston classic early 2000 techno thriller.

Uh, the premise is basically there's like a giant meteorite down on an island off the Southern tip of South America.

And this billionaire has hired Eli again.

Eli, Jen and uh, effective engineering solutions, this sort of uh uh, mysterious engineering company that it's under the radar but does like the impossible things they can do right um, and their whole plan is how are we going to extract this meteorite and get it back to this guy's museum in upstate new york?

It's good, and it would be the heaviest object ever moved by man, because it's like super dense and then like it's weird things.

They're great techno thrill.

There's weird things happening with the meteorite, but also the Chilean Navy, this one sort of commander in the Chilean Navy who has this really weird, interesting backstory.

He's really bitter.

He's like, I'm suspicious of this.

So he's around bothering them, and eventually he has reasons to want to kill them, and so there's...

Like a good techno thriller, you have all these things coming together for like the final sequence.

I love classic techno thrillers.

There's not as much of a market for it anymore.

Like a lot of the genre fiction market right now is outside of fantasy, like the Brandon Sanderson types.

It's like really, it's not techno thrillers.

It's like people falling in love with dragons and romances with fairies and dark academia, which I read one of those a couple summers ago.

Anyways, fiction's a big market, but the techno thrillers, they were the thing in the 80s and 90s.

They're not anymore.

Which I think is too sad, until I write my techno thriller, which is going to be about Jesse skeleton going back in time.

Maybe the fight Vikings.

I don't know.

I got to figure that out.

All right.

Second book.

I read a Byung-Chul Han book, the burnout society.

So over the summer, early in the summer, I did a podcast about his book about the swarm, the something his book about.

I forgot the exact name the connected swarm.

I think anyways, he's a, he's a, he's in Germany.

He's a philosopher in Germany.

I believe he's South Korean, a South Korean philosopher.

He's a German institution.

And he writes these series of books that are like a little bit more accessible than a lot of continental philosophy.

And they're sort of affirmative and they're very popular among Gen Z or whatever.

And so I had.

I had done a book about his other, a book whose topics seem most relevant, but this is the book that everyone talks about from him the burnout society.

So it was good.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

I mean, he's, It's interesting.

He talks nomically.

He kind of makes these pronouncements.

It turns out there's a lot of other writers, especially from more of the 60s and 70s critical theory era, that write the same way.

So it's not as novel as I think a lot of his Gen Z readers think, the format.

But it's interesting stuff.

I think it's a little Marxist-influenced.

I mean, he plays with a lot of different philosophers.

So it's cool.

I thought it was interesting writing.

I took a lot of notes.

Maybe I should do a podcast about it at some point.

But he's hard to read, but easy to read, right?

He's an easy-to-read, hard writer, if that makes sense.

He's a real philosopher, but he makes it just accessible enough that you can sort of get wisdom out of it.

All right.

Second novel I read, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Now, this was interesting.

I didn't get this book at first, and then I did.

So the premise for this book, it takes place in the future.

It's in a future time where basically death has been solved.

And money – like you don't really – you don't have to work and you – they can replace your body.

Like if you get killed, they can just like – you download your brain and they can just like recharge your brain and either put it into your body again after fixing you or do a rapid clone of your body.

It's like people aren't like worried about death.

And there's this weird sort of culture going on where it's like people are just doing projects.

And you can kind of like take over a project just through – everyone has like a popularity ranking.

And if people like you, your reputation is good, you can kind of take things over.

And the main character lives in Disney World in Florida.

But it's not run by Disney anymore.

It's like these different coalitions kind of take over parts of the park.

And they can kind of just run them unless they're – because they try to like push them out and take over the part of the park would make your reputation really fall.

But unless their reputation falls enough and you can come in and do it Anyways, at first, when you're reading this book, you're like this novel's not doing it for me.

There's no... none of the normal stakes you need for drama.

Like nothing really matters.

Like this seems so fake.

It's like weird.

This world of like they're.

They're trying to redo the haunted mansion so that, like this other group, doesn't take it over with their technology.

And everyone kind of cares about it.

But it's also stupid and it's all kind of like weird and superficial and there's no stakes.

The main character gets shot early on and they just reload them.

And there's, you know, like maybe the only stakes is like his neuro interface isn't really working.

Um, Like I don't care about what they care about.

I don't like empathize with this.

And it's like it doesn't make sense.

It's like plastic.

This is like doesn't seem like a real world.

And then you get it.

Yeah, he's personifying online culture like and doing a brilliant job of it.

This it's it's it's urgent and at the same time meaningless.

You have these things you really care about and you're racing to get done, but it doesn't matter and no one cares.

And it's like a reputation and popularity and this is having its moment and now this or whatever.

And Doctor Who, what he's really doing –

He's making you – so it's more of like a postmodernist sense.

He's making you – he's personifying the sort of empty, plasticness and emptiness of online culture into this sort of view of the future.

Then once you get that, you're like oh, it makes it a hard read because it doesn't have all of the normal elements you might want out of drama, like empathy with characters, stakes that you care about, surprise and caring about the resolution.

You don't really care.

But in doing that, you're like, oh, I see what you're saying.

This is actually really smart.

So it's a really good book.

I'm actually glad I read it, but it took me halfway through to really get what was going on there.

Then I went to a nonfiction book, Sarah Hurwitz's new book, As a Jew.

Sarah Hurwitz wrote – she's a speechwriter.

She was a Clinton speechwriter and a Michelle Obama speechwriter.

So she's a D.C. person.

She lives around here somewhere.

And in her 30s, she wrote a book called Here All Along, which was about like rediscovering.

She's Jewish but like non-practicing, and then rediscovered Judaism in her 30s and how it like, really helped her in a lot of ways.

And she like kind of wrote a book about it.

And then this book is actually pretty interesting.

This book is about her – she's making the argument.

She's confronting her tendency when she was younger.

To say things like you know, like I'm, I'm a, I'm a cultural Jew, or I'm a social justice Jew, or this or that.

And, you know, she didn't really know much about it.

And she's basically making the argument in this book that this is just.

She now sees, this is just part of a, you know, the last 100 years of this, like 150 years of an ultimately fruitless effort of Jewish individuals to try to assimilate, to try to avoid the the the the, the baggage and the harm and the what, what they've had to put up with for the last 2000 years.

And if they're like, if we just assimilate enough, then like we won't have to.

You know, people will like us, or whatever.

And she's basically coming to grips with like, it never works.

This is, this happened in the early 20th century.

This happened in the 19th century.

This happened in the mid century and it never works.

And she's kind of coming to grips with like I have to come to grips with, like being Jewish and what that means.

I can't – like she said, I didn't talk about Israel in my first book.

And she's like, I can't not talk about it.

I'm Jewish.

I have to confront that in this role in my life.

I didn't talk about anti-Semitism in my first book.

But it's like the defining force for the way I was acting.

So I don't know.

I like this better than her first book in the sense that – it's more self-reflective.

You want like to hear.

I mean so the places in the context of the show.

It's very deep life relevant.

So if you want a good example of like, a particular case study of someone trying to understand their life and what matters and how to transform it into something deeper when it happens, something more shallow, this is like a great.

This and her last book like, are a great contribution to that category.

But I like the second book better because I think it's more like psychologically self-reflective and searing like it's more interesting in that sense it's not.

It's like really people grappling with something they're really dealing with i think is often more uh in a way that is like real and messy is more meaningful than maybe like a more uh pat.

Like you know, i was struggling, then i found this, then i'm better, so i thought that was really interesting.

She does a really good history of uh anti-semitism, which i think is really good.

I mean, the best work on this I really think is Dara Horn.

People love Dead Jews.

I think in some of her writing she's done on this recently for The Atlantic and Tablets probably the best.

But her – because she's a speechwriter, is very good.

This is the thing I noticed was like this is kind of dry, some of this.

It's history stuff.

But speechwriters are very good at like moving it forward and simplifying the language.

I learned a lot of it.

That was good.

I think her thing about –

Where does anti-Semitism come from?

It's a 2000-year groove that you can trace back to, and she goes through the history.

That was very useful.

So I thought – I'm thinking about the book a lot.

So, whether or not you care about the struggles of Jewish identity, it was, I think, a good book.

What am I all about?

Why am I all about?

And what's that actually mean?

Because I think a lot of us go through those same series of questions when you're trying to figure yourself out.

All that really differs is like the specific details of those questions.

So you know, if you're a secular Jew from DC, it's going to be.

Your questions might be centered on that, but different people will have different content behind those questions.

But how people tackle those questions is, I think, it's really important for thinking about.

How do you build a deep life in a world where the digital is trying to make it superficial and fragmented?

So it stuck with me.

I think it was an interesting book.

All right, final book, a novel.

I read The Searcher by Tana French because everyone's talking about this novel.

It was good.

This is now like it's a classic.

It's genre, but it's highbrow genre.

So, you know, it's lit genre.

So she's a really good writer.

It's basically, I guess, detective mystery genre, technically.

But it's about a police officer retired from Chicago whose name is Cal, which I appreciate.

Cal Hooper.

And he moves to – I mean I like the premise.

It's very deep lifey.

He moves to a small town in Ireland.

They, like, fix up.

He's just, like, done.

You know, he's divorced.

His daughter's older.

Being in police force was hard.

And he's like I'm going to move to this like small town in the middle of like very rural Ireland.

I'm going to build up this, fix up an old house.

I have 10 acres.

A lot of characters.

I walk in the town to like the pub in town, like one of these type of situations.

Right.

I just want to kind of get away from it all.

And like, that's it.

But then you know mystery finds, like a local kid from comes in and is, like you know, my brother's missing.

And despite his best interest, Cal Hooper kind of gets into like for various reasons, like I have to try to figure this out.

And then pushback comes from the town of like, you shouldn't be asking those questions.

So it's a great setup, right?

But I love the setting and I love the deep life themes of like I'm escaping the city to move to Ireland.

And what's good about that and what is like fantasy is not what I thought.

And Tana French is a fantastic, she's fantastic at writing these type of books.

So that was a good one.

So there you go.

Those were the books I read in September.

All right.

I think that's all the time we have, right, Jesse?

All right.

Thanks for listening.

We'll be back next week with another episode of the podcast.

Hopefully everyone's getting their Halloween decorations ready.

I just showed Jesse my sound light synchronized controller I built from scratch, which I'm going to hopefully install this weekend.

I'm looking forward to it.

It's incredible.

Hopefully everyone's doing something similar.

So I'll be back next week.

And until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here.

One more thing before you go.

If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewportcom.

Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.

So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewportcom and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

Thank you.

[The Neuroscience of Phone Addiction: Why Willpower Fails and What Actually Works]-[Ep. 374: This is Your Brain on Phones]

📋 Summary

The Neuroscience of Phone Addiction: Why Willpower Fails and What Actually Works

The "Short-Term Motivation System"

Why Common Advice Fails

What Actually Works: A Strategic Approach

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Neuroscience of Phone Addiction: Why Willpower Fails and What Actually Works]-[Ep. 374: This is Your Brain on Phones]

📋 Summary

The Neuroscience of Phone Addiction: Why Willpower Fails and What Actually Works

The "Short-Term Motivation System"

Why Common Advice Fails

What Actually Works: A Strategic Approach

Conclusion

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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