How Social Media May Be Ruining Your Life with Cal Newport

So welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, a place for conversations that matter. That's Pharmacy F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And today we're gonna have another amazing conversation about things that really matter that we might not really wanna talk about, which is social media and our addiction to our screens and technology. And we have with us an amazing guest who's Cal Newport. He's an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University. And he's researching cutting-edge technology, but he also writes about the impact of these innovations on our culture, on our behavior, on our thoughts, on our performance. He's written six books, including Digital Minimalism, out in February 2019, and Deep Work about doing work that is quality work that's based on focus and attention, which we can't really do when we're distracted by our technology and social media. His work has been featured in lots of publications, including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, and he's been writing essays for his personal website, calnewport.com, which I encourage you to check out for over a decade. and he has never had a social media account, and he is a millennial, and he did an extraordinary TED Talk, which is almost five million views, which disrupted our idea about whether or not social media is a good thing or a bad thing. And he actually makes a case in this TED Talk of staying off of all social media. So welcome, Cal. We're gonna get into this now.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I'd like to say, if you have any complaints, direct them all towards Twitter. That way I won't see them. Right.

So now you did this TED Talk which described why we should quit and you talked about some of the key myths that are about why we have to be on social media and you challenge those myths, you break them down and you talk about how social media interferes with both our social connections despite it being a social network. and deep work. So can you take us through what you presented in your TED Talk? Because it was very compelling and it made me want to shut off and turn off all my social media accounts, which would basically affect my business, but that's okay.

Yeah, but you might be happier.

Well, actually, just a quick intro to this. My wife and I love to be together, but often I'm on my phone or I'm focused on the latest whatever I got to do or it's usually work related.

But.

All she wanted was the quality of my attention. And when you look at relationships and what breaks and keeps relationships is the quality of the attention we give to each other. And so for our anniversary, I bought her a box, a little wooden box. And she was oh, that's such a nice little box. Thank you, thank you. And I said, no, that's not the present. The present, I take my phone, I stick it in the box for the weekend. and I give you my full attention. And she started crying and it was like very emotional. That's the best present I ever got. And, you know, it sort of speaks to how much we've been attached to our phones and disconnect from real relationships.

Yeah, we have been. And what's crazy is that you can get that strong of reaction about the idea of putting your phone in a box and yet most of us are so comfortable just using it constantly. I mean, could you imagine anything else in your life that was causing such contention or stress or what have you that your spouse would actually cry when he talked about, I will step away this for a few weeks weekends and that you wouldn't be thinking, this is now my number one priority is to be wary of this ill in my life. And yet somehow with phones and social media, we've been giving them a pass. We look at them, we kind of wring our hands. We say, Kids these days, you know, they're on their phones too much. Then we go back to business as usual. So, yeah, I'm out there trying to.

Disrupt and saying, I think many fewer people should be using social media. Yeah. So tell us about your TED Talk and what you came up with, which are those four different Myths or ideas that we get into in our way of actually limiting our social media. Yeah, so in my talk, I called.

It Quit Social Media. My argument was maybe not everyone should quit it, but I think many fewer people should be using it. My analogy is it should be like Game of Thrones, right? There should be a fair number of people that really like it, but most people don't care. It shouldn't necessarily be ubiquitous like it is right now. I think that's the problem. So in that talk, I decided I'd go over some of the common arguments in favor of social media. And see, they're not nearly as strong as people like to think. So for example, people think if you're not on social media, you're not going to be able to maintain a healthy social life in the 21st century. And we don't have a lot of evidence that's true. And in fact, we have a lot of evidence that the opposite is probably true. I mean, the literature is a little bit confused. If you look at the literature, you get peer-reviewed studies that are saying, Social media causes loneliness. It causes isolation. And then you'll see Facebook, for example, pointing to studies to say, no, look at this. Social media makes people happier, usually in.

Quotation marks, if you use it correctly.

So like the soda company saying that soda doesn't make you fat. Well, it is true. It is true. So I did a literature review recently, and almost every positive article did have a co-author that was a Facebook data scientist. But actually, what's happening if you dig deeper into this literature is that the positive social media articles, what they're essentially finding is in isolation, there are certain things that happen on social media that make you happier than if you weren't doing them. So if I put you in a room, for example, and say do nothing or send a note to a close friend or family member on social media, you'll be a little bit happier having sent a note to a friend or family member than doing nothing. Now, it turns out that actually talking to a non-close friend or broadcasting information to a large audience or reading information that was broadcast to a large audience, none of this even in isolation makes you happier.

But there's a few things in isolation.

So now you're Facebook friends, but you're actual friends and family. You're actual friends and family. Yeah, at the same token though, the sort of best research we have that looks at the correlation between social media use in your life and indicators like perceived loneliness or social isolation say that the more you use it, the less happy you are. Even when you do all of the standard controls that you would do, for all the different demographic and economic variables that you think might be relevant. And so what's going on, right? This seems like they're countervailing. Yeah. And what's probably happening, what the researchers thinks is happening, is that you get a little boost to do sort of virtual interaction with people. But real world interaction is incredibly valuable and incredibly useful and vital to being happy. And the more you use social media, the less of the real world interaction you actually do with friends. Because you have the sense of, I'm connected to people. I'm talking to people all the time. I just sent these six messages in the last five minutes and I talked to my high school roommate and here's my old college roommate. But the benefits you get from that is so small compared to what you're losing by doing less real conversation and analog interaction that you end up net negative. So the more you social media, the less you do actual real interaction and the worse and worse ironically your loneliness actually gets.

Yeah, so face to face instead of Facebook.

Face to face instead of Facebook. I mean, our brain, the degree to which our brain has evolved to essentially be a social processing engine is incredible. If you look at the research on how much of our brain power actually goes towards trying to understand and process complex social cues, it's completely impoverished when you take away this rich stream of input that you and I are seeing right now being in person and seeing facial expressions and movements and both tonalities and you replace it with a one bit indicator, like a one and a zero. Yeah. It doesn't do it for our brain, right? It's leaving it anxious and without much to do. And so that's sort of the first myth that somehow you're going to be happier in your social life using social media. The inverse seems to be true. If you don't use it, now you're going to have to do real social interactions to feed that urge. People have forgotten.

I mean, he's amazed with these kids and millennials, They don't want to call each other on the phone. They are socially awkward and not able to actually have real connections and authentic relationships, but they're on social media doing that. And they've lost the skill of actually human connection interaction.

Yeah, and it's a vital skill. I mean, not just for navigating the world, but just for mental health and happiness. So, yeah, it is a big issue. So, for people who are a little bit older, I'm old enough that I learned how to do all of that. I grew up before there were cell phones, and social media. And so, the big risk for someone my age might be that I get away from that too much. But if you're younger and it's all you've ever known, I think it's a big problem.

Yeah. Now, the other part of it is not just that it doesn't make you happier, but you quote research that it actually makes you anxious and depressed and impairs your cognitive function. So, not only is it not helpful, but it may be harmful.

Can you talk about the harm part? Yeah. Well, so the first indication I had that there's something screw going on with this constant connectivity was probably four or five years ago. And so I was doing an event on a college campus, it was an elite college, and I was talking to the head of the mental health services on the college, and we had talked about some of these issues. And she said, you know, Cal, something I have noticed in my time here is that the issues we're dealing with with the students have changed dramatically. That what we used to deal with were sort of the standard, mix of mental health issues you might expect in 18, 19, 20 year olds. There were sort of eating disorders and homesicknesses and some OCD and schizophrenia and some depression, sort of a mix, a variety. And she said it was like a switch flipped and it's all anxiety and anxiety related disorders. And not just that that's overtaken everything else, but the number of students coming in with these issues is well beyond what they ever saw before. And I said, okay, well what changed, and without a hesitation, she said smartphones. It was that first class that came in that had smartphones throughout their teenage years. They began to see it. So that caught my attention. Then we get a few years later, you get Jean Twenge, who's one of the, or Twenge, I might be pronouncing her name wrong, but she wrote this, I think, very important book last year called iGen. And she's one of the top generational demographers, the world expert on understanding trends and how they differ between generations. And her whole book is basically making this argument that that's not a mirage. This entire generation, this entire iGen, the first generation to have smartphones starting from their teenage years is having off the charts mental health and anxiety related issues. And it's not, there was some pushback that, okay, well maybe this was reporting has changed, we're more aware and acute to sort of mental health issues now. That's not the issue because we have hospitalizations for suicide attempts. among the same group has gone up right along with the mental health issues. So there's actually real issues that are happening. And she looked at every cause she could. She did not want the answer to be something so simple as it's smartphones and social media. It's really been the only thing that fits the only thing she's found that actually fits the timing and the characteristics of the data. So I think there's actually for young people, a mental health crisis caused by these phones.

Yeah, no, I see that. I do see that in patients. I see it in my family. members and the other part of it, in addition to the anxiety and social isolation, which in some way are a little surprising, I think it makes you more connected, is the effect on your cognitive function. And you talked about the intensity of your focus and attention being related to the quality of your life, your productivity, your success in life, that you actually say you don't even work after five o'clock and you've written six books and what are you, 25 years old? How old are you?

36.

Okay, well that's pretty good. It took me till I was like 50 to write six books. But I think that that, you know, that's a very interesting point because what happens to your ability to focus, pay attention, engage with your life, be present and alert to what's actually happening when you use social media?

Yeah, that's actually my entryway into this issue. So I wrote this book back in 2016 called Deep Work. and the premise of the book is that the ability to focus intensely without distraction, that's what I call deep work, is actually becoming more important in our economy at the same time that we're getting worse at it because of technology and that this created a mismatch. And so that you would have this big advantage if you're one of the few to really care and cultivate your ability to concentrate. And one of the things I discovered in researching this book is that, yes, these tools are having a permanent effect on people's abilities. to concentrate. It's not a matter of whether the tool is in front of you right now in the moment which you're trying to concentrate. If you were just used to in general pulling out the phone or the tablet or opening up another tab as soon as you get a little bit bored to give yourself a little bit of hit of stimuli, it permanently changes your brain, or at least for a long term, such that if I then take you away from all those stimuli and then put you in, you know, a faraday cage where you could have no distractions and you're on the plane and the Wi-Fi is not working, you're gonna have a hard time focusing. And people think, oh, it's different. Yeah, at home, I do this, I get bored, I look at the phone a lot, but in work, I really concentrate. It has an effect. It's like an athlete saying, I only smoke on the weekends, not when I'm training. Smoking's still gonna affect you when you're on the playing field, you're hurting your physical health. And so, these intense addictive forms of distraction have a long-term effect on your cognitive health, and this has professional impacts. if you work in a knowledge sector job, it's going to make you worse.

At what you do. Yeah, it was interesting. I was sitting at a lecture the other night with a friend of mine, and she was on her phone and she was tweeting and she was picturing and she was doing all kinds of stuff, instagramming. And I said, give me your phone. And I grabbed the phone from her. I said, open your phone. And so I opened the screen time app.

Yeah.

And it shows not only the amount of screen time, which was a lot for her, but it showed the number of times you pick up your phone. And it was like a thousand times in a day. And she's, what's yours? And I opened mine, it was like 60 or 70 times, which is still a lot. But I was like, wow, that's a lot. And I think people don't realize that it affects your ability to be engaged in any particular work for a long period of time. And that's concerning because the things that matter to us, the quality of work we do, determines our success in life, in terms of actually be able to be engaged with what's happening around us. And that's a big deficit.

Yeah, I think it's crazy if we were professional athletes and we're eating junk food or we were smoking people say, that's crazy. You make a living off of the physical health of your body, but it's the same thing if you're in elite level knowledge work. It's literally your brain and its ability to concentrate, its ability to take in and process information and produce new information that has new value. That's at the core of probably a lot of your audience's living, right? That's how they make a living. And to be on these phones all the time, that is the cognitive equivalent of junk food.

And yet somehow we're not seeing it that way. So you're a scientist. What is the data that validates what you're saying? Because I can imagine people listening go, oh yeah, that's just kind of sure, maybe I don't believe that, I'm fine. What is the actual hard data that supports this thesis that being on your phones all the time or being distracted by social media is actually impairing your ability to focus.

Well, one of the more- Do deep work. That's right. Well, I think one of the more alarming pieces of data that's out there now is we call it sometimes economist a productivity paradox, which is if you study non-industrial productivity, so the economic metric of productivity, so the amount of actual output produced per hour spent working, it should have continued to increase over the past 10 years as we've had this revolution in not just our technology but in connectivity and information. People are connected in places they never were before. They have essentially all of the world's knowledge at their fingertips. They can move files and information from a device that fits in their hand with a supercomputer-like power. Like this is amazing. And yet during this entire period, productivity has been stagnant. It's not going up. It should have been going up, but it's not. And there's a growing sense that one of the forces at play here is that, yes, this technology is giving us more options and power, and yet at the same time, it's working against the way that our wetware works. To actually fragment our intention in the way it does makes our brain actually worse at concentrating and producing value. And so the downturn from that combined with what should have been enhancing our productivity, which is the tools, is just flattening out. And so I think this has a real real issue, and I can only imagine that we're going to see if this is true. Non-industrial productivity actually start to go down as the younger generation that's more connected than anyone before starts to come into the workforce. So we have that piece of evidence. Then we have a lot of more close study, those individual type studies actually trying to understand work, the late work by the late Cliff Nass of Stanford University. He did a lot of work actually in the lab, the psychology lab, with individuals working on what he called multitasking, but it's basically the same idea.

There is no such thing, right?

There is no such thing. He actually helped spread that idea, but he was the one who actually had some pretty good research on chronic multitaskers. I think they're really good at concentrating, but they're much worse than people who don't. Another thread of research I'd like to point people towards is to work on attention residue that's done by a professor named Sophie Leroy. What she's finding is that When we think that we're not multitasking, what we're doing when we've rejected multitasking now, we know we're not supposed to do it. So we try to do one thing at a time. We only have one window open, but every five or ten minutes we do a quick check. So we don't have multiple windows open. We're not doing the late 90s style of multitasking where on the phone and doing email while writing. We're doing one thing, but every five or ten minutes it's- Check the phone. The phone or the tab. And what she's finding is that context switch and then back again, even if it's very brief, leaves what's called attention residue, which you can measure in the lab reduces your cognitive capacity and takes a while to actually clear out. And you can measure this easily in the lab because you actually have people doing cognitively demanding puzzles. Yeah. And so they can see you start.

Making more mistakes and it takes 10-20.

Minutes to actually get to reset. And then in that 20 minutes, you do another one. You do another. And so what most knowledge workers are doing is they read Cliff Nass's work and they say, I multitask, I'm so advanced, I just single task. But because they're quick checking every five to 10 minutes, they put themselves in a state of persistently reduced cognitive capacity.

It's like a reverse neuotropic or something, a drug that makes you worse at what you do. Yeah, I know when I write my books, I literally have to turn off my phone, I turn off email, I often turn off Wi-Fi unless I'm not researching some article. And I can literally sit and work for eight hours or read, or I just print it out in paper and do it, you know, because it's so powerful and I get so much done. And yet, you know, when I'm constantly distracted between different things, I feel like I'm never really productive.

It's attention residue.

Yeah. I feel like I'm always sort of catching up and never complete it. And that's a, it's a very interesting thing because what we're saying is that by using our phones and technology, the way we do, we're actually decreasing our ability to be productive, to function, and.

There'S no such thing as multitasking. Yeah. And even if you think you're single.

Tasking, if you're quick checking, it can be just as bad. Quick checking, yeah. Well, that's sort of like multitasking. Now, you know, I feel like the thing that is fascinating about your work is that you also sort of talk about the positive benefits of not being on your social media or devices. And I'd like you to later clarify about the difference between being on devices versus social media because they're not always the same, right? So, what are the benefits of doing this? And by the way, there are so many movements out there around digital detox. There are camps, people go to the weekend and they put their phone away. We in our Center for Functional Medicine at Cleveland Clinic, we all put our phones and during meetings, we put them at the front of the table and no one can touch them. And we have much more productive engaged meetings.

Yeah. Well, So the interesting thing about digital detoxing, it puzzles me a little bit. It's really big right now. It's this notion that I'm going to whatever, put my phone away for a weekend or Sundays, I step away from the phone and I don't use my phone or something like this. But then you go back and start using again normally. And so if you think about this, if you use this methodology for detoxing from anything else that we were addicted to, it's not going to work that well. If I said I'm an alcoholic, so what I'm going to do, I have it all figured out, don't worry, I'm going to go away and on Sunday I'm not going to drink, but then get back to it again on Monday. Is that really solving the problem? This is my issue with just the detox notion or the digital Shabbat notion of you just take a little bit of time off. And so the lifestyle I often pitch is, and this is the new book, is not digital detoxing but digital minimalism. Yeah, what is that? So it's a philosophy of technology use that says you should start with your values. What do I value? What's important to me in my life? Then for each of those, you ask, okay, what's the best way I can use technology to help these specific values? And then that's it in terms of your engagement with technology. You can ignore the rest. Miss out on the rest. Yeah.

Right?

As opposed to this maximalist approach of, if I can think of anything interesting about using this app, I'll download it. If I can think of anything that might be cool about this gadget, I'm gonna buy it. Minimalism says, no, no, my life is about doing the things I really care about and really value. Often there's some way that you can use technology very intentionally and very selectively that's going to even boost and enhance.

Those things you care about, right?

I mean, I'm a computer scientist who loves technology. Yeah, exactly. But you only use it in that way and then you ignore the rest. And so instead of cluttering your life with every possible form of technology that begins to eat away at your attention and happiness, you have this very intentional use of a few things that do really well and you're happy missing out on everything else. So, I mean, to get back to your original question, I've been studying these digital minimalists and they're calm, they're happy, you can have a conversation with them for a long time and they won't once glance at a phone. They don't have this obsessive urge to document every nice moment. They can just actually be in the moment. They're much more productive in work, they produce things of great value, they're respected by their friends, they're involved in their community. I mean, you can go down the list, but when they free themselves from this constant sort of emotionally draining pull on their attention and get back to, here's what I care about, this is what I want to do, I'll use technology selectively to help that and that's it. It's a much more present, mindful and satisfying type of life.

But that's not so easy because you also talk about the design of social media to be addictive and the data scientists and behavioral experts sort of attention experts who work for these social media companies designed these programs to be addictive. So can you talk about what you mean by that? Is it truly addictive? Is it just a metaphor? And what's actually happening biologically? How do they come up with the ways to make these things so sticky?

Yeah, it was a depressing period when I dived into the reporting and research on how these companies make their products addicting. It's a little bit dark actually. So the best way-- Pull back the veil. Yeah, so-- Put the light on it. The best way to understand it is what psychologists think is that what they're trying to create is what they would probably call moderate behavioral addictions. So this is different than say a strong substance addiction, right? So, I mean, if I take away Facebook from a heavy Facebook user, they're not going to sneak out in the middle of the night to go to an internet cafe because they have to get a fix. On the other hand, they might. If you're a heavy Facebook user and it's in your pocket and you can get at it anytime during the day, you're going to have a very hard time not using it a lot because that's what a moderate behavioral addiction is going to drive you to do. A lot of this absolutely is engineered. What these attention engineers do is they try to hijack psychological vulnerabilities. There's actually a famous lab at Stanford where they they studied this. So this is something they're pretty good at. So I mean, I can give you a couple examples. On Facebook, for example, when they first added notifications on the mobile app, the designer said clearly this should be within the Facebook palette, which is gray and blue, right? So it's like sort of a very nice aesthetically pleasing thing. But the attention engineers came back and said, no, it needs to be alarm red because we get a much higher click rate if it's that color. It catches your attention. It's very hard to avoid. the notion of this sort of endless scrolling, right? This was emphasized in part because it exploits psychological vulnerabilities sort of like a slot machine would, that there might be something one more scroll away, there might be something really interesting. These companies have invested millions of dollars to solve really, really hard computer science problems, problems I know about as a computer scientist.

You're like programming issues.

Programming issues that they really didn't need to solve, like for example, auto-tagging people in pictures, right? this was a very hard problem in image recognition, but now if you post to Instagram, it can figure out, okay, this person, you know, that's Dr. Hyman, let's send them a, you know, a note and say, do you wanna tag this person, right? This is a very complicated technology. Why did they do it? Because if you say yes, I wanna tag them, that sends to you what they call social approval indicators. And the richer the stream of intermittently arriving social approval indicators that's arriving in your sort of virtual app inbox, the more irresistible it becomes to tap on. So one of the things they optimize for is this is why the like button took off. Yeah. Right, it was originally there for a much more mundane reason, but every time someone clicks like, social approval indicator. Every time someone tags you in a photo, social approval indicator. So now you have inside this app every time you click on it, indicators that other human beings are thinking about you. Sometimes they're not there, sometimes they are.

It's like, how does that affect the.

Person hitting the like?

It affects the person getting the like.

They're getting the like. They want the richest possible stream of social approval indicators coming at you from your network. That makes it almost irresistible to click on that app to see what's going on. I mean, that's just pure psychological vulnerability. There's no reason for there to be like buttons on these things. Original design of social media was not so two-way. You would post things that people could read. They added that because you get social approval and they get the tagging so you could get social approval indicators, and that plays on this deep-seated psychological vulnerability. Someone is thinking about me and I can get evidence of it if I touch this button right here. That's an incredibly powerful thing, and it really shot up their profitability and their average user minutes once the company started introducing these into their social media apps. I mean, the whole experience is engineered to keep you obsessively clicking on this.

Thing and looking at that screen. What about the brain response to this? Because it's a dopamine response, which is the same hormone, or I mean, the same neurotransmitter that is stimulating your brain when you have cocaine or heroin or alcohol or nicotine, right? So how does that play a role in here?

Well, it's the same effect that the famous Zyler experiments with the pigeons pecking on the lever and if they intermittently got food, the way that messed with the dopamine system made them addictively tap in a way that if they knew they'd always get food, they wouldn't. And this is the effect that all of these intermittently arriving social approval indicators have. It's not food nuggets, it's likes and tags, but they're not always there. But sometimes they're there. And that messes with the dopamine system in a way we've known since those experiments in the 1970s that can be- BF Skinner, right?

Yeah, it's impossible. It's impossible to ignore. And the best way to train your animal is intermittent reinforcement.

Don't give them the treat every time. Make them guess and then keep them coming back. Yeah, there's even rumors, I don't know if it's true, that Facebook for a while was actually purposely introducing randomized delays into giving some of this feedback back just to make sure that it was a little bit more intermittent. I don't know if that's true, but.

I wouldn't put it past them given what I've learned. So then there's good science about how.

They'Re doing this and the technology that.

They'Re using, and it is addictive.

Yes, it's meant to be.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's frightening. So you think you're in control, but you're not. No, you're the product. Yeah. There's a reason you're not paying for this. They have their clients, which are the advertisers. Yeah. And you're the product. and they wrap you up nicely. I mean, anyone who has a small business or a large business who's advertised on social media will tell you it's wonderful. And this is why, is because they have something close to a billion users worldwide that are clicking on this thing obsessively. It's like an advertiser's dream.

So let's talk about this book, Digital Minimalism a little bit more. I mean, it's coming out in February of 2019. And what are the main theses you have in the book? What are the take homes that we really should pay attention to and why should we be reading this book.

I mean, what I argue is that your digital life is as complicated and as important as say your physical health. And we learned when it comes to our physical health, we learned during the 20th century when our diet changed and we got the advent of a lot of highly processed food and food abundance, people started to get really sick. We got heart attacks, we had people, you know, this was, this was, people got unhealthy. And we learned that this issue is more complicated than just maybe throwing some tips at it.

It.

You're like, well, you just try to eat healthier. Maybe not eat too much. That didn't work. I mean, this is almost every guest on your show is that this is very complicated. So we had to get much more sophisticated in how we thought about our relationship with food. And we had to have whole philosophies developed that people could, could, could subscribe to. You, you would say that I'm now Primal or Paleo or something like this, or vegan or vegetarian. But we had a whole philosophies arise about different food and what's the right way and is values based. And I think, of course, we need this in our digital life because we're having the same type of health issues. They're just cognitive happening as this digital technology spiral out of control. It's the same thing as fast food and processed food coming in the early 20th century. We can't just throw tips at it. That's all we're doing now, is take Sundays off. How many times do I hear someone say, turn off notifications? Like that's going to solve the underlying problem. I mean, it's like, you know, whatever, telling people, don't buy too many Doritos or something. There's deeper problems. So my idea was to get healthy in our digital life, we need the same type of thoughtful, sophisticated philosophies we have in, say, physical health. And so digital minimalism is one such philosophy. And if it's not this, you should have another, but you should take it that seriously, that you should say, this is my philosophy towards my digital tools. I've thought about it. It's based on my values. And I can follow it, I can use it to push back, make a bulwark against these sort of addictive forces trying to get at my attention. And so that's the motivation for us. Digital minimalism is one such philosophy. Start with your values, figure out how to use technology to help them, ignore the rest.

So how does that practically work? Because you can give up alcohol, cigarettes, but you're gonna have your phone with you. And it's usually connected to cell service or Wi-Fi.

Yeah.

So how do you then take that choice of wanting to be a digital minimalist but still have this powerful sense of addiction and need to obsessively check your phone?

Well, you know, I was just writing an article about this this morning before coming over here, so this is fresh on my mind. But actually what I did in this article is I went back and looked at the video of the original keynote address in 2007 where Steve Jobs walked out on that stage at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and said, you know, we call it iPhone. He said, Today, Apple reinvents the phone, right? So, the very beginning of this age. And what's interesting if you go back and rewatch it is how different it was people used to talk about these devices versus how we use them today. So, you go back and watch this original keynote. For the first 30 minutes, you know, what Steve Jobs is talking about is look at this beautiful interface. Look at how good we made the iPod. We now have a touch interface. It's beautiful. And look at how much better the phone is than the phone you have now. It's now much easier to make calls. It's now much easier to do whatever. I talked to one of the original teams. That was before Facebook. Before Facebook. Before Twitter. Yeah, before Twitter. Before the App Store. There was no App Store. Yeah. Yeah, he didn't trust it. He's like, I don't want other people's stuff on here. Like we have a great experience. I talked to one of his original developers. more recently when I was researching the book. And he said, oh yeah, Jobs did not like the idea that someone else's app would be on there. He thought it would be ugly and it would crash it. And that he really did think of it as an iPod that made calls. And so what the iPhone used to be was a beautifully engineered device that took a small number of things that people already valued and did every day and made that experience even better. People loved music. It was a beautiful music experience. People make phone calls. It was a beautiful phone call experience. And my argument is go back to that. Let the phone be what the phone was supposed to be, which is a beautifully engineered phone. If you need to find directions or call someone or load up the doctor's pharmacy, you know, and it has a nice interface where it's gonna play, that's great. But let it be that. It doesn't have to be what it's become now, which is this constant companion, this sort of like source of diverting information all day long. So my advice in that article was take off your phone any app in which someone makes money from your attention. So get all the social media off there, get off the breaking news stuff, get off those games in which you obsessively play and you pay money to get whatever, like a bonus or whatever that is. Take that all off the phone. Take email off if you can. If you're not sure if you can.

That's a big one.

Yeah, if you're not sure if you can, try it and see if you actually get in trouble. I think people overemphasize the necessity for them to be that accessible. I mean, it used to be with smartphones, email had to be on there because laptops were huge and when people are on the road, you didn't have access to email, but now laptops are really small and really light and tablets are much better and so you don't need it on the thing that also comes with you to your son's baseball game and also comes with you to church. Take that off if you can. Bring it back to just being an elegant device that does a small number of things really well. you pull it out occasionally to do specific things. And then otherwise it's, you know, in your bag or on the table by the doorway. The minimalist approach to a phone is to make it into a phone.

But, you know, here, true confessions. I was at a conference and I was in a lecture. It was kind of boring. So I pull out my phone, I stuck my earphone in, I listened to your TED Talk. And I felt like I got real value more than what I was doing. So that would all go away, right?

I mean, yeah, you'd be bored more. But actually it's good to be bored more because here's the problem. If your brain gets trained this Pavlovian response that every time I get a little bit bored, I get a really nice stimuli that gets rid of my boredom. The problem is when it comes time to do something hard, almost always a hard thing is going to be boring in the technical sense that there's not a lot of novel stimuli. You're focusing on the blank page to try to write something. or whatever it is, right? And if your brain has learned, boredom means stimulate, boredom means stimulate, it doesn't tolerate it. And so when I was helping people in business be better at concentrating, I had to tell them, you need to be bored way more often in your life outside of work, or your brain is never going to tolerate the type of concentration we all used to be used to, the sort of the boringness of just doing one hard valuable thing. So I don't think boredom's all that bad, actually.

So how has it affected your life? Being a digital minimalist?

Well, I think it's been an important.

Part of my life.

So I've never had a social media account. You don't even know what you're missing. Yeah, people say that, but I've never.

Taken your first snort of cocaine.

It's true, but I don't think social media is rocket science. I think I have a pretty good sense of how it works, right? I don't think it's a, you know, it's not the secret meetings of the Masons over here. I sort of know what goes on on Facebook. even if I don't have an account. So I've never had a social media account. I don't web surf, so I don't have a staple of sites to cycle through when I'm bored. When I work, I work really intensely with a lot of organization. When I'm done, I'm done. I have clear cut-offs between the two. And it's been great for me. I mean, my line of work depends on concentration. So I'm a writer and a theoretical computer scientist. And so I stare at blank pages and I try to solve theorems. And so the ability to concentrate is everything. It's like my 40-yard dash time if I was a linebacker or something like this. And so I think it's had a huge positive effect. I'm very comfortable with boredom. I'm comfortable concentrating for long periods of time so I can produce more work in less time.

This is one of the big advantages of it. Yeah.

So, you said everybody more work in less time. More work in less time. You know, the factor that came up a lot when I was researching deep work was two. In the sense that in different lines of work, people who were really intentional about their ability to concentrate would produce about a factor of two more work.

Two X.

Two X. Yeah. And in hard fields, I mean, it's not about you're a little bit less distracted or maybe the moral argument that we shouldn't be so distracted, it's nice to be more focused. It's about massive improvements to the amount of work you produce. It almost looks like a superpower. In some fields, it can almost be like a superpower.

So besides the deep work, what about deep life?

Yeah.

And that aspect of it, because you're saying not only does it affect your quality of your work, but also the quality of the rest of your life.

Yeah, I've definitely discovered that to be true. I mean, I have three boys under the age of six.

Yikes.

I have a busy household. But I can just spend time with them a lot. I mean, I don't have my phone out. I mean, this gets me in trouble. Yesterday, I was with my two older kids and we were gone for maybe three or four hours. I had them at Sunday school at the temple and we did a couple of things. And I realized about an hour into it that I guess my phone was somewhere still at home. Yeah. Because I don't notice these type of things necessarily. So it's great for the relationship. Maybe bad if my wife needed to reach us in an emergency, but I can be more present with them. which to me is really important. Paper, you read paper books. Paper, I read a lot of books. Yeah, that's important to me. I walk a lot, that's important to me. I think if I was constantly plugged in to all these social indicators and news and entertainment, I would probably be an anxious wreck. I know myself, right? George Packer, the New Yorker writer, had this essay once about why he doesn't use Twitter, and he says, the reason I don't use it is not because I think I'm above it, but because I worry if I did, I'd let my kids go hungry. I think I'm kind of in that camp. I don't know what would happen if I opened myself up to that. I mean, I think I'm a patsy when it comes to these type of manipulations, so I don't even want to go there.

It's funny you said it took you an hour to figure out you didn't have your phone. I think for most people it would be like five minutes, they'd feel like they lost their arm and where are.

They going to do it? Yeah, there's something to recommend that, yeah. Or go somewhere in a city without your phone. It's really nice to try to figure out the directions, right? Like we all used to have to do. Like, okay, well, literally that's East because the sun's over there and I need.

To go to 22nd Street. And I don't know. It's not even-- I don't even know they make actual maps anymore. Like, when was the last time you.

Saw a map for sale in the gas station? I don't know. I bought one a few years ago. I have it in my car.

It's spiral bound. It's great. It's all the roads in America. What a great piece of-- It's not just you. When you're writing your book, you do this investigation of people who wanted to do a digital detox, and you thought, maybe who's going to do a 30-day detox? You'd find like five people. But you had like 1,600 people sign up to do this voluntarily.

Yeah, 1,600 people. New York Times end up writing an article about it. It became a big thing. But I didn't call it a detox. What did you call it? I called it a declutter. Because the idea between this was you take 30 days away from all optional personal technology. no social media, no online news, anything you could get away with not using. But the idea was not just to go back to it all when the 30 days were over. Instead, it was the start from a blank slate. So the 30 days you were detoxed, you no longer felt sort of compelled to use all these things. Your slate was clean. And then you could start and start reintroducing technology very carefully and really make it earn its keep back into your life. So before you download the random app that you sometimes click, you say, is that really something that's the best way to support something I value? And if not, don't put it back in. And you do that again and again with everything you used to have in your life. And so these 1600 participants ended up with much more minimalist, much more intentional technologies in their life. And for a lot of them was a huge difference.

And what did they notice?

Well, there's a couple things they noticed. So first, it was really hard for the first week. People said they had this compulsion. I had to check something, I had to look at something. One young woman took everything off her phone and had this compulsion to check things on her phone that was so strong that she ended up obsessively looking at the weather app because it was the only thing on her phone that still actually had information that you could click on and get some piece of new information.

Like it's going to change temperature in five minutes.

Well, she said for that first week she could have told you up to the minute the temperature in 12 different cities worldwide or something like this, but then that faded. The second thing a lot of people noticed was that they had forgotten how much pleasure they got out of the analog activities that used to fill a lot of their day. They have stopped hobbies, long conversations, sports and athletics, things that used their hands and their bodies and their mind in the real world, manipulating the real world, interacting with real people, painting, writing, that came up a lot. Knitting, woodworking, getting back to playing soccer, getting back to the ultimate Frisbee league. Four or five different people sent me sort of long fan-ons to returning to the library and how much they forgot how much they loved going to the library and just browsing and coming away with a stack of books. And they had forgotten how much pleasure they got out of it and by comparison how much less enjoyable their life was when they filled all of those moments with this much more lightweight type and then the final interesting thing is some of these people afterwards said, forget the declutter, I'm going back to everything, and found they'd lost a taste for it. Really? And so they said, I'm so excited the 30 days are up, let's get everything back on there. And it was after you stop eating fast food, right? You come back to it after a while, it tastes, you're like, Ah, it's so salty. Yeah. And they lost their taste for it. They said, this is impoverished, it doesn't taste as good. And so that was a big eye-opener to me. Yeah, both the scope of how many people are interested in this, but also how quickly they can make their lives so much better.

It's true. I found it fascinating that Apple introduced this new feature on the iOS 12, which is screen time. And it's curious, people underestimate the amount of time they spend on their screens. And my nephew, I asked him to start sharing with me. He's 25. And he's like, why? Because I only do two hours of screen time a day. and that was his report every day to me. And when he actually looked, it was seven hours, most of it on social media or YouTube, which is a sort of a social media in a sense platform. And it was stunning to me and to him. And it's all the interstitial space that gets filled up that actually has a negative effect on your mood, your concentration, your ability to function, work, tension, happiness. All these things that we think it's giving us, it's actually taking away.

We write all these storylines about how all these technologies are so vital. I used to get such hate mail.

Because I thought, yeah, I bet you're not popular here.

I'm not popular, you know. I said quit social media, but I've written about this before in various major publications. Yeah. Get off social media. I used to get, you know, just tons of hate mail, but I'll tell you, you know, people saying it's absolutely vital and here's all the ways in which it's at the core of, you know, all things that are good in the world. That's really started shifting. And so this has been the other interesting thing I've noticed.

It's a backlash.

In the past couple of years, people are getting much more comfortable with this idea that maybe, whatever, General Mills doesn't have all of our interest in mind. Maybe I shouldn't be eating Lucky Charms every day for breakfast. That same type of thing is going on. And there's this backlash growing where people are starting to get interested in hearing other options.

Okay, so what advice do you have for me? Because, having on this show is not necessarily my best interest because I share a lot of my content through Instagram, through Twitter, through Facebook, through email. And it's really how people connect to things that are meaningful or that are life-changing or that help them grow. How do you reconcile that?

Yeah, well, there's an interesting, I think it was Seth Godin had this interesting idea that he wrote about recently and I'm going to best paraphrase it, but he basically said, For example, Mona Lisa is huge on social media, but the Mona Lisa doesn't tweet. Mona Lisa is big because she's iconic, not because she's really good at using these tools or something like this. And so people do use social media to share things. That's good if you're producing things that are good and that people want to share. But it doesn't mean that you have to be heavily engaged in it yourself. Yeah. And that's often, that's often the case.

But how is it fair to ask my listeners or people who are interested in my work to be on it, looking and listening for it?

Yeah, well, there's attention. There's attention. I mean, I think there is attention, right?

I mean, I think- Everybody listening, make sure you just watch my stuff. Nobody else's, it's fine.

Just keep mine on there. Well, but there's nothing wrong with a pot, right? I mean, like a long-form podcast is fantastic, right? I think it's intellectually stimulating or this or that, but I think- But to find out about it, people have to that's what you're getting at, right? And should you be encouraging, you know, if you have to encourage people to be on these tools so they can find out about this good stuff, but on the other hand, these tools could be really addictive. There is attention. So the best way I can recommend people to maybe step away with it in a cautious way is recommend, take this all off your phone, right? If you don't have it on your phone, you've gotten rid of 99% of the power of these tools to hijack your brain. That's where almost all of the attention engineering effort goes. You still have the account, and you can still log on on your desktop computer, you know, once or twice a week and see what's going on. And in fact, I would argue that most people could probably fulfill 99% of the value they get from social media in about 20 to 40 minutes a week. Maybe like Sunday and Wednesdays log into an account. So maybe this is the balance we can strike right now is get it off your phone. If it's on its phone, it's using you. If you're accessing it through your computer, then you're probably using it for very specific things, like seeing is there a new episode of the Doctors out, right? Yeah, without it being something you check all day. So maybe that'll be our... And you.

Face the same thing. You're publishing books, you want people to know about them, you want to get out there, you write blogs, but how.

Do you get blogs to people, right? Yeah, you know, people find it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not on social media. It used to be, this used to be heresy. My publishers were, you know, I remember having publicity meetings and they'd bring in the sort of the young person who was like, okay, I'm the social media marketing expert who's gonna help you with your book and let's talk about all the things we're going to do. And then I would watch their face fall.

As I said, I don't have any of those accounts. Well, it has an impact. You know, like I, you know, I've done a lot of promoting and my work through social media. And, you know, I actually asked Hugh Jackman to, because he read my book, to do something on social media. So he did a little Instagram post. I think it might have been 15 seconds. I think it had over a million views. And the impact on my book sales was far greater than even television or other formats. I was like, what happened here? I just shot up to the top of Amazon. And it was just his ability to sort of communicate what mattered to him and what helped him allowed, you know, everybody to kind of have the social proof and then buy the book and then they actually got healthy. I mean, I sat with a guy at lunch who randomly I just sat with and he had lost 60 pounds using my 10-day detox diet. And, you know, there's some value there. So how do you sort of reconcile that?

I think it's hard because I think these platforms have a lot of dangers with them and we have to weigh it against the values.

So have a glass of wine but not three bottles.

Yeah, yeah, or maybe you don't drink wine, but the idea is your book's important, people will find it. And if they can't find it, I mean, I know all about all of your books, right? And I didn't find it through Hugh Jackman's social media.

Maybe it's Lady Gaga.

Yeah, it was Lady Gaga or something like this, right? So it's true, right?

It is very influential.

She didn't post, by the way. I'm just saying. Yeah. So it is very influential and it moves a lot of things, but I still think we have to be really wary about it. I mean, I think that's true. That's true, but it's also really dangerous. And so, I don't know, maybe I would have sold more books if I.

Was on social media. I'm not sure how much the difference would be. Yeah. Yeah, all right. Well, so what's your advice to People who want to minimize their technologies.

Where do they start? So, I mean, something like this 30-day declutter is a good way to do it. Step away for 30 days and then make everything that comes back into your.

Life earn its way back into your life. So, keep your phone, but delete all the apps and the ones that are essential.

Yep. Like Google Maps and Uber. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Or at least, yeah, you keep the Google Maps, keep the Uber, but anything that's optional you take off and including news. Get your news through the radio or the newspaper for a month, right? And then be very strict about what you let back in. I think that's-- Keep the podcast. Keep the podcast if that's vital, right? But be strict about what you let back in.

So curate your own experience rather than curated for you.

And do it with intention, right? I mean, if you're using something, have a really good reason why you're using it. And it can't just be that it helps something you value. It should be the best way to help that thing that you value. For example, I don't do social media, but I blog. I've been a blogger for over a decade and it's something I've thought a lot about and I think it's a technology that is really, really important for something I value, which is the ability to sort of explore a lot of ideas, to reach an audience online but do so in a way that's, you know, sort of respectful of their time and attention, to get a lot of feedback from smart people, to meet interesting people. Social media could give me some of those things. I think blogging doesn't better. So I chose what I thought was the best way. So very intentional, very selective.

Amazing. So if you were the ultimate authority for day king or had some autocratic power to change laws, regulation, to sort of affect this trend, which you see clearly is impacting our success as a society, people's individual ability to work, to focus, concentrate, have great relationships, what would you say we should do as a society?

Yeah, well, so I'm a huge booster of the internet, for example. I think the social internet, which is the ability to use the internet to find information or connect to people and ideas, is massively important. It's as important as the printing press.

How I found you.

Yeah, so I'm a huge booster of that. I think the problem is when you get the attention economy into this equation. So when you use an economic model in which your attention is going to be monetized, this is what Facebook does, this is what Alphabet does, this is what the major social media platforms does, that's the source of the issues. And so, I mean, I often talk about, I think, using the internet to connect to people and ideas and to find information to pursue activism is a powerful use of it. But we need to try to divorce that more and more in our personal choices from these giant, giant conglomerate companies that extract your attention as their main resource. I mean, Facebook is valued at twice as much as ExxonMobil. Yikes. And instead of extracting oil from the ground, they're literally extracting minutes of your life. and packaging it up. That's what I think is scary. So if I was in charge of the world, if I could influence everyone's behavior, I would keep people's love for the internet, but I would get them away from any sort of product where your attention is what they're trying to extract. I think that's where the issue is. I would love to get back to what David Ruschoff calls the weird internet, the sort of more ad hoc, personal, creative internet. People would create their own sites. They would use tools that were supported maybe by open source as opposed to a giant company. You blow up the walled gardens and instead, it's people can just find and interact with other people through open protocols. There's a lot of interesting emergent bottom-up democratic type ideas out there on the internet. And that's what I think we need to get back to. Get away from these massive, massive companies that have to get as many minutes as possible from your from your mind in order to keep their stock price high?

So do we need to regulate that or legislate around it? Or, I mean, is there a policy that can actually help shift this in the right direction?

I mean, I've been, there's been a big upswell in regulation talk. I've certainly noticed this at the events I've been speaking at. I'm not necessarily a believer that that's going to be the way to do it. I think we look at it similar to the same way we looked at food and health. Consumer education was the way to do it. We couldn't regulate Doritos out of existence. Like this food is bad, you're not allowed to sell Doritos anymore. But what we could do is-- you- can tax it. You can tax it, yeah. You could try to, you know, soda tax. You could try to incentivize good food. You could try to incentivize good food, but none of that's going to move the needle nearly as much as, you know, reading one of your books or something like this. And so I think that's going to be the key is letting people know, get them away from this sort of cognitive junk food and get them back in control of their life and their values. same skepticism around the technology people have around their food, get people smarter, more intentional, more selective, taking control of their digital life, I think it'd be a lot better.

And it's really a powerful idea that you can sort of reclaim your life and actually improve the quality of your experience and work and relationships and all that. And it's, you know, I think getting the word out there and helping people understand the harms the technology and what they're being taken advantage of for. I think that can help move the needle. So we know that soda causes obesity. People don't understand that technology or social media is the issue that's driving anxiety, concentration issues, and they do deep work and many, many other issues. And that the benefits, so it's not just limiting something that you like, it's actually selling the benefits of actually being in the world again. and I've noticed that. I mean, I, I, when I put my phone away for the weekend, I literally was like, first, and I was like, oh, I get to just sit on the floor and listen to jazz and snuggle with my cat and.

Yeah.

Do nothing and not have to look for my phone to fill the gaps in my day where I'm looking for something to learn or something to do or someone to communicate with or some momentary dopamine fix.

Right.

And I was, it was really powerful, and I, and, and made me, again, feel like you know, I'm almost 60, and it made me feel again like when I was in college, where you just had these vast spaces and this vast openness. Because, you know, computers started in 1984, and I was my first computer, which was quite a while ago. And you probably weren't born then. And maybe you were. You were just born.

I was two.

And, you know, just to actually have that quality of spaciousness in your life is something that I think we all miss. you know, it was just a real reminder of what matters in life. And you're not trying to take away people's pleasure and experience. You're suggesting that our lives will be improved by actually thinking about this thoughtfully and actually making some choices in our personal life that actually can improve that quality.

Yeah, I think it's a good way of thinking about it. I mean, digital minimalists have nice lives.

It's not either or.

It's not either or, yeah. I mean, as I like to say, I'm a technologist.

I make my living.

You're not a Luddite. I'm not a Luddite. I mean, I make my living as a computer scientist. I study, I try to advance technology. And I think we can, the same way you can say, I love food, but I'm not obese and unhealthy with type 2 diabetes from eating habits. You can say those two things. It makes a lot of sense. And I think you can say, I love technology, but I hate this idea.

That I'm going to spend all day.

Sort of renting my brain out to Facebook's advertiser clients. So get rid of the junk food technology. Get rid of the junk food technology. Get back to the cool stuff. Technology is great, but I mean your life is going to be a lot better. You can't be someone, I think, who is really serious about your physical health and not start to think about this aspect as well.

I think you have a harder job than I do, which is telling people to stop sugar and starch. You're like, this is a much harder.

Guy to talk to. It's not though because people don't like this stuff as much as they think. People, you take a week away from bread. You still want to eat bread, right? But you take a wake away from Facebook and you see it differently. I find it's really important for me.

In my life to take at least two or three weeks a year where I'm gone somewhere where there is no service or signals. I go on a rafting trip this summer for a week and I brought my family and the teenagers and everybody. I was like, everybody was just present with each other. Nobody was like on their phone all the time.

We're wired for that. I mean, that's how we're supposed to encounter the world. If you get rid of that, I mean, of course the brain's gonna go haywire. You can't drastically change the cognitive environment that we spent two million years evolving to be used to do something completely different and then expect that we're just going to be fine.

Well, thank you for your work and inspiring us to think about what we do automatically and how that's affecting us and how being attentive to it might actually improve the quality of our life. So, thanks, Cal, for joining us on the Doctors Pharmacy. Thank you. You've been listening to the Doctors Pharmacy with Dr. Mark Hyman, a place for conversations that matter. And, if you like this podcast, please leave a review. share with your friends and family, and you can subscribe anywhere you subscribe to podcasts. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free with Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts. You can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.