Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166

The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone whose writing, like his book Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media and in his book Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out called A World Without Email where he argues brilliantly I would say that that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives and very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches to do theoretical computer science. At the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life. Quick mention of our sponsors ExpressVPN, Linode Linux virtual machines, Sunbasket meal delivery service, and SimpliSafe home security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say.

That deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years. Deep work and is hard, but is ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing. The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distraction of the world just fade away. Social media, yes, reading the comments yes, I still read the comments is a source of joy for me. In strict moderation, too much takes away the focused mind and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both the focus and the fun. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter lexfriedman. If you can only figure out how to spell that. And now here's my conversation with Cal Newport.

What is deep work? Let's start with a big question.

So I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.

What does it mean to work deeply on something?

I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that. Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAIL at mit, right? So I was surrounded at the time, when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians. And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turing award, Turing Award, MacArthur Turing Award. I mean, you know the crew, right?

Theoretical computer science.

Theoretical computer science, yeah. Yeah. So. So I'm in the theory group, right, doing theoretical computer science, and I publish a book. So, you know, so I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier one skill. Like, that's what you would talk about, right? Like how. How intensely I can focus. That was the key skill. It was like your 4:40 time or something, if you were an athlete. Right. So.

So this is something that people actually the, The. The theory folks are thinking about.

Oh, yeah, really?

Like, they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus?

I mean, I don't know if they would quantify it, but focus was the tier one skill. So you would come in. Here'd be a typical day, you'd come in, and Eric Demaine would be sitting in front of a whiteboard with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them, and maybe that projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem. You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back, they're sitting there staring at the same, Same whiteboard, right? Like, that's the tier one skill.

This is the difference between different disciplines. Like, I. I often feel, for many reasons, like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with, like, either mathematicians or physicists. It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work, because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming or like, machine learning, like the, The. The experimental machine learning, or like just the engineering version of it. It. It's. It feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe. It feels like you're just like, cheating your way into, like, some kind of trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case. Yeah, that's how it feels.

Right.

And it's. I'd be interested to. To hear what you think about that, because programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply to work deeply, but sometimes it does. So it's a weird dance, for sure.

Code does Right. I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs. I think it's a great example of deep work. I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme. I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with an Olympic athlete like, oh, I see, that's what it is now for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level. But the faculty, the faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes. But coding, I think is a classic example of deep work. Because I got this problem I want to solve. I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly. So basically I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion. When I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. That was the term I used. Then I published this book so Good They Can't Ignore youe, which came out in 2012. So like, right as I began as a professor and that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction, that it's not just following your passion. You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage. And there was this big follow up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at this? And then I look back to my grad school experience, I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do. I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians. It's important here and it's important here and it's important here. And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector. Focus is very important and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.

So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically you say knowledge work, but basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world. Can we break that apart a little bit?

Yeah. So a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different, really, even if it's brief, and then try to bring it Back to the main thing I'm doing that causes a huge cognitive pileup that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay, and I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on, but every five or six minutes, you quickly check, like an inbox or your phone that initiates a contact shift in your brain. Right. We're going to start to suppress some neural networks. We're going to try to amplify some others. It's a pretty complicated process, actually. There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens. You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing. And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing, even though it's also your brain's in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. And it's fatiguing too. I mean, you do this long enough, you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.

Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say? So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus, you know, every 20 minutes or so? So if you're thinking of like this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming, you know, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe small scale on a particular function or large scale on a. On a system? And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that? And then you have to look it up. This is the danger zone. You go to the Internets and so you have to. Now it is a kind of context switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem you now have, switch thinking about, like, consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem. It definitely feels like a context switch, but is that a really bad thing to do? So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to as much as possible, go deep and stay there for like, a really long period of time?

Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I Don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar. Right. You're thinking about this type of solution, you're thinking about coding, you're thinking about this type of functions. Where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different and if there's unresolved obligations. So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox. Right. Because here's 20 emails. I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different. Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this is very different than the coding I'm doing and I'm leaving it unresolved. So it's like someone needs something from me and I'm going to try to pull my attention back. The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing. So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter, I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there. Right. That could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing, that's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there. And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again, it's really difficult.

So it's both the information and the emotion.

Yeah, Both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before. So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lacks going on there. Right. So an hour at least, you get a good 40, 45 minutes. Plus I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk. We can get a lot done, but just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit.

Yeah. And one of the beautiful, you know, people can read about in your book, Deep Work. And I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concep, but it's still pretty profound. It has stayed with me for a long time. There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts, like words matter. It's pretty cool. And just for me, sort of as a comment, there's. It's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for A prolonged period of time. But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy. So forget being productive and all that. Yeah, I'm just satisfied with my life. I feel, I feel fulfilled. It's like joyful. And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards. It's a, it's a beautiful thing. And there I find the opposite. When I don't do that kind of thing, I'm much more irritable. Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything. And there's this stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life. So. So in that sense, deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness. I'd love to ask you, how do you. Again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate deep work into your life? What are the different scheduling strategies that you would recommend? Just at a high level?

Yeah.

What are different ideas there?

Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking. Right. So if you're facing your workday, don't allow like your inbox or to do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next?

Yes.

I mean I'm a big plan of saying here's the time, here's the time available. Let me make a plan for it, right? So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left. What do I actually want to do with it? So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this. For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that. And during this hour I'm going to try to fit this in and then actually have this half hour gap between two meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands? I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available. I mean, I find that's much more effective now once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, the deep work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them. So I can prioritize this. And you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying what's next?

I schedule every single day kind of thing. So it's like try to, in the morning to try to have a plan.

Yeah. So I do quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. There's a deadline coming out for academic papers at the end of the season. Here's what I'm working on. I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this. You have the, the big picture vision of what you want to get done. Then weekly you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I going to. What's my week going to look like? What do I need to do? How am I going to make progress on these things? Maybe I need to do an hour every morning. Or I see that Monday is my only really empty day. So that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day you look at your weekly plan until you block off the actual hours. So you do that three scales, the quarterly down to weekly, down to daily.

And we're talking about actual times of day versus. So the alternative is what I end up doing a lot, and I'm not sure it's. The best way to do it is scheduling the duration of time. This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings. I'm like religiously don't do meetings.

All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.

Yeah, I know. No zoom meetings. I find those are. That's one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic is both the opportunity to. Okay, the positive thing is to have more time with your family, you know, sort of reconnect in many ways. And that's really interesting. Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things. The negative is actually both those things are also sources of the negative. But the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule. And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically. Just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting. Like, what are we doing here?

What's the meaning of life? Yeah, I have.

Every zoom meeting is. I have an existential crisis.

So Kierkegaard with a Internet connection.

So what the hell are we talking about? Oh, so when you don't have meetings. There's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to, like the important things, like deep work sessions to last way longer than you maybe planned for. I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule. The goal is to schedule. To sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope I can keep going.

Yeah.

And hope I can get lost in it. And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go and the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world? Or is there some magic to the time blocking?

Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities. Right. So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially. There's academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff. There's the business surrounding my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well, just rock and roll and let it go on. So one of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it. So I even sell this planner to help people time block. It has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over one. Next time you get a chance, you move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining. So in other words, there's no bonus for, I made a schedule and I stuck with it. It's not like you get a prize for it. Right. For me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time, and if I have to change that plan, that's fine. The state I want to be is basically, at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and gave it some thought for what to do, because I'll do the same thing. Even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs. And I basically prioritize the deep work, and they get yelled at a lot. That's kind of my strategy is like, just be okay getting yelled at a lot. Because I feel you if you're rolling. Yeah. Well, that's what it is for me. Like, with writing, I think writing's so hard in a certain way that you don't really get on a roll in some sense. Like, it's just difficult. But working on proofs, it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof. If you start to get some traction, just you've been at it For a couple hours. Then you feel the pins and Tumblr starting to click together and progress is being made. It's really hard to pull away from that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.

Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume as opposed to stopping on a dead end.

That's true.

There's the. Yeah, there's a. There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with. If you stop on a dead end to return to the task.

Yeah. Or a cold start. Yeah, whenever I like. I'm in a stage now. I submitted a few papers recently, so now we're sort of starting something up from cold. And it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to. It's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not. Yeah, we're in it. Like, here's where we are. We feel like something's about to give here. We need the very early stages where it's just. I don't know, I'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them. I'm going to have no idea how to make progress. Is not. Is not motivated.

What about deadlines? Can we. Okay, so this is like a therapy session is why it seems like I don't. I only get stuff done that has deadlines. And so the. One of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline or there's artificial or real sense of urgency. Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines? Why do deadlines work so well?

Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the, in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about, should I take a break now? This is the big issue with just saying, I'm going to go write. I'm going to write for a while. And that's it. Because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks. We're not just going to write forever. And so why not right now you have to be like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer. Five minutes later. Why don't we just take a break now? We should probably look at the Internet now. You have to constantly have this battle. On the other hand, if you're on a time block schedule, I've got these two hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. I have a break scheduled over here. I don't have to fight with myself. And maybe at a larger scale. Deadlines give you a similar sort of effect. I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due.

Perhaps, but what you're describing is a much healthier sort of giving yourself over. And you talk about this in your email book. The process, I mean, in general, you talk about it all over is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process. The. But then you have to be strict with yourself.

Yeah, but what are the deadlines you're talking about? So, like, with papers, like, what's the main type of deadline work?

So papers, definitely. But, you know, publications like, say this. This podcast. I have to publish this podcast next. Early next week. One, because your book is coming out. I'd love to sort of support this amazing book. But the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 48 miles with David Goggins. And so I want this podcast that. This conversation we're doing now to be out of my life. Like, I don't want to be in a hotel in Vegas, like, editing the. Like freaking out while David Goggins is.

Yelling on hour 43 of your terrifying thing that you're doing.

But actually, it's possible that they still will be doing that, you know, because that's not a hard. That's a softer deadline. Right.

But.

But those are sort of. Life imposes these kinds of deadlines. Yeah, I'm not. So, yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline. But I am almost referring to, like, the pressure that people put on you. Hey, man, you said you're going to get this done two months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done?

I don't see. I don't like that pressure.

Yeah.

Now, first of all, I think we can.

I hate it, too.

We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you is probably a top productivity technique. I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling. But see, I don't like that. So I will try to get things done early. I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today. It's due at midnight, and we've got a lot to do. And it's the night before because then I get in my head about what if I get sick? Or what if I don't get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly, so I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked about this. If you go back and read the Ethics, he's trying to understand the meaning of life, and he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply. It's kind of a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do, and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said ultimately that's where he found his meaning. But, you know, he's touching on some sort of intimation there. That's correct, that. And so what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it. I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like, I gotta. I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere. I have my notebook in it. Because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some. I'm working on this new proof. And it just. So you train yourself. You train yourself to appreciate certain things, and then over time, the hope is that it cretes.

Well, let's talk about some demons, because I wonder. There's like, deep work, which. And the. The world without email books that to me, symbolize the life I. I want to live. Okay. And then there is. I'm like, despite appearances, an adult at this point. And this is a life I actually live. And I. It's. I'm in constant chaos. You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate it too, but it seems like I'm always in it. It's a giant mess. It's almost like whenever I establish. Whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.

Yeah.

And like, I don't want to, but, you know, it's. So you have to look in the mirror at certain point and you have to say, like, who the hell am I? Like, I keep doing this. Is this something that's fundamental to who I am, or do I really need to fix this?

What's the chaos right now? Like, I've seen your video about, like, your routine. It seemed very structured and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So, like, what's the chaos now that's not in that video?

Many of those sessions go way longer. I don't get enough sleep. And then the main introduction of chaos is it's taken on too many things on the to do list.

I see.

It's.

I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with, which is saying. Not saying no. But it's not like I have trouble saying no. It's that there's so much cool in my life.

Yeah.

Okay, listen, I've. There's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics robots and the other.

Yeah.

And they're giving me spot. So there's in a To do. What am I going to say no?

Yeah.

So they're giving me spot, and I want to do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it. Okay. So that's now a to do item.

And then you go to Texas for a while. And there's Texas, everything's happening. There's all the interesting people down there.

And then there's surprises right there. Power outage in. In Texas. There's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things, and you sleep less. And then there's personal stuff, like just, you know, people in your life, sources of stress, all those kinds of things. And. But it does feel like if I'm just being introspective, that I bring it onto myself. I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing is. Is they. They flourish under pressure.

Yeah.

And I wonder if that. If that's just a hack I've developed as a habit early on in life that needs. You need to let go of. You need to fix.

But it's all interesting things. Yeah, that's. That's. That's interesting. Yeah. Because these are all interesting things.

Well, one of the things you talked about in deep work, which is, like, really important, is, like, having an end to the day, like, putting it down.

Yeah.

I don't think I've ever done that in my life.

Yeah, well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. So, you know, I didn't have a real job. I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job. And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work, because, you know, hey, when work's over, she'll be home, and I don't want to be, you know, on campus or whatever. And so real early on, I just got in that habit of this is when you know, this is when you work. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job. Right. I put artificial. I was like, I want to train. I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial, large, time consuming things into the middle of my day. I basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this while still maintaining the nine to five. Because I was like, okay, I want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay. I didn't want to get flabby when my job was easy. So that when I became a professor. And now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids, so now I don't really have a choice. That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is I just don't have time to do them. And then after a while, people, you know, stop bothering.

Well, but that, you know, but that's how you have a successful life. Otherwise you're going to, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.

Yeah.

Like to where. No, nobody wants, nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity. Like, you're driving. You attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you.

Yeah.

So if you, if you live in chaos, you're going to attract chaotic people. And then, then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy.

Yeah.

And it feels like I'm not bothered by it, but I guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying, which is like, I think one of the big hacks for productive people that I've met is to get married and have kids. Honestly, it's, it's very. Perhaps counterintuitive.

Yeah.

But it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer.

Yeah. It enforces a lot of timetables, though. It has a huge kids, have a huge productivity hit those. You got to weigh it. But okay, here's the complicated thing though. Like, you could think about in your own life starting the podcast as one of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself. Right.

Yeah.

Like, you know, I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago and like, don't do that. Like, your research is going well.

Right.

But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is. The direction that's taking you is like A couple years from now, it's gonna. It'll be something really monumental that you're probably gonna. Probably lead to. Right. There'll be some really. It just feels like your life is going somewhere.

It's going somewhere. It's interesting.

Yeah.

Unexpected. Yeah.

Yeah. So how do you balance those two things? And so what I try to throw at it is this. This motto of do less, do better, know why. Right. So do less, do better, know why. It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but, like, an interesting array. Right. So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing. So a couple things are. You know, they were interesting, like, have a couple bets placed on a couple different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things, and then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes. Like, with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training. I was like, I want to be a better writer. I want to be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student. I really wanted to write hardcover idea books. I started training. I would use New Yorker articles to train myself. I'd break them down, and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills. And it took forever until. But now, today I actually get a write for the New Yorker, but it took a decade. So a small number of things, try to do them really well, and then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value. Like, in general, I think this is worth doing, and then seeing where it leads.

And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what, Like a little. Like a. Like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing. Like a sense that you say you wanted to write, get good at writing. You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking. This actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.

Yeah. I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is, like, the first thing I kind of got infamous for. I wrote that back in 2012. But. But the argument there is passion cultivates. So what I was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start, and then that's what propels you where actually the reality is, as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill, and more impact, the passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is, I'm very passionate about what I do, and that's a worthy goal. But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify. Like, for sure, you should be a writer or something like this.

So I was actually quoting you. I was on a social network last night in Clubhouse. I don't know if you've heard of it.

Wait, I have to ask you about this because I'm invited to do a Clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a Clubhouse about my new book.

That's awesome. Well, let me know when because I'll show up.

What is it?

Okay, so first of all, let me just mention that I was in a Clubhouse room last night and I kept plugging your. Exactly what exactly? You said about passion. So we'll talk about it. It was a room that was focused on burnout. Okay. But first, Clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place because, you know, we talk about email, we talk about social networks, but Clubhouse is something very different. And I've encountered in other places, Discord and so on. That's voice only communication. So it's a bunch of people in a room. They're just eyes closed. All you hear is their voices. Real time, real time, live. It only happens live. You're technically not allowed to record, but some people still do. And you know, especially when it's big, big conversations. But the whole point is that they're live and there's different structures. Like on Discord, it was so fascinating. I have this Discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together. Right. We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics.

Okay.

And so you're sitting there, not. So it's just voices. And you're able, with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other. First of all, like, as a dynamic.

System, like, you see icons just like mics, muted or not muted? Basically.

Yeah, well, so everyone's muted and they unmute and they start. It starts flashing.

Yeah.

And.

Oh, so you're like, okay, let me give precedence. Yeah. So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation, like a faculty meeting, and you sort of like kind of make some noises like while the other person's finishing. And so people realize, like, okay, this person wants to talk next. But now it's purely digital. You see a flashing, but in a.

Faculty meeting, which is very interesting. Like, even as we're talking now, there's A visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption.

Yeah.

When it's just darkness, you actually listen better and you don't interrupt. So, like, if you create a culture, there's. There's always going to be assholes, but they're. They're actually exceptions. Everybody adjusts. They kind of evolve to the. The beat of the room. Okay, that's one fascinating aspect. Okay, that's weird because it's different than, like a zoom call where there's video.

Yeah.

It's just audio.

You think video ads, but it actually.

Seems like it subtracts. The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy, it's feel. It's weird because with strangers, it. You. You connect, you know, in a much more real way. It's very. It's similar to podcasts.

Yeah. But with a lot of people.

With a lot of people and new people.

Huh.

And then you. And they. They bring. Okay, first of all, different voices, like low voices and, like, high voices. And. And it's. It's more difficult to judge. In Discord, you couldn't even see the people. It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face. In Clubhouse, it's your actual face, so you can tell, like, as an older person, younger person. In Discord, you couldn't. You just have to judge based on the voice. But there's a. There's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers that feels almost like a party with friends and friends of friends you haven't met yet, but you really like. Now, Clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage, and you can bring people up onto stage so only people on stage are talking. And you can have like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20, 30 people on stage. And then you can also have thousands of people just listening.

I see.

So there's a. I don't know. A lot of people are being surprised by this.

Why is it called a social network? It seems like it doesn't have. There's not social links. There's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention. It feels like a communication.

So the social network aspect is you follow people, and the people you follow. Now, this is like the first social network that's actually correct use of follow. I think you're more likely to see the rooms they're in. So there's a. Your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now.

Okay.

And the people you follow are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in. And so the final result is like, there's a list of really interesting rooms. Like, I have all these. I've been speaking Russian quite a bit. There's practicing, but also just like talking politics and philosophy in Russian. I've never done that before, but it allows me to connect with that community. And then there's a community of like, it's funny, but like, I'll go in a community of all African American people talking about race and I'll be welcomed.

Yeah.

I've never had, like, I've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race, like, with people from all over the place. It's like fascinating. And musicians, jazz musicians. I don't know, you could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture. I suppose Twitter and Facebook allow for that culture. But there's something about this network as it stands now, because no Android users. It's probably just because it's iPhone people.

Less conspiratorial or something.

Well, listen, I'm an Android person, so I got an iPhone just for this network. Which is funny, is for now, it's all like, there's very few trolls.

Yeah.

There's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on. So I don't know. It's. It's interesting. Now, the downside, the reason you're going to hate it is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people like you just every, like really successful, productive, very busy people. It's a huge time sink. It's very difficult to pull yourself out.

Interesting. You mean once you're in a room?

Well, no, Leaving the room is actually easy. The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people, there's a literal button that says leave quietly.

Okay.

So cultural, no etiquette wise, it's okay to just leave. So you and I in a room when it's just you and I, It's.

A little awkward to leave if you're asking questions and I'm just gone.

Yeah, but. And actually, if you're being interviewed for the book, that's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to. But usually the person interviewing would be like, okay, it's time for you to go. It's more normal. But the, the normal way to use the room, it's like you're just opening the app and there'll Be like, I don't know, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein. I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app, Bill Gates. I mean these people on stage just like randomly just plugged in. And then you step up on stage, listen, maybe you won't contribute at all. Maybe you'll say something funny.

Yeah.

And then you'll just leave.

Yeah.

And there's the, the addicting aspect to it. The reason it's a time sink is you don't want to leave. What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people.

Yeah.

That they love this, this the there I think might have to do with the pandemic.

It might be a little bit. Yeah.

There's a loneliness.

Yeah.

But also it's really cool people.

Yeah.

Like when was, when was the last time you talked to Sam Harris or whoever? Like think of anybody, Tyler Cope, like any, any faculty.

This is like what universities strive to create. But it's taken because you don't have cultural evolution to try to get a lot of interesting smart people together that run into each other.

We have really strong faculty in a room together with no scheduling. This is the power of it. It's like you just show up. There's none of that baggage of scheduling and so on. And there's no pressure to leave. Sorry, no pressure to stay. It's very easy for you to leave. You realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings and like faculty. There's like even stopping by, you know, before the pandemic. A friend or faculty or colleague and so on. You know, there's a weirdness about leaving.

Yeah.

But here there's not a weirdness about leaving. So they've discovered something interesting. But the final result when you observe it is it's very fulfilling. I think it's very beneficial, but it's very addicting. So you have to make sure you moderate.

Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, so maybe I'll try it. I mean, look, there's no. The things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here. So the feed is not full of user generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does. And you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company. I mean, it seems like it's more ephemeral. Right. You're here, you're talking. The feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening. You're not jockeying in the feed for, look, I'm being clever or something. And I'm going to get a, like, count that goes up and that's going to influence. And there's more friction. There's more cognitive friction, I guess, involved in listening. The smart people versus scrolling through. Yeah, there's something there.

So there's no.

Why are people. So I see a lot. There's all these articles that seem. I haven't really read them. But why are reporters negative about this competition?

The New York Times wrote this article called Unfettered Conversations happening on Clubhouse is.

So I'm right in picking up a tone, even from the headlines, that there's some, like, negative vibes from the press.

No. So I can say, say, well, I'll tell you what the article was saying, which is they're having cancelable conversations, like the biggest people in the world almost trolling the press.

Right.

And the press is desperate for chanting.

The press? Yeah, the press.

But by saying that, you just. You guys are looking for clickbait from our genuine human conversations. And so the. I think the. Honestly, the press is just like, what do we do with this? We can't. First of all, it's a lot of work for that. Okay. It's what Naval says, which is like, this is skipping the journalists. Like, the interview. You. If you go on Clubhouse, the interview you might do for the book would be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you.

Yeah, that.

That's more a traditional. Yeah, it'd be a good introduction for you to try it. But the, like, the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up and it's like, again, like, me. I'm sorry, like, blame. I can't. I keep mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know. But, like, a lot of these major faculty. I don't know, Max Tegmark, like, just. Just major faculty just sitting there. And then you show up and then I'll ask, like, oh, don't you have a book coming out or something? And then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee and go to that. So, like, that's the. It's not the journalistic. You're not going to actually enjoy the interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing.

Yeah.

Like, you're there for 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience.

Right. Like, I'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like Jason Freed and I are talking about email, but it's using some more There'll be like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually. But it's using some sort of traditional webinar. Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally. Like, I jump in, like Jason's there, and then someone else jumps in. And. Yeah, that's interesting.

But for now, it's still closed, so even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be quite famous people just sitting there listening to you. Yeah, but the numbers aren't exactly high. So you're talking about rooms. Like, even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand. Right.

And this is probably like SoHo in the 50s or something too, just because of the exponential growth. Give it seven more months, and if you let one invite begets two invites begets four invites begins, pretty soon it'll be everyone. And then the rooms in your feed are going to be whatever marketing performance enhancing drugs or something like that. Exactly. Yeah.

But then. And a bunch of competitors. There's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up Twitter spaces. So Twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse. Yeah, because they just have a much larger user base and they already have a social network. So I would be very cautious, of course, with the addictive element. But it doesn't. Just like you said, this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the, like, it doesn't have the context switching problem. Yeah, you'll just switch stochastic and you'll keep stuck.

Yeah, to keep a context is great. Yeah, yeah.

And. But then I think the best way I've found to use it is to acknowledge that these things pull you in.

Yeah.

So I've used it in the past, like almost, you know, I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation as if that's how I use podcasts. Sometimes I'll just like, play a little bit of a podcast and then, you know, I can just turn it off. The problem with these is it pulls you in. It's really interesting. And then the other problem that you'll experience is like, somebody will recognize you and then they'll be like, oh, Lex, come on up. Come on. No, hey, I had a question for you. And then it takes a lot for you to go, like, to ignore that.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah. And then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool, people. So it's like a source of a lot of joy. But it is. You have to be very, very, very careful. The reason I brought it up is we. There's A room, there's an entire club actually on burnout. And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins. As the process I go through, which is, you know, my passion goes up and down, it dips. And I don't think I trust my own mind to, to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not. I kind of go with the David Goggins model of. I mean, he's probably more applying it to running. But when it feels like your mind can't take any more, that you're just 40% at your capacity, I mean, it's just like arbitrary level. It's the Navy SEAL thing, right, The Navy SEAL thing. I mean, you could put that at any percent. But it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going. It's similar to this idea of a process. If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on, then ultimately if you look in aggregate, the passion will increase, your self satisfaction will increase.

And if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine so that what you hope for is off phase. Off phase alignment. Sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem, but off phase alignment's good. So, okay, my research, I'm struggling, but my book stuff is going well. And so when you add those two waves together, like, oh, we're doing pretty well. And then in other periods, like on my writing, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere. But I've had some good papers, I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that can counteract each other now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough. Then when everything, because everything for me is cyclical. Good periods, bad periods with all this stuff. So typically they don't coincide. So it helps compensate when they do coincide. You get really high highs, like where everything's clicking. And then you get these really low lows where your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher.

Is. Do you, do you think about the concept of burnout?

Because.

So I personally never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is like, it's not just the up and down. It's like you don't want to do anything ever again. Yeah, it, like it's, it's. For some people, it's like physical, like to the hospital kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah. So I Do worry about it. So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students or student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools. And I used to call it deep procrastination. But it's a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork. This is due. And the professor gives you an extension. And the professor gives you an incomplete and says we're going to fail the course. You have to hand this in. They can't do it right. It's a complete stop on the ability to actually do work. And so I used to counsel students who had that issue and often it was a combination of. This is my best analysis is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties of. They're usually under a very hard load. They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just really pushing themselves. And the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic. So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board. So a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be. Their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in. They're everyone's hope that they were going there and that they're in three majors. They don't want to let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever. So your motivation's not in the right place. The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum. And you have hardship and you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I would always be very worried about that. So I think about that a lot. I do a lot of multiphase or multiscale seasonality. So I'll go hard on something for a while and then for a few weeks go easy. I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easy or I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales and in the day I'll go really hard on something but then have a hard cut off at 5. So every scale it's all about rest and recovery because I really want to avoid that. And I do burn out. I burnt out pretty recently. I get minor burnt outs. I got a couple papers that I was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago and I wasn't sleeping well and there's some other things going on and it knocks out and I get sick usually is how I know I've pushed myself too far and so I kind of pulled it back. Now I'm Doing this book launch. Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So seasonality for rest and recovery, I think is crucial at every scale. Daily, monthly, and then at the annual scale. An easy summer, for example, I think is a great idea, if that's possible.

Okay. You just made me realize that that's exactly what I do, because I. I feel like I'm not even close to burnout or anything. Even though I. I'm in chaos. Yeah. I feel the right exact ways of seasonality is the.

Not.

Not even the seasonality, but like, you always have multiple seasons operating. It's like you said, like, because when you have a lot of cool shit going on.

Yeah.

You. There's always at least one thing that's a source of joy. That there's always a reason. I suppose the fundamental thing. And I've known people that suffer from depression, too. The fundamental problem with, like, the experience of depression and burnout is, like, why do. Like, life is meaningless.

Yeah.

And I always have an answer of, like, why. Why Today could be cool.

Yeah.

And.

Yeah. And you have to contrive it, right? If you don't have it, you have to contrive it. Yeah. I think it's really important, like, okay, well, this is going bad, so now is the time to start thinking about. I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic. It's like, this is going pretty bad. But you know what? This could be something really interesting.

Deep Questions with Kyle Newport.

I do it all in that voice.

I love the podcast, by the way, but, yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said the key to life is to be unbearable. I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially generate anything. Like, find something in your environment, in your surroundings that's a source of joy. Like, everything is fun.

Yeah. Did you read the Pale King? It goes deep on boredom. It means it's, like, uncomfortable. It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. Like, the characters in that are just driven to the extremes of. I just bought three books on boredom the other day, so now I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week, so I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for. I might do it as an article first, but as a book. Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about because I was worried about, like, I don't know, is the launch going to work? The pandemic? What's going to happen? I don't know. If it's going to get that. So I. This is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning a whole sort of intellectual exploration.

Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas in Deep Work that you don't expand on too much is boredom.

Yeah, well, so Deep work had a superficial idea about boredom. I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom. And a very functionalist idea was basically, you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli. And once it forms that connection, it's never going to tolerate deep work. So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours. It's just not going to tolerate it. But more recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive, right? Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst. They serve a really important purpose for our species, right? Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason. Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured. Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive. So what's boredom? Why is that uncomfortable? And I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action, like as a species. I mean, think about it like what. What got us to actually take advantage of these brains? What got us to actually work with fire? What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action. So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it. Just like we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger. And it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions and then that causes. It's like a cognitive action, obesity type things because it short circuits this system that wants us to do things, but we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do. And then we're really frustrated we can't do them.

And.

And we're short circuiting all of our wires. So it all comes back to this question. Well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch how much work I do and what I work on to be as in touch with that as Paleo. People are trying to get their diets in touch with that. And so now I'm just, well, see, this is something I made up.

Yeah.

But now I'm going deep on it. And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about on the show and I was like, well, I kept trying to learn about animals and boredom and she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom. So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high so I can get through the wave that's low of like I don't know about this pandemic book launch. And you know, and my research, my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed nice, you know, high. So there we go. There's a case study.

Well, it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because I didn't even realize that it's so simple. I'm one of the people that has interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger. Trying to understand the hunger with myself. Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food. I don't know. But there's probably a perfect. That's a nice way to think about diet as action. There's probably an optimal diet response to the experience that our body's telling us, the signal that our body's sending, which is hunger. And in that same way boredom is sending a signal. And most of our intellectual activities in this world, our creative activities, are essentially a response to that signal.

Yeah. And think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits.

Yes.

Right. It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper palatably and it doesn't end up well. Now think about modern attention engineered digitally mediated entertainment. We have this boredom instinct. Oh, we can take care of that with a hyper palatable alternative. Is that going to lead to a similar problem?

So I've been fasting a lot lately. Like I'm doing eating once a day. I've been doing that for over a month, just eating one meal a day and primarily meat. But it's very. Fasting has been incredible for me for Focus for well being, for feel. I don't, I don't know, just for feeling good. Okay. We'll put on a chart what makes me feel good. And that fasting and eating primarily a meat based diet makes me feel really good. And so. But that ultimately what fasting did. I haven't fasted super long yet. Like a seven day diet, which I really like to do. But even just fasting for a day, for 24 hours gets you in touch with your, with the signal. It's fascinating. Like you get to listen to your, learn to listen to your body that like, you know, it's okay to be hungry. It's like a little signal that sends you stuff. And then, and then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body. Like, and I get to like, okay, cool. So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal. Like it sounds ridiculous. Okay.

No, you could do that with different types of food. It feels different. So you learn about what your body. Yeah.

For some reason fasting, it's similar to the deep work embrace boredom. Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal that I could say I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit. Okay. I love apples and cherries. Like I don't know how to moderate them. So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know calories matter. But they say calories. 2,000 calories of cherries versus 2,000 calories of steak. If I eat 2,000 calories of steak, maybe with just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower, I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy.

Yeah.

If I eat cherries, I'm going to be, I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked and.

Like it's just all around.

Yeah. With everything and just like bloated, just not. And unhappy. And also the, the mood swings up and down. I don't know. And I'll be much hungrier the next day. Sometimes it takes a couple days, but when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs. I. It starts, it's just unhealthy. It's a. I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the Amazon or something like that.

Yeah.

And so fasting was the mechanism of. For me to start listening to the body. I wonder if you can do that same kind of. I guess that's what meditation a little.

Bit is a little bit. But yeah, listen to Boredom. But so two years ago I had a book out called Digital Minimalism. And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30 day fast. But from digital, personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom. And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like, I just want to teach your body not to need the distraction or this or that. But it really wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom. Like, okay, I can't just dispel it. I can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say, what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table and sort of ask, what is this? What am I craving? Like, what's the activity equivalent of 2,000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side? And I had 1700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this. And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what is this really pushing me towards. And it was pushing people towards connection. It was pushing people towards, I just want to go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities, like, I want to go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom. But then it completely rewired how they thought about what do I want to do with my time outside of work. And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right? You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like. But that's basically listening to boredom experiment. Just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have the digital cheez, its okay, so if I can't do that, words are going to drive me. Well, I guess I kind of want to go to the library, which came up a lot, by the way. A lot of people rediscovered the library with physical books. Physical books. You can just go borrow them and there's low pressure and you can explore and you bring them home and then you read them and you can sit by the window and read them. And it's nice weather outside. And I used to do that 20 years ago. They're listening to boredom.

So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days. If you were to recommend that process, what is ultimately the goal?

Yeah, digital minimalism. That's my philosophy for all this tech. And it's working backwards from what's important. So it's. You figure out what you're actually all about, like what you want to do, what you want to spend your time doing, and then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech could amplify or support some of these things? And that's how you decide what tech to use. And so the process is, let's actually get away from everything, let's be bored for a while. Let's really spend a month really figuring out what do I actually want to do, what do I want to spend my time doing, what's important to me, what makes me feel good. And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things. That was the goal. That turns out to be much more successful than when people take an abstention only approach. So if you come out your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much, like, I don't like how much I'm on Instagram, that's a bad thing. I want to reduce this bad thing. So here's my new thing. I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram, much less likely to succeed in the long term. So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative. Because in the moment you're like, yeah, but it's not that bad. And it would be kind of interesting to look at it now when you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards, it's very powerful for people. Like, I want my life to be like this. Here's the role that tech plays in that life. The connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong. And then much, much easier to say, yeah, using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life. And I really want to have that life. So of course I'm not going to use Instagram. So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on.

So if you quit social media for 30 days, you kind of have to do the work.

You have to do the work of.

Thinking, like, what am I actually, what makes me happy in terms of these tools that I've previously used? And when you try to integrate them back, how can they integrate them to maximize the thing they actually.

Yeah. Or what makes me happy unrelated to technology. Like, what do I actually. What do I want my life to be like? Well, maybe what I want to do is be outside in nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity. Like I'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset. Like, you create this picture and then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I keep up with my cycling group. But Twitter is just toxic. It's not helping any of these things. And, well, I'm an artist, so I kind of need Instagram to get inspiration. But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone, it's just on my computer and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week. You really can start to point. It was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment, the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't was to people who did the experimentation and the reflection, like, let me try to figure out what's positive. They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much, so I'm just going to white knuckle it. Just 30 days will be good for me. I just gotta get away from it or something. It doesn't last.

So you don't use social media currently?

Yeah.

Do you find that a lot of people going through this process will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media? Primarily about half.

Right. So about half when they went through this exercise. And these aren't quantified numbers. This is just. They sent me reports and.

Yeah, that's pretty good though. 1700.

Yeah. So roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether. Once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about social media is not the tools that's really helping. The other half kept some. There were some things in their life or some social media was useful. But the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it. So for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone.

Oh, interesting.

You can't optimize if you don't know what it is, the function you're trying to optimize. So it's like this huge hack. Once you know, this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter and suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio and it goes way from the company's advantage and then way over towards your advantage.

It's kind of fascinating because I've been torn with social media, but I did this kind of process. I haven't actually done it for 30 days, which I probably should. I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking what kind of approach to Twitter works for me. I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day. And at that time, checking from the previous post, it like, it makes me feel. Even when there's like negative comments, they go right past me. And when there's positive comments, makes me smile. I feel like love and connection with people, especially people I know. But even just in general, it's like, makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people. Okay. When you increase that from checking from 2 to like, I don't know what the threshold is for me, but probably like five or six per day, it starts going to anxiety world, like where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally and. And positive comments will feel more shallow.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's kind of fascinating. So I. I've. I've been trying to. There's been long stretches of time, I think December and January, where I did just post and check, post and check. That was. That makes me really happy. Most of 2020, I did that. It made me really happy. Recently I started like, I'll go, you know, you go right back in. Like a drug addict. Well, you check it. Like, I don't know what that number is, but that number is high, not good.

You don't come out happy. No one comes out of a day full of Twitter celebrating humanity.

And it's not even. Because I'm very fortunate to have a lot of just the positivity in my. The Twitter. But there's just a general anxiety. I wouldn't even say. I wouldn't even say it's. It's probably the thing that you're talking about with the context switching. It's almost like an exhaustion. I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling. It's almost just an exhaustion to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my life, just exhausted.

Like an existential exhaustion.

Existential exhaustion. But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use from the people you've Seen from yourself to use social media in the way I'm describing moderation, or is it always going to become.

When people do this exercise, you get lots of configurations. So for people that have a public presence, for example, what you're doing is not that unusual. Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it, and that's kind of it. But you've thought through like, okay, this supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness. Okay, then you can say, if that's my goal, what's the right way to do it? Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day. Maybe what I do is every day at 5, I do my post and check on the day. So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the stoics a lot, and he has this similar strategy. He posts one quote every day, usually from a famous stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure. And that's just what he does. He just post it. And it's a very positive thing. Like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration. He doesn't spend time. He's never interacting with anyone on social media. Right. But that's an example of. I figured out what's important to me, what's the best way to use tools to amplify it. And then you get advantages out of the tools. So I like what you're doing. I looked up your Twitter feed before I came over here. I was curious. You're not on there a lot.

No.

I don't see you yelling at people now. Do you think social media as a medium change the cultural standards? And I mean it in a. Have you read Neil Postman at all? Have you read, like Amusing Ourselves to Death? He was a social critic, technology critic, and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism. So the ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia, but the ways that the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves. And that book is all about how different communication medium fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates. And so he sort of gets into what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it. And this was all pre social media. But this is one of these ideas I'm having is like, what's the degree to which I Get into it. Sometimes on my show I get into it a little bit. The degree to which Twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what for example, debate and discussion was like. It introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. And it's like it's a complete. There's different places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently, right?

Well, yeah, absolutely. But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think that there's the technological solutions, like there's literally different features in Twitter that could completely reverse that. There's so much power in the different choices.

Yeah.

That are made and it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects. Perhaps more negative or hopefully more positive.

Yeah, I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two ways social media, let's say, could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today. One could be a little bit more economic. Right. So the Internet made it cheaper to get news. The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive. But once you're in a paywall model then, then what you really want to do is make your tribe, which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you. So you want to work to them. But then there's the sort of the determinist point of view, which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary. Jack and Evan, just whatever, let's just do it this way. Influenced the very way that people now understand and think about the world.

So the one influenced the other. I think they kind of started adjusting together. I did this thing, I mean, I'm trying to understand this part of the. Part of the. I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea. That's a very particular dream I've had of a startup that this is a longer term thing that has to do with artificial intelligence. But more and more it seems like there's some trajectory through creating social media type of technologies. Very different than what people are thinking I'm doing. But it's a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done. But it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make an exceptionally engaging platform like Clubhouse is very engaging and not have any of the negative effects. For example, there's chrome extensions that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes and all of that from Twitter. So all you're seeing is just the content.

Yeah.

On Twitter that to me is creates that's not a compelling experience at all. Because I still need. I would argue I still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading.

Yeah.

Because I don't only have a limited amount of time, so I need to know what's valuable. It's like Yelp reviews on tweets or something.

Yeah, exactly.

But I've turned off on, for example, on my account on YouTube, I've turned. I wrote a Chrome extension that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views.

Yeah.

I don't know how many.