hi its Jill Schlesinger and on this episode of Jill on money we are going to
find the key to living well in a high-tech world the answer may surprise
you you have all these things on your phone
they're all collaborate for your attention you have some explanation for
each here's the reason why I downloaded that or here's what I could do with this
but the overall negative cost of having your attention constantly be pulled out
constantly be manipulated it's far outweigh the sum of all those little
benefits they bring you welcome to the Jill on Money podcast I
am Jill Schlesinger and I have such a great treat today because I've been a
fangirl of this guest for a while his name is Cal Newport I kind of fell in
love with him when he wrote a book called deep work his newest book is
called digital minimalism choosing a focused life in a noisy world when we
are through with this interview I want you to reassess how you are using social
media and all of your communication tools it will blow your mind
so here's our interview with Cal Newport you're listening to Jill on money with
Jill Schlesinger ok this is so exciting for me I'm a little bit of a fangirl Cal
Newport live in the studio welcome to the program of course thanks for having
me so we start the show with a very specific question and that is what is
the best financial or career decision you've ever made oh that's interesting
well probably the best career decision was all the way back as an undergrad
computer science major and was trying to figure out do I want to go into industry
so I had a job offer from Microsoft so stock and good salary or do I want to go
to grad school mm-hmm very little salary no stock options but the a idea I had
was if I go to grad school I will have enough flexibility that I can keep
writing books while continuing that can do my computer science education that's
interesting because there was also a certain amount of you could sort of have
a nice steady stream of income if you kind
made it through and got on a tenure-track but also indulge your
creative side and be really have excitement around that and and find your
passion that's awesome yeah it worked out well and also it gives you this
balance so if let's say the academic life is grinding you down you can take
some refuge in the writing and then if you go through a stage when the writing
is grinding you down you can take some refuge in the academic and I could
bounce back and forth and sort of self modulate it that's great it worked I
first became familiar with you when you wrote a book called deep work and it
kind of blew my mind so can you just outline a little bit of the thesis of
deep work and then maybe we can talk about how that may have led to your
current new book digital minimalism well they're definitely connected so deep
work in substance was talking about some of the unexpected consequences of
technology in the workplace and the argument it was making is that we are
undervalue heed focus so we're under valuing what you get a sustained
concentration and we were over valuing convenience of let's say flexible
communication or accessibility and so the argument was if you're an individual
or organization that cultivates the ability to focus intensely during work
you would have this huge competitive advantage because almost no one else was
doing it when you started writing that what year
was that about probably 2014 is what I started to get serious at the research
for that so already we had the iPhone out for seven years we have lots of
different interruptions but the focus part of that we've always been
interrupted by different things in our lives I mean email or the phone way back
when so what is it that you prescribed in deep work that you have found has has
really yielded great upside for people who need to focus well even the
vocabulary was a big deal for a lot of people the shallow work which is the
emails and the meetings and the putting together the PowerPoint slides is
different that the deep work which is the sustained concentration and that
when you make the claim that it's the deep work that actually moves to needle
that's what actually is going to push you ahead in your career or gonna raise
the profit of the company while the shallow work is just what keeps the
lights on it's the logistical work that keeps
things going and noting that those are two different things so it's not just
enough to say I'm busy or that I I work really hard I listed the office all day
that you actually have to start thinking what
type of work I'm doing just adding those terms to the efforts that people did in
the office I think really helps people rethink okay what am I actually doing
here frenzy is not enough you know the actual type of activity matters and
focus is producing the value and what's interesting I just interviewed Daniel
pink who wrote a book called when and he talks about doing deep work at specific
periods in the day which may be different for every individual did you
find that also it is different but what they shared Kabat is a commitment to
having actual systems for how they schedule it add rituals surrounding the
actual deep work because it's actually really difficult it's a big ask of the
human braid to say I were to give sustained attention especially if
something that's abstract or symbolic like this is this is a big ask it's not
something that you're gonna feel like you're in the mood to do it's not
something that you easily slip into so serious deep workers have these
scheduling philosophies this is what I do my deep work could be different
between what you do or I do but it's clear and then they have these rituals
that surround that okay how do I coerce my braids it's you actually enter this
mode of sustained concentration on something abstract so that is really
common and what do you do to drown out everything else so you don't put your
email on you turn off your phone what else
yeah well it's key of the definition of deep work that et distracted me just a
longer deep work so even the quick glance is only every 15 minutes still
doesn't count if you're looking at it box at all if you're glassy-eyed a phone
at all it doesn't count so that's the hard and fast rule we have for deep work
is that it has to have zero distractions your ticket needs to be on the one thing
only that one thing you get in your sustained concentration because we have
a lot of research to shows what kills you in concentration is not multitasking
it's the contexts which eat so even if you just context switch for a minute to
look at an inbox you're gonna pay a cognitive price for a long time after
that and so we got the message maybe around 2010 or so that pure multitasking
doesn't work so if I'm on the phone and answered email while trying to write
something difficult I'm not doing any of them well the subtle issue though is
people now fake their signal Taski because they only have let's say
Microsoft Word open for the most part they're only working on that one hard
thing but they're doing these quick checks
every 10 or 15 minutes right so if I check my phone yeah while I'm writing my
manuscript I am really losing ground in that endeavor of deep work after you put
the phone away you continue to lose ground so long well at least 10 to 15
minutes Wow yeah and most I would say most knowledge workers go less than to
the 15 minutes in between quick checks and so they think they're single tasking
because literally speaking they're not doing these things at the same time
except for in those quick moments that they're checking but the attention
residue cost which is the term that comes out of the psychology literature
the attention residue when you come back to the primary task last for a while it
reduces your cognitive output and so that's why deep workers are so adamant
that there can't be a single glance and if you glance the whole session no
longer counts as deep or what yeah the whole thing the whole thing not even
like that first half-hour where you blew it know if you've blast the last
half-hour does it count okay so let's use me as an example why not I wake up
very early so I have to check my email because I'm in news right so I have to
make sure nobody needs me to come on set or do anything I do that very quickly
and then should I put an auto-reply on my email at that point and basically say
I will not be checking email for the next two hours or something or develop a
ritual that the people who need to reach you know I mean something's very calm is
you have some sort of emergency procedure so here's my vote here's my
phone number the people you work with know if there's something breaking you
could call this phone or said to Texas right otherwise this is my writing time
and then I'll be back on it and whatever write expectations are set people adjust
pretty clearly it turns out of the workplace that predictability is more
important than accessibility and we often get that wrong what people need to
know is I know how a twit I could reach you and how that system works is more
important than actually having 24 access to you interesting
and if there's some emergency someone has your number they'll call you yeah
maybe you put a little bit of friction in you're surprised by how rarely that
actually happens there are some people who have said to me but my boss really
expects me to check in during vacation how do I get out of that trap right but
I mean a lot of that is offered the predictability versus accessibility
dynamic if it's unclear when I can reach you it would I
can't that I just need to be able to reach you right because I can't deal
with this idea that I might need you and I have no idea how to get in touch with
you and so let's just default to answer my emails yeah but if it's clear okay
here's how it works I definitely reachable there's certain periods what
I'm not want to do this type of work what about vacation this is my point of
contact these are the rules of engagement for getting back in touch
with me that's hype of clarity almost always satisfies do you think that I'm
the autoresponder actually works or doesn't work I think it could be useful
because it does give information about accessibility I think in general what I
call communication rules are useful which is having clarity so for example I
don't have an autoresponder as an author but I have a pretty clear set of
communication rules on my website here's four different addresses they each have
different purposes so use this address for this that address for this here are
the expectations about whether or not you should expect to hear for me or
whether or not I'll read it and so it's clarity mm-hmm and you would worry and a
lot of writers for example it might worry well that's going to upset my
readers but they don't see if that upset actually what's more upsetting the
readers is if you don't have that clarity see I don't know I see at email
address and so I respond I had an expectation an implicit expectation that
you were going to respond that you did it if you instead say here's my address
I love to get XYZ but I probably won't respond people are ok I got it I didn't
expect a response and so I'm not unhappy and then when you do respond when you
see a good lead or something people are way more happy than they want to get for
grant that is great so this work deep work was really popular and what year
was that published 2016 16 and here you are already with another new book at and
so basically you've lapped me six times isn't this your six books or smoke yeah
I just had my first book out today on the day of this interview and you now
have lapped me six times and you are a lot younger than I am so what do I have
to show for myself not a lot I guess I see what you start keep working though
back there next year all right there you go talk about what led you to digital
minimalism choosing a focused life so there's your favorite word focus in a
noisy world the readers of deep work were actually a big part of the initial
push into this topic so I was out there on the road
was talking about it this is a book about the workplace deep work was about
to workplace and readers would come up to me they'd say okay maybe I buy this
premise about what's going on in the workplace but the real issue I need the
one that's literally keeping me up at night is the impact of new technologies
of my personal life mm-hmm and there's something really interesting going out
there but also really different than what's happening in the workplace the
workplace we're talking about expectations with bosses we're talking
about email we're talking about slack what what's happening to people's
personal lives was actually much different and I had been noticing
because I've written about these topics for a while but I'd been notice heat
around that type 2016 early 2017 that there had been a shift in the way that
people seem to be talking about this mmm this shift from the self deprecation
like about my photo all the time isn't it crazy into actual unease where people
were starting to get fed up people were actually looking for changes they this
is not healthy this is not sustainable what's happened in my personal life this
message was so strong I was receiving it so strongly I felt like I had no option
but to actually leave the world the business and dive into this particular
topic what's happening in our personal lives with technology and you were able
to go out to your fan base and say who wants to help me with this project
basically yeah talk about that experiment and what it yielded well so
what are the things that became clear when I was working on the book is that
if you're gonna transition your digital personal life to something more
sustainable small tips small changes this wasn't going to get it done
something more wholesale had to happen I worked out a process a 30-day process
that I thought could affect this rapid transformation but I wanted to kick the
tires on it so I put out a note to my readers just on my email list saying hey
is anyone willing to come along with me and do a 30-day experiment you're gonna
have to step away from all the technology of personal life it's not
going to be easy and then send me reports about it I thought that maybe 20
or so people would agree and it's a big ask and then over 1,600 people is it
upside you know that is like that is a cry for help right there isn't it like
not only do I want to do this but I really need you to help me yeah and it's
interesting that you said it around your personal life cuz you make a distinction
that part of this look there you have the deep work and some of the rules and
the consistency around work life which I get everybody has different
expectations if you work at some big law firm yeah and the client wants you tough
luck don't be a lawyer in in this day and age if you don't want to be notified
at late in the day right yeah but for your personal life that's where you were
seeing having these feelings that came out that were I think that people
understood like I'm sort of not like maybe I don't I'm not addicted maybe I
am addicted but I have a tendency and urge something is drawing me back to
this device and and I can't escape it can you just talk a little bit about the
two issues especially around social media that draw you in
yeah well it's substance two companies went too far and that's part of what was
creating this trend where people were going from self deprecation to ease is
they got so good at getting you to look back at the phone because again that's
directly the activity that generates revenue for the company you going back
to the phone using it giving data and allowing your data to be used at Target
advertisement at you that's the business model they got real serious about this
business model around the time they started to think how are we going to
make this IPO success so Facebook in particular innovated a lot of what's
bringing us to the phone with the IPO was coming up they were thinking we have
to get the revenue up they get revenue up we have to get user engagement
minutes up they get user engagement minutes up we have to completely
re-engineer the experience of social media and we have to take it away from
what is used to be which is primarily you have a profile other people maintain
a profile you check in on your friends profiles they subtype check-in on years
and they reengineering it to this experience where you're getting the
steady stream of rewards coming at you through the app like likes we think like
is fundamental to social media it's not that's a feature that's much more
serving the interest of the companies that it is the users photo auto tagging
the the quick comets that you could leave the hearts on Instagram this
changed the experience of social media in the one where you have cost it
rewards social approval indicators about you commuted which really led to this
new relationship people had with their phones which is this constant companion
I'm always clicking which is different than it was before I love the you said
that the tech companies encourage behavioral addiction intermittent
positive reinforcement that's the hearts that's the likes which you think should
just be banned like everyone should stop doing that immediately
it's not a feature that was added because it made the user experience
better those features they were added because it quadrupled user engagement
minutes that's incredible and the drive for social approval because we are
social animals right and we do want that where is it that you see in the the the
iteration of where we are today in social media where you start to see the
approval part of that well so the big shift was instead of the static
experience where maybe I read what's going on in your life or maybe someone
reads about what's going on in my life they had to figure out how we give
indications that people are paying attention to you and so if I see theirs
likes that literally means someone liked something I was doing so if I tell you
like here's an envelope and in this envelope is something that someone was
thinking about you human nature makes it almost impossible
enough to open that envelope or as I say hey if this envelope there's something
interesting or funny oh that's nice maybe I'll get to that but if I tell you
no no someone said something about you I wrote it down it's it that envelope
you're gonna have to open it and so the social media platforms figured out
pretty quickly we have to find these indicators of social approval we have to
make the stream of social approval indicators as rich as possible because
that's human psychology 101 it might be nice to see what my friend is up to but
I have to see what people are thinking about me oh my god that is what got me
off of social media right there by the way the count's know what people are
like or dislike because so in my case you know on Twitter or not so much on
Facebook but more like on Twitter which is a cesspool I had to be on for work
like you're in journalism which i think is baloney I think this is all set
baloney to the nth degree like I know tons of journals you're like oh no you
have to be on Twitter like yeah if you're a producer and you're looking for
people to be in stories yes but for someone like me I don't have to be there
and I was really not into the nastiness I wasn't really not into I really didn't
like the anti-semitism oddly enough it wasn't great I don't have a thick enough
skin I guess but I really said I need to stop this so mark the executive producer
extraordinaire kind of runs my social accounts and he'll tell me if something
I need to respond to or he'll forward something to me that is important yes
and he'll to me you know this person's looking for
you they want a speaking engagement or I think your uncle's looking for you on
Facebook you know I I am so much happier with Mark being my filter because it
just hurt my feelings so much yeah which by the way is the way I think news
organization should run is there should be people who engage or monitor what's
going on social media on behalf of the journalists as opposed to this model
that the journalists themselves should be constantly engaged in the social
media that also distracts you and fragments your attention it makes it
very difficult to write the scripts or think through the story and so I'm with
you all right so now I want to talk about the principles of digital
minimalism starting with one of my favorite things which is you quantify it
and you say clutter is costly yeah and explain that right well I mean if we
take a step back what is minimalism asking you to do what it's asking you to
do essentially is wipe the slate clean of all of this haphazard junk that
you've added into your personal digital life for arbitrary reasons ypically get
rid of it all and they carefully rebuild it from scratch except for when you
rebuild it from scratch you just put in the big ROI the big wins big ROI options
right okay selective intentional use of technology
right now you're choosing very specifically this is going to help
something I really value this is going to help something I really value this
doesn't so I'm going to ignore it right that's classic minimalism now the
question is why does that work because it does mean that you have to miss out
on things that could bring you some small value or convenience very focus
you know just the big wigs you're ignoring the small winds so why do you
end up net-net better off well one of the reasons is this first principle is
that the clutter itself has a big negative cost and so we're used to this
in the physical clutter space that if I'm a hoarder that's oh my house is
overflowing with all this junk it's true that if you point to any one thing in my
house I could give you some reason why I might need that newspaper from 1985
right whatever that was a good year I might want to remember it but obviously
the overall negative cost of having my house be so over cluttered far outweighs
even the sum of all those small pieces of value well it's the same thing in
your digital life you have all these things on your phone they're all
collaborate for your attention you have some explanations for each here's the
reason why I downloaded that or here's what I could do with this but the
overall negative cost of having your tit should
constantly be pulled out constantly being manipulated could far outweigh the
sum of all those little benefits they bring you so the first thing I did after
I read the book was I deleted all social media from my phone and I'm like okay
not missing it at all okay and the other thing that happened it was weird I think
this was before I read your book but I was sitting in a bar in New York totally
enjoying a beautiful bourbon and I'm looking at my phone and I thought to
myself you know 15 years ago I'd be sitting at this bar and talking to the
person next to me yeah right and I put my phone away and I turned the guy next
to me and I'm like so where are you from and it was so much more of an
interesting experience and I'm look I'm an extrovert anyway so I like talking to
people I like face to face conversation it was so much a richer experience and I
know that sometimes we are when you see everyone else on their phones you want
to go on your phone but it was so much better to talk yeah well I mean that's
what are the specific examples I give in the book is the way tea did the
restaurant or the bar for someone you're gonna meet and just be there and how
interesting that actually is and I've had multiple people actually come up and
say the same thing that you're saying even last night I was talking to someone
a reader who was telling me that exact story how much she now enjoys that
period at the restaurant before her friends arrive it's actually really
interesting I mean you know we drown a bar you could talk to the bartender
there's eight recede people they were just watching what's going on it's like
a drama unfolding I mean you're just a load with your thoughts but also
encountering the world that's what our braid sort of expects to do our braid is
not evolve or the mid yeah text on a glowing screed that's that's this
rapidly that's also like emotionally engaging and about you that's
short-circuiting the brain and what about if you are if you find yourself
really it's like incapable you know I have a lot of friends who are corporate
people and they say like well look it's the expectation is that I have to check
my phone all the time and then once I check for work I'm now then dragged into
this other world how how can we help those folks yeah you have to try to
break those bridges where you can't I mean one of the things that's very
common about almost 80 digital minimalist tech setup is that their
phones are incredibly simplistic they have very few things on their phone
they would never for example even if they had a need for social media some
specific thing for work or this or that they would never have it on their phone
because they don't want that portal that always odd cost a companion model
digital minimalist are very old-school in the ways that if they need to use
Instagram or something like this it's on their desktop at home and they do it
just occasionally you know so they dub down their phones a lot so that you
broke of these bridges so I have to go out there the check if I have an email
for my law firm cannot easily then change into and so as long as I'm here I
better see what the latest baseball trade rumors are and okay now I really
this guy really has it wrong so I have to really let him know yeah it's
completely undervalued Bryce Harper then you go off it now you're down that
rabbit rabbit ocean you gotta fill in the rabbit holes basically and the
foetus where most of them live so once you realize that you have the clutter is
costly you say that optimization is important that is principle number two
of digital minimalism can you explain that right so what middle lists do is
after they make these intentional selections this is the tech I'm going to
use my personal life here's the big win I want to get out of it they don't stop
at the binary question of what they also ask how and win and this is where they
really start to get the big wid so they want to say well how am I going to use
this technology and what am I going to use this technology and so this is where
you get these setups like I was just saying where what's not on their phone
maybe it's just on their desktop and maybe they very severely curate their
experience and they have schedules around it and so an example I give in
the book is that I work with a lot of visual artists who told me okay it's to
grab passes this test of this is important for something I really value
because if you're a visual artist you need to have a constant stream of
creative input that's the grist right into the mill of creative output and
Instagram is a great place for that because a lot of artists post images of
their work and so the minimalist to go through this process who are artists to
say okay so I do need Instagram where they do the how in the wind question
they completely re-engineer their experience with Instagram and so for
example they'll often curate who they follow down to maybe let's say 10
artists they'll take it off the phone they'll put it on the desktop they'll
have a schedule which is like this is what I do Sunday more need I spend 20
minutes to see what's been posted by these artists over the past week they're
getting 99% of the deep you out of the service and out there
avoided 99% of the cost so that's the optimization piece of being a minimalist
it really does help push you in the big win category what drew you to the Amish
I found that to be rather curious and really illuminating well the Amish
highlight the third I would say principle about digital middle is why it
works which is this notion that intentionality itself can be so valuable
that it swaps out the inconveniences of being selective and so the Amish take
this idea and they push it to a far extreme so they have this very clear
intention we misunderstand the Amish often we think fallaciously that they
froze their technology at some point the 18th century right it said okay it's
never going to be better we're not gonna do anything new it's you know 785 just
gonna say you know it's like 1801 done yeah like whatever they really like that
year like I can't imagine we're gonna get any better I just added all the case
I mean I learned a lot about the Amish through Kevin Kelly who spent a lot of
time with the Lake historama switch he was younger he writes about how you show
up at a Thomas village and that idea gets blown out of the water right away
he talks about showing up and an Amish boy goes by on rollerblades and there's
solar panels and generators and the disposable diapers of the kids so what's
really going on with the Amish it's not anti-technology they have this clear
intention which is for them community straight to community like that's the
whole ballgame and so every new technology that comes along they
evaluate it is it going to make our community stronger or is it going to
make it weaker and they'll test it they'll say okay here's a smart phone
will use it cell phones let's try it let's have someone try it out cars let's
buy a car let's see what happens where they watch what happens and if it
strengthens the community they say great if a week is if they say no go right and
so this is why you could have a diesel generator or disposable diapers it does
it week at the community but if you have electricity connected to the grid well
now we're kind of too connected to the outside world or in a car is really a
problem because when they tried cars in the early 20th century people left they
go do other things and they weren't around Disney with neighbors they said
okay no cars now I'm not advocating that we should follow the same value system
of the Amish but the fact that the old Amish community still exists even though
they're surround the hi Western East Coast civilizations like
they don't know what's going on emphasizes this broader point which is
there could be so much a value would be intentional that it swaps out the
inconveniences because they have ed commedia says pushed to an extreme and
yet this order still survives in large part because there's such value out of
it attentional so what abut smaller scale
that's why digital minimalist could end up better off is yeah it's it convenient
sometimes not to have all these apps but the value you get out of beads so
intentional about your technology can be so satisfied that it swaps out all those
minor inconveniences and the thing that I thought was really cool is as you talk
about going on your 30-day digital purge is that you know obviously just don't
you're saying like don't go cold turkey and then bring it all back it's really
about thinking what have I missed and what am I going to replace this with
I have always been a physical book book person and even I mean I tried a Kindle
for five seconds and and even an iPad but I always like holding a physical
book and I think the reason I really like it is I feel like I am immersed in
it and that when there's technology that's underlying it then I can be
distracted quite easily what is it that people are bringing back into their
lives that they hadn't thought about in a while that will help them bridge the
gap between what they had and what they will have well at a logue leisure is a
big part of what people rediscover would they do this 30-day decluttering and by
the way I used to turbulent very specifically instead of detox because to
me it says mystery the way that the digital community has appropriated this
term detox it's a real perversion of the actual media of this term right it comes
out of the substance abuse community where a detox was you you break the sort
of addictive compulsion to use something as the first step towards building a new
life that doesn't have this in it anymore and yet in the digital community
we have this weird notion of a detox we're like okay here's the idea we take
a break they go back to what we were doing before which baffles people who
are used to this term from before and so I used to turbulent because it's not
about taking a break it's about completely changing so during this
30-day process where you're away from basically all of these technologies
before you rebuild your life analogue leisure is one of the big
things that people report back to be is that they rediscovered things as simple
as going to the library and getting a stack around the books like okay I now
get to go home and read these you know that and errata but I might like
something I might not others and it just kind of seems interesting that I have a
weekend afternoon here that's something we were all used to but we've lost
getting back into hobbies is a big thing for people and physical hobbies there
was there's something really interesting about that to me that there was
something about whether it's a gardening project or some sort of home-improvement
project that that was very satisfying well this is something I really
discovered working on this book is that there is a difference between even a
skilled digital activity at a skilled physical activity and a lot of it is the
way that our brains have evolved because we're a tool usage species is that what
our brain is set up to do it craves is manipulated the physical world at senior
attention manifested concretely that's what you use your hands and you you hit
the stowed right and you build the arrowhead and you could see that you've
built something new you had to detach it and you changed the physical world we
really need that and it's held recently we always had that because almost any
activity you did was going to be something in the physical world you're
making something you're building something you were repairing something
and so people find great pleasure when they get back to that they had forgotten
how much joy they used to got out of that and they were unaware of the degree
to which they had pushed almost any physical interaction with the world out
of their lives and replaced it with just an interaction with a digital stream
when you think about the the minimalism you also include you not only YouTube
but streaming media and I found that interesting cuz I was like hmm what why
is that because is that just because of the binging yeah actually my readers are
the ones who pushed that odd to me so what I did this original experiment I
had a list okay here's what I mean by technologies in your personal life and I
didn't have streaming media on it because I know the me it was kind of
confusing like is it TV or not TV I mean we have it come through our TV and it's
sort of maybe it's that the same as TV it's kind of the same thing and and left
three young kids we don't watch a lot of TV I mean we don't have a lot of free
time so did it really occur to me but the two push backs I got was you need to
add streaming media to it and it was because of the binge eat people were
using this as a way to not have to actually engage with the world or the
selves with their own thoughts and the video games my radar at all but a lot of
young Ned wrote it it said that has to be on this list so those are the two
things that I learned are having a big effect in people's lives I don't even
really realize about if you're not a bender should you still strip that away
yeah you don't have to be my original rules it's like if you're someone like
me like my wife and I might watch 30 minutes of TV at night or something like
that if we have time I didn't see that as being particularly troublesome but
people who were younger than me who had more down time let's say that we're
feeling it more streaming media they wanted the bad they pulled off though I
got a clever hack that I would say four or five different readers came up with
the same thing which is they had a rule about streaming media during this period
what is it they couldn't watch it but the rule was they could only watch it if
they're with someone else yeah I noticed that that there was like if I'm by
myself I'm sort of fall prey to that with
someone else and it's just a social I'm with someone else for watching to show
it social so I think that was a good compromise for a lot of people that's
excellent um what about the group of these young of these younger people who
are prone to having more anxiety and that the suicide rate is up and I'd
heard that but when I don't know why it just struck me as I read it in the way
you put it in context to me so awful and depressing and what can we do to
actually snap out of that horrible downward spiral well the good news is
there is a lot of pushback happening let me essentially what has happened with
that young generation Generation Z is that the data is starting to get so
stark that it's now crossing into public health crisis territory and now the
signal is beginning strongest and literatures become more robust is that
we are seeing a sharp rise and anxiety and excited related disorders as well as
the corresponding hospitalizations for self-harm and suicide attempts which is
what tells us this is not a self-report in effect a bug that generation and it's
a hockey stick graph if you're looking at your board and incidents of these
exciting exciting really disorders the corresponding hop to hospitalizations
it's like right at this point that it became standard for someone who was
young to have a smartphone it really rises
really really fast and I mean think about that like if you were 15 16 17
years old where you do have a natural anxiety about social intercourse you
have a real fear of missing out that it's like it preys on this almost
teenagehood in such a major way yeah if you're feeling like that and or you feel
like you're a parent and you're watching it what steps do you think that they
should be taking well so what I've here it is that there's there's a growing
unease above the young people themselves so they recognize this they recognize
this is a problem and they don't like it and what you really need in this
situation is you don't need a wholesale culture change of thus it's that okay
everyone has to stop using these things what I'm hearing and what I've heard
other people who really working on this issue closer than me Sade is we need
positive deviants which means if we can get two or three families it'll give it
school that don't let their kids have smartphones that will break the dam and
give the cover needed for lots more people not to do it and so I think the
schools need to get involved I think it is a public health issue but one of the
reasons I bring it up in the book is that it's also a canary in the coal mine
for those of us who are older right because this is a controlled experiment
you take the independent variable which is how much time do you spend looking at
a screed as opposed to interacting with the real world and you push it to an
extreme with that generation right because they push it to an extreme that
you and I would never get to where they essentially do all of their socializing
in their room all these green I know it's ridiculous like you see them at a
party like someone said to me oh it's like my kids bar mitzvah everybody was
on their phone not actually doing the party this was my teenage years was the
the the social navigation of are we cool enough to go to this party of trying to
read the room which is good trading but it's a great experiment like let's push
this independent variable to an extreme and see what happens and there were cede
extreme negative results so that's a that's a hit for the rest of us there
maybe not as isolated as a gin Z teenager but it might explain this sort
of background hub of anxiety that so many people feel is that we're just
getting a watered-down effect of this thing that we're seeing when we look at
the group that's pushing it to an extreme the key issue you write is that
using social media tends to take people away from the real world socialising
that's massively more valuable so this is the bar situation yeah what is it
that face-to-face communication delivers well our brain is primarily a social
processing computer and there's a ton of neuronal hardware that is optimized for
actually reading the Ritz Tremec use that you see if you're actually in a
physical analog conversation so it's looking at small changes in facial
structure it's looking at body language there's an effect called limbic
consonants where I'm actually going to start to try to match some of the
rhythms and intonation of your voice so that there's more of a connection there
these are huge parts of the brain that are working on how do I sit here with
another person and navigate this back and forth interaction I'm doing
something called mentalizing which means okay now I'm also simulating your braids
in my brain so that I can essentially run experiments on my braids as to how
will you react if I say this or that right that's also going on when you're
interacting with someone face to face so we have all of this hardware that's
optimized over evolution to handle something that's incredibly complicated
which is human interaction almost none of that hardware gets used when the
interaction is digital and on a screen if it's just text-based or even worse
just a icon like a like button you see an account go out from 6 or 7 or I say
happy birthday mm-hmm on your Facebook wall
none of that uses any of that machinery and so you might be telling yourself oh
I'm so social I said happy birthday to 23 people this week but as far as your
brain is concerned you haven't talked to anyone how does that play out in a
workplace where there are so many remote employees I mean you remember when
Marissa Mayer got like her ass kicked because she's like no more working
remote maybe she was on to something where people did need to be in the same
physical space not every single day but more often than not to be more
collaborative to be more collaborative but also to avoid real large problems
that were coming out of misunderstandings because when you're
just it'll say email or slack based communication you're not getting any of
these social cues voice intonation and body language and so we have a really
hard time try to extrapolate that from text and so what happens is when you're
almost all doing text based communication is there's all these
Poisson their standings mmm like well Jill I think is mad at me or you know
right because you don't know you're you don't know how to put toad it's a just
text it so people get resentments people get really upset there's sort of false
the visions that are happy digs get heated and this is all because we're not
made we're social creatures that don't know how to socialize through ASCII
characters we have to have the analog component and so there is a lot of
pushback on remote work II and I think this is part of it
sherry Turkle the MIT professor you mentioned the book she's reported that
even and odd remote workplaces this is a problem with young employees because
they're uncomfortable cuz it's very hard right it's very hard to do interaction
which is why we're supposed to spend our whole adolescence practicing it we're
supposed to be you know hate in the party and try to read the room but
having these conversations if you don't practice you're not very good at because
it's incredibly hard what we do what seems easy to us there's actually really
really hard and so if you spit your whole teenage years avoiding that
communicating through ASCII instead of analog even if you're in the office
they're very uncomfortable talking to their boss face to face I'm hoping that
your book and more of the research that comes out is really going to prompt
people to have these conversations although there was only one thing that I
really had I had a pain in my belly when you said it which is you know I walk my
dogs a ton so I'm out and I walk and it's great but I think you don't approve
of the fact that I listen to podcasts while I do that well about a thigh
podcast so you could f initely left a podcast but the key is to have sometimes
when you're not I know that's what I'm gonna do solitude yes hello with your
own thoughts you don't have to always be alone with your own thoughts Kristen
you're lonely bit Franklin wrote about this at his and went back and found it
in his journals right and he talked about solitude is crucial but if you do
too much of it you're gonna be very unhappy you can't do no solitude if
you're never a load with your own thoughts it's problematic on the other
hand if you're always a load with your own thoughts like it's solitary
confinement that's not so great either so so I give you dispensation I can cut
down a little bit I think that's okay okay Cal Newport before you leave when
we started I said your best financial or career decision you said was actually
going to grad school going into academia what was your worst uh probably the
amount of student loads I took out as an undergraduate mmm I don't really think
much about it no why would you yeah yeah unfortunately this worked out okay
there's more for anything I was able that I was able to pay those back but
but yeah I mean it was so casual everybody a stillness
now but I was so casual back that I know you're so worried about it right and and
anyone could get it and any kid could get it now any parent can get it you
know the fastest-growing segment of people who borrow for education are
those over the age of 60 interested does that blow your mind or
what I mean the numbers aren't as big it's just that the pace is insane
there's so much money to be made there if you're the yeah and also like there's
so much so many like broken hearts and terrible stories that people over 64
like yeah I wish I could retire man sorry yeah all right Khalid I want to
bring you down yeah no upset No I love your books I
think that you are fantastic it's a breath of fresh air and for for those of
us who are feeling the pain of that pull it is a perfect antidote so thank you so
much for coming on the program well thank you I did it thank you so much to
Cal Newport I hope this really is helpful for you it was incredibly
helpful for me remember we dropped new episodes of Jill
on money every Tuesday and Thursday and in between those days just hop on to the
website Jill on money.com and you can buy my new
book it's called the dumb things smart people do with their money thirteen ways
to write your financial wrongs our music is composed by Joel Goodman Mark Taylor
sue is the executive producer we're distributed by cadence thirteen see you
next week
you
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