This dialogue provides a sophisticated scientific excuse for our lack of self-discipline by framing modern boredom as a clinical pathology. It remains a perfect intellectual irony to watch a digital video explaining why digital consumption is destroying our focus.
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Am I *Actually* Addicted to My Phone? (w/ Anna Lembke)Ajouté :
It's become fashionable when thinking about our phones to joke around about being hooked on these devices. Oh man, I'm so addicted to my Insta, we say with a grin on our faces. But should we be taking this possibility more seriously?
What is the line between using our phones too much and suffering from an actual psychopathology?
And if we are addicted, what would it mean to treat it? Not just half-hearted tweaks here and there, but to actually try to find real freedom from this problematic behavior. Well, it's Monday, so that means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which seems like the perfect opportunity to dive deeper into this issue. Now, to help me, I'm bringing on a guest that I've long been trying to book, Dr. Anna Limkkey. Anna is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. In 2016, she published a book titled Drug Dealer MD about the opioid epidemic. But if her name sounds familiar, it's probably because of her 2021 bestseller, Dopamine Nation, which looks at how addiction functions in the brain and takes particular aim at the potential for digital devices to become addictive. Now, you may have seen Anna on her popular appearances on the Joe Rogan podcast, the Andrew Huberman podcast, and the Oprah podcast. You may have also seen her featured in the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma.
Now, I crossed paths with Anna recently because we both just recorded a masterclass course. So, if you like what you hear today, you should definitely check out her class, which is called Dopamine, Take Back Your Brain. Now, in this interview, Anna and I discuss how addiction works in our minds, how digital addictions compare to substance addictions, how to tell if you have a problem, and the best ways to get help if you do, including the recent rise in a technology related 12step program called ITA. We also talk about kids uh and why the problem with devices and young people is worse than we thought, as well as possibilities for making all of this better.
So, if you've ever worried about the role of uh your phone in your life or the lives of your kids or other people you care about, then you need to listen to this conversation. It's scary, but it's important.
As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
Well, Anna, it's a pleasure to uh have you here. I've read your work so long, it is almost a surreal experience to actually be talking to you in real time.
So, so thank you uh for joining us on the show today.
>> Well, thank you for having me and likewise, um I've been reading your work for many years now and I'm admire an admirer of your work. So, I'm honored to be here.
>> Uh so, here's one place I wanted to start. It's something I heard you say in an interview, I think about a year ago, and you summarized part of what you've been seeing in your work on addiction, especially uh in the clinical setting.
You've described it as a diffuse addiction to the internet that this has been what you've been encountering. Can you flesh out a little bit what you meant by that and what you've been seeing?
>> Sure. So, the fir the earliest signal was really the the early 2000s when we were seeing middle-aged men coming in um addicted to pornography and compulsive masturbation.
And many of them reported, you know, using pornography without a whole lot of problems through most of their adult lives. But with the advent of the internet and then especially uh the the mobile phone in 2007, smartphone in 2007, that's where they their lives became unmanageable. So that was that was the earliest signal. And then we saw um mostly teenage boys and video games coming in um you know having a lot of excessive video game use, up all night, up all day, not going to school, not taking care of their bodies.
And then the next signal some years later was young girls and social media.
And then we entered this period which I call diffuse internet addiction. Uh which is just people sort of all of it.
You know when they're not on social media, they're buying stuff online. When they're not buying stuff online, they're gambling or playing video games or both at the same time since those are now convergent ecosystems.
um or they're watching pornography or they're watching, you know, Netflix.
It's just it just all kind of mushed together. And indeed, you know, Pew Charitable Trust has done surveys on adolescent internet use and found that at this point about 50% of teenagers, US teenagers, report being continuously online. So, they're they're never not online. Um and I think, you know, I think that's that's where we're headed.
And and before we get into the details of what is unifying those digital examples, there's this other bigger question I'm always wondering about.
Maybe you can help me out here. Is that often when we look at this type of landscape, there's both like a mechanical explanation and then there's a cultural contextual explanation. So, you know, we have at the same time as everything you talked about there, the opioid addiction crisis that that sort of morphed into the fentinol addiction crisis and, you know, continues to this day, but certainly spiked, you know, 5 10 years ago, uh, at a really high point. Um, completely different mechanisms. And so then my question, what I'm trying to understand is to what degree are we dealing with some sort of common cultural cause that is making people susceptible for addictive behavior? And to what degree are we looking at? No, no, it's the me mechanisms that matter. It's the mechanisms of what was in those drugs that helped spur that uh opioid crisis.
And there's a mechanism and what's happening on those phones that's spurring the digital crisis. How do how do you think about the balance between uh mechanism and context?
>> Yeah, interesting question. So my answer to that would be this is definitely a contextual problem whereby we have drugified uh our environment and our ecosystem making everything that's reinforcing more potently reinforcing more bountiful more accessible and more novel but it's also a common biological mechanism. So I I I I the all reinforcing substances and behaviors work on the same brain reward pathway. They all release dopamine in the nucleus ccumbent. The more dopamine that's released and the faster that it's released, the more likely is that substance or behavior to be something that our brains want us to do again and again. Um so I would say it's common, right? It's both a common cultural ecosystem ideology and it's a common biological you know neurological mechanism because really you know addiction whether the addiction is to a substance we ingest or to a behavior we're engaging in the the pathophysiology it's the same final common pathway for all of it. So can we get into that um a little bit? I often try to summarize this sort of pathophysiology and I do it poorly. So you could do a service for my entire audience um by maybe walking us through a little bit about what actually happens in the brain with these reinforcing addictive behaviors.
>> Yeah. So I mean I I simplify it you know maybe to the point of being oversimplified but for me it's very helpful and it's helpful for my patients when I explain the the sort of fundamental mechanism of what we call neuro adaptation. So imagine that in our brain's reward pathway there's something like a a teeter totter in a kid's playground that very crudely represents how we process pleasure and pain and they work through what's called an opponent process mechanism. Um that is to say when we experience pleasure uh that teeter totter tips one way and when when when we experience pain it tips the other. And there are certain rules governing this balance. And the first and most important rule is that it wants to remain level with the brain. And this is what neuroscientists call homeostasis. And homeostasis is those finite number of physiologic states that an organism must preserve in order to survive. For example, if you think about temperature, we can get colder and we can get hotter, but if we're too cold or too hot for too long a period of time, we die. And the same thing applies to the way that we process pleasure and pain. We can experience pleasure, we can experience pain, but if it's too much, our our brains just simply cannot uh survive in the face of that. So the way that our brains um you know maintain homeostasis is by working very hard to restore a level balance with any deviation from neutrality. So imagine something that's reinforcing, rewarding, intoxicating.
That releases dopamine. Our reward neurotransmitter in the nucleus encumbent, part of our brain's reward pathway that feels good combined with other indogenous neurotransmitters like our indogenous opioid system, our indogenous canabonoid system, serotonin, norepinephrine, you name it. And that pleasure pain balance tilts to the side of pleasure. But no sooner has that happened than our brain will adapt to that increased level of dopamine firing by downregulating dopamine transmission.
And I like to imagine that as these neuro adaptation gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to bring it level again. But the gremlins like it on the balance. So they don't get off as soon as it's level. They stay on until it's tilted and equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. That is the comedown, the hangover, the blue Monday, or even just that state of wanting to have one more drink, smoke one more joint, watch one more Tik Tok video.
Now, if we resist that urge to consume again, which by the way is really hard to do when we're presented with an environment where we have endless access to a high quantity of cheap drug, but let's say we somehow manage to reserve, you know, to uh resist the urge. Well, those gremlins get the message that their job is done. they hop off and homeostasis is restored. But if we continue to consume our drug of choice over days to weeks to months to years, those gremlins get bigger and stronger.
We've got Arnold Schwarzenegger gremlins on the pain side of the balance. And eventually we change our hydonic or joy set point. Those gremlins are camped out on the pain side of the balance. We've now entered into addicted brain, which means now we need more of our drug in more potent forms, not to get high and feel good, but just to level the balance and feel normal. And importantly, when we're not using, we're walking around with a balance tilted to the side of pain, experiencing the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance or behavior, which are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, dysphoria, and craving. And the reason that this is so important, especially in the context of psychiatry and dual diagnosis, where we're also targeting symptoms of depression, anxiety, inattention, insomnia, is that patients will come in and say they're self-medicating with their addictive behaviors, a substance or behavior. And if we could just treat the underlying depression, they wouldn't engage in those behaviors anymore. But what we need to educate them about is that it may feel like you're just self-medicating, but really all you're doing is adding more gremlin to the pain side of the balance. When you use again, you temporarily restore homeostasis. And so, of course, it feels like, oh, this is the answer to my anxiety, but really, you're just digging a deeper and deeper hole as those gremlins multiply and you sink further into that chronic dopamine deficit state. And what we know from neuroiming studies is that people with addiction, you would think they would have more dopamine transmission in their reward pathway, but they actually have less dopamine transmission in the reward pathway because again, their brain has adapted to this constant external source triggering dopamine in the brain by actually downregulating production of their own dopamine.
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So, what's the importance of the reward being something that you have a substance that's crossed the bloodb brain barrier? You have nicotine, you have an opioid chemical versus a behavioral based reward. Do we understand it as reward is reward that causes this misbalance? Now, uh rewards that are caused with actual chemicals can sometimes be more intense and they can maybe much more quickly create these misbalances. But is it ultimately from the point of view of these gremlins and the teeter totter and that metaphor it does it matter or what does matter in that difference between substance and behavioral uh addictive behaviors?
I in my clinical experience and this is also supported by the neuroscience.
There are more similarities than differences between drug and alcohol addiction on the one hand and behavioral addictions to things like sex, video games, online shopping, social media on the other hand. So what we see phenomenologically in clinic is that people start out using whatever their drug of choice is for one of two large reasons. Either number one to have fun or number two to solve a problem. And that problem can be very wide ranging from depression, anxiety, loneliness to just simple boredom. If the drug, and I'm using the term drug here very loosely to also encompass reinforcing behaviors, if the drug works for them, they'll continue to seek out and consume that drug. And over time, their brain will adapt. They'll get this dopamine insensitivity. They'll ultimately end up in this dopamine deficit state. And now they'll be committing all of their available resources to getting the drug, using the drug, paying for the drug, hiding drug use, and starting all over again. until now they've crossed over into addiction which is broadly defined the continued compulsive use of a substance or behavior despite harm to self and or others. So phenomenologically in clinical care whether you're addicted to methamphetamine or you're addicted to sex it doesn't look any different biologically what we see you know from animal studies and also neuroscience studies uh neuroiming studies in humans and other types of studies is that reinforcers that are behaviorally mediated like gambling and sex and social media activate the same reward pathway as drugs and alcohol. They release dopamine. the more dopamine that's released and the faster that it's released, the more that substance or behavior is to be refor re potentially reinforcing for that individual. And interestingly, now there are studies emerging showing that for people who get addicted to like the internet for example, they show the same type of downregulation of postsaptic D2 receptors as we find in when people get addicted to drugs and alcohol. So the pathophysiology looks to be quite similar. I think really what we're dealing here with is just simple differences in terms of drug of choice. You know what's really reinforcing for one person may not be for another and vice versa. You know for me personally for example um you know my dad was a pretty high functioning alcoholic and I just thought you know when I first tried alcohol like it did absolutely nothing for me. nothing at all. In fact, gave me a headache. Kind of made me tired. Nothing that I would want to do do again. Not reinforcing.
So, I So, I thought, oh, that addiction gene just kind of skipped me. But really, the truth was I just hadn't yet met my drug of choice, which turned out to be socially sanctioned pornography for women in the form of romance novels, which I did develop a mild addiction to.
It wasn't a life-threatening addiction, but it was certainly compulsive, you know, continued use despite harm. So my point is that you know if you haven't if you haven't encountered your drug yet, it's it's coming soon to a website near you.
>> Is there So this is fascinating and terrifying. So I'll put that both out there. Um you use the term mild. This came up a lot like in the early 2010s when I was trying to understand a literature for a book I was writing on phones and and phone use. There's a lot of use of this dichotomy between substance addiction and mild behavioral addiction. Are there like rate limiters of the descent into this sort of psychopathology based on the type of stimuli? So, a romance novel is going to be a much slower descent or maybe a limit on how strong addictions get depending on the stimuli. So, you know, maybe stuff you're doing on your phone is going to leave you in a different place than heroin or is I mean, so what's what's the difference, right? Is it the speed of the scent? Is it the the how far you can fall into it? How do we understand that difference based on what type of reward stimuli we're talking about?
>> Great question. Really big question. So, I'm going to I'm going to try to unpack it. So, addiction is definitely a spectrum disorder. And how addicted we get to something, it it depends on a lot of different factors. It does depend and I like to like I like to distinguish those factors as nature, nurture, and neighborhood. So nature has to do with our inherited risk for addiction. And we do know that people come into this world with different innate vulnerability to addiction. If you have a biological parent or grandparent with an alcohol addiction, you are at about four times increased risk compared to the general population of becoming addicted to alcohol yourself just based on genetics alone. And that also includes quite a few studies of people adopted out of you know from biological parents raised in tea totler homes. So where there's no alcohol at all still having increased risk. So so we know that there's this innate component. It's probably partially mediated by things like impulsivity and emotion dysregulation and who knows what what other types of character traits you know that innate character traits may be contributing that but there's definitely that genetic component. We also know that if you have a co-occurring psychiatric disorder, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders, you're at increased risk to to get addicted. And the theory of that varies. It it might be some kind of early self-medication that then blossoms into its own independent uh you know addiction problem or there might be some third mediating factor that that relates to both addiction and other co-occurring psychiatric disorders. But anyway, there's this nature component. Then there's this nurture component. We know that early childhood trauma, multigenerational trauma can contribute to addictive uh vulnerability. We know that if you have a parent with whom you have or caregivers with whom you have an unhealthy relationship who also don't know where you are, who your friends are, or what you're doing, you're at increased risk for addiction. Inversely, in this case, helicopter parents tend to be protective. So parents who know where their kids are, who they're hanging out with, and what's in their backpack and under the bed, that tends to be decreased risk of addiction. But anyway, the point is that your your psychological development matters. But then we get into neighborhood. And neighborhood has to do not with the individual, but their ecosystem. The their and one of the biggest risk factors for addiction that we almost never talk about, but we need to talk about now is simple access to our drug of choice. If you live in a neighborhood where drugs are sold on the street corner, you're more likely to try them and more likely to get addicted. If you go see a doctor who's free with their prescription pad for opioids or benzo or stimulants, you're more likely to be exposed to their that those drugs and more likely to get addicted. And my point in dopamine nation is that we now live in a drug world where we've taken everything and we've made it more accessible, more abundant, more potently reinforcing, um, more novel, more uncertain. And that uncertainty has to do with the way that our brain responds more strongly to unpredictable rather than predictable awards. And we've learned to engineer unpredictability, right? We we know how to do that. So, it's really it is those specific features unique to the drug interacting with the specific features of our unique brains. It's really like a lock and a key. And once you know our brain meets that perfect key, I personally think we're all pretty helpless to the problem of compulsive overconumption. Now whether or not that stays at the level of, you know, oh gee, I regret the way I used that drug or that behavior to like, oh wow, I'm I've lost everything. I I I'm I'm, you know, I've now legal consequences. I've lost my health. I've lost my family. Um, I I think that has mostly to do with whether or not our unique brain encountered our unique drug of choice with enough access to cheap and large quantities of our drug of choice minus the other protective factors that keep us away from, you know, really descending into severe addiction. And of course, what are those protective factors? Exactly what you would think they are. meaningful work.
Um, uh, you know, otherwise good mental health. Um, people who care about us and who hold us accountable and are there for us when we're struggling. Um, you know, a place to live. Um, all those things that we, you know, clean air, um, that we know are are good for mental health.
>> How do we know? I, if we're thinking about like our own phone behavior, it is a spectrum. What are the right indicators to look at to measure how concerned an individual should be with their relationship with their phone?
>> Well, the classic things we look for in clinical care are the four C's plus tolerance and withdrawal. So, what are the four C's? Control, compulsion, craving, and consequences. Out of control use, I meant to, you know, go on social media for half an hour and six hours later I'm still on. A compulsive use. Even when I planned not to use and I was doing something else, I found myself grabbing my phone and almost in a dissociated state starting to scroll. A craving uh when I can't have my phone with me or I'm going to go through a period of time without my phone, I start to feel anxious. I'm irritable. Um I'm, you know, experiencing intrusive thoughts of wanting to use my phone or why it's absolutely justified that I need to check my phone right now even though I said I wasn't going to, right?
Because craving is not necessarily uh just in the form of I want my phone like I have the desire. It's very often these long rationalizations or narratives to justify the use against our intention not to use. And then um consequences and that's all the all the types of different consequences that we can have.
And there are a lot when it comes to smartphones. the biggest of which you know- which you talk a lot you've talked a lot about in your New York Times article recently about cognitive consequences and those are huge but there are also um it can be a big contri contributor to things like depression anxiety loneliness right which is so ironic because we have the illusion that we're connecting with people when we're really separating ourselves further uh eating disorder body dysmorphia uh cyber bullying exploitation um you know, fraud and other monetary forms of of loss. Um and and then the biggest of all just opportunity costs, right? So like all the other things that we're not doing because we're spending so much time on our phones. And it's amazing. We do something when we're doing screening called the timeline fallback method where we ask people just to, you know, plot out every day in the last week how much time they spent on their phones. And you do it starting from today and going backwards to yesterday, the day before, the day before. And it can feel really innocuous on any given day. Oh, I only, you know, I was only online watching YouTube videos or whatever it was for two hours.
That's no big deal. But you add it all up, two hours a day is 14 hours. 14 hours is a whole day. Wow, I spent a whole day in my lived week on my phone.
I don't want to live like that. I don't want to give away a whole day. So, I think, you know, these types of reckonings are are are really important.
The other thing that's you won't find in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders for screening, but which I think is really important and we use a lot in clinical care is um whether or not people are getting into the lying habit. So am I lying about not only you know how much time I'm spending but what I'm actually doing online. And if we find that we're lying about the time and and where we're spending our time and that we wouldn't feel comfortable having somebody else look through what we just looked through. To me, that's a really important indicator that we're uh straying from, you know, uh the kind of thriving life that I think we're all aiming for.
>> Anecdotally, it often seems like teenagers or younger people get we're more likely to see them with intense versions of this. This might not actually be true quantitatively, but anecdotally, certainly what we saw with the video game addiction crisis in like the the 2010s with a lot of the, you know, body dysmorphia as we see a lot of it with uh really phone overuse, assuming that's somewhat true, how much of that comes down to like there's an people often think it's the unique brain development process when you're that age. How much of it comes down to the unique sort of social cultural context of being that age? And how much of it comes down to I guess the other option would be um you know just access you just you you have less things to do. You have more access to it. Why does this seem like these these digital addictions are often really bad for teenagers?
>> Well, I I would start by saying that these digital platforms are inherently really addictive. I mean, they just are addictive. We've sort of turned our brains inside out a and and kind of created this platform that is inherently deeply reinforcing.
Um, and I think we're all struggling.
You know, I think we often point to teenagers, but really I I just think we're all all struggling. And there's kind of like a hidden digmic among older people, too, because they're very isolated. They can't do a lot physically. And a lot of folks who kind of, let's say, go into retirement homes, you know, to sort of have more social contact, like what you find is a honeycomb phenomenon where they're all in their individual hives and not talking to each other.
>> Um, but with teenagers, we're more concerned because their brains are still developing, right? And they have this incredible plasticity. They're pruning back neurons they're not using. They're mileating the neurons they use most often. And essentially by age 25 we have that neurological scaffolding that will serve us for the rest of our adult lives. So the kinds of habits and patterns that we evolve as teenagers will really um you know get sort of um concretized in a way for the rest of our lives. And kids are especially vulnerable to all forms of addiction not just digital media but all forms of addiction. We see you know in epidemiologic curves that's where you get your huge spike is starting in teenage years up till about age 25.
Although again that's changing uh with older people experiencing more addiction than ever before. But with teenagers especially anything related to social media or social validation. Why? Because you know we evolved to once we turn about age 13 go out and meet other people. Why? Because that's really important for perpetuating the species.
You know finding mates. So teenagers are exquisitly sensitive to social validation.
uh peer reputation and social uh social social reputation enhancement. Um the equation between like uh like adventure, this is an adventure and this is risky is is very different for teenagers. They they tend to underestimate risk and overestimate benefit in almost everything they do. So they're not really able to like delay gratification as well or appreciate um future consequences. So you've got this kind of perfect storm of this intense sensitivity to peer validation plus increased risk-taking plus this developing immature brain and and all of that combined means you're going to have kids who are going to encounter a lot more potential harm and have a much higher risk for addiction. Uh not just with digital media but but you know all reinforcers. So, what and I know you've talked about this. I I think your kids were featured, right, in the social dilemma documentary, and I don't know if your thoughts have evolved, but >> uh what do I do? I'm a parent. I have a 13-year-old. It's my oldest. What's your rules of the road?
>> Yeah. So, I mean, I I I don't like to come down as like super judgmental. You know, parenting is hard and especially in this day and age, but my general recommendations are that um kids not have their own personal devices with access to the internet before age 13.
And I would include iPads, smartphones, and even watches, frankly, um because I'm not sure that, you know, these smart watches, I think that primes kids to sort of always be on constant alert for these sort of notifications and to be attached to the internet in a way that I just think is is really insidious and and ultimately pernitious for kids. That zero to 13 has got to be the time where we're really encouraging kids to move their bodies, do things in real life, learn the social skills that will serve them for the rest of their adult lives, participate actively in family life and family chores and all of the effortful things that it takes to make real deep human connections. And you know, this is also why, you know, parents and advocates and clinicians need to make sure that we're not just doing this at home, but they're doing it in schools, right? that they're not giving iPads to kindergarteners, which unfortunately is happening. So, unwinding all of that in the schools and really giving kids an opportunity to learn and grow without being constantly primed and shaped by the internet and and the devices and these inherently addictive platforms.
Now, once a kid turns 13, that's not my preferred age for giving a kid their own device, but many kids by then will go out and just acquire their own device.
And it's very hard for us as parents to even know that they're doing that.
>> But what's your perfect world age? If >> okay, a perfect world, frankly, in my opinion, perfect world is not till they hit high school. And then it depends on the kid, you know, because some kids will be able to handle it and others won't. And you give a device to take it away. You give it to take it away. It comes with guidelines, road maps, ground rules, and if you break the rules, we're taking the device away. And it just it has to be like that because you know we have we have four kids and full disclosure some of our kids uh at you know all of our none of our kids had devices before age 16. Um they all went and got their own phones when they were 16 paid for them themselves bought them themselves. We didn't do that because we weren't supportive of it. We got them their you know their laptops which unfortunately they still needed for every single class assignment. Um, but some of our kids could handle their smartphones and I'm just going to say some of our kids couldn't and started failing in school. We were hearing the kid was on the device constantly during class in between class. For that kid who was vulnerable just got sucked in. So that kid had had their device taken away until they were more mature and better able to handle it. So, and you know, and frankly, you know, again, a lot of empathy for parents because even the most conscientious, most well-informed, most, you know, well-intentioned parent out there can have a kid for whom digital media is their drug of choice.
And that there's that that's potentially a kid who maybe can't have a device at all or needs so many guard rails and and so much more support in order to navigate, you know, this this really crazyly reinforcing uh medium.
>> Yeah. I I mean that's I think that's an important point you added about kids are different. Um and and that the the baseline should be more aggressive than people think. I I I'm with you on uh 16.
I know I know John height points to that age too from a developmental standpoint is you've really gotten through a lot of both neurological and social psychological development by then so you're at least at a somewhat of a more sturdy platform but I think it's really important what you're saying because I've seen this for some kids it's fine like great and then I'm 16 and I get my phone and I'm studious and I look up some baseball scores on here and isn't that nice and they move on with life and other kids it's put it in my veins right like it's I this is all all I want to do and feeling empowered >> to say this is a potent >> potent substance and we're going to introduce it with care later than you might like and it's going to be tentative because >> we got to see what it's going to do to you because it it's it is pretty powerful. I think that's a that's a that's a very useful thing to add to it.
>> Oh, good. I'm glad. And I would also say that you know that sort of this can't happen in a vacuum, right? You can't have a home where parents are constantly on their devices. You've got screens in every bedroom and you know the the smart house or whatever they're calling it now and then you ask a kid or you tell a kid but you can't be on your device, right?
I mean that's just cruel. It's got to be if you especially if you have a vulnerable kid, the whole family has to kind of come together and support the kid by making it, you know, a safer zone. You know, a place where that kid's not having to constantly rely on willpower or feeling ostracized in some way. Well, it's a piece of advice I've been giving to my audience recently that I think you'll probably approve of, which is, yeah, what you need to do as parents, the whole family, once you get a phone, we're all joining this compact, which is when we're at home, the phones are plugged in in the kitchen. And and one of my listeners dubbed this landlinining. So, that's his you tell your friends like, "Oh, you'll have to call me. I'm landlining tonight, so I'm not going to see a a text message if you, you know, send it right away." But it's a way to ensure that in the house, if we're eating dinner, we're watching TV together, you're working on homework or or you're reading a book, you don't have the device right there.
>> Absolutely.
>> Activating those short-term reward networks that's doing all the voting for like pick me up, pick me up, pick me up, and it sort of sets a culture.
>> Yes, absolutely agreed. And and I like to recommend an even lower tech approach, which is just actually keeping your landline in the f in the home. So having your landline, you know, those you can still get those. We still have ours. And just powering the devices off.
Yeah. Like literally turning them off because there's something about a phone that's off that >> also doesn't command as much of our attention. When it's on and we know it's transmitting and receiving, I think there's always this part of our brain that wants to check it like what came in, what came in. But something about it just being like dead, like just like a rock, you know, not alive in this way that it seems sensient even though it's not. Um, I think can be really really good for our brains.
>> Should we be using social media at all anymore?
>> I mean, if you're talking about the really addictive forms of social media, I mean, I, you know, >> talk, etc. >> Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm sort of generally not in favor. I think those mediums are so addictive that we all become slaves to the platform and I generally don't recommend them. Um, I mean, I know that a lot of people feel like it's mandatory for their job. Now, when kids say, "Well, I have to be on to be cool or to be have friends or be in the in crowd."
All I can tell you is what we find in clinical care is that when those kids get off, they feel that that they have better social connections, better friendships, more intimacy. So, I think that it's it's this illusion that I think we need to be especially alert to this sensation that we have that we're connecting or that we're productive and getting stuff done when it's really just this colossal waste of time.
What about what Australia did with the the ban on social media under 16? I you know I've heard that justified in part which makes sense to me is it gives ammo to parents. It just makes it easier to deal with the question of but everyone is doing it. If you can say no it's illegal that's why you can't do it >> right.
>> Are are you generally in favor of that in in the US context? Should we do something similar?
>> You know I am in favor of trying things right. I mean, so I I really applaud the Australian Initiative because they're they're getting, you know, they're rolling up their sleeves and they're getting in there and and trying something. We have to try something. And maybe it'll turn out that that's not the right solution or the best solution or it has unintended consequences and we have to tweak it. But bottom line, we can't just sit back and be like, this is all okay, or this is how it is now, or this is normal. I just really think that the mental health harms are so clear. Um and not to mention again also the diffuse harms, the kind of uh insidious dissolution of the social compact. Um even if we're not looking at you know individual harms just the social harms on a collective level I think are enormous and we have to we have to do something about it.
This the technology is not going away and there are a lot of good things but it's there are clearly a lot of bad things too. So, I think getting in there with policies and legislation and giving it a try and see what seeing what happens.
>> Have you seen anything else interesting from like a legislative perspective?
There seems to be a not a wide variety of ideas. We we there's bans for youth.
Uh maybe like section 230 reform, but that gets pretty wonky like what that means. Is there anything else in all the work you've done on this? anything else you've come across where you say that's an interesting idea for a law that could be passed at least to see what happens.
>> Well, I think that there there is definitely a a role for laws, but I think we we also have to bring and incentivize the technology to make it feasible and practical. So to me, one of the most interesting uh ideas that I heard a couple of years ago talking to some um Yale law students was the idea of airplane Wi-Fi.
So this idea of airplane mode where we would collectively agree in certain spaces with I guess with an app on the phone or some shared technology that we wouldn't be connecting to Wi-Fi. So it wouldn't be this cumbersome having to like give up your phone, but it would be be entering into this collective bubble where we say this is this is a space where we're not going to be connected to the internet, right? Or we're only going to So I think those types of nuanced types of intervention are really what we need. Likewise with like you hear a lot about um and I think this is appropriate and I'm hugely in favor and I've been advocating getting smartphones out of schools belltobell to get the slot machine out of kids pockets but kids have these laptops right and they're texting each other and watching YouTube video so we need better technology to make a laptop that really does reinforce learning and not these other activities right so these are I mean I'm not you know I I'm not a computer scientist you are um but but surely we can harness all of the wonderful creativity and energy and knowhow in the realm of computer science to make better devices as well as better software so that we can protect ourselves from these constant addictive distractions.
>> I also that top down legislation should incentivize institutions like schools, right? So it's not just oh you guys should get rid of smartones in classroom. It's like, hey, we'll pay you to do that, right? Um just like we did with uh changing uh drinking laws, you know, when federal legislators said, hey, we'll give you money to build better highways if you raise your the age of uh you know, of what's legal to drink in your state.
That was very successful, right?
Everybody ended up raising the drinking age to age 21 because they wanted the money to build better highways. those types of ideas.
>> Um, I like all those ideas. Yeah. I mean, it feels like we need to be thinking about like it's becoming harder to avoid the fact that this is very potent. Uh, and this this really is an issue what's going on. And as long as you have an attention economy that's based off of free engagement, this is free and the more you use it, the more money we make and the device is ubiquitous and just let the market speak. I mean this seems like a a just a normal case study and what's going to happen in that unregulated capitalist instance. They are going to get very very very good at getting you to look just like if with substances if you had no uh restrictions on sell whatever you want and make them as addictive as you want. Uh we would have you know we would have heroin and apples right. So like if you if you have a market >> Yeah. I mean let kids go and you know get buy heroin and Yeah. I mean it's crazy.
>> Yeah.
>> We would never do that.
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What about the role of so uh based on what you said in a model I've also heard is there seems like okay there's there's two different factors going on when it comes to these these addictive behaviors uh that both feed into the intensity of the reward right so the way I understand is like the bigger reward you're getting kind of the more bigger impact it's going to have on all these neurological mechanisms and so then there's there's two parts to the rewards you one of the parts you mentioned is like it just depends what the activity is and this is maybe why like a drug that can get in there and mess with your neurotransmitters like opioids or whatever uh that can really pump up the reward. But the other aspect I want to ask you about this that this is like yo on Harrari and chasing the scream talks a lot about the other aspect is the emotional or psychological reward that it's giving you. So like the alcohol might uh physiologically give you this sort of buzz that feels good, but when that really gets powerful is when that buzz that feels good is how you're escaping emotional trauma. Now that reward has just gotten five times as valuable and you know he would say this is why you can inject heroin into little old ladies in England which they get when they get hip surgery or getting dimmer and they're not addicted. But if you're taking that same pain drug uh after an injury has subsided because you've lost your job and it just makes you feel better and then you're much more likely to to uh get addicted. So is there an aspect it's a long question. Is there an aspect when it comes to these digital distractions is also asking a question of is there an emotional need that this is serving? Is there a hole that this is filling? And I might want to also think about addressing that need or filling that hole as aggressively as possible with other means so that I'm getting less reward from using the sort of lowquality stimulus like the device that I should I need to be more social. I need to be feel better about myself. I need to whatever it is like what's the aspect of the you know making the offline part of your life better when it comes to avoiding online addiction.
>> Yeah. So key to recovery is not just what we're going to avoid, but also what we're going to approach, right? So it can't just be, well, don't don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. It's like, what am I going to do instead? You know, what are the healthy adaptive coping mechanisms, the healthy adaptive behaviors? Also, frankly, the healthy adaptive sources of dopamine because we are the ultimate seekers, right? We're we're not people who who really want to have a pleasure pain balance that's just constantly at our phasic dopamine level.
We like those dopamine spikes. So, how can we get them in a healthy and adaptive way? And what I talk about in dopamine nation is that the best way to get our dopamine is actually to pay for it up front by doing hard things.
Because it turns out that when we intentionally press on the pain side of the balance, those gremlins will go to the pleasure side of the balance and we can get our dopamine indirectly.
Perfect examples of that are the runner's high, right? Turns out that that exercise is actually toxic to cells. But we know it's good for us.
Why? Because our body senses injury and then starts to upregulate our own feel-good endogenous production of endogenous dopamine, uh, opioids, canabonoids, serotonin, etc. Of course, we can get addicted to exercise, too.
So, you have to be a little bit careful.
But we live in this world of ultimate convenience where we for no upfront work, we are now flooding our brains with with dopamine. So we have to really turn that on its head. At the same time too, we are deeply social creatures. And and to me, what chasing the scream really gets at and what's like sort of the heart of recovery is that addiction is isolation and the opposite of addiction is connection. Um, and that is really true. But I always like to emphasize that you can actually have the best family and the best friends and the best job and live in the best place in the world and you can still get addicted if you happen to meet your drug of choice in large quantity at little expense in large abundance. So, um, I always like to say that because when we have this sort of question, well, is it supply or is it demand? It's both. It's both. and they each feed the other. But the problem is that with more supply, we have more demand. And I think that's a key piece that people maybe are sometimes missing. And again, because I work in in mental health and psychiatry, we get a lot of people saying, "Well, this is wrong with my life and that's wrong with my life and I have depression. I have anxiety and that's why I'm addicted." And the truth is that that might be part of the story, but it's also perfectly possible that you feel that way about your life first because you are addicted and your addiction has changed your hydonic set point. It's leeched your other rewards of their salience. It's given you this victim mentality where now you're blaming everybody else for your problems and you're isolating and replacing human connection with your drug. So that now you've got this vicious feed forward cycle where your life actually wasn't that bad, but your addiction made it look bad, right?
>> Yeah.
>> And and there's the real truth, too, that the the the the most vulnerable humans in the United States when it comes to addiction are people who are living in poverty, people who are traumatized, people who are unemployed, you know, single family homes. You know, when you think about the digital media, like sure, it's great to say don't give your kid a device, but you know, a lot of parents rely on that as babysitters while they're working multiple jobs. So, you know, it's it's people living in poverty who also have incredible access to these highly reinforcing sort of processed cheap drugs in all their myriad forms that are at highest risk.
So, it's a complicated phenomenon, this supply and demand, and both play a really big role. All right. Well, I have I have two final questions. The first is going to be about what we can do to sort of uh prevent ourselves from getting farther down a digital addiction rabbit hole. And the second is going to be about what do we do if we're there and we're struggling. So, so the the clarify the first question. What is what is the game? I want to give a game plan to my audience and I'm hearing for example uh do hard things.
>> Be very social and and probably in like a sort of sacrificial sense that is like sacrifice time and attention on behalf of others, right? Like real sociality.
>> Um and be very very wary of the digital junk food, right? Like just don't use Tik Tok. Don't you you're a grown-up.
Like you don't need to be you probably don't need to be on Instagram. Like just you got to start thinking about that as this is low low uh low value calories. I don't want those in my life. And then maybe do something like landlinining or keeping your phone completely off uh when you're at home as well. Okay. What else am I missing or what else would you recommend from the how do I stop myself from getting into a worse situation perspective?
>> Well, I really like those because those were very um actionable and also big.
You know, they're not like minor tweaks.
I like that they're just like they just say, "Hey, this this is a drug. Uh if you're you know, if you're going to use it, know you're using a drug. Use it in moderation. and leave enough time in between to sort of reset those reward pathways. Um, and be very mindful and accountable around your use and then do other healthy things. But I talk a lot about too about what you know what's called self-binding strategies. So don't rely on willpower alone. Put in both literal and metacognitive barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice so that we don't so that we can press the pause button between desire and consumption and aren't relying on willpower alone. So that that's things like um you know these sort of accountability software and you know there covenant eyes and many different ones where we other people can see what we're doing because we massively co-regulate based on the people around us. Um it's things like committing to what I call radical honesty which is telling the truth about all things large and small. Because what happens in addiction is we get in the lying habit and then we're lying not just to other people but also ourselves. Whereas if we're being truthful, yeah, I really did watch Tik Tok or YouTube or whatever it was for six hours last night until 1 in the morning. You know, like I that's what I did. That's how I spent my time.
And that kind of wakes up our frontal lobe and like, you know, then we're dealing with a truthful narrative. And if we don't have that truthful narrative, we don't have the information we need to make better choices. So, embracing radical honesty, self-binding strategies, which you know, again, can be like literal things like get it out of the bedroom, delete the app, uh use a blocker, you know, so we're not just relying on that. And then, you know, all the other things that people talk about like making it less potent by um let's see, going grayscale. That really works for some people, not others. One of the things that I do because I tend to use more YouTube than I want because you don't need an account for it. It's so accessible. But I've if you delete your history and you have to actually type in what you're looking for, boy, that's really helped me because now I'm not just getting this algorithmic feed that's tailored it to my preferences, but I have to go looking for it. And that's just enough to sort of again sort of remind me or alert me, oh yeah, and I I'm doing this pain in the butt thing of typing in, you know, what I want to what I think I want to watch because I know that if I leave it up to the algorithmic feed, I'm going to find myself caught in in the vortex.
>> Well, and that's a good final one because this will be on YouTube as well.
And and YouTube is a complicated one because I you know, I think video is important. and we're democratizing TV, but man, that recommendation feed is it's brutal. I always so that's what I tell my listeners is I actually tell don't use on your phone, do it on a computer. Uh have the blockers that gets rid of the recommendation feed and then it's just like your DVR 15 years ago.
You just have better That's how I do it with my boys. We have five channels. Uh they're largely like makers like Mark Robber type channels and we we have to manually type it into the Apple remote.
>> Yes.
>> The name of the channel to see if there is a new video and it's like a television. It's like oh once there's a new video this week and then that's >> Exactly. Exactly. And you know what I often say to to patients with addiction of any form. I said, you know, the solution is not going to be one pill or one particular psychotherapy or, you know, one supplement or whatever it is.
It's a lot of little things that accumulated over days to weeks to months to years will make a huge huge difference in your life. So, that's what I tell people. It's all these little things. It's it's the concatenation of all these little things.
>> So, then the final question is I don't I'm sure you're the same way. I really dislike all the shame that surrounds this topic. So, I really want to speak to members of my audience that are in a bad way when it comes to this. They know the four C's apply and they're worried about it and it's beyond the point where uh the types of interventions we just talked about are likely going to stick.
So, what does someone in that situation I mean, first we can reassure them, this is okay. People have this problem.
It is very common and it's not it's not a failure on your part.
>> What do they do? What do they do next?
So, if if you're someone who feels like you've really crossed over into the threshold of compulsive addictive use, um I recommend seeking out a an addiction professional with expertise in this area, getting an evaluation. You're not committing to, you know, you know, even weeks of treatment, but you're just getting an evaluation, talking to somebody. What's really important there is, I think, talking to somebody with addiction expertise. Okay.
>> If you just go see a general mental health care provider, they're usually not that well trained in addiction honestly because it's not that well done in medical schools or uh you know other types of mental health training. So it really that's an important piece of it.
Um and just kind of talking to someone, you know, reaching out for help, getting some advice or or getting some some guidance. The other thing uh that I would recommend is seeking out a 12step group. And there are lots of wonderful 12step groups. They're modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. They've been around for a hundred years and they really work when people actively participate. We're living in an age where 12step groups are really um kind there's a lot of bashing of them in the media and I don't know why that is. I mean they're not for everybody but again they can be incredibly helpful. Um they're free you know they're everywhere and there are even now specific 12step groups for internet and technology.
>> So there's something called ITAA. If you Google that, you can find Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, which is a 12step group that just grew up from a, you know, collection of individuals who realized, hey, I'm not living the life that I want to live, and it's because I'm addicted to my device in some shape or form. So, um, those are just two possibilities right there for folks who are maybe struggling or on the deeper end of this type of problem.
>> Well, and I appreciate you coming on. I think this was a phenomenally important discussion you know for my audience. We talk a lot about autonomy in the digital world meaning in the digital world. Uh expressing your full life and not being controlled by the whims of other sorts of devices and I think this gives this is like the foundation on what a lot of these issues are built or against which they tumble. So thank you very much and uh thank you for your work. Uh dopamine nation of course is the book everyone knows. Is there anywhere else you would like to direct people um to find out more about what you're up to?
>> Well, not surprisingly, I'm not on social media, so I would just say read the book, watch this podcast, and thanks thanks for your kind words. That that means a lot to me. It was a pleasure talking to you.
>> All right. Thank you very much. All right. So, there we go. That was my conversation with Dr. Anna Limkkey. Um you know, Jesse, she she really didn't sugarcoat it, right? Yeah. because she actually deals with patients with addictions and it's just saying we're seeing a lot of it. We have been seeing a lot of it. Phones have made it worse.
This really compelling social media has made it worse. And I mean I thought this was scary, but basically she's saying if you really are addicted, which you might be and a lot of people are, you have to treat it like an addiction. Mhm.
>> Um, the one thing I wanted to load up because she mentioned this ITAA, Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous, like a 12step program like Alcoholics Anonymous, but for people who are addicted to their phone. Um, it intrigued me. I want to take a quick look at it here to get a sense of what would it mean if you actually went to ITAA. So, I found this guide for newcomers and it goes through uh what you would do, what they several suggestions they would suggest, okay, if you were to join an ITAA group. And I thought I'd go go through some of these quickly. They said at first you would attend daily meetings. So, they think for uh you should attend six meetings in a short time frame to help decide whether this program may be helpful. As second, they push abstension.
They said you identify and abstain from the specific behaviors which trigger addiction. They call the these terms bottom lines to describe the compulsive behaviors that once we start we can't stop and once we stop we can't stay stopped. So they actually are going to have if you join something like ita these really strict lines of like you're just not doing this particular digital behavior before. They then say they focus on taking one day at a time.
Recovery is a gentle process like don't even bother counting the days just get through the current day. you will get called daily, daily outreach calls. Um, and then they talk about finding sponsors and learning more about the recovery process. So, it's interesting straight up like you would do with alcohol or narcotics.
>> Yeah.
>> And Anna would say there's a lot more people than you think. The other interesting thing is she said there's a lot of things and if we use the device to medicate, there's a lot of things the device can deliver that makes you addicted. Your drug of choice might be social media. It might be Tik Tok. It might be Instagram. You said internet gambling. Boom. can do it. Online shopping, boom, that can do it as well, right? Compulsive YouTube watching, that can do it as well. So, there's uh it's like you're in a casino of sorts and every single game is flashing their lights at you. So, anyways, that was a good conversation. Uh definitely check out Dopamine Nation or Anna's Masterclass course to find out more.
All right, well, that's enough about Anna and my thoughts. Now, let's hear what you have to say. As is our tradition in these Monday advice episodes, we like to open the show's inbox to read some of your messages.
Now, remember, if you have a question, comment, or interesting resource to share. You can always reach us at podcasthelport.com.
Uh, all right, Jesse, what do we have first in our inbox today?
>> We received an anominous question about digital minimalism and what counts as good and bad uses of your phone.
>> All right, let's see what we got here.
It's a classic type of question. I have a question for you about digital minimalism. I feel that I use my smartphone quite a lot, but my screen time is mostly spent on chess.com, playing active games, the Kindle app, reading books, but only if I cannot use my actual Kindle or a physical book, YouTube, watching informative videos on matters that interest me, not shorts.
Podcast, listening to long- form content. I usually do this during my commute or during free hours at work. My question is, is this okay under the philosophy of digital minimalism or should I still try to minimize this specific screen time activity as well?
Jesse, I should sell my own uh screen time app and it only lets you watch my YouTube channel and it only lets you listen to my podcast. Um, and when you play chess, you're always playing against a virtual version of me and it always wins because I think people need to know. They need to have that relationship with me. you'll just cheat.
Just your pieces disappear. I can make two moves at a time. Um, all right. This is a good question because it allows us to very quickly revisit the digital minimalism philosophy. This is the philosophy I first laid out in my aonomous 2019 book for how you should be approaching technology in the smartphone era. The key to digital minimalism is there is no master list of good and bad technology. So I got to I got to look at the formulation of this question is leading me to believe that the person asking this question has a slightly different model of digital minimalism that's different than mine. It's a model that says the more you minimize use of technology the better. That's not what I mean by digital minimalism. If that is what you mean these are a good question.
You're like well I know you're saying I should minimize all technology use but here's some technology uses I like. Are you sure that's not okay?
This is not the way I think about technology use. The actual philosophy of digital minimalism does not have a list of good or bad technologies and it certainly doesn't try to minimize overall technology use. It says technology use should be driven by your values. If a particular usage of a technology supports things that you care about than that something does good in your life. If it doesn't or causes more cost than it does benefits then it shouldn't be in your life. And for the technology that passes this bar and therefore you keep in your life.
Once you know why you're using a technology, it's much easier to put tight fences around that usage to make sure that you're maximizing that benefit and avoiding as many of the superolous cost as possible. So, it allows you to when you're focused intentional about technology usage, you can constrain it much more easily, right? And this is why, for example, for a lot of people, if they look at, you know, this was a big example back in 2019, but they look at Instagram in their life, for a lot of people it's a super diversion. It's actually a worse problem now than it was back then. Back then, you are still largely seeing posts from people that you explicitly followed. Today, Instagram is pushing more of a Tik Tok style algorithmic curation model where half the stuff you see, you have no idea what it is. You're like, I followed a couple authors uh and now I've just cut to, you know, a video of Cal Network ripping a phone book in half using his toes. I mean, that's awesome. And of course, you're going to watch it, but it wasn't what you signed up for. So for a lot of people they yeah Instagram isn't really supporting a massive value and the little benefits I get out of it aren't huge and they have a lot of cost so I don't need it but maybe you're a visual artist you're like no no no Instagram I use to follow some other artist in my general genre and it gives me inspiration they post photos of their work in process and it it helps my creative process. Oh I have a real value I get out of Instagram but if I know that's why I'm using it I can put rules.
It doesn't need to be on my phone. I don't need to post. It could be on my computer. These artists don't post very often. So, this could be a Friday afternoon activity. It takes 20 minutes to see what they're doing. Boom. Benefit preserved, cost eliminated. That's digital minimalism. You use a technology if it supports something you really care about and you put fences to protect the benefit and try to eliminate as many costs as possible. Let's go back to the list from the question here. Uh, chess.com.
If playing chess is important to you, it's a real value, it helps you stretch your mind, I see no problem with that.
If it's become like an addictive thing, you're using it to get away from things or to escape other things that are more useful, then put better fences around it. Maybe don't do it on your phone where it can be a default behavior, but do it on your computer and set a aside certain times and conditions in which you play. Kindle app, just bring your Kindle with you, right? Just just have the Kindle with you or bring paperback books. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but reading on an actual backlit screen like that where it's actually pixels that are glowing as opposed to like a Kindle or a book where it's a physical surface that light is reflecting off of it just we treat it differently with our brain when we're scrolling with our finger, when we're in a different type of cognitive context and you have all of those distractions right there, one tap away. It really is like being in college when you're reading a book on your phone as opposed to a Kindle or a hardcover book. It's really like being at college and you're like, I'm going to go study, you know, my o for my OIM final in this part of the library where there's like topless co-eds doing conga lines around me. I'm like, I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm going to study. It's like, why don't you go study in the quiet part of the library? You're in the part of the library where there's like a bear on a unicycle with a keg that's filling up beers for people and growling as he goes by and you're like, I'm not going to pay attention to that. I'm just going to do my O Kim. Why not just go to the part of the library without that? That's what it's like trying to read a book on the world's most fantastically effective distraction machine that's ever been created. So, I'm not a a big believer in the Kindle app, except for in like extreme circumstances. It's not the worst thing, but try to read the Kindle when you can. YouTube the the Here's the YouTube is a it's it's like a dialectic.
You got these two things that are clashing together.
DIY video is important, right? The whole promise of the internet or at least a big part of the promise of the internet is the democratizing of content produ production and consumption that anyone can create content that anyone else can access. This doesn't mean that anyone can be read or viewed or popular. It's very hard to make good content but innovation happens when you take down the logistical barriers to producing content. Right? So podcast mean you can listen to audio content from almost anyone. Most podcasts are terrible. Most podcasts are not successful. But by getting rid of the barrier of I have to be in a building that's literally connected to an antenna that has a permit from the government to broadcast during certain times of days on certain frequency bands allowed a lot more people to try and stuff that percolated up is interesting and innovative. Video is incredibly compelling. This is why television 8 radios launch as soon as it was invented. Even though all the things we say about audio today on podcast you could say about radio in the 1940s. It's portable. You can do it while you do other things. Um, it it it's uh much closer. Like you could just a voice in radio sounds like someone right there where TV was on these small little screens. It didn't matter. We'll stare at a 6-in black and white screen of a poorly lit stage of Charlie McCarthy uh you know puppet mouth being moved because we're very compelled by vision.
So it's important that this democratized media independent media movement that the internet enable it has to in include video and YouTube has the best technology is the only game in town right now. The problem with it is the auto recommendations. You can rabbit hole on it in a way that doesn't happen on say a television where it's like what about this? What about that? What about this? And when it's an algorithm suggesting stuff and learning what to suggest to you so you'll click on things and get you more likely to click and watch, you end up in weird places just like on TikTok, right? Algorithms bring you to weird places and there's people that are willing to provide the weird if there's a crowd that's going to come.
And so you have to be I mean I think you have to think of YouTube as a combination of a reference library and a television. Maybe if we want to be a little bit more 2025, like 2005, 2005, like a television with a to look up specific things you need to know. How do I change the oil on my car? I'll look it up on YouTube useful for that. Or treat it like your to in 2005. There are certain shows I like and I go and I search for that person to see if they have a new episode of the show and if it is, I watch it. This is for example how uh I do YouTube with my kids. We have it on the TV only on the one I can control.
So, they're not allowed to use it by themselves. And we have a collection of channels that we like to watch. They produce shows once a month or every, you know, couple of weeks. And we like, oh, there's a new, you know, uh, stuff made here episode. Great maker. We like to watch. Electrical engineer does really cool stuff. Great. We can sit down and watch it just like you would wait for your television show. Ironically, Jesse, most of the channels we watch are bears on unicycles with kegs filling up beer and libraries.
>> So, that's a good use of YouTube. So, it's it's this dialectic. If you're on your phone using just getting lost on the auto scroll, it could be really terrible. But if you're sitting on the couch with your kids and you're like, "Hey, we can watch uh you know a maker video and it's like really interesting content and or we've been watching these RS R ours Technica channel called War Stories where they will do extended interviews with the developers of classic video games and they just walk through like what were the challenges making this game? What happened? How do we make it work?" That's great content.
That's better than most of the stuff that's going to be on cable. So you have to be careful about YouTube. Um but it has advantages and podcasts. I don't know. That's radio. I like podcast. I'm not worried about it. All right, enough digital minimalism. What else do we have today, Jesse?
>> We also got a lot of good feedback about your newsletter last week about the use of AI and academic publishing.
>> Oh, yes. So, if you if you don't subscribe to my newsletter at calupport.com, you should. It's basically dispatches from this battle between depth and distraction that we talk about here on this podcast. Uh, sometimes I go more deeply into the type of things we talk about on the show and sometimes it's completely unrelated dispatches that I didn't have room for in the show. Last week I took something we mentioned in the show during the inbox segment and I expanded on it. So it was this task force for a academic journal that was studying the impact of AI on publishing and what they found is AI caused in particular LLM based tools in the gender of AI revolutions. the last 3 years has caused an explosion in submissions to this academic journal.
The problem is the quality of these submissions is very low. They have a much higher chance of ending up desk rejected. They have a much much higher chance of not ending up actually uh accepted for publication with revisions, but they still all have to be looked at.
And so it creates a huge backlog and it actually is slowing down the publication of good science and stressing every exhausting everyone involved. And it's so it's a sign where AI making some things easier doesn't necessarily make it easier to produce good results.
Anyways, we had all sorts of thoughts both sent in to my email address uh here at the show and also comments on the blog version of the newsletter at calupport.comblog.
I'm just going to read a few of these, Jesse, just as people had interesting observations. All right, Shauna said, "I was so relieved when my tenure as an academic journal editor ended a couple months ago. The situation is getting quite bad and is taxing our already stretched volunteer resources. Mostly the AI produced papers are still very obvious. They look great at a glance, but when you read them, there's nothing there. Nevertheless, it is a great waste of everybody's time. I'm hoping the situation will hit a breaking point and then calm down before I have to take up any more editorial roles. Mary said, "I also see these AI assisted papers and peer-reviewed reports. Deciphering the gist of the recommendation and commentary is difficult because of the frequency of nonsense synonyms and vapid vocabulary. I would much rather have poor grammar and medical jargon to sort through. Abigail said, "I am a nonprofit professional and I've built my career writing grants to secure funding for a variety of organizations. Your work seems like the only sane voice out there right now as I watch nearly all of my colleagues rave about AI and offload all of their critical thinking skills and years of experience with these machines praising the results it spits out. I was recently on a webinar for a grant opportunity and the funders asked potential grantees to be careful of their use of AI in their grant applications because they have been finding that it actually does a disservice to the organization applying that the AI creates a more flattened narrative and instead weakens the nonprofit's arguments for why they are positioned to best use the funding. I find this encouraging and I find your newsletter equally encouraging that hopefully people will start to move away from the utter obsession and fascination with this technology. I couldn't agree more with your line that quote making things faster or easier is not the same as making things better. End quote.
Finally, Travy says, "There's a similar trend going on for HR teams in charge of hiring. We are receiving hundreds more applications and resumes and they are increasingly hard to read. They're often filled with large filler words and don't add value and leave me feeling like I don't know what they're trying to convey. In hiring team conversations, it repeatedly comes up how the submissions that were clearly written without AI or the minimal use of AI have a different feel. Even mistakes are seen in a different light because we know the person created it largely on their own.
This has changed the landscape of hiring and interviewing and in my personal experience, not for the better. So there we go. What is the moral of this story?
Don't write with AI. I think we should just say it's not good to write with AI.
I know we're all futurist out there.
where we're all sort of now x risk transhumanist adjacent and get super excited about like oh my god all these things are going to change or maybe you were excited about something you saw in AI and now uh you take any sort of critique of it as a critique of yourself and makes you embarrassed so you become you double down on being super booster whatever's going on in your mind I think we should be able to just say writing with AI isn't helping writing is supposed to be hard it's how we organize our thoughts it's how we communicate clearly It's one human mind trying to convey a cognitive state information to another human mind.
It's lazy to use AI to write. It's avoiding pain. It's speeding up something that doesn't need to be sped up. It's not the bottleneck to doing good things. When you're writing a grant that is going to fund you for five years, it's five years of continuous effort. Does it really matter that you saved a couple hours writing the grant on some Saturday? Just do the hard work.
If you're going to you want money, you want to do five years of it, use your own words. I just think there is a there is a fraud, an implicit fraud to having machine communication play it off as if it's your own. Communication plays a privileged role. Written and spoken communication plays a privileged role in the modern post-neolithic human experience. And we shouldn't take that lightly and just say, "Ah, well, machines talk on our behalf." We're hearing more and more of these reports. I think it's okay to say that's a bad use of AI. Hey, AI companies, stop enabling that. Build more specific products, products that matter, products that don't degrade our humanity. I don't know. I'm on a soap box, Jesse, but writing with AI to the degree that people are doing it. Um, this is not Where's our cure for cancer?
Where's our flying cars? Where's our like much more efficient way of getting resources to people that need them?
Where are like the type of inventions that actually make the world better?
Where's our electricity?
Where is our, you know, the federal safety regulations for cars? like stuff that improves the lives of many.
Instead, you're just throwing these tools at us. We don't even know what to do with them except for like find these sort of vapid conveniences that we weren't even clamoring for intend to make things worse. So, anyways, I'm getting fed up with some of these use cases.
All right. Uh let's end as we like to do on Mondays by catching up with what I have been um up to. We should start with reading. I keep forgetting uh What the to make up a life is a book title that I've forgotten like for why am I forgetting this book title so much?
It's a It's a perfectly interesting book title.
>> It's got a long subtitle.
>> I've already asked you about it today. I just had to look it up again. I like the book. But anyways, I read a book called What to Make of a Life. This is uh Jim Collins's new book. I keep forgetting the name, but I actually enjoyed the book itself. It's sort of in the vein of the deep life, right? I mean, it's how do you build a meaningful interesting life? I like Jim's approach. He call it the paired cliff approach. He'll take two people with similar paths in their lives up to a certain moment in which there was a big change or disruption in their life and then he compares the different ways that they reacted to it to help try to understand the different ways to navigate cliffs in your life and it was just had like a lot of really interesting stories um and a lot of uh you know a lot of interesting good ideas in there. Uh, you know, Jim is now his upper 60s, I think. So, there's a big emphasis on the second half of your life is where a lot of cool stuff can happen.
Which reminds me of like David Brook's book, The Second Mountain. It reminds me like Arthur Brook's book from was it Tree to Tree? Is that right?
That feels, man, I'm not doing great on books. Does that is that is that possibly the name from tree to tree?
Uh, from strength to strength with a picture of trees behind it. Arthur, you should have named your book from tree to tree and it could have been about swinging on tree branches.
>> Any idea how Collins's book is selling?
>> Well, let's find out. Um, it was New York Times bestseller. It came out recently. I actually had a uh he sent me um he sent me an advanced copy. I don't want a good phone conversation with him at some point. He gave me some really good advice. He's a really interesting guy and I write about him to some degree uh in my new book on the deep life. All right. So, this is the Kindle edition.
It's always riveting audio when you're looking something up on a computer. Uh, the hard cover of What the Make of a Life as of the day we are recording this has an Amazon rank 520 came out April came out a month ago.
That's fine. You're top 1,000 a month after you came out. That means you are getting after it. So if we go to like success self-help category uh you know there it is top 10 >> what's number one >> right now let them theory man Mel Mel is going and then it's start with yourself which is Emma Greed's book um which has an interesting cover then Mark Manson's book all right people whose podcast I've done Robbins yes Mark Manson's yes then it's Admiral William McRaven haven't met him Robert Green haven't met him Morgan household Haven't read them. Future rich person and the four agreements I've read. Then what to make of a life. And number 10 is Remit Sethy's I will teach you to be rich.
I've known Reiet forever. I like Reiet a lot.
>> I think the four agreements got to be really big because McAfee had it on his book club and Aaron Rogers like talked about it during like co or something.
>> Oh, interesting.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. It's weird. I'll be honest. It's kind of weird. Uh uh Deepwork's not doing great. It's number 30. Sometimes it's in the top 10, but right now it's number 30. Um, well, there you go. Uh, okay. So, what else is going on? I will say if we're talking about books, I'm not going to mention I told Jesse about this, but I I aborted another book. I I won't say what it was. Someone sent it to me. I liked the topic. I thought it'd be quick to read. Couldn't get through it. I I I went uh 60 pages in and I just I Yeah, I couldn't go.
>> Fans are going to want to know what it is. Uh, all right. It was East of Eden by John Steybeck. Terrible book hack. No, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but I'll tell you what the issue was because I think it's an issue for non-fiction writers in general. It was conversational unstructured. So, the biggest sin in my in my mind and idea non-fiction writing is what I call writing for the sake of writing. I have my outline of the topics that this is a reasonable outline of topics for this chapter. And then I'm just going to kind of riff to fill up each of these sections and I'm just sort of riffing ideas mainly like kind of ideas that people have heard before. No real cited sources. Um I might just mention you know an idea I had or an experience I had when I was younger that I probably made up a little bit and I'm just kind of rock and rolling just kind of going through good idea non-fiction. You have, you know, a very structured original new thought. You have a structure that you're bringing people through this.
You're using compelling stories as needed to try to implant new insights and twist them around. Read a Malcolm Gladwell book. He's taking you on a very carefully constructed narrative journey through both an idea space and a real world story space and they merge together and it's a real experience. You can't just riff. Well, here's some thoughts I'm having about this and you know, I don't know. Anyway, so >> when you taught your class up at Dartmouth a couple summers ago, was that all the stuff you were teaching them?
>> Well, the Dartmouth class I taught was writing about technology. Okay.
>> So, we were looking at all the different ways that people write about technology and we broke it down by like all these different styles and it was like really interesting. Like there was like the essay me memoristic style. There was a very like technical explainer type style. There's the sort of narrative investigative journalist style and I was trying to uh show them there's like a great art form to writing about technology and like trying to argue um trying to argue that it was it was really important. Um all right, I'll tell you what the book was. to critique a pure reason by Emanuel Kant. Just rambling. Come on.
Want more stories. All right, enough of that nonsense. Uh, that's all the time we have for today. We have a I'm sure we'll have our AI reality check episode on Thursday, so stay tuned for that.
Then we'll be back next Monday with an advice episode. I've got a good one planned. Uh, so until then, as always, stay deep.
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