Ep. 374: This is Your Brain on Phones

26:41So thank you, rag and bone. So what I'm trying to say here is it's time to upgrade your denim with rag and bone. For a limited time, it's a good deal. Our listeners will get 20 % off their entire order if they use the code DEEP when they go to rag-bone.com. That's 20 % off at rag-bone.com when you use the promo code DEEP. Use that code. This is a really good deal. You need a good pair of jeans. Get them from rag-bone.com. Use the promo code DEEP so you get 20 % off. and when they ask you on the site where you heard about us, please mention our show so they know you came from us. All right, I also want to talk briefly about our friends at Grammarly.

27:20Look, in the knowledge economy, the ability to communicate clearly is everything. Not only does it help you do your job, if you're a good communicator, it'll help you get promoted. You really should care about how you communicate, but most people struggle because writing is hard and it's not obvious how to get better at it. This is where Grammarly enters the scene. Grammarly is the essential AI communication assistant that boosts both the productivity and the quality of your writing. I don't think people fully realize how powerful Grammarly has gotten. Let me tell you about a particular feature I've been enjoying, the proofreading agent.

27:53I'll give you a real example. I had to write an email that was going to go out to a large group of people, so I typed out a quick draft, but before sending it, I had the proofreading agent and Grammarly take a look. It found a straightforward mistake. You know, Grammarly is very good at that. That's great. But it can do a lot more. There's a whole list of different functions. So I clicked, for example, sharpen opening point, and it suggested ways to be less wishy-washy and more precise in explaining up front like what this email was about. It actually gave me ideas that made the email better. And this was without me having to sit there and give this email, which I didn't care that much about, the same type of thought I would give if I was writing like a New Yorker article or something.

28:33So it just – in places where I'm not even like thinking much about writing or my brain is tired, it can still help you write better. But here's what I would suggest. If you're a knowledge worker, have Grammarly be like an editor who sits behind you and looks over your shoulder. Have it take a look at any communication that's going out to people that you care about, how they think about you. Let it fix mistakes. Let it comment on your precision. Let it detect or adjust your tone. It can help you brainstorm titles or ideas if you get stuck. This will all make you a better writer, and that's what makes the difference in our current economy.

29:04You use a keyboard, you need Grammarly. You can download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com slash podcast. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. All right, Jesse, let's get back to our deep dive. All right, so before we took a quick break, we talked about the common advice for using your phone unless it doesn't work. And we use our new understanding of the short-term motivation system to explain why it doesn't work. Now I want to do the opposite, and I want to look at a few ideas that do work, and now we can understand why they work based on our understanding of the brain. All right, the first idea I want to mention here that I think actually does work is eliminate the strongest reward signals.

29:51So one of the things you can do is prevent the brain circuit that recognizes the pattern of your phone being nearby from being exposed to such a constant stream of highly purified reward signals. We want to reduce the expected reward that that brain circuit associates with looking at your phone. The easiest way to do that is basically stop using on your phone algorithmically curated content. The best rewards come from content that is selected using a machine learning algorithm that uses your engagement as input. They're building an approximation of your reward estimator in your brain, and they're going to give you a very clear signal.

30:29So just stop using. I know this sounds both simple and impossible, but this is what I'm telling you. So stop using on your phone things like TikTok or Instagram or X or anything that you have an algorithm trying to choose things that's going to free you from boredom real easily or give you pleasant surprise. When you reduce that reward signal over time, the power of the vote of the pick up the phone circuit is reduced. And it goes from being like a really well organized campaign to a sort of haphazard campaign. And that's good. and now the urge is lower. You still need to use these apps for like work or this or that.

31:09Great. You do it on a computer or whatever. And that's not like, what's the difference? It's all the difference because now you're getting those reward signals over on your computer. It's not being associated with the pick up your phone circuit. And the phone is the thing you have with you all the time. So that matters. All right. Speaking of having it with you all the time, we understand the brain. The second category of advice that we think will actually work is reduce the ubiquity of the cues. So if you don't have your phone right with you all the time, then the amount of time during your day where the pick up the phone pattern fires is reduced because the phone actually has to be accessible for that pattern to fire.

31:46So even if the expected reward is really high for looking at your phone, if the phone is not there, the pattern that's going to generate that vote is not going to fire. Now, the easiest way to do this, I've been now saying this for a while now, people don't like this advice, but I'm telling you, you need to do this. When you're at home, your phone is plugged in in your kitchen, plug in your charger, whatever. That is where your phone lives. If you need to check on like a text message conversation, you go to the kitchen and you check on it. If there's a call you're expecting, you put on the ringer like an old-fashioned phone, and if it rings, you go in there and you check on it.

32:23If you want to listen to a podcast while you do the dishes, you use earbuds. You use wireless earphones so that the phone can stay where it is plugged in. so importantly if you're reading if you're at the dinner table if you're watching tv you're brushing your teeth like whatever it is the phone isn't actually there for you to grab so it makes it's the easiest thing you can do to make the cue non-ubiquitous and if the cue is not there the pattern won't fire and you don't have to fight that vote all right the third thing that actually works once we understand the brain is strengthening competing systems so the short-term motivation system is really good at like yeah go get that water go pick up this phone because that's like most of what we do during the day but there are other brain systems that can overwhelm or overwrite the short-term reward system because like of course there are if there weren't things would get pretty primal pretty quickly so one of the systems that can overwhelm the vote from the short-term system is our long-term motivation system.

33:28The system that does a better job of simulating the long-term future of certain activities, right? So we don't just have a direct connection. The short-term system is like, I can associate the immediate reward we'll get by doing this. When I eat the cookie, it will feel like this. When I pick up the phone, almost immediately we'll get something like this type of reward. The long-term system is thinking about, for example, when you're picking up a weight, it's looking down the line for you being in shape or when you're you know working on a book chapter it's looking down the line towards the book being done and it's doing more of a complex simulation so instead of it just being an association this cue with this reward it actually does a whole simulation there's a there's a fascinating literature about how these simulations work I've talked about them before on previous episodes, but it uses like stored memories about experiences from the past.

34:24It has like a logical simulator that then takes those memories. They try to figure out possible futures and based on those memories, what can it expect? Anyway, the reward signals from that system can easily overwhelm those from the short-term system. This is why like we do boring, hard stuff at our jobs, even though there's like more fun things nearby we could be doing because like the long-term reward of like keeping our job and like having this thing that my boss is asking me for is like swamping the short-term reward. Like, well, don't we want to go to like the snack machine right now? Wouldn't that be fun?

34:58So you can strengthen this long-term reward system by practicing and introducing discipline into your life. And by discipline, I mean getting used to the long-term pursuit of goals that require consistent action over time and then have really good rewarding outcomes on the other end. The more of these you have, the more power you're giving to your long-term reward system. And the more comfortable it is saying, hey, short-term system, I don't care about your vote. The reward that really feels good is when these big long-term projects succeed. Let's go work on that type of thing. And so the more your brain gets used to discipline, it gets used to working on long-term projects and reaping big rewards down the line, the easier time you'll have basically pushing aside the incentive salience that you're getting from the short-term system and turn your attention to efforts that maybe in the moment aren't as pleasurable, but your brain's like, I know where this story ends, and that's the real stuff.

35:55And the long-term reward system, of course, is like how the human species has really differentiated itself as part of at least how we really differentiate ourselves from other animals. Because we can overcome these sort of short-term impulses to work on, you know, building fire, inventing language or mathematics or building like massive structures. And there's so many things we do that differentiate us from other animals because our long-term reward systems got hyperdrive. So you practice strengthening your competing systems and practicing disciplined pursuit of long-term important goals really begins to shift the balance of power within your brain and the short-term reward system gets much less play.

36:34All right, so there we go. Those are, once we understand the brain, the things that we know don't work and the things that I think actually will work. They're not as sexy, by the way, right? They're annoying, the things that do work. It's like take the fun stuff off your phone. Keep your phone plugged in when you're in the kitchen and be disciplined. That's not fun. I want to have like a fun detox every week and make my phone grayscale and rail against like Mark Zuckerberg being bad. Like all that stuff is more fun. This stuff is not fun. But it works because it's actually compatible with our brain.

37:06All right. So, Jesse, let's do some takeaways. We have some takeaway music.

37:20All right, so here's how I feel about this. There was a time when talking about spending too much time on your phone sort of sounded like kids these days type of old man yelling from his porch type of advice. But we're past that time. No one is happy about how much of their life is punctuated by that little glowing piece of glass. Nor are they happy about the impact this is having, not just on their ability to live deeply, but on our society and our ability for like our political system to function. the mental health of our kids, the freedom from random nihilistic violence. So eliminating that sense of needing to constantly look at your phone, that addictive sense to look at your phone, has never been something that people care more about.

38:02And the message I'm hoping to deliver today is that not all advice about this goal is made equal. It's not enough to just say, let me go try some stuff. Different advice works better than others. And if you study how the brain actually works and how it actually creates the sense of motivation and what circuits are firing and why to get you to keep looking back at that device again and again. When you understand that, it becomes much clearer that most things that you might try to fix that problem are ineffective, but there are a few things that we can expect to work really well. And again, as I just said, they're not sexy.

38:36It's taking apps like TikTok off your phone. Just get rid of that super clean reward signal associated with your phone. It's about putting your phone in the kitchen when you're at home. or going for a walk without it. Get rid of the cue. The pattern doesn't fire. If it doesn't fire, it begins to weaken. And finally, strengthening the other systems, the systems that really make us human and that can overwhelm the short-term motivation system, the systems like long-term motivation based on the discipline and pursuit of stuff that you care about, focus on those so that the balance of power shifts in your brain and the short-term motivation system doesn't have so much to say.

39:08None of that is easy. None of it is fun. But once we understand how strong those reward loops are in our brain, we see how far we really have to push ourselves if we want to get free. The little stuff isn't going to matter. It's the big, uncool, but effective stuff that we have to focus on, and we have to push on that hard. So we can tame our phones. It just requires understanding what really we're trying to do, and we set out to accomplish that goal. There we go. That's my – this is your phone on – your brain's on phone. Is that the way we go? This is your brains? Yeah. On phones. That's my analysis, Jesse.

39:46Have you seen those fob things? No. I saw them. I was filming a documentary. They were filming at my house, and some of the crew was showing them to me. They were using them. You have to touch it to your phone to unlock it. So the idea is you put that, you know, you're like, oh, there's this, like, friction step. Yeah. And the reason, like, it seems like kind of a weird thing, but, like, the reason why that became a big product is that Apple, They make it hard. They really don't want third-party apps to have control over other apps on their phone. They change this. There used to be apps, a lot of apps you could buy on your phone that restrict your phone use.

40:21But those are hard to make now because they're new terms of service. Say your app can't affect someone else's app. You want to control your phone time, you have to use screen time. But as we talked about on the show over the summer, screen time is great if you're trying to control your kid's phone. But if you're in control of the screen time, you can just turn it off. Yeah. So, but one thing you can do is have an, it's just locking and unlocking can be very strong. But that's what the fob thing is, is it's just like an unlock mechanism. Your phone is, anything goes when you turn it on. So I thought those were cool, but you know, they're not going to be enough because that is not enough.

40:57That friction is not enough to change the expected rewards. So there we go. All right. We got a lot of good show coming up on this topic. We have questions from listeners about their own struggles with both them and their kids trying to deal with their phones, including a mom of an 11-year-old who I think really is looking for permission from me to say, get that 11-year-old your phone. It's going to go the way she thinks, I think. We also have, coming up a little bit later, my reading list from last month where I talked about the five books I read in September. I think that's really well-suited for today's episode because what could be more contrary to looking at your phone all the time than reading?

41:37I kind of like that. I mean, I try to do this early each month, but I think going over the books I read is like a really good sort of in-cap to discussion we're having today. But before we get into all that, let's do a little housekeeping. Jesse, do we have any housekeeping about the show we need to get to this week? Yes, we do. We need some more calls specifically about phone usage, social media, that sort of thing. How do people call into the show and leave calls to be featured on the show? uh they just go to the deep life.com slash listen and there's a link right there at the top right so you could do this right from your uh phone or your computer from your web browser we need more calls the calls we have are all pretty deep worky pretty productivity so what we really need is calls about other types of struggles you have with technology in your life and questions about technology questions about technology in your life questions about creating a life that is more internet proof we're really looking for that so you have a good chance of getting featured uh what else do we got um if you're interested in the newsletter which is revamped and awesome it comes out every monday morning they can go to calnewport.com and sign up and they can also go to the deep life.com and sign up yeah you got to sign up for that i mean basically i guess the way i would say it recently jesse is really like the newsletter has been in conversation with the podcast so like often like the newsletter that came out you'll that came out today the day this episode's coming out is taking one of the ideas from the podcast and actually running with it.

43:06So there's a lot of that going on. Or I'll get a reaction to the podcast by newsletter. So really, like the newsletter plus the podcast together really gets you into these ideas a lot better than one on their own. All right, anything else? Did you see that Paramount's buying the free press for$150 million? I did see that, yeah. I think that's a good sign, I guess, for those of us doing independent media. here's what I want you to put on your list call NBC and tell them hey look we're reasonable they can have deep questions for like a hundred minutes right because they don't need because I guess that's what they're doing now does that mean I get a host of the today show like how's this work if they buy us we could do four hours in the morning I think it's politically oriented as well based on you know the politics of the current the one thing seems to be like a lot of people reacting who are like online who are upset or very jealous about the money.

44:06I do want to just make a like, here's my business PSA. Barry Weiss did not just get handed$150 million. I think people read that and are like, oh, someone just gave$150 million to Barry Weiss. No, no, no. There's an agreement to buy the free press, which unfolds over many years. And much of that has to do with stocks and stock swaps. So there's like a certain amount of stock the free press is going to get every year. So the actual amount that in the end, the purchase will depend on what the Paramount stock does. Barry Weiss doesn't own 100 % of the free press. They've taken on, I mean, they have many partners when they started.

44:42They've taken on a lot of venture capital. So, you know, yeah, she made a lot of money. I don't want to downplay it, but she didn't just get$150 million. I think people don't always. Speaking of the free press, you need to have Neil Ferguson on the show. He's a smart guy. Niel Ferguson. Did you read something of his recently? Yeah, and then I signed up for the free press, and I get alerts when he writes stuff. He's a cool guy. Niel Ferguson. People say Niel, but it's N-I-A-L-L. He was at Harvard before he went to the Hoover, and he was a historical economist. or an economic historian, I guess.

45:28Like the thing is like he was a historian but would use the tools of economics to do his history, right? So it'd be like one of these things where like, oh, we want to learn more about like the medieval Florence in like the early Renaissance period. And that type of historian, like, we're going to go read all the ledgers. And we're going to like reconstruct like how the money was moving through the economy. And it was really cool. I think that type of, he's a really smart guy. He writes a lot of books. Yeah. But then he left. He's conservative-ish. I mean, it's all relative. But then he went to the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

46:03Yeah, I think he's a smart guy. We should have him on. And he has an accent, right? Yeah. And he's going to sound so much smart. Here's what we're going to do. All right. Here's how we're going to count. We're going to have Neil Ferguson on. I'm afraid his English accent is going to make him seem smarter than me. So you can speak in your French accent. Well, no. Here's the solution from last week's episode. It's even better. When I speak, we put the Jordan Peterson violin music behind me. just like, like just really. So then I'm going to sound more profound than I can counteract his, his English accent.

46:31And when he speaks, I'm thinking like someone playing the spoons or like, you know, you can play the jug where you blow into the moonshine jug with the triple X's on it as part of like an old time band from the depression. We're going to play that behind him to kind of reduce the impact of his English accent. And then for me, it's going to be like really emotional violin music. I'm going to talk real slowly. All right. That's housekeeping for today. Let's move on to some questions. Who do we got first, Jesse? First question is from Andy. My 11-year-old son is the only one in his class without a smartphone.

47:05He gets bullied and he feels left out of trends. Smartphones aren't allowed at the school, but that doesn't change the fact that he's clearly missing out. Well, I mean, first of all, I'll say I recognize the issues here. And I recognize that it's really hard and it's also not really fair for my generation of parents and especially the people in my generation who are a little bit older, like whose kids are in high school or just going into college now because we didn't sign up to have to be part of this experiment of let's take this incredibly powerful new technology. Let's give it to our kids.

47:37They'd be like, let's see what happens. Like, let's just make it socially ubiquitous and then leave it on individual parents. They're like, okay, you got to go read like John Heights, 700 page, you know, annotated bibliography online about mental health impacts of smartphones and make a decision that's going to make you like a complete outlier in your community. It is really, uh, we really put a really big burden on parents. So I have a lot of empathy. This is a really hard time. A couple of things I want to say here. It's probably not true that your 11-year-old is the only kid in your class, not without a smartphone, but it can really feel that way.

48:10And at some schools, that is more true than others. That's changing now, which I think is good, but that hasn't completely changed yet. I would also say if he's being bullied, the phone is not going to help. So one of the big concerns, and I did a talk recently at my kid's school where I went through and said, why are the experts actually concerned about these things? and I broke those concerns in the four categories and I talked about the four categories. And one of the categories was the sort of negative externalities of digital sociality, which by the way, Jesse, is exactly the way to talk when you're trying to impress a bunch of seventh graders.

48:45They really liked that. It was funny because we were doing it for the students and their parents. But there's these negative externalities of digital sociality and one of them is there's whole parts of our brain that give us sort of like interpersonal guardrails that, you know, prevents me from like trying to club Jesse when I'm upset about, you know, an ad transition or something. We have all these interpersonal guardrails that makes us more reasonable people. We need that to survive as like a community oriented species. A lot of them turn off when social interactions become purely linguistic.

49:19So when I am just sending texts to you on Snapchat or on WhatsApp, yes, if you ask my prefrontal cortex, is there a person like, am I talking to Jesse over WhatsApp. It knows it, right? It's not confused about it. But many of these other deeper social circuits aren't seeing a person. They're not hearing a person. So they are turned off. The guardrails get turned off, which means in purely linguistic interaction, we're basically like worse people. And we're much more likely to be mean or to bully. I mean, obviously we see this among adults on social media all the time, just like the stuff they say on X, It's crazy, right, like how enraged or outraged or how mean or how terrible they get.

50:02It's because the stuff that stops us from saying that in person is turned off when it's linguistic. So anyways, bullying goes up when you move more conversation digital. And then if you're in a compromised social situation in school – and by the way, tell your 11-year-old that it does get – it will get better. Middle school is not great necessarily, but like keep doing what you're doing. you know be you have interest develop skills develop discipline start doing stuff that's like really hard and following through it will get better but if you're having a struggle socially then the other thing that happens when i have a smartphone again man such a burden is your relief goes away so those interactions are happening all the time not just at school at home you're doing your homework when you're at dinner you're going upstairs a bit it's right there on your phone all the time.

50:50So you get no cognitive relief from high-stakes social interaction, which is exhausting. And if you're in a socially compromised situation, they're also really negative potentially. And so that's like even worse. So this is not a solution. If you're upset about your social situation in middle school, like in a classic social middle school, like I'm not fitting in as a bullying situation. Hey, here's a phone that people can be like bigger jerks and you have to be in touch with them all the time. That's not necessarily going to make that better. There's A couple of things that can help with this collective action problem.

51:22I'm a fan of things like the wait for eighth pledge where you get parents in your grade to sign up and you use the wait for eight website onto this pledge. If I'm not going to give a phone to my kid until after eighth grade, which is like roughly when like John Hyatt recommends when the surgeon general recommends it, the last surgeon general. It's sort of like an emerging consensus. Wait till high school to have your first smartphone. And it gives you statistics and that's where it's powerful. And then you can say, you know what? You're not the only kid not to have a phone. 33 % of your grade has signed on to a pledge saying that their kids aren't going to get a phone until high school anyways.

51:53So that social evidence of you're not the only one is very effective because you do not need 99 % of your class to not have a phone before you feel comfortable with that. You need roughly like 15 % to 20 % before that becomes a socially acceptable option. So I'm a big fan of those. You can help organize one of those pledges. The way this works is it's really parents and grades at individual schools say, I want to pledge for our grade. And they get together with a couple of parents and you put together an email and you tell the school and the school gives the email addresses and you send it out.

52:23That's all it is. And grade by grade, you begin to create these pledges, which I think are very powerful. We should start those as early as third or fourth grade. So you have different options there. Okay. And then you have lots of logistical things like, you know, if there's group chats you want to be a part of, you can have set up group chat on a family iPad. You have certain times set aside where you can look at the iPad and do the group text and stuff like that. but I really want to add friction to the idea of like, wouldn't it all just be easier if I just gave him the phone? I wouldn't have to be dealing with this.

52:54It's really so bad. And I really want to emphasize it is, that is not going to be the solution to these things. The social things you worry about his social things. There's so much bad that comes with it. What I want to do here. I don't know if we have this, Jesse, do we have that clip? Yeah. I want to play. Here's an ad that's been going around the internet. It's from a smartphone free childhood. It's a nonprofit organization. They did an ad. We only have the audio here, but you can kind of imagine the visuals here, which I think does a good job of making you confront the reality of what happens if you give your 11-year-old a smartphone.

53:26So we're going to hear the audio. So just to set the visual of this ad, there's like an 11-year-old kid. I think it's like a 10 - or 11-year-old looking kid, like a young-looking kid that age. And a dad is in bed, and his dad is like at the doorway like saying goodnight to him. All right, let's hear this audio, Jesse. Hey, kiddo. it's about time for bed okay okay well remember there's a box in the corner over there with all the pornographic material that's ever been made in the world even the really weird stuff that could scar you for life i'm trusting you not to look in there okay okay feelings are for losers oh and this guy's gonna be in your corner all night just randomly spewing out hateful things just ignore them okay well i'm thinking of it there's an order form on your desk where you can purchase illegal drugs.

54:12The mean girls from your school are going to be standing there talking about you all night. And this Russian hacker is going to keep asking for your password. I'm not a hacker. Amazon customer service. Just need you to ignore them, okay? Love you, buddy. We ask too much of our kids when we give them a smartphone. Let's change the norm. Together. Maybe we go around the room and share social security numbers. Join the movement at smartphonefreechildhoodus.com. I'll get it anyway. we try to hide that reality but it's the truth like would you ever with like your 11 year old be like look I'm gonna put pornography and bullies and sort of like weird interest group like these influencers that have these like really weird agendas there's gonna be a bunch of hackers let's put in there like catfishers too that are gonna try to pretend that they're like young women on text messages then try to like exploit you out of money which has been causing like like a very large, like trend in self-harm, like all this stuff.

55:12Oh, and like a lot of addictions, like let me just put in like constant video games and TVs are always on and like addictive stuff in here. And just like, I trust you and just like handle it. You know, it's an incredible thing to ask of a kid. And that's what happens to give them the smartphone. So it's hard, but stand strong is what I would say. I think norms are changing and your kid will thank you not to have to deal with all that at their current age. All right. Who do we got next? next up is natasha i want to quit social media however i sometimes get an irrational urge to show off i think everybody feels this to some extent they want to brag about their looks their lifestyle body wealth job intelligence whatever i was often the weird loner at school and as an adult i still have that chip on my shoulder how should i overcome this right well the main thing i want to say is the urge is not irrational so like the the deep down the urge you're feeling It's like a very human urge.

56:09The thing that is abnormal here is the technology medium in which that urge is being expressed. That is what sort of perverts things and creates the negative outcomes. So what is the natural, so to speak, outlet for this urge to want to show off? The real natural outlet for that is that I want to have respect and be in a position of leadership in my communities. That is where that's going. I want in the communities I'm involved in, real-world communities where I know what the people look like and I see them in person, in those communities, I want to over time through sacrifice service and demonstration of competency, build up like increasing levels of respect and leadership that people look to me.

56:49They're impressed by me, and they want me to like be in charge of thing or be involved or someone they can count on. That is actually what we crave. The social media just takes that craving and perverts it. This is like what happens with a lot of the attention economy-based engagement technology is they take completely normal human impulses or urges that actually can lead to very positive outcomes. That's why we evolved to have them, and they hijack them. They hijack them, right? It's just like boredom is like a very strong urge that is meant to try to push humans to not just lay in the sun like cats can do and are perfectly happy to do.

57:24but to get up and actually go try to see intentions made manifest concretely in the world in positive ways, that leads to invention. That leads to innovation. That leads to protection. I'm going to go build fences around our paleolithic camp. I'm going to try to build a better flint axe that's going to help us better do whatever. It's a very human thing but social media hijacks that. It's like, oh, boredom's bad. It feels good when it goes away. Scroll endlessly on TikTok. It's hijacking it, right? just like procreation is good pornography hijacks that like oh that's there we can hijack that over here like junk food hijacks like our hunger urge but that's what's being hijacked here by the social validation that's built into as an engagement mechanism to social media so take that urge don't push it away but find a natural healthy outlet for it which is becoming a leader and someone who is respected within actual real world communities and i'll tell you what when you match these urges, people feel this all the time, to what they're really meant to drive you towards, it's a completely different feeling.

58:26It is a completely different feeling knowing like, hey, I was here for my community. I stood up and people look up to me. That gives you a sense of satisfaction that lasts so much more than I did like an Instagram filter on my face when I was taking a picture at the beach and, you know, it got 50 of those hearts. I don't know what that means and someone you know in broken english was like you hot that's like a short term like oh it's a little simulacrum of what that urge is actually driving you towards so nothing you're doing is irrational but the technology is screwing with a very healthy natural urge go be a leader go go earn respect among real people it is it's the real deal is 10x better than what you get on those screens.

59:10All right, who do we got next? Next up is Carl. You talk a lot about phones and social media. I don't actually spend that much time on my phone. My issue is video games. How do I stop playing these so much? Well, if we go through our model of how the brain works, there's a lot of these same brain mechanisms at play. Games are designed to give you, it's going to be a pretty consistent reward because it's such an artificial environment and it's calibrated to be difficult, but not too difficult. So the reward you get is one of both novelty of your seeing stuff. You get a little bit of adrenaline.

59:40if it's like an action game, and most importantly, you get sort of progress. And so it fits roughly in that model. Like, oh, I see my video game is here. I'm at home. I could go to the gym. I could read a book, or I could pick up the controller. The queue is right there. The controller is right there. And because it's this artificial environment, it can give me like a really clean reward. So it does build up like a strong association. There's a certain type of game that really messes with this system even more than our phones do, and that is massive online games. If you talk to people within like technology overuse type related fields and research, the real things they fear are massively online games because they add in some extra elements to make their attraction even more powerful.

1:00:23They have like an endless increase in score. So if you're playing World of Warcraft or something like this, you're going to get this steady leveling. You do a little bit of effort in level. That's simulating like in real world, building up competency and getting more respect for it, which is a very powerful driver. They simulated in those games. Now, of course, you get this when you're just playing like Mario a little bit because you're making progress. But in the online multiplayer games, your mind is like, no, no, no. Other people know what level I'm at and they see it. So that's much more powerful.

1:00:56It's simulating like I am in a real community of people and I am earning their respect. I just talked about that in my answer to Natasha that that's a strong urge. this thing grabs it way stronger than like getting hearts on instagram and like really twist it so that is super compelling um also the sense of uh it hijacks this sense of like i have this is my tribe because i hear them in my headset we're on like a discord server while we play or whatever and i'm with them all the time and we're doing stuff that kind of pushes the buttons of like adventures and trials it's not the real things there's not nearly as strong as like i'm actually in battle with people but it simulates that sort of band of brothers type connection this is super super addictive on top of all the other just standard like we have nice positive reward signals to get associated with it that's where we have the most problems it's where like if you look to south korea where they're they're sort of they 5x all the problems we have with technology here because it's like a much more technology focused culture they have detox centers there for these video games not for phones but for massively online video games they have cases over there of people dying because they played the game so long that it was like dehydration and they had heart issues so you got to be worried probably the most addictive consumer-facing technology we have are some of these massively online player games i'd be really worried about it like my advice about those games is like a game where a lot of people are playing at the same time just don't play them just don't use it just i would just stay away from it right it's like don't get you know you might be like a marijuana user don't get near the stuff that might have fentanyl in it like why even like play with that okay so i am very wary uh i am very wary of those games what what i would recommend if you're playing video games triple a games are usually the best that are non-multiplayer a triple a game it costs 60 bucks it has about 50 hours of gameplay programmed into it that's supposed to be stretched out it's challenging i'm going to want to take breaks because it's hard i'm not leveling up in a way that like someone's watching me and like yeah that's like your your equivalent of like me watching a lot of movies i'm not so worried about that but i I worry about the massively online player games.

1:03:00So to give you actual advice, Carl, don't play those. Just stop playing those. You know, just grown-ups shouldn't play those games. Stop playing those games. If you like other video games like Work of Art that are single player and AAA, then like, yeah, you could treat it like TV. You know, like, yeah, instead of watching a movie when I get home on Friday night, I'm going to play the video game for two or three hours. I guess that's okay. I'm not as worried about that. All right. Who do we got next? Next up is Carissa. I spend most of my time on my phone text messaging. I don't really think I'm addicted, but feel there's a ton of stuff to figure out and people's questions to answer.

1:03:32What do I do about this? Yeah, that's a complicated question. We did an episode about this earlier in the summer about text messaging actually being a major driver of phone use, especially when you get a little bit older and you have more responsibilities and maybe you're doing logistics for kids or you just have like a complicated social life or work slash social life you're trying to navigate. And this really complicates the picture. because when we're talking about something like TikTok, that's purely optional. Like it gives you a nice reward signal, but you do not need that particular reward signal to function in any way.

1:04:04And no one notices or cares if you stop using TikTok. People do notice if you stop becoming available on the messaging services. So the hard thing with these is trying to differentiate between logistical necessity and social-driven addiction cues. And so here's the issue. You might be using this a lot mainly because I'm just involved in six threads that are all relevant because they're all logistics and timing and I have to figure it out. But there's also a really strong cue here that our short-term reward center is going to really care about, which is there might be people waiting for me to respond.

1:04:46And the negative affect they have towards me will increase the longer I'm not responding. That catches our attention. People are getting madder every minute I don't look at my phone, potentially, makes you really want to look at your phone. And for obvious reasons, right? So these two things together can make this really powerful. The best solutions here, as we talked about in the episode of the summer, is not just to abstain. I just don't use my phone anymore. But to try to reroute the actual necessary communication more out of these text messages and or to reprogram over time the expectations of people who communicate to you through these apps.

1:05:30So that your mind is not so worried that people are upset. like you know uh we we have different ways of organizing different logistics ways we check in i'll call someone once a day or we figure out a plan in advance so there's like less stuff that's probably coming in urgent and also people have learned in my circles my phone's in my kitchen and so i come and i check it but if maybe once an hour but there might be a two-hour break and they can call if there's something really time urgent that tells your brain like they're not just sitting they're upset and stewing. They know and understand the way you use your phone.

1:06:03You basically have to change your relationship to communication so that frequent time-sensitive communication coming through text messages is not that common anymore, that people understand you're not always checking it. And because of that, you have the backup phone calls and other types of logistical types of things you do. That's all a pain. What I'm saying is do that pain. It's worth the pain because the cost, on the other hand, is to almost addictively have to check that phone all the time. And that has so many negative impacts. It's worth the pain of like, I have a kind of janky way I deal with like logistics and communication.

1:06:37It's worth, it's worth the effort. All right, let's see. Do we have one more question? Yep. Next up is Robert. I have newspaper apps on my phone, like the Washington Post and New York Times and New York Post. I also have these on my iPad where I normally read my news. Is it fine that I occasionally read these apps on my phone? I don't go on social media sites when doing so. it's not the worst thing in the world what i would recommend if you're going to look at like the new york times app is treat it like a newspaper and just say like yeah this is when i sit down like with my morning coffee or something and i go through because it's it's not super dynamic they kind of set it for each day and then have some minor changes throughout the day based on what's happening let me go through and like see which articles i read and maybe one of the opinion pieces I read.

1:07:25And then you're kind of like done with the New York Times for the day. Just like you would have done in a day where you had the newspaper and you would read it over breakfast and that's it. And now you're done reading the newspaper. If you treat it that way, it doesn't really matter what medium you're reading it on. An interesting thing about the New York Times in particular is in their app design and in the way that they're now thinking about news stories, they're highly influenced by the success of other news bearing social media, which they see as their competitors, and it's reflected in the way they actually cover news now.

1:07:55So you'll notice two things they do to try to prevent you from bypassing them and going straight to something like Twitter when there's breaking news. The first thing they do is the live updates. That is a direct response to social media. So they want to give you a sense if there's some sort of breaking thing happening, that if you're on the app, there will be updates. It'll keep updating, and you can click the thing, Show me the new updates or whatever because they know people have now learned through social media. It's not enough of like something happened. I'm going to wait until we know more about it.

1:08:27Then I'll read an article that summarizes what we know and then maybe later that day or the next day I'll get like this. OK, a day later. Now what do we know? I need to be like collecting information, right? That's what social media taught us. I have to be like Woodstein and Woodward and Bernstein and all the president's men like trying to put together all the pieces. Like you want to have just like information coming at you. So they try to simulate this. Like, oh, we'll do these like breaking like reports. The other thing they do, which is very conscious reaction to social media, is they'll do five articles on an issue.

1:08:57Like instead of just like, OK, here's what happened. Here's what's going on. Right. And here's our article where we explain what's going on. Like we'll do five articles on it. Here's what's happening. Here's another take on it. Here's a news analysis on it. Here's looking at the other side of it because they want you to feel like we're flooding the box. I have lots of things I can read about this thing I care about. again 15 years ago this would be weird i just have a good article on it that you put in what you know but social media train people again they want to be reading lots of stuff i want to read this and that and this and i kind of want to like immerse myself in what's happening so they do that now so they'll generate five articles on something right away as opposed to one so it's interesting so they've had to respond uh they've had to respond to social media that tried to be attractive but it's fine you can read it on your phone just do it once a day i mean again they don't update those apps that much because it's a newspaper model.

1:09:48So there's not that much for you to see there, even if you check it all the time. All right. We still have a lot of more cool stuff on this topic to come, including a case study from one of my listeners where they talk about what happened when they, as a parent, I'm going to have to gasp here, changed their mind and took a piece of technology they had given their kid back again. Turns out you can do that. So we'll see what actually happened there. Hint, it involves a double murder. Not really. That would be funny if I sounded it up like and she killed. He killed me and my wife. No. All right. And we also have a phone call about it's about Instagram.

1:10:24What's our phone call about something? Yeah. Yeah. We got a phone call from a listener about Instagram. And of course. I get a reveal the five books I read in September. So we got a lot of cool content coming forward on this topic. But first, stay tuned because we have to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. I want to talk about our friends at my body tutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, My Body Tutor's founder, for many years. He's one of my go-to guys for fitness advice. His company, My Body Tutor, is 100 % online, and it's a coaching program. So it's a 100 % online coaching problem that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency.

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1:12:04So head over to MyBodyTutor.com, T-U-T-O-R, MyBodyTutor.com. tell them you came from deep questions get$50 off and begin your quest towards becoming healthier I just want to talk about our friends at indeed Jesse let me tell you something I'm not very good at which is hiring we recently hired a creative director to help run the newsletter among other things and you know what my process was for trying to hire this person I took a receipt I found in my pocket and I wrote on the back me need newsletter guy money maybe non-juggler preferred I just nailed that to a telephone pole. Long story short, the juggler we hired ended up being pretty good, actually.

1:12:44So that was okay. But there has to be an easier way to do this, and there is, and it is using Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. So stop struggling to get your post seen on other job sites. Use Indeed Sponsored Jobs, which will help you stand out and hire fast. It works. According to data from Indeed, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45 % more applications than non-sponsored jobs. You can spend less time interviewing candidates who check all your boxes, less stress, less time, more results now with Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of the show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get their jobs more visibility if they go to Indeed.com slash deep.

1:13:32Just go to Indeed.com slash deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. All right, Jesse, let's get back into it. So we're going to do a case study here. This is where listeners write in to talk about how the ideas we talk about on the show have actually impacted their lives. We got a good one today, but we can't do a case study until we get our mind in the right context. And the best way to do that, Jesse, is playing our case study theme music.

1:14:18Our case study today comes from John. John says,

1:14:50week and allowed unlimited books last month she tested in the eighth grade math and achieved the highest score in her grade on an end of year literature exam her social life certainly hasn't suffered either she now has a flip phone for calls and emergencies but the novelty wore off quickly and it lacks the intense stimulus of the watch we otherwise do our best to favor in-person interaction through hangout sports and scouting so surprise surprise jesse you give these technologies that completely overwhelm the short-term motivation centers in our brain and you give it to a fourth grader and their brain goes haywire.

1:15:24And, you know, I feel like we, we pretend like this is not true, but it is, it's like that commercial that we just played for. You're giving all these capabilities to someone who's, you know, nine and you're like, okay, we just like trust you to use this well. So well done, John, realizing that like, yeah, you can change your mind. I get this all the time at talks where people are like, man, I wish I hadn't I wish I hadn't given like this phone to like my kid like what can I do you know and I was like well you are the parent like you can change your mind and if you're not willing to fully change your mind the thing I've been recommending that people do say okay uh yeah you have a phone it's not yours it's ours we pay for it's not your property you have no right to it I always joke in my talks that these kids who you know talk monosyllabically when it comes to like you try to take their phone away become like Berkey and private property scholars like this is liberty is built on the the private possession of property and you may not trot on my freedom what it is it's your phone and so you just say like okay at home my phone lives in the kitchen so when you're home we plug it in there and you can go there if you need to text your friends or you need to check in on things but you don't have it at the dinner table and you don't have it at the couch and you certainly don't have it upstairs in your room with the sheets over your head the phone lives here none of this i really don't like when i hear the parents like i wish please please stop using your we're trying to eat dinner oh please stop using your phone what can you do kids these days i don't know it's your phone you're paying for it lives in the kitchen so you can go back all right what i do with my kids um so people do ask what we do uh none of my kids have phones we we own a couple family flip phones not a kid's phones family phones it's like the phone we leave if one of our kids is at home and we're out going for a walk like that's our equivalent of the the old-fashioned phone if you need to like there's an emergency or whatever um and if you're going somewhere like taking the public bus to baseball practice where it would be good to have a backup or you could tell us something went wrong you can basically like check out one of the family flip phones which are terrible to use and it's like really bad technology you can check one out to bring with you to have in case there's a problem when you get back we take it back and just like john was talking about there's something interesting on these phones.

1:17:31They don't actually want to use them. That's what we do. When I was worried about location tracking for my second grader, what I innovated instead, I think this is a really good idea, is that I actually integrated into his backpack a 150 decibel fire siren. And what I have it do is just at random intervals, it just wails for 30 seconds at a time. So I can kind of just see where he is around town. It's like, oh, I hear the fire siren over by the library. So that's, you know, that works. You got to innovate. That's the idea. All right. So good. Way to go, John. And don't give her a smartphone until high school and have it super locked down.

1:18:07And don't give her a less lockdown smartphone with social media until she's 16. That's my advice. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear this. Hi, Kyle. Thank you so much for your content and writing. It's been a great help for me and countless others. A question today is around Instagram. as an aspiring photographer. I'm wondering what your thoughts on if I need a grown presence on Instagram to make a success in the photography. Or do you think I can do it without it? It feels like in today's world, it'd be difficult to be successful in fields like this without a social media presence.

1:18:44I appreciate you, mate. Thank you. All right, it's a good question. I don't know that it's vital for you to be successful. But let's say you're worried about it and we want to alleviate this worry. Understanding what we now know about how the brain works and creating that urge to look at your phone that we talked about in the beginning of the show, this gives us some options here that can give us a little bit more confidence. And the clear option that comes to mind for your situation is if you need an Instagram presence for your photography, it should have nothing to do with your phone. Do it from your laptop.

1:19:17Now, this is going to be easier for you, by the way, because if you're a professional photographer, your photos are not being taken on your phone. So you're going to have to be like uploading them onto your computer anyways before you post them. One of the reasons why Instagram is so successful is you had to. It was mobile native because for most people, the photos they were posting were taken on their phone. And so it was mobile native. And the reason why it took off ahead of Facebook at the time when it really began to take off in the second, the 2010s, is because Facebook was just moving on the mobile.

1:19:48but people didn't yet have that ingrained habit of like, oh, I want to go to Facebook on my phone. They were used to this, like something they did at work when they were bored. It was like a website they went to. But Instagram was mobile native because the whole idea was I took a picture on my phone and now I can go over into Instagram and post it. And so it got this really big user growth, but it wasn't just the user growth, it was the engagement that really made Facebook perk up. Oh, wow, Instagram users use it a lot because the camera was on your phone. And so it was the first real social app where people associated it with like, oh, I do this on my phone.

1:20:22And then they built up that – the reward signal got really strong and they built up that pattern recognizer and their short-term motivation system and they started picking up their phone all the time. So Instagram more than Facebook actually got people looking at their phone more than they planned. OK, so do your photography Instagram on your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Don't log in to Instagram on Safari on your phone. Have a bad password and never type it in on your phone so it's not something you can do impulsively. by bad i mean good like in the sense of it would be complicated to remember it kind of confusing here bad like cool you know what i'm talking about right and so now and then this could be like you know have a plan think about your instagram for photography as like one of the boring things that you have to do it's like sending out your stupid invoices and like the invoice reminders like i got to go into like quickbooks and like click these buttons and i hate it and no one ever really knows what's happening in QuickBooks and you just press these buttons and you're like, I think this kind of worked, right?

1:21:18Treat it like that. I got to log it on my computer. I got to import the photos and I'm going to change the format and make it more of this. I go to my Instagram account. I load it in and I have this copy and I post that and then I log out again and you do it three times a week and that's how your stuff gets up there. Your brain never builds up the cue of your phone being involved. Because you're not really – without your phone, you're not going to consume a lot of Instagram. So you're not going to have that strong reward signal associated with it. And so you're not going to get that like strong vote being fired up in your brain all the time and it's not going to lead the technology over you.

1:21:57It's unless like you work at your computer all the time and maybe you could learn that cue if I want to go to the Instagram website. So do it that way. But the other thing I would recommend, this is an idea for my book, Deep Work. At some point, either before you do this or after you've done it for a while, take a 30-day break where you don't do anything on social media and see, does anyone matter? Does anyone notice and does it make any difference? Because a lot of times you might realize like, okay, my 75 subscribers on Instagram and that one photo that went viral is like not making a big difference.

1:22:24That's not where the action is. Where I really need to be is like on Thumbtack as a preferred contractor on LinkedIn or it has nothing to do with the internet. It has to do with like shows at whatever. So, you know, test it out. don't just assume it's vital but do it on your computer and it won't be that addictive all right final part of our show we get a sound effect for this one yeah well we have a transition oh do we have a yeah let's do transitions okay part three let's hear a sound here final part of the show it's the early in the new month so i'm going to talk about the books i read in the last month so i my goal is always to read five books a month reading reading reading it's the best way to internet proof your brain the best way to become smarter the best way to be better, the best way to, like everything good in a cognitive society comes from reading.

1:23:12It's like saying you should be like walking in your physical health. All right. So I try to read five books a month. I want to talk about the five books I read in September, 2025. A quick shout out. I like to shout out the friends of the show that have new books out. A friend of the show, Robert Glazer, I've been on his podcast several times, the Elevate podcast. Cool new book out this week called The Compass Within, a little stories about the value that guide us. It's about how do we find authenticity and fulfillment in every areas of our lives. It's built around a parable. Check that out, The Compass Within.

1:23:42All right, so what are the books I actually read? Three novels. Let me look here. Three novels this month. It's unusual for me. First novel, it was a novel from my childhood that I saw in a little free library around Tacoma Park, and I grabbed it and read it. The Ice Limit by Lincoln Child and Douglas Preston. Classic early 2000 techno thriller. The premise is basically there's like a giant meteorite down on an island off the southern tip of South America. And this billionaire has hired Eli Gin and Effective Engineering Solutions, this sort of mysterious engineering company that is under the radar, but does like the impossible things they can do.

1:24:28Right. And their whole plan is how are we going to extract this meteorite and get it back? to this guy's museum in upstate New York. It would be the heaviest object ever moved by man because it's like super dense. And then like it's weird things. Great techno thrill. There's weird things happening with the meteorite, but also the Chilean Navy, this one sort of commander in the Chilean Navy who has this like really weird, like interesting backstory is like really bitter is like, I don't, I'm suspicious of this. So he's around bothering them and eventually he has reasons to want to kill them and so there's like a good techno thriller you have all these things coming together for like the final sequence i love classic techno thrillers there's not as much of a market for anymore like a lot of the genre fiction market right now is outside of fantasy like the brandon sanderson types it's like really it's not techno thrillers it's like people falling in love with dragons and romances with fairies and dark academia which I read one of those a couple summers ago anyways fiction's a big market but the techno thrillers they were the thing in the 80s and 90s they're not anymore which I think is too sad until I write my techno thriller which is going to be about Jesse Skeleton going back in time maybe to fight Vikings I don't know I gotta figure that out alright second book I read a Byung Chul Han book The Burnout Society so over the summer early in the summer I did a podcast about his book about the swarm, the something, his book about, I forgot the exact name, the connected swarm, I think.

1:26:05Anyways, he's a, he's a, he's in Germany. He's a philosopher in Germany. I believe he's South Korean, a South Korean philosopher. He's a German institution. And he writes these series of books that are like a little bit more accessible than a lot of continental philosophy. And they're sort of affirmatic and they're very popular among Jin Z or whatever. And so I had done a book about his other a book whose topics seem most relevant, but this is the book that everyone talks about from him, The Burnout Society. So it was good. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, he's... It's interesting. He talks nomically.

1:26:40It kind of like makes these pronouncements. It turns out there's a lot of other writers, especially from more of the 60s and 70s critical theory era that write the same way. So it's not as novel as I think a lot of his Gen Z readers think, the format, but it's interesting stuff. I think it's like a little Marxist influenced. I mean, he plays with a lot of different philosophers. So it's cool. I thought it was interesting writing. I took a lot of notes. Maybe I should do a podcast about it at some point. But he's hard to read, but easy to read, right? Like in a way, he's an easy to read, hard writer.

1:27:12That makes sense. He's a real philosopher, but he makes it just accessible enough that you can sort of get wisdom out of it. All right. Second novel I read, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Now, this was interesting. I didn't get this book at first, and then I did. So the premise for this book, it takes place in the future. It's in the – we're at a future time where basically death has been solved. and money like you don't really you don't have to work and you they can replace your body like if you get killed they can just like you download your brain and they can just like recharge your brain and either put it into your body again after fixing you or do a rapid clone of your bodies like people aren't like worried about death and there's this this weird sort of culture going on where it's like people are just doing projects and you can kind of like take over a project just through everyone has like a popularity ranking and if people like you your reputation is good you can kind of take things over and the main character lives in disney world in florida but it's not run by disney anymore it's like these different coalitions kind of take over parts of the park and they can kind of just run them unless they're because to try to like push them out and take over the part of the park would make your reputation really fall but unless their reputation falls enough and you can come in and do it anyways at first when you're reading this book it's you're like what like this is a this novel's not doing it for me there's no none of the normal stakes you need for drama like nothing really matters like this seems so fake it's like weird this world of like they're they're trying to redo the haunted mansion so that like this other group doesn't take it over with their technology and everyone kind of cares about it but it's also stupid and it's all kind of like weird and superficial and there's no stakes the main character gets shot early on and they just reload them and there's you know like maybe the only stakes is like his neural interface isn't really working like I don't care about what they care about I don't like empathize with this and it's like it doesn't make sense it's like plastic this is like doesn't seem like a real world and then you get it yeah he's personifying online culture like and doing a brilliant job of it this it's it's urgent and at the same time meaningless it you have these things you really care about and you're like racing to get done, but it doesn't matter and no one cares.

1:29:38And it's like a reputation and popularity and this is having its moment and now this or whatever. And Doctorow, what he's really doing is he's making you, so it's more of like a postmodern in this sense, like he's like making you, he's personifying like the sort of empty plasticness and emptiness of online culture into the sort of like view of the future. And then once you get that, you're like, oh, that makes it a hard read, right? Because it doesn't have all of the normal elements you might want out of drama, like empathy with characters, stakes that you care about, surprise and caring about the resolution.

1:30:09You don't really care. But in doing that, you're like, oh, I see what you're saying. This is actually really smart. So it's a really good book. I'm actually glad I read it, but it took me halfway through to really get what was going on there. Then I went to a nonfiction book, Sarah Hurwitz's new book, As a Jew. Sarah Hurwitz wrote, she's a speechwriter. She was a Clinton speechwriter and a Michelle Obama speechwriter. So it was a D.C. person. She lives around here somewhere. And in her 30s, she wrote a book called Here All Along, which was about like rediscovering. She's Jewish but like non-practicing and then rediscovered Judaism in her 30s and how it like really helped her in a lot of ways.

1:30:52And she like kind of wrote a book about it. And then this book is actually pretty interesting. This book is about her. She's making the argument. She's confronting her tendency when she was younger to say things like, you know, like I'm a cultural Jew or I'm a social justice Jew or this or that. And even though she didn't really know much about it, and she's basically making the argument in this book that this is just – she now sees this is just part of a – the last 100 years of this – like 150 years of an ultimately fruitless effort of Jewish individuals to try to assimilate, to try to avoid the baggage and the harm and what they've had to put up with for the last 2 ,000 years.

1:31:37And if they're like, if we just assimilate enough, then like we won't have to, you know, people will like us or whatever. And she's basically coming to grips with like, it never works. This is, this happened in the early 20th century. This happened in the 19th century. This happened in the mid century and it never works. And she's kind of coming to grips with like, I have to come to grips with like being Jewish and what that means. I can't, like she, she said, I didn't talk about Israel in my first book. And she's like, I can't not talk about it. I'm Jewish. I have to confront that in this role in my life.

1:32:04I didn't talk about anti-Semitism in my first book, but it's like the defining force for the way I was acting. So I don't know. I like this better than her first book in the sense that it's more self-reflective. You want like to hear – I mean so the places in the context of the show, it's very deep life relevant. So if you want a good example of like a particular case study of someone trying to understand their life and what matters and how to transform it into something deeper when it happens in the more shallow, this is like a great – this and her last book like are a great contribution to that category but i like the second book better because i think it's more psychologically self-reflective and searing like it's more interesting in that sense it's not it's like really people grappling with something they're really dealing with i think is often more uh in a way that is like real and messy is more meaningful than maybe like a more uh pat like you know i was struggling then i found this then i'm better so i I thought that was really interesting.

1:33:02She does a really good history of anti-Semitism, which I think is really good. I mean, the best work on this, I really think, is Dara Horn. People love dead Jews. I think in some of her writing she's done on this recently for The Atlantic and Tablets, probably the best. But her, because she's a speechwriter, is very good. This is the thing I noticed. This is kind of dry, some of this. It's history stuff. But speechwriters are very good at moving it forward and simplifying the language. And I learned a lot about that was good. I think her thing about where does anti-Semitism come from is a 2000 year groove that you can trace back to.

1:33:38And she like goes to the history. That was very useful. So I thought I'm thinking about the book a lot. So whether or not you care about the struggles of Jewish identity, it was, I think, a good book if you care about someone she's now – she's roughly my age, I think – struggling with, more generally speaking, what am I all about, why I'm all about, and what does that actually mean? Because I think a lot of us go through those same series of questions when you're trying to figure yourself out. All that really differs is like the specific details of those questions. So, you know, if you're a secular Jew from D.C., it's going to be your questions might be centered on that.

1:34:20But different people will have different content behind those questions. But how people tackle those questions, I think, is really important for thinking about, like, how do you build a deep life in a world that digital is trying to make it superficial and fragmented? So it stuck with me. I think it was interesting. Interesting book. All right. Final book, a novel. I read The Searcher by Tana French because everyone's talking about this novel. It was good. It was good. This is now, like, it's a classic. It's genre, but it's highbrow genre. So, you know, it's lit genre. So she's a really good writer.

1:34:54that it's basically, I guess, detective mystery genre, technically, but it's about a police officer retired from Chicago whose name is Cal, which I appreciate, Cal Hooper, and he moves to, I mean, I like the premise. It's very deep lifey. He moves to a small town in Ireland to like fix up. He's just like done. You know, he's divorced. He's, his daughter's older. The being in police force was hard. And he's like, I'm going to move to this like small town in the middle of like very rural Ireland and build up this, uh, fix up an old house. I have 10 acres. I, a lot of characters. I walk in the town to like the pub in town, like one of these types of situations.

1:35:34Right. And I just want to kind of get away from it all. And, um, like that's it. But then, you know, mystery finds, uh, like a local kid from comes in and is like, you know, my brother's missing. And despite his best interest, as Cal Hooper kind of gets into like, uh, for various reasons, like I have to try to figure this out and then pushback comes from the town of like, you shouldn't be asking those questions. So it's a, it's a great setup, right? Or, uh, but I love the setting and I love the deep life themes of like, I'm escaping the city to move to Ireland and what, what, what's good about that.

1:36:10And what is like fantasy is not what I thought. And Tana French is a fantastic, uh, she's fantastic at writing these type of books. So that was a good one. So there you go. Those were the books I read in September. all right i think that's all the time we have right jesse all right thanks for listening we'll be back next week with another episode of the podcast hopefully everyone's getting their halloween decorations ready i just showed jesse my sound light synchronized controller i built from scratch which i'm going to hopefully install this weekend i'm looking forward to it it's incredible hopefully everyone's doing something similar so i'll be back next week and until then And as always, stay deep.

1:36:50Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:37:44Thank you.

1:38:10Thank you.