Why You Should Quit Social Media in 2026 | Cal Newport

20:44Dr. Michael Gervais:In this course, you'll learn the foundational psychological skills to be your very best. Full stop. And the best part is, you can start anytime. Right now, we're running a limited time offer on finding your best. Simply head to findingmastery.com slash course and use the code RENEW100 to get$100 off your registration. If you've been waiting for the right moment, this is a good one now to lean into. Spring and summer, they are powerful seasons of momentum. It's a great natural time to step into growth, to refocus, to recommit to who you want to become. And this discount will not be around for long.

21:18Dr. Michael Gervais:So go to findingmastery.com slash course code renew100 for$100 off today because your future is not shaped by what you intend. It's shaped by what you train. Very cool. Logic of sound. And I think you'll appreciate this. I'm not organized right. Intellectually, I know deep work based on your research earlier in the day. And I'm not organized right. So one of the things that is a problem for uniquely to my organization is that we have an international employee base. So at Finding Mastery, we've got teammates all over the globe. And so to meet with teammates that are, we've got in Europe and Africa, those meetings happen in the morning.

22:02Dr. Michael Gervais:And so now here I am doing meetings, which is kind of task checking, if you will, like or project checking and alignment and communications, all the stuff that's required to get a team to move forward on something that is remote in this case. That overhead and drag is happening in my morning hours when I am at the highest volitional kind of potency I have. I'm spending on drag behavior. So I don't know how to solve that. And I'm not asking you to solve that because... I have an idea. Okay, I would like an idea. Yeah, that's good. I wrote about this last year in The Atlantic. I wrote this piece about hybrid attention models.

22:39And I said, okay, look, we're talking about hybrid work and the semi-common now schedule of some days are remote days and some days were days in the office. And I said, okay, here's my suggestion. Like, let's say you have a hybrid schedule. Then I'm going to tie it back to international time zones. I said, if you have a hybrid schedule, fine. But here's what I really care about. If you really want to increase the amount that is produced in your company, don't just have hybrid work locations. These days are in office. These days aren't. have hybrid attention model. All right, these days, the at-home days, let's say, there are no meetings.

23:11There are no meetings. There is no expectation of communication. You are working deeply on things to move the needle for our company. The other days when we're in the office, like that's when the meetings are scheduled. It doesn't reduce the number of meetings. It kind of consolidates them more in other days. But actually, you're going to get a lot more high-value stuff done. So you could think about something similar in a highly international organization. It's like, well, these are the meeting days. It's two days a week where my mornings are spent catching up with people in lots of different time zones.

23:38And then these other three days, I'm not. OK, for this to work, now we have to think more about how those meetings operate and what we do in between meetings. But there's changes to make now. Like, OK, if I'm only going to be able to check in with you twice a week, now we start thinking about what should happen during those check-ins. And there's a lot of cool theory about what to do with meetings. And how should we structure collaboration and tracking work and workloads outside of those meetings so that you'll be OK if we have to go this many days before we can actually check in again? So I think there are solutions here once we're willing to open up the toolbox and try some things that seem non-standard.

24:09Dr. Michael Gervais:Would you make a case for having more managers than people that are frontline producing? Or would you want to thin the manager layer down to be more efficient? How do you think about that and then add the complication of AI in the mix on it? Yeah, I put AI aside for now because I don't think that's ready to change everything yet. I care more about structure than managers, right? So I think in part, the less structure you have, the here's how we think about communication and workload and how we think about how work unfolds, like the less structure you have there, the more haphazard it is, which is how most knowledge work really unfolds.

24:46It's like, it's autonomy. You work how you work. It's none of my business. I'm just going to give you an OKR that you have to try to satisfy, but it's objective-based management. The more that there's actually structure there, the less you need in terms of management, right? So like if we think about software developing, teams that like run a good like sort of agile methodology. You don't need like a lot of layers of management. We kind of know what we're doing and like how we come together. So maybe I'd lean towards that, but I don't know. It depends what you do. So like what's your concern? So when you're thinking like your organization or the organizations you talk about, what happens or what's the fear if you strip back to management layers too far?

25:20Is it going to be people unsupervised go off to reservations or what's the real concern?

25:25Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, I think that that's probably it, which is like managers help to manage projects, you know, to completion effectively and much more, you know, there's a cultural component that there's, they're also responsible for, but it's like you hear about the frozen middle and kind of that middle layer of management having a real hard time themselves in organizations. And it's like, there's a tax in it of itself of managing the managers, if you will. So I don't know, like it's, it's just something I hear a bunch and it's, you know at finding mastery we've i'm not sure if i have the right mix or not of managers to people that are executing in uh on a front line but i'm not sure so it's have you heard about the theories of managerial capitalism no i don't know that this was i've been reading this more recently this is alfred sloan um had a couple really good books like the the visible hand was one of them and it's a theory of what happens to capitalist theory when you're talking about the rise of organizations that have hierarchies, right?

26:25Management, you have different layers of management, which we're used to now, but it was like, this is relatively new. This is 20th century stuff, right? I mean, if you think about the typical knowledge work organization in like 1870, it's going to be Charles Dickens stuff, right? It's going to be, you're all in the same room, and here's the boss, and there's four people, and, you know, it's at a small scale. And there's this interesting study, this book won the National Book War back in the 70s. What happens when organizations get really big and you have to have layers in management? so he calls it managerial capitalism and he said one of the big things that happens is that you begin to get a disconnect between day-to-day activity and the bottom line right and especially because now like who sort of supervises the activity is is sort of managers in the middle but they don't get a direct feedback from hey if we're having more meetings or making people be more responsive the emails that like right away i see like the where this project got done later and my money the money goes down that came in this month there's kind of a disconnect between the bottom line and what they're doing.

27:20So what are they going to optimize for? And the Sloan's argument was the managers are going to optimize mainly for like stability. You know, I don't want surprises. I want things to be predictable. I want like my position to be like, okay, like I don't want to take risks because I'm not getting a direct market signal. And the argument is in that setting, you can have operational practices drift increasingly farther away from like what actually is most productive in the sense of producing the most value per employee. So it like kind of helps explain when the knowledge sector, technology changed and work changed.

27:52We could begin to get, I always hypothesize that we've seen actually a pretty big division between the best ways to use brains to produce value and like what we're actually doing in organizations. And partially it's like this theory of managerial capitalism is when you're really not feeling immediately the effect of your decisions about how you run things, if there's too many layers of obfuscation behind it, you're going to start optimizing for other things like convenience and stability. And, you know, I fear like I I'd rather just you everyone answer my emails right away because I kind of fear that something bad will happen.

28:24And that gets rid of that fear that like at least I know you haven't like disappeared for the day or you're not being lazy or, you know, so it really changes the incentives. So I think there's a big gap right now between the best way to run organizations and knowledge work and like what we're actually doing.

28:39Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. And so is your most recent book, and I know it didn't just release, but in your most recent book, Slow Productivity, how do you address that? You know, I'm trying to argue, let's have alternative definitions of productivity. So like the starting of that book says, here's the biggest problem with knowledge work, like how we get in this situation I've talked about. So part of the way we get there is we use terms like productivity, but we have no idea what they mean. So we'll be like, I want to be more productive. But what does that mean? It's often sort of code for other sorts of things. So I look closer.

29:09It's like, what do we really mean when in knowledge work someone says like, oh, I want to be more productive or I care about productivity? Well, it's not what we meant by productivity in industrial manufacturing. It's not what we meant by productivity in agriculture, where it was a ratio of outputs to inputs. That's not usually what we're referring to in knowledge work because it's hard to measure outputs on the individual level. I can't actually measure very easily how many widgets are you producing per, you know, eight hours of effort or whatever. So typically what we're doing in knowledge work, when we say productivity, we really mean pseudo productivity, which means visible effort.

29:40And we just use it as like a rough proxy for useful effort. If I see you doing stuff, that's good. And the more stuff I see you doing, the better. And that's basically been how we've managed in knowledge work. Now, this was okay in like the 1970s, like, okay, whatever, we're going to come to the building because we're using the factory model. We're here for eight hours. I'll put the magazine down when the boss walks by or, you know, it's like a little game we played. But in the age of network communications and mobile communications is really driven people to burnout because now you can be demonstrating visible activity at like any moment of the day at fine granularity because it's like responding to individual Slack messages, responding to email messages.

30:18So the granularity at which you can demonstrate that you are doing stuff becomes super small. So that's exhausting. And because a mobile computer can follow you anywhere. So now like every moment, whether you're at work or not, you have to have a debate with yourself. I could get on my phone right now and demonstrate some visible activity, which will be in my favor. And so now I have to constantly be trying to balance other things in my life that are important versus what's going on in my job. And so that's even extra exhausting, right? So that type of pseudo productivity we implicitly use, like this is not working.

30:51So I say, let's have a different definition of productivity, a different way of thinking about it. So that's what that book was about. And like the number one, the first of the three principles is what we were just talking about before. It was, okay, number one, you should be looking to have people do fewer things at once. Like, let's say that's better. The fewer things you work on at once is going to increase the number of things you complete over time. And then I say, we need to be much more realistic about timeframes. How long do things take? How long can I maintain intensity? how much variation do I need?

31:18And then we have to like make quality. That's the third principle. We need to make quality a tier one principle. Well, how good is the thing you're producing? You should be driving to get better at the thing you do best. I care much more about that than like on average, how fast you respond to Slack messages. So I'm trying to give an alternative, alternative measures of productivity that I think are more compatible with the human brain and knowledge work.

31:38Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. So the three principles are do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and then obsess over quality. So I think I'm hearing one in three in there, obsess over quality. I've got a teammate here at Finding Mastery. He's exceptionally talented, very creative. I love collaborating in the ideation phase. And then he's able to drill things down in a very concrete way to make sense of best practices in sport to crosswalk them in a business. He's a great teammate for me and with me. However, he wants to do everything. He wants to be part of every part of the organization. So it's like, Kevin, how you doing?

32:17Dr. Michael Gervais:I'm sure he's listening right now. Is he adjusting your microphone right now because he wants to be a part of that? No, he's not that saturated, but like wants to be in part of every meeting, which then of course, because he loves everything and it's like, oh, I want to hear this and that's great. But then that moves timetables back in ways that compromise our promise to our customers, if you will, which is what the business really runs on. So how do you address that? Somebody has got a big motor that is exceptional at what they do and has a huge appetite to be part of everything. And so how do you work with somebody like that, which is a great problem to have?

32:55Yeah, no, it's a good problem to have. It's a common problem in sport as well. I'm in Washington, D.C., so I was just thinking about there's a current debate about Debo Samuels about like, well, can't he also be on special teams? He'd be good at that too, and he'd be good at this or that. And there's this argument of like, well, look, there's only so many hits you can take. And it's better to find a thing you do best and really leaning to that. So I think the answer here comes out of that quality mindset. Like, no, here's what we care about. What we care about is what you do best, doing that at the highest possible level.

33:26Like we don't care about quantity so much. Busyness doesn't mean anything to us. The fact that you're here in like 15 different things, like good for you. But what we care about is what can you do that you can do at a super high level that very few other people can do. Like pick your moments and get great at it. Like pick your spots. Yeah. Yeah. And do it really, do it really well because ultimately doing something great has, and this is like personal advice I often give people, but doing something great has huge returns versus doing like lots of things kind of good. It's not this linear thing.

33:57Like, well, if I do five things pretty good, that adds up to more than doing one thing great. No, no, no. It's not how that curve works. It's exponential. Like the value for yourself in the marketplace of doing something great just because the competition falls away, the other people who can do it, you become more valuable in the marketplace. That shoots up exponentially. So it doesn't just straight add. And I think it's often a mistake high powered, high talent that individuals make as they think it add, like they do math in their head, like, okay, it's a scale of one to five of like how good I am.

34:27And if I do five things at level two, that's 10 points. And so that's better than doing one thing at level five, right? It's twice as good. But no, the reality is if you can do something at the highest level, that's better than doing 50 things at a lower level. It's just way more valuable to the marketplace. So you got to lean into what you do best. Like the superstar mindset is like the mindset I would take to someone like that. I wrote about this years ago, old 2012, like 13 years ago, I wrote this book so good, they can't ignore you. And it's about individuals, right? So it's not aimed at management, but like individuals and how you build a career that's like really successful.

35:00This was a core concept and I got into superstar economics. So, you know, Rosen's theories of superstar economics and how the value of what you do increases as the number of people who can do it falls. And when you look at superstar economics, it makes all these predictions like, oh, we see this every day, you know, in everyday life. Like I talked about Pavarotti, the opera singer. And I was like, look, if you're one of the top 10 opera singers, I'm a really, really good opera singer. It's a world of difference than being Pavarotti. Like he's like this hundred million dollars made from all these sort of deals.

35:34And if you're just like a really good opera singer in Lincoln, Nebraska, who's not that much worse than him, it's, you know, a middle class job and you're struggling. So like it really the rewards jump as the number of people who can do what you do fall. And so that's superstar economics.

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37:06Dr. Michael Gervais:That's always in your control too. This is the same morning mindset routine that some of the world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part? It only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to findingmastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to findingmastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. Do the thing you can do best best if you're a star. It's really refreshing, you know, to just be reminded of that idea. And I think it's also difficult at some level to, for an individual to know what they do best.

37:43Dr. Michael Gervais:So I'll put you on the spot, Cal. Like, what are you a superstar at? What is the thing that is your crown jewel? And you might say there's one or two or there's a hybrid somewhere in there, but like what is your crown jewel? It's ideas, right? Like the thing that I'm very good at is sorting through ideas and finding an idea. Like this idea is just, it resonates with me. This idea is right. I think this gets at the core of what's going on. This kind of summarizes down. This is all, and then I built up a lot of craft skills around that so that I can use it, right? in my role as a professor. I was a theoretical computer scientist.

38:18Most of what I do now is more about just technology and impact. But, you know, I came up and earned tenure on the back of being a theorist, doing sort of math theory. The core of that is I'm very good at ideas, like finding problems. This is the right problem. This is what's interesting. I had to learn a lot of math so that I could apply that general skill there. Writing was another area. You know, I've been professionally writing since I was 20 years old. The ideas are core there. I can come up with like, this is a really good idea. Like deep work is a really good idea, but I had to learn the craft of writing so that I could, you know, deliver that, that talent in that place.

38:50So I feel like my empire is built on an empire of ideas. Like my, I have a very good ability to survey a bunch of information, but like this is at the crux of it. And then I built up a bunch of toolkits that take advantage of that.

39:02Dr. Michael Gervais:Let's do the toolkit thing for a minute, because obviously you can speak eloquently and clearly, and you can do the same with writing. I would imagine, I would imagine, it's a guess, that you speak better than you write. Writing takes a little bit more time to define mastery in that space or even on the path of mastery. Why did you choose to build that compliment or that muscle as opposed to offload that to somebody? You speak to them and then they write, they put the commas in the right place and stitch the sentences and ideas in a way that is eloquent. Why did you decide to go down that path and support your idea expression?

39:38Dr. Michael Gervais:in something that maybe wasn't as natural or as skilled as somebody that you could hire or partner with. Well, so when I was thinking about how do I want to apply, how do I want to build on this skill? And I was thinking about, okay, I want to be, I made this plan in college that I was going to do an academic path and write. And it went together. I was like, look, if I do an academic path, if I'm like a grad student for the next six years, it'll be much easier to also write, right? So it's going to be conciliatory. This is, so I had this plan. This is what I was going to do. And when I thought about applying the skill to write, I was like, what type of things do I want to write?

40:11And I, you know, I had this vision for like what I wanted my writing to be like. As part of that vision, I was like, oh, I need to get better at writing than anyone I could hire to write for me. Because my vision was I really respected really serious nonfiction writers. And the vision very early on is like I want hardcover books at the front of the bookstore and smart books with like smart ideas. To do that well and the writers I admired who could do that well, you have to become a really good writer. and I was like I have to become a better writer than someone who's making themselves available that like the hired a ghostwriter this or that it's like I want to become this was my goal which eventually succeeded it's like I want to become a New Yorker caliber writer and yet still have advice in my books like that was the whole vision like what if I could become a great writer but also keep plugged in to I mean I'm so compelled by this idea of being able to transmit an idea to someone else's head and it physiologically changes the way they feel and like their possibilities in life.

41:03So the smart self-help genre that I sort of helped invent, that was my plan. I was like, oh, I got to become great at writing for this to work. And that took a long time, by the way. That took a decade to get good and almost two decades to get notably good. Takes a long time.

41:19Dr. Michael Gervais:Very cool. That's a cool answer. And what I hear underneath that is like, no, I really wanted to do that. I wanted that as part of the art of my expression. So awesome. A slightly hard pivot, but we've already hinted at this before, is can you just open up and talk about digital fatigue? Who's suffering from it most? What can we do about it? What are some of the telltale signs for somebody that might be struggling with it? What helps here, what I think is often missed, is that we have to differentiate between two domains of digital that both are creating fatigue, but they're from different causes and have different solutions, right?

41:51So there's the professional digital fatigue. I'm talking about Zoom overload, email overload, Slack overload. Huge problem, right? like exhaust us. Then we have non-professional digital fatigue. And I think here smartphones, I think social media, I think scrolling, I think it's this sort of I'm lost in the world of digital and not fully ever present in the world of physical, right? They're similar sounding. They have two different causes and they have two different solutions. So like very briefly in the digital world, the cause of digital fatigue tends to be over communication, over collaboration.

42:22And there's, there's two reasons why we have this. One is we do too many things at the same time. So if I have no control over my workload, so I just pile as many things as possible, the overhead of all those things is going to take up my schedule to the point where all I'm doing is answering emails and going to meetings because I have to actively upkeep so many active things. So overload leads to digital fatigue in the professional space and then collaboration style. So with the advent of email, and I wrote a whole book about this back in 2021, but with the advent of email, we evolved a way of collaboration where we just work things out with unscheduled back and forth messaging.

42:55So it's like very low friction in the moment. Just like, Hey, Mike, what about this? Send. And you're like, Oh, I don't know. Did you think about this? Send. And I'm like, Oh, yeah. Okay. Should we meet? Send. You're like, yeah, that sounds good. Are you free next week? So we let things sort of unfold with unscheduled back and forth messaging. The problem with that approach is that if I have multiple ongoing conversations that are unfolding with unscheduled messaging, in order to actually bring all of these conversations to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time, I have to check channels constantly because I don't know when the next message is going to come back, but I got to see it pretty soon after it does because I need to volley it back to you so you can volley it back to me.

43:32And so that led to like constant context shifting. That's super exhausting in the world of work. In our personal life, it's more the fault, I think, of the people creating the services that are distracting us. So it's not, Google doesn't need you to use Gmail more. They just need you to need Gmail so you pay for it by the month. TikTok wants you to use it as much as possible. Like it actually, they make more money the more you use it, right? So like in that world, what we're dealing with, I think is just like highly engaging, algorithmically optimized information that over time rewires our short-term reward circuit so that like nothing else seems as appealing.

44:04And the reward circuits are like, the thing is right here, pick it up and we're going to get like a jolt of something. Dopamine splash because there's a reward that we can get right now. And that overwhelms almost anything else you want to do. You know, like I'm just lost in my phone. I can't be present. So two different problems to fix the work overload, you got to fix work, all the types of stuff we're talking about. The fix, the out of work overload, well, you got to change your relationship to devices. And that's where I become more, people think I'm more puritanical, but I was like, you don't need to be on social media.

44:33You don't need to have your phone with you at all time. You have to completely change your relationship with devices. You have to be in control, not letting like four or five large companies that run these attention economy empires run your attention in your life.

44:45Dr. Michael Gervais:Do you have any best practices for folks other than kind of providing the mandate? or the suggested mandate. Yeah. So for outside of work, you got three things you can think about. So if you have troubles with your phone outside like email and meetings, which we talked about, but you have troubles with like social media and distraction. There's three things you can do. One, take off your phone in the application where someone makes more money the more you use it. And if you have some argument like, but I need to be on X because, you know, three times a week, my nephew uploads pictures of like whatever that I want to see.

45:14Great. You can access that on your laptop and you can have a time and you can go on three times and go on. that's the web interface to Instagram or whatever, if you look it up, but take off your phone, anything where someone makes money every time you look at it, because they're really good at that game. They really care about money and they're going to win at that game. They're going to beat you at it. Two, phone foyer method. When you're at home, the phone's plugged in. It's a really simple rule that makes like a huge difference. My phone is in the kitchen. My phone is in the foyer. If I need to look something up, I go to the phone and look it up.

45:44If I need to check in on a text conversation, I go to my phone and check in. If I need to listen to a podcast, I use earbuds, right? So like, I don't have to have the phone with me. So when I'm at dinner, when I'm watching TV with my family, when I'm working on something else, I just don't have the ability to pull that thing out and look at it. This completely rewires your relationship. Your short-term motivational circuits change. It rewires your relationship with the device. And the third thing is you could think about using something like brick technology, where in order to use the phone, even when you have it on you, you have to get the other fob and you have to do some friction and there's some steps you have to go through.

46:14That just, again, helps break this short-term reward loop. But I've become so much more aggressive about this recently. I mean, there was a stage early on where I was like, look, I don't use social media. I don't think this stuff is too valuable. And the world was like, you know, you don't care about democracy. Like this is, everything needs to happen on social media. They used to really get mad at me. I'd be like, oh, well, we can look, we can moderate this and this and that. And nowadays I just think, I don't know, I've seen enough of Mark Zuckerberg. Like how much more land do we need to help him buy in Hawaii?

46:41like let's move on with our lives like we don't that's okay we don't need to be this is getting kind of arbitrary now like tiktok instagram reels it's like i think at some point we have to just

46:53Dr. Michael Gervais:like move on and do cool things in our lives i'm laughing because like i catch myself often feeling like the old man on the porch you know get off my lawn kids stop having fun like am i outdated or am I more anchored to first principles? And when I hear you saying that, I can absolutely hear the rash people would develop around your idea, but I think it's a first principle, which is be outside a little bit more, stay away from products that are designed to suck your attention in if you want to have, quote unquote, a more organically designed life. But if parents knew what you knew, what would you, what would you hope that one, two or three things that they would know and accordingly do to be a better parent to raise a quote unquote better child?

47:43My middle schooler hates this because I just, I, I just gave this talk at my kid's school. I'm the parent that is all of his friends are like, your dad is why we don't have phones. So he really, he really hates it. But I think the evidence here is, you know, really clear, right? Like what's the general best practice? I mean, it would be don't have a smartphone till high school. And even then it's a lockdown smartphone. Like, no, you don't have TikTok on there, right? Unlock smartphone. Like you can have social media and sort of use it. Like that's really like 16 plus or post-puberty. So like you already have developed a social identity and social group and activities and interests before you bring in these sort of tools, which could otherwise have a big impact on the developing social brain.

48:21And then even after the kid has the phone, my argument is like, as long as you live in this house, when you're at home, the phone is plugged into the kitchen. It's not, you don't have a right. This is not like your personal property that you have a right to have it with you everywhere you go. Kids become like Berkey and conservatives. As soon as you start talking about things like phones, like the right of private property and civilization is built on my ability to have my property. It's like, no, I'm paying for the phone. When you're at home, it's plugged in here. You can check in on your friends and your text messages here, but you don't get it at the dinner table.

48:51You don't get it while you watch TV and you certainly don't get to bring it up to your room and stay up till 3 a.m. Like those are the three things. And then when you get to college, do what you want. But by that point, you'll have fully developed yourself and your identity and your habits and your brain. And it's not going to be as tempting. Like that's where I think we are. Some of those are more extreme than people are recommending, but some of them like phones tell high school, this is like starting to become, I think we're like a couple of ways, years away from that becoming like a cultural norm.

49:16Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah. Hearing you, I'm like, Ooh, I missed a couple tricks, but you know, the only app that my son, he's 17 has on his phone is Snapchat. And I felt pretty good about that, you know, and he didn't get any of that stuff until he was in ninth grade until high school. So I feel pretty good about that. It does. And I also like this idea of like, when, when you're in the home, plug it in, I can hear the pullback, like what, you know, like, it's not that I'm afraid of confrontation of it, but I'm like, is the juice worth the squeeze here to create that type of relationship with his technology? it's a good one for me to consider.

49:49Dr. Michael Gervais:It's a new principle that I haven't thought about before. So thank you for that. Well, here's the hard part. For it to work, if you didn't start with it, is probably you have to do it too. That's the way it works. That's exactly what I was thinking. That's the problem. It's not, hey, I'm telling you as my son, you have to do this new thing now. It's our family has a new thing. Just as if our family moved or our family now goes to you know, religious services and we didn't before. It's like the family is now doing this thing. But I hear you. I had a conversation with a parent the other day and she was near tears.

50:21She was just like 17 year old daughter. She's like, I, I just, I don't have, I don't have the fight in me. You know, it's, it's, it's the problem. It's like not our fault. It's super bad luck to have raising adolescents in the last five or six years, because it's like, just as we, this technology was new, we're just learning it's the people who have five-year-olds right now as their oldest kids they've got it made like by the time those kids are in middle school like we'll have figured this all out but this is like the rough we're at the end of the roughest period in terms of kids and phones because we're just figuring this all out and typically what we do with new technologies which makes sense is like when they're new we're like let's just rock and roll and see what happens because you know what else are you going to do you know you don't know and then there's usually a period of observation then a period of reaction and then there's a new restabilization and like the new restabilization is coming, but yeah, it's, it's tough right now.

51:13Like, well, wait a second.

51:14Dr. Michael Gervais:I already have a 17 year old. Yeah. Yeah. Just last night I was talking to an NFL coach on my phone. We're texting back and forth and it was timely and urgent. And I was also kind of trying to listen to my wife at the same time. And I just, what a, what a stupid thing I did. She goes, what are you doing? And I was like, ah, and so I tried to explain it and she, and she's right. Like, why didn't I just say, hey, hold on a minute, babe. You know, let me finish this. And I want to hear what you have to say. And it was just so sloppy. And so that type of tension and pain that I feel about being sucked into the immediacy of the thing that I was trying to solve and not having the wherewithal to draw the right boundary either direction.

51:57Dr. Michael Gervais:Yeah, I mean, you're pointing at things that I think all of us are feeling. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn. Earlier, I mentioned LinkedIn Hiring Pro. And I want to come back to something a little more personal. We talk a lot about the people who make extraordinary things possible. And I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of ours. Janelle, Taylor, Alex, Emma, and our newest teammate, Chelsea. Every single one of them came to us from LinkedIn. And every single one of them has raised the bar of how we operate here at Finding Mastery. Our relationship with LinkedIn, it also runs a lot deeper than just using their tools.

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55:04I'm not worried about massive economic disruption in the next few years. I'm not worried about, you know, Project 2027 style fears that we're going to have takeoff and the human race is going to be extinguished by superintelligent AI. Like from a computer science perspective, none of that's imminent. I'm not worried about that. I am worried about more prosaic or pragmatic impacts. And one, I think, is paradoxical reduced productivity. So I'm actually like working on an episode about this today, actually. I'm recording it later tonight where there's this issue when it comes to things that require deep work, that required focus concentration, right?

55:41You have to be very careful about how you bring in other tools to help you. And what a lot of people are starting to do now, computer programmers are doing this, writers are doing this, is what they're trying to do is have a collaboration with AI where, OK, I'm going to pass off some of the cognitive load to you. Like you do this. I'll work on this. I'll edit what you do. And we have a mounting amount of evidence that that's a more pleasant work experience, but it's sufficiently less effective. You never actually get your mind up to where it needs to be to do good work. And things take longer and the quality is lower.

56:09So I'm worried about an accidental productivity fall. There's a good article about this not too long ago in The Atlantic that Rosary Karma wrote. I'm quoting at the end of that article, but that gets into that well. I'm worried about that. I'm also worried about kids. And the thing I'm worried about kids is AI, gender of AI is to writing what a calculator was for, you know, arithmetic, right? That it can produce writing for you. The issue is if you're a kid, if you're a student, why are you writing? It's not like, oh, this is just some sort of thing you have to get out of the way to get to some other sort of goal.

56:42It's how you actually practice. You take circuits in your brain that are forged through learning and reading and you practice actually using them. Writing is cognitive push-ups. It's cognitive pull-ups. It's a big part of how you actually train a brain to exist in a sort of world of symbolic information like sort of modern society is. And if you outsource all the writing during the period where you're trying to train your brain, I just think it's the equivalent of like, hey, I've got this great new hack that if I bring a hydraulic lift to the gym, I don't have to put as much effort to do the leg press.

57:11It'll do it for me. You know, fair enough. but what you really wanted was strong legs. And so in the world of grownups and work, I'm worried that like, if you don't use this right, it's going to make your work easier and worse. That's not where we need to be. And for kids, it's going to make you dumber. Those are both scary,

57:27Dr. Michael Gervais:you know? I mean, they're not terrifying, right? Like I'm not terrified. It's not, I think social media and smartphones had an even equally big, bad impact, especially. I see it as terrible. I mean, what is our greatest asset as a human? It is our ability to process information. it's our ability to connect it with feelings. It's our ability to have a consciousness about the experience that's taking place. And to strip away one of those three stools to the uniqueness of the human experience, like that's a bummer, you know? Like to be able to process well. And I like how you thought about like when you're offloading some of the cognitive tasks, like you downshift in your ability to have like real cognitive strain to get better.

58:11Dr. Michael Gervais:That's what's going on. That's what's going on. I wrote an article last year where I looked over the shoulder of university students writing papers using chat GPT. I came into that article thinking, here's what they're going to be doing. They're going to be trying to have shortcuts. They're trying to save time, you know, get the paper done earlier. It's not what happened. These students were taking longer to get these papers done. It was not speeding things up. So what were they doing? They were running away from strain. And it turns out if you make your paper writing into this back and forth conversation, this parasocial, they would name the GPT bot and like have conversations.

58:42it prevented the peak strains from being as high, but it also made everything take much longer. And the result wasn't as good. I mean, it's like athletes know this. You learn super early on in your process of like athletic journey, the physical discomfort of training. And like one of the first things you learn if you're going to be an athlete is like, that's a good discomfort because that's at like the core of how we're going to get better. Let's go. You know, if you take that out of cognitive life, how do we like take the rough edges off of strain. But the problem is, of the stools that matter, we've knocked out a lot of the legs already.

59:15I think like smartphones and algorithmic entertainment knocked out the stool where you read and encounter complicated information and try to input complicated information. It knocked out the stool of self-reflection because it's portable. So now I just miss all these moments when I could be alone with my own thoughts, trying to make sense of my world and my life. I wrote about this in my book, Digital Minimalism, the inner life of Abraham Lincoln, and how important this was, like just him walking and thinking. I went to the sort of the house in the hills outside of D.C. where he would go to think, right?

59:44And how important he was just reflecting. We don't do that anymore because we have constant distraction. Now we're taking out this other stool, which is the production of new knowledge and practicing doing that with writing. To me, we're a cognitive society and we're allowing a small number of technology companies to make us worse at being thinkers. And to me, that would be like if we were in ancient Sparta and it was a martial culture where everything was built on our ability to wage war. If there was like a couple organizations in ancient Sparta that was making everyone like out of shape and worse at combat, it would be a really huge step.

1:00:14We're going to lose to Peloponnesian wars. Like this is a problem. The same thing is happening now, but you know, we just, we don't think about the brain the same way.

1:00:21Dr. Michael Gervais:Very cool analogy. Last question, put on your optimistic lens. When you think about humans in the next three to seven years so like a horizon two viewpoint what do you see well if i'm going to be optimistic i think there's a couple things if i'm going to be optimistic that's great uh there's a couple possibilities at the technology interface would make i'd be optimistic about all right so one i think we're poised to move on from this like temporary state of the internet where we said what the internet means is for companies that have like highly engaging products delivered through mobile apps.

1:00:58That's not what the internet was prior to 2010. It's not what the internet needs to be going into the future. And I could imagine, you know, it could be a zeitgeist shift that happens like this. We're like, you know what? I don't want to be on TikTok. I don't think Instagram's that important anymore. And so we could go back to like what I've long argued for is a much more distributed and diverse and idiosyncratic web where you have small groups of people that you get together with online because they share an interest and you sort of can self-regulate and police each other and not trying to have a billion people all on the same social conversation platform, which is just doesn't fit with our human wiring and just causes problems.

1:01:34The internet could get better if we say enough of this experiment with like consolidating the internet in the walled garden of six services, right? Nothing inevitable about our current setup. So that would make me optimistic. Another thing that would make me optimistic is the future of AI, right? And this is like a very long discussion, but like my very short piece to it is, I've been writing a lot about this recently. This idea that we're going to keep scaling up a small number of massive language models, these frontier models, and that one of them is going to become brilliant and can do all work, that's probably not going to happen.

1:02:05There's technical reasons why not. But there's another vision of a future of AI where what we do is we're going to see a fragmenting. The development of many, many, many different systems that use things like language models, but other types of models as well, all connected. And each of these systems is bespoke to a particular thing. You know, here is a system that is like really good for doing like this type of thing that happens in my job. And here's a system that's really good for doing this type of thing. We're good at building these bespoke systems. We have a system that can beat professional poker players.

1:02:33We have a different system that is a very highly rated chess player. We have another system that can play the game diplomacy very well. And they're all different from each other, right? I call this the gentle takeoff, the AGI. But I have this vision of the future in which there's all of these companies in all of these areas that all have their own sort of custom system that are all product market fitted to do very specific things and it's going to make a lot of our lives easier right so instead of it's like we're all talking to chat gpt it's like this type of scheduling i don't have to do anymore i don't have to wrangle my inbox as much because these 10 things are being handled by this thing over here and that it might take some of the the overhead cost of work all this overhead and context switching might actually make knowledge work better not because it does our deep work for us but it helps us get around these things to get in the way of deep work.

1:03:18So I have a vision of AI that I think is much more gentle and controllable and productive. It's not big right now because it's not going to be two companies. It's not something that the venture capitalists can make a fortune on because they put their money in early. But I think it's better for the economy. It's better for us. I think we could have an AI future where like, oh, like it's not scary, but there's a lot of things in our lives that are easier. Just like the web made a lot of things in our lives easier. Like, I don't have to look up this company in the yellow pages and call them to see when their hours are.

1:03:43I can go to their website. So I think there could be big, big booms from AI that aren't sonic booms, if that makes

1:03:50Dr. Michael Gervais:sense. Cal, thank you for sharing your intellectual prowess and your clarity of ideas with us. It's always fun to connect with you. I really appreciate it. And I'm wishing you the best. And I hope people go reintroduce themselves or for the first time, go check out Slow Productivity, your latest book. And we're looking forward to your next one as well. But thank you. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Always have fun. Ditto. next time on finding mastery we're joined by dan harris best-selling author of 10 % happier and one of the most honest voices on anxiety mindfulness and the messy work of being human in this conversation dan and mike talk openly about panic attacks self-talk and what it really takes to meet stress without being overtaken by it not perfectly but skillfully if you want to continue into the new year with more steadiness, clearer perspective, and practical tools for working with your own mind.

1:04:42Join us Wednesday, January 14 at 9am Pacific. All right.

1:04:48Dr. Michael Gervais:Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more insights, we have a newsletter we send out every Wednesday. Punch over to findingmastery.com slash newsletter to sign up.

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1:06:00Dr. Michael Gervais:Lastly, as a quick reminder, information in this podcast and from any material on the Finding Mastery website and social channels is for information purposes only. If you're looking for meaningful support, which we all need, one of the best things you can do is to talk to a licensed professional. So seek assistance from your health care providers. Again, a sincere thank you for listening. Until next episode, be well, think well, keep exploring. Come on.