transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] Hello, and welcome back to excellence, actually. I'm one of your hosts, Clay Skipper, joined by Steve Magness and Brad Stulberg. And we are very excited because we are joined by another guest today, friend of the pod, professor of computer science at Georgetown, author of some of our favorite books, Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, Slow Productivity, Cal Newport. And we are talking to Cal because he wrote a great article in the Opinion section of The New York Times called There's a Good Reason You Can't Concentrate. The idea is essentially that we have been so taxed cognitively by smartphone use, social media algorithms, now AI, that we are at a moment where we need to start thinking as intentionally about our cognitive fitness as we have been thinking about our physical fitness for the last 20, 25 years or so. So we're going to get into all of that today. We're going to talk about Cal's article, and then we're going to talk about building an exercise program for your brain. So Cal, I'm going to kick it over to you. That was the high level summary. Do you have anything you want to add to that, or how would you sum up your article?

Speaker 2:
[01:07] Well, I'll say the title I proposed was In Defense of Thinking, because what I had in mind was actually Michael Pollan's book about rediscovering a healthy relationship with food that had been completely hijacked by other sorts of forces that really don't have our best interest in mind. Basically, my argument is we can directly analogize that to what's happening with our brain, that the ability to think goes back deep in the human story, and it is core to our experience. And basically, everything that we find valuable as humans ties back to our ability to do abstract thinking, sustained concentration on abstract ideas, and that really it is in recent years where industrial forces have been systematically undermining that ability to think, and just like we had to learn to worry about industrial forces underlying our diet and putting us in situations where we're much less healthy, we have to worry about this and begin to fight back. So I think we're at a moment now, that was my argument. We're at a moment now with thinking where we were with diet and physical fitness in the mid-20th century, where suddenly there was a revolution and we started to care about it.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] So real quick, just to give more context, when you say that, Cal, I assume that what you mean is that we had the industrial revolution, where all sorts of physical manual labor became mechanized. And then we also had the food revolution, where suddenly we had abundant, cheap, highly processed foods that were readily available. And in the article, you argue that the same thing is happening to our consumption of information, but also our ability to produce information. Is that fair?

Speaker 2:
[02:48] Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. So in health and physical fitness, we cared about what we were consuming because food got worst and industrialized. The same thing is happening with the information that we're consuming in our brains. More and more, we're subjecting it to this sort of quick hit, dopamine sugar high algorithmically optimized content that does not give our brain what it needs to actually build those connections that allow us to be smart. And then on the exercise analogy point, we used to in the mid 20th century, we stopped moving as much. And now we find ourselves in the 21st century, not exercising our mind as much. We're not producing new knowledge. We're trying to avoid writing. We're trying to avoid more sustained thought or complicated conversation. So yeah, I think there's a really good analogy consumption and exercise to the flaws we're finding right now and are using our brains.

Speaker 3:
[03:38] So just to be super, super clear, because I'm dense, the consumption is we are being exposed to highly palatable, synthetic, highly processed information that is really easy to consume and gives us a sugar high, but is not great for our brains. And the production is that instead of doing the hard work of lifting boxes, we've now got forklifts, instead of doing the hard work of writing and thinking, we can now ask AI to do it for us. And the result of that is a term that you've used offline with B multiple times, which is cognitive obesity. So, can you explain how you think about cognitive obesity?

Speaker 2:
[04:15] Well, it's the opposite of where we want to be, which is to be cognitively fit. Right? So I think we're in a state of cognitive unfitness, or we could call it cognitive obesity right now. But we struggle with taking in complicated information. And because of that, we do less of that. And so now our ability to both take in complicated information and to produce original interesting thinking, be it about third-party subjects, or just even reflections or introspections about ourselves, that begins to diminish. And that creates a cycle where our ability to actually extract value in our life from our brains really diminishes, just like bad eating and lack of exercise puts us in a spiral where our ability to find more pleasure in our day-to-day physical life goes down as we become less healthy. I think that's exactly what's happening there. There's a cycle. This is what makes right now a really dangerous situation. There's a self-reinforcing cycle where we get the digital ultra-processed food, the stuff that we're getting from our phone. That keeps us away from the activities that would be healthier for our brain, like engaging with written text or long-form conversation, meaningful conversation, right? Because of that, we begin to sort of lose our tolerance, right? We lose our tolerance for using our brain. And then when we get into other situations, like where we need to write something at work or in school, or we would have to actually apply whatever brain cells we have, we now have tools like AI that says, hey, you know how that's become harder and harder for you? I've got you, bro. I'll just do it for you. So it's like the last place we had where we were being forced to actually use our brain is being taken away. You put those into a self-reinforcing cycle, and I think we're getting a severe diminishment in cognition capability.

Speaker 4:
[05:54] And I think here what is really important on what you're saying here, Cal, is the environment shifted, where it used to invite the things that we needed for learning and grow, whether that's physical in terms of fitness or intellectual. And with these environmental shifts, it's like it's not a moral failing on us. It's that we're going to choose the path of least resistance essentially. And if we don't, kind of like we've done in fitness and health and started to in nutrition, is if we don't kind of rig the environment a little bit, like we're going to go down the same path of cognitive obesity. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:
[06:37] This is exactly what we learn with physical health, right? We learned that we have these evolutionary instincts, right? If the environment is a mismatch for that, it can drive us inevitably towards poor health. And when that mismatch occurs, the right solution is you have to then build purposefully and intentionally alternative cultures and ways of living that pushes back on those natural forces and it's hard. And that's what happened with diet and exercise, right? Is that obviously ultra palatable food or evolutionary instincts were like, that's the path of least resistance. I want to eat that. Of course, I want to eat that. All of my short-term motivation systems are saying, eat that food right here. The same thing with exercise. We're not, we're energy conservers, right? So it's not our instinct to want to make our muscles burn or our lungs burn. Like, hey, if I can sit in a comfortable Cadillac and drive that, like to work a course, I'm going to do that. So we had to build these pretty complicated cultures around diet and around exercise. We had to invent new technologies. We had to invent new systems, whole new ways of thinking about life. All to push back and correct for a mismatch between our environment and our evolutionary instincts. That's what I say is happening with our brains right now. The digital world has created an environment that is at a real mismatch with our evolutionary instincts. And so now we find ourselves really drawn towards the cognitive activity that's actually worse for our brain. And so we have to do similar work to what we did. And I document this in the article. I got, you know, I didn't go deep on this question, but I was just fascinated by how quickly and what happened in the mid 20th century that got us actually thinking about diet and exercise. There's really like a 10-year period that sparked it all. It started in the 1950s with Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack. He had a heart attack in Denver. He was there to play golf. Instead of trying to cover it up, they brought in this doctor who had started the American Heart Association. And they're like, educate the public. Because everyone, you know, it's Ike, it's the general, right? Everyone was shaken by this. And he did these press conferences where he said something that's obvious to us today, but was not obvious back then. You can do things to reduce your chances of heart attack and diet is a big part of it. Like that was a new idea. And then within 10 years of that, we got Dr. Cooper writing his book, Aerobics, which now we sort of think back like, oh, aerobics, Jane Fonda. But actually this was a huge deal. He was a NASA doctor who worked with exercise and astronauts to understand how the body works. And he had that, that book, Aerobics, had a simple idea that was a huge, at the time, it was a huge idea. Doing cardiovascular exercise is good for longevity. It makes you healthier. It's not just something you need to do if you're a soldier or you're an athlete, it actually makes you healthier. And there was a massive increase in exercise. And of course, like we're not a perfectly healthy country, but I found some good reviews looking back at the second half of the 20th century. And they're really clear about it, improvements on cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular related diseases. We had a significant, significant improvement starting after that 1950s to 1960s period. We didn't make everyone healthy. But we have to remember, before that period, it was basically like half a man, you were just like, I probably will die by the time I'm 60. And maybe I'll be lucky and I don't. And that's just how it went. Like you're either going to die in your early 60s or you were Ben Franklin, you're lucky. And you just sort of assumed, of course, you're going to retire by the time you're 62, because like there's a coin flip, you're going to be dead by the time you're 65. And we don't think that way anymore. And that's because of the revolution.

Speaker 4:
[10:11] So I want to, I can't help but double down on this because this ties into my favorite topic ever running.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] I thought you were going to say Dwight D. Eisenhower. Okay.

Speaker 4:
[10:19] Almost, almost Dwight D. Eisenhower. But you know, close second there. But I don't think most people realize how weird it was to go jog in like the 1950s. Like if you will read running biographies from there, there's examples of people being like, yeah, I went on a run and like the cops came and got me and asked me who I was running away from type thing. Like America's best marathoner in the 1950s literally moved to England because he said, you know what, they have kind of a running culture over here a little bit. So I'm going to move to England and train here. And he set the world record in the marathon as American training in England because he's like, America's crazy. But like you said, in the 60s, Kenneth Cooper at the same time, he had Bill Bowerman released a book Jogging in 1967 right around Cooper, Robix Books. And that made it where I think the numbers you cited and that I've been aware of is like in the 19, early 1960s, less than 100,000 joggers existed in America. And within a decade or so, 15 years, that number is like 35 million, 30-ish million. So it had like this drastic effect in a very, very short time of like making it normal-ish to like go outside and exercise.

Speaker 1:
[11:40] So do you think we've reached our inciting moment, our Eisenhower moment, Cal? Because 10 years ago when you put out, that was was that Deep Work or Digital Minimalism?

Speaker 2:
[11:50] Deep Work.

Speaker 1:
[11:50] 2016.

Speaker 2:
[11:51] Deep Work.

Speaker 1:
[11:52] Deep Work. You said some things that seemed more provocative at the time than they probably do today. I mean, I remember you gave me an incredible quote one time, which I still appreciate this day that giving a teenager a smartphone was going to be like giving them a cigarette. I think people were kind of like, that's crazy. I think that seems less crazy now than it did in 2016. But people in those 10 years still seem to be cognitively addled by all these things. Do you think we're going to get to a moment where we have our Eisenhower moment or are we already there with AI where it's like we need to fix something? Or do you think we're just going to keep going down this path?

Speaker 2:
[12:25] Maybe we're at a turning point. There's two things I would point to that would give me hope that maybe we're at our Eisenhower moment. I think one is the massive shift on kids and phones finally happened. Right. And it happened in two places. It happened in schools. I think that was the inciting incident was height finally succeeded in basically getting every school in the country to take phones out of it. And it just made things unambiguously better. And I think that was a big wake up call that like that that finally happened. And then I think some of the legislation and lawsuits around social media, that's also important. So Australia banning social media for kids under 16. That was a big deal. I think Metta losing their lawsuit a couple weeks ago was also a big deal. So that's one constellation of things I think are a big deal. The other is AI. Unlike a lot of these other technologies I've written about that have caused these issues, these side effect issues, like email or like social media on smartphones, there are technologies that started, we were excited about them. They're unambiguously useful and then they had these unexpected side effects or they evolved in a way that made them much worse after we already started using them. AI is a different thing. It just makes everyone uneasy. No one really wants, we're just watching the news. Like why? Why are you doing this? It's like AI companies like, well, we couldn't help ourselves, but we released the new model and well, you know, bad news, it can read the mind of bears and cause them to attack children. But you know, what are we going to do? We got to progress, right? It's just like all, no one's clamoring for it. They're like, I guess this is cool that I can use chat CPT, but it also kind of freaks me out. And I kind of be happier if it wasn't here. Those two things together, us finally realizing and accepting that social media is bad for kids and it caused a lot of damage. And then also having this other technological assault on thought in such a clear way. It's not even trying to hide it. It's like, we will think for you. You don't have to think. And those two things together, I don't know, people are, this is an interesting time. Someone just, you know, threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's house. Like you didn't used to see this type of thing happen in the tech industry. You know, people thought Zuckerberg was an odd guy, but they weren't like throwing bombs at his house. So there's something potentially interesting happening now. That's why I wrote that article when I did is I'm trying to put some nudges out there.

Speaker 3:
[14:46] We are absolutely going to get into the exercise or the fitness program for your brain. And before we do that, I think it's worth nerding out and going a little bit more deep and intellectual. And I'm doing something that I'm terrified to do because Cal is one of the people that is three times smarter than me. And I'm going to push back a little bit here on the power of an actual cognitive fitness revolution. So you're right that in 1964, 1965, the average life expectancy of males was 65 years old and the average life expectancy of women was 71. And it has steadily gone up until most recently, the last decade where it's kind of plateaued to late 70s for men and early 80s for women. So there have been vast improvements. However, what I would argue is that the vast improvements really came from two things and continue to. The first was 1964, the Surgeon General's Warning and Report on Smoking Cigarettes. And to me, that actually tracks perfectly to your argument about banning phones in schools and more regulations on smartphones. I mean, that is like a one-to-one model. And public health researchers speculate that that drove the vast majority of gains in life expectancy between then and now. The other thing that happened was a suite of biomedical advances, a la pills. So we had blood pressure medications first came out in the 1950s. In 1987, we had statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs. And as a matter of fact, even with those medications, rates of physical overweight and obesity have continued to climb from 1965 until two years ago. And what happened two years ago, the widespread dispersion of GLP-1s, which are essentially weight loss drugs. So I think that my question is, or it's a long preamble for you to respond to, I completely agree with the cigarette smoking, the regulatory regime that hopefully is coming to set age kind of age limits or age ramifications on smartphone use in schools. I think there's also just an awareness that happens with the Surgeon General's report on the harms of cigarette that is starting to pervade culture with smartphones. Where I'd push back a little bit is, and I and Steve and Clay are the biggest proponents of fitness, and our listeners are too, individually it can make an enormous difference. Societally, I just, I don't think the fitness revolution really did anything. I think that people that were high socioeconomic status started to exercise and that worked, but I think most of the gains in longevity came from tobacco regulation in medicine.

Speaker 2:
[17:27] Well, I think all these are examples of the same thing. You get this rise of awareness, mid-century where people say, oh, there's things I can do to affect my health that's going to affect my longevity, in a way they weren't thinking about it before. So yes, the obvious ones are like what I eat matters and exercising matters. But once we started caring about those, we're also caring about what is the actual effect of those things. Well, it helps my blood pressure, it helps with this or that, right? And so like, okay, now we care about all of these indicators of physical health. If we can take a pill, that will help, we can exercise, that will help, if we do our diet, that can help. If we're struggling with the diet, we can take medicine as well. I put that all together as we really began to care about our physical health in a way that we weren't pre-mid-century. I think pre-mid-century, you cared much more about disease and injury and disability, right? That's what you cared about with physical health, was like, I hope I don't get tuberculosis, and if I break my back, it's going to be a problem because I'm not going to be able to work anymore. So anyways, I don't want us to get too locked in on like the guardrails of the analogy of like, is it exactly physical exercise and diet, not drugs, but more this idea that we started to care. We started to care about our health, exercise, food, what we put in our body, how to improve that. A lot of us struggled with it, but we cared about it. And all these things together really made a huge difference. And maybe the future of cognitive fitness is going to involve pharmaceuticals more as well. Like we already have Adderall out there. So it's not like that is something that we haven't haven't already thought about. So I think it's a good point. But I think we should just broaden the analogy.

Speaker 3:
[19:08] I think that then we're in 100 percent agreement. The only reason that it is worth pointing out is because it's just kind of dystopian to think of a world where we're going to have statins and beta blockers and GLP-1s for our brains. And is it going to get to a point where hopefully people listening to this podcast have the education and the know-how to take control of their cognitive health, just like you do your physical health. But you look at that and it tracks again directly on socioeconomic status and are we going to be in a world where there's an elite few that go through a training program for their brain and then everyone else kind of suffers until some pharmaceutical company comes along and says here's a magic pill to lessen the urge to check social media. Here's another magic pill to actually help you think so that you're not just outsourcing everything to AI and that just feels somewhat likely and also somewhat dystopian. The only reason I say it's somewhat likely is because that's exactly how we responded to the industrial revolution with our bodies and our physical health.

Speaker 2:
[20:09] Yeah, but it's more than an elite few, right? I mean, how many gyms are there in the country? It's a huge industry. Yeah, it's a huge industry. Whole Foods is a massive company. Yeah, there's how many tens of millions of people like run on a regular basis. So it's better. It's way better than it would have been. But you might be right, by the way.

Speaker 3:
[20:27] I mean, I hope I'm not right.

Speaker 2:
[20:28] GLP-1s is already kind of that, right? That's what I mean. Yeah, some of the side effects of this are hitting, for example, motivation centers in people's brains. And people are reporting like, actually, when I'm on the GLP-1 for physical health reasons, that phone isn't as compelling anymore. I find myself not feeling as locked in to the slop universe or whatever. So we might already be kind of there. Adderall prescriptions are super high. I bet we're gonna get some equivalent of statins, by which we mean like a sustainable low side effect drug that has some sort of non-trivial benefit that's widely prescribed. I want to be surprised if that has to be one of the responses to the damage wreaked by Silicon Valley. I agree with you, it's kind of dystopian, but I want to be surprised.

Speaker 4:
[21:10] So let me make a kind of analogy that I think might help out here and also puts me against Brad, which I always love to do. I don't think it's not that the exercise revolution didn't help. It's that the exercise revolution was equivalent of having everybody go from running zero miles a week to like 15 miles a week. Well, the environment was demanding, we need you to run 80 miles a week because we have so much obesogenic stuff going on. So that 15 miles a week helped, but to make up that gap because most people aren't going to be professional marathoners or amateur marathoners, we had to have the drugs to come in there and fill that gap and help us out here. I think the question tying this to the argument Cal is making, and this might get us a little into what do we do about this, is the environment we're in now with AI, social media, smartphones, etc. Is that pushing us so far that like the equivalent of jogging, which might mean reading 20 minutes every day, is that going to be enough to close that gap? Or do we need the equivalent of the professional marathoner who's saying like, I need to read 100 pages or like three hours of deep think or what have you. And I don't know where we fall on there, but I think it's really easy to say like, okay, this didn't work and we needed pills. But it's like, we need the combination of things to get us to close that gap if that makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] Yeah, I actually have, I want to extend this metaphor. I think a lot of people who use their phone or social media, there's one level where it's just, it keeps them from doing deep work, right? There's another level I think a lot of people not only are avoiding deep work, they're also avoiding emotional turmoil, like it's way easier to get on the phone than it is to sit with difficult feelings. I'm not saying that with judgment, I do it all the time. But it's almost like we haven't been working out, and it's not just that our muscles have atrophied, but that we also have like some sort of muscular skeletal setback, and we got to go to PT to get all that fixed before we can even get to the point that we can build fitness again. And I think that's where this can get complicated, is like, it's not just that we've been sitting on a couch and our muscles have atrophied, and we got to get moving a little bit. It's like we've been sitting on the couch and our muscles have atrophied, and now we've got tight hamstrings, and our ligaments are messed up because we haven't been dealing with emotional stuff cognitively. So we got, sometimes we got to fix that before we can even get to the deep work thing.

Speaker 3:
[23:47] Yeah, we have no capacity for discomfort, is what you're saying, because we have these adult pacifiers. So much like with physical fitness, pre-industrial revolution, everyone is working physically, manual labor, you're strong, you're calloused, you can tolerate a lot of discomfort. So not only are you fit, but you also have the ability to tolerate discomfort. Lifespan still sucks because everybody is smoking and we don't have medications for things like cancer, but from a physical fitness standpoint, we're fit. Then the industrial revolution comes along and suddenly not only do our actual physical muscles atrophy and we put on all this body fat, but we also lose the ability to be uncomfortable. When it's hot, we turn on the air condition, we want to pick something up, we have a robot do it for us. I think you could argue that with our phones and with AI, there is the atrophy of our ability to think and do deep work and to focus. But anyone who ever has done deep work and focus, and as Cal wrote 10 years ago, there's always a period of resistance that you have to overcome before you can actually do the deep work. It's no different than telling a person to start an exercise program and they're like, I can't do this because it hurts, it's too uncomfortable. Is that what you're saying, Clay, that now we've done both these things? We've atrophied our muscles and we've given everyone an adult pacifier so now we don't even know how to feel the discomfort that comes with thinking hard because thinking hard is hard.

Speaker 2:
[25:08] Yeah. It's a close analogy because there's actually similar mechanisms at play. There's these conservation mechanisms at play. We don't like feeling our muscles burn or our lungs burn because our body's like, oh, this is bad. We're at a capacity, this is bad, we need to slow down, we need to recharge it. It's similar when we try to do sustained inner concentration because it's not something that our mind is usually pretty happy about. We've hijacked centers of our brain and rewired them throughout our childhood and educational years to be capable of connecting different centers that weren't evolved for this purpose to do sustained thought on abstract things. As far as our brain is concerned, like this is energy burning. Our brain does not like the feeling of focus, just like our brain if you're doing a bench press is like, oh my God, this is a problem. Like we're being crushed by something. Our muscles are burning. Like we got to get out of this as quickly as possible. So I think that's a very close analogy. Here's good news, bad news, right? The good news is if you talk to people who are our age or older, especially people who really grew up with cognitive fitness, so like serious readers, you'll hear a common story, which is they'll recognize more recently, oh my God, I can't read these books anymore, right? We hear this, this is Nick Carr, this is Marianne Wolf wrote about this as well. I was a big reader and I struggled to read books. But the other thing you hear from these same people is if they actually go back and systematically force themselves to read, it takes on the matter of weeks before like, oh, I can read these hard books again. Like they have that, it's like the before and after photo scam where it's really like a really good athlete who put on weight after a surgery recovery, they take the before photo and their body is going to snap right back. And that's the, given an example of someone we all know, it was, I was amazed and jealous to hear Rich Roll on a recent podcast talk about, oh, I gained 40 pounds after my surgery. So I stopped eating, you know, sugar and bread. And within six months, I lost all 40 pounds. Like that's just the body that wanted to go back to being a D1 swimmer or whatever. The bad news is what happens if you've never had that experience where I'm worried? So what happens if you go through your childhood and you're barely laying down those deep reading circuits? So those deep processes aren't really there. You've never really been exposed to the discomfort of what it means to actually think. You don't even have the discomfort of writing because you're using AI. There's no muscle memory to return to. There's no sort of like fit version of your body that it remembers and it wants to go back to. So it's like good news, bad news. For us or older, we can get that back pretty quickly is my guess. But for people who are being raised right now without it, I'm worried this is going to be like the issue we have with people who have been severely overweight their whole life and it's like really difficult to lose that way because your body's like this is not what we know. We need to get back to where we were. That's where we're comfortable. So I think that's going to be at the crux of what we need to do to actually start making progress on this problem.

Speaker 1:
[28:08] So one more piece of pushback or maybe that's too strong, just point of clarification. We talk about how social media, especially AI, a lot of the stuff helps us avoid moments of sustained concentration, deep work, which I think is true. But isn't it also that we might be people who are using AI and stuff like that are using it not necessarily because they want to avoid sustained concentration, but because they're like time poor, they just don't have the time to do periods of sustained concentration, at least outside of work or periods where deep work is already built into their routine.

Speaker 2:
[28:51] Well, so my current claim, based on my reporting on AI and the knowledge work sector, is that the primary motivation right now, the primary use case of AI tools, if you try to categorize it, is to avoid cognitive strain. It's not the only way that people are using it, but this is a signal that keeps coming up in my work that I think is being missed. There's a lot of discussion of AI that just assumes like, oh, these things, it's great at automating all these tasks for you, and just be careful about where you use it. It's not what I'm seeing. I would say in a lot of the cases, if you really, why are you using it here? Why are you using here? Why is this student using it here? Why is this worker using it here? It's almost always to avoid moments of cognitive strain, even if it creates a work environment that is more hectic, they feel more busy, they feel more exhausted, and they're not necessarily shipping any more high quality stuff, and they know it, we will go really far to avoid having to strain our brain. It's just like we don't want to get out of breath. Like we really don't want to do that unless we really want to. We do not like straining our brain. And I'll say just as a quick aside, I don't think I recognize the degree to which that was true when I wrote Deep Work. My entire life, I'd been in educational institutions, doing professional thinking, right? I mean, when I wrote that book, I was a professor, theoretical computer scientist. I had just finished spending six years in the theory group at MIT with the world's best thinkers. And all they did all day was think and all they thought about and all they thought was good. Their entire moral universe was based around how much can you sustain concentration. My job security was entirely based on the degree to which I could sustain concentration. So I was in a world where like that's all we did. And I was around the best people in the world doing it. And I think I underestimated the degree to which for like most people, they're like, I do not want to do that. Like that does not feel good, right? It's like hanging out with Navy Seals your whole life and being surprised that people don't want to just go do PT, right? You're like, wait, that's what we do. Like what's the problem? This gets us strong. It's good. They're like, are you kidding me? You want me to do flutter kicks?

Speaker 3:
[30:49] I think you're right. And I think like my my own experience with some of these tools is that it's a really slippery slope. And you can start by saying, I'm going to run a piece through it and ask it to catch typos. And then you can pretty easily say, I really could use a great quote to help elucidate this point. And I know the point is true because I've done the research, I've done the reporting, but I'd love a quote from a historical figure that would fit. So then you could ask the machine to get that quote. And now suddenly you're not doing the reading to get that quote. And next thing you know, you sit down to write a newsletter and you say, well, it's not a book. It's not really an article. It's just a newsletter, so maybe I could give it an outline and have it write the first draft. And that's the point that I've currently got to where I'm like, nope, time to shut it down because this is my craft. What would you say to someone who it's not their craft? Because we're also still, I'm not in the MIT theoretical thinking group, but we're still in a minority because our craft is writing. A lot of people just see writing as a hassle. So they're like, yeah, I'm going to give Claude the outline and let it write because it's going to do it good enough and that's fine by me.

Speaker 2:
[31:54] Well, I think if we're talking to someone where it's not their job, it's not their livelihood, right, to use their brain, to produce original thoughts, the exercise analogy is useful here, right? It's like you're not going to get on someone's case for, oh, you took the escalator that time, right? The problem would not be, I took the escalator occasionally. It would be, I always take the escalator, right? So like for the average person, it's writing is really good for your brain. Reading creates these deep reading network circuits. Writing is when you reverse those circuits and actually use them to produce original thought. You will then be able to use that sophisticated thought generation apparatus for lots of other things, including reflecting, understanding your own life or things that are going on in like your business. It gets you in really good shape. So I wouldn't get on the case of the average person for occasionally avoiding an opportunity to exercise, but I would say you better be exercising a lot. Like you should be writing on a regular basis. So if you've replaced all writing with AI in your job, it's like you never walk anymore and you just drive and take escalator like that's going to have a physical health purpose. But I'm not going to yell at someone taking the escalator at the mall because maybe they're in a hurry or they didn't know where the stairs were or they're just a little bit tired. So I do think it's an important point because I think it's same thing with like social media and the consumption side. I'm not going to yell at someone for eating birthday cake. But if someone is like, yeah, birthday cake is the lunch I pack every day. I think it's kind of a problem. Like it's fine to like, you know, have a slice of pizza at your kids party, but like don't have pizza every day for lunch. And so that's the way I want to think about this now. There's like elite thinkers, that's its own world. But everyone else is like, hey, you want to be healthy. And you didn't know just like you didn't think about cigarettes and steak in 1949. You just didn't know that if you're doing that all the time, it's going to be a problem.

Speaker 3:
[33:43] I'm completely sold. I think that you are a canary in the coal mine telling all of us, watch out. I think we are at that mid 1960s moment. I don't want to wait for myself and more importantly, for my kids for the Surgeon General's report and regulations. I don't want to wait 20 years for the equivalent of statins and 40 years for the equivalent of beta blockers. So if I want to be someone that is on the cutting edge of the aerobics revolution, who exerted my own agency, who didn't wait for everyone to catch up, because I do think you're on the cutting edge, let's talk about what's the cognitive fitness plan for adults and what's the cognitive fitness plan for kids.

Speaker 2:
[34:22] I'm going to throw out a few things real quick and then I want to see what other people have in mind too. But let me tell you the things that I've come across in my work that I think is really important. All right. I think consumption matters, both in terms of limiting the stuff that is going to be bad for your brain and increasing the stuff that's going to be good for your brain, just like with food, you want to create a very healthy diet. And then also be careful and strategic about the unhealthy stuff that you eat as well. So I think that's really important for information. To me, the healthy diet is going to consist of, I think reading is a uniquely important thing for the modern mind. I think the modern human mind is built on reading. And if you're not doing that, you have a mind that is actually not capable of fully participating in the modern post-pandemic world that we built. So reading is like a unique activity that I think is really important. I think also reflection and contemplation is also part of a healthy information diet. Thinking about yourself just with yourself. Just being able to sit there, I'm going to work through thoughts, I'm going to hear stuff, my mind's going to wander, I'm going to bring it back. That facility with inner thought, inner attention, I think is really important. And on the junk food side, I think of the short form, fully algorithmically curated content like TikTok or the shorts on Instagram. I don't know what, are those reels, the ones that you just scroll and there's no following and it just, and you don't know who the people are, it just shows it to you. That is, to me, that's ultra processed food. And you like basically want to avoid it because it's hard to stop once you start. I think you can be sparing and strategic about traditional social media where you've chosen who you're going to follow and you get value out of what that person is doing. That's fine. Do that sparingly. Just like having your glass of wine or something like that. It could be a part of like makes your life better, less likely to be addictive, but be careful about it. So I care about that. On the exercise side, I think, so we talked about reading as being important. Writing, I think, is a really good way of actually exercising those brain muscles. It takes the circuits you built reading and reverses them to try to connect areas of your brain to produce new thoughts. So it's thoughts being produced from multiple areas of your brain wired together. The brain wires them, writing uses them. So I think writing is important. And I also think just going on thinking walks is very getting used to that. This idea of like, I have no distraction. It's me and the world around me and my thoughts. I'm going to go for a 20 minute walk and just do that is like fantastic brain exercise as well. So it's like what you consume, what you don't consume, and what you produce. So like that's a starting place, I guess. I would start there.

Speaker 3:
[36:58] Can we get, even if you're shooting from the hip a little bit, because in the 1960s before, you have to have something to study before you can study it, there were no empirical guidelines. Listeners might be thinking, okay, I like this. Should I be reading 30 minutes a day? Should I be reading three times a week for 30 minutes? Should I go on one long walk without my phone? Social media, you said use it sparingly. Is that two hours or is that two minutes? Can we try to peg just some loose guidelines to each of these things?

Speaker 2:
[37:31] Yeah, I can shoot from the hip. I mean, some things I've said before is reading, you want to do your 10,000 steps a day is probably like 10 to 20 minutes of reading a day. I think you want to do at least one activity per day without a phone. It could be short. And then you want to do one longer activity without a phone per week. So I'm going to actually go on a significant series of errands or a really long walk or whatever without my phone. So a little bit a day and a big one each week, probably a longer reading session. You want to try to get that in once a week as well. Look for opportunities to write and change your mindset about it. That the strain is like the burn you feel in the gym. That's good. Like, okay, I'm looking for that. So a few times a week. With social media, I think to me it would be, it's not every day. I think is important. I would think about it as something like a television show. It's on certain nights. Like, I spend 20 or 30 minutes doing my social media one night instead of watching a TV show, and that's a pretty good container. And I don't do it every night. That's probably like the healthy level. And then the highly addictive stuff, I would just stay away. I mean, TikTok is the ultra-processed food or maybe even like the cigarettes of the information consumption world. It is really, really hard. It really hijacks your brain in a way that's hard to fight. So why have that fight? Like, that's probably a place where you just want to abstinence.

Speaker 4:
[38:45] I love this because I know I'm the guy that does this, but this sounds so much like the 1960s training plan for fitness, which is like every day, you kind of got to do something, which is reading. And then a few times a week, you got to do something that is hard, which is writing. And then on the weekend, what do you do? You go on your long run or your long hike, right? Which is the long thing. And I think maybe that's too much of a stretch, but I think the same kind of guidelines we use, which is we have to know what's the long-term consistency sustainability thing that kind of builds us that foundation. And then what are the things that help us kind of say, okay, I'm going to stress myself in a way to kind of push my brain to adapt. And those are the longer and the harder or deeper concentration periods.

Speaker 3:
[39:37] And I'll go a step further and say that it maps perfectly on the consumption side because the no short form video is essentially saying don't smoke. Smoking is really bad and it's hard to quit. And if you need help quitting, it's a process. You can do it cold turkey, but it's going to be hard. And we're not going to be so rigid purists. So if you're someone that likes to, you know, go out to dinner a few times a week, you can, but just pay attention to what you're ordering and don't do it every night, which is essentially how you treated social media. So I think it's on both sides of the exercise and the consumption. It really is this incredible metaphor.

Speaker 1:
[40:17] I also think just to talk about scaling it down for anyone who's listening and might feel like if they do feel like reading 20 minutes is too much, I would say similar to physical fitness, start where you're at. I mean, for me, for instance, I was noticing for a while that I couldn't watch an NBA game without getting on NBA Twitter. I couldn't watch a movie without bringing my phone over. For me, the practice was just watch a whole movie without your phone, which maybe sounds ridiculous, but it was actually more difficult than I imagined, but that was where I was at. I was on a plane recently and this guy had his Nintendo switch out and iPad and he was watching a movie on the back of the screen. If you're that guy, maybe go from three screens to two screens. But the point is you can make this work for you in the same way that you go from couch to 5K rather than couch to marathon.

Speaker 2:
[41:02] I think that's important. With reading, I always tell people find a thing that you absolutely love and want to read. If you're a sports guy, I just want to read baseball season retrospective books or whatever it is. Don't get weird or picky or elitist about it. Moving words from the page into your brain is where you want to start. Find the things that you are super excited to read. Don't treat it like homework. Find the stuff that you love. Then I would add for kids, a few things I think about when I think about kids because they need extra protection from a parental perspective. I would say if you're a kid, we want to keep you away from any digital content consumption where it's engineered to be addictive, your brain can't handle that. That's going to include giving a smartphone, full YouTube access to a kid. It's going to involve social media access to a kid. It's going to involve highly addictive, massively online multiplayer games, games like Fortnite, God forbid, Roblox, like a kid should not have access to that either. That brain just can't handle it and parents have some, so just don't bring it into the world yet at that age. Then I think educational institutions need to think of themselves like a mental gym. They're like, yeah, our goal, we want you to make your brains wire together in a more complicated way and get you comfortable through the strain of using that rewired brain to produce original knowledge. If you're not metaphorically out of breath most days, like we're not doing our job, right?

Speaker 3:
[42:31] Yeah, and that's what we're doing here. Yeah, and AI out of school because the equivalent of AI in school would be going to a gym and using a forklift to pick up the weight instead of picking up the weight yourself. Like, why would you even go to the gym? And like, why would schools have AI? Yeah, you can use a forklift on the weekends when you're at IKEA, but the point of going to a gym is to train, the point of going to school is to train. I want to give a really specific example on what you said about kids because Cal, you were so helpful to my family in thinking through this for our own kids. We grew up in the era, all four of us, where video games were kind of bad and you would want to withhold video games and you had to limit your time and I didn't get a console until I was in like fourth or fifth grade. And what we were sold to us by other parents was this game called Prodigy that kids play on an iPad and it's this great game because it's a math game. And Theo started playing Prodigy at about five and a half, six years old. And for six months he played Prodigy and then one day, Theo came to us and he said, Mom and dad, I gotta log back on the iPad. And I said, why? And he's like, I gotta collect my Prodigy points. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, I got so many equations right this morning, that this afternoon in order to get my points to play the next level, I have to log back in. I'm like, this is weird. This is a game that's telling you that you need to log back in to get your points. This is supposed to be an educational math game. So I'm like, all right, Theo. So I sit over his shoulder and I watch him play Prodigy. In this game, every thing about this game that is supposed to be an educational game is designed to be addictive. Yes, you're answering math problems, but you enter math problems, then you battle villains, then you have to log back in multiple times per day. And the better that you get, the more time you have to spend on Prodigy to keep advancing. And I distinctly remember, I called Cal on a walk, and I was having my phone on this walk, thank god to call Cal, and I'm like, I don't know what the hell I just observed, but this is bad. And what you told me, Cal, is you said, get him a Nintendo Switch. Like, don't be a purist, don't say that video games are bad, but nothing on an iPad, no scrolling, no game where you have to come back, get him a Switch. And you told me, I don't know if you remember this, you said, don't make it internet based. Just let him play the cartridge games, and don't let him play video games all day, give him some time limits. And I'll tell you what, we got him a Switch for his eighth birthday. He hasn't touched an iPad in the last two months. And it's great. Like he has such an easier time putting it down. He knows his time limits. He's playing NBA 2K. So he's learning basketball plays. It's just it's so much better. Yet, I was of the mindset that, oh, a Nintendo Switch, he's too young for video games, this prodigy things, math, whatever. And it was totally backwards.

Speaker 2:
[45:17] It all depends on how much you paid. Right. So if a game is free, that means the business model is to get you to play as much as possible or do in game purchases. If it's a massively online multiplayer game, then they want you to spend as many hours on there as possible. If the game, by contrast, costs 50 bucks like NBA 2K, the business model is like this is supposed to be challenging. And we want you to spread this out. And, you know, you can only play so much and you're going to put it down. Come back to it and like that's fine for a kid. It's like, oh, this is fun. It's hard. I get tired of it after about an hour and it's not designed to be addictive. It's designed to make you feel like, okay, I got my $50 worth. But we didn't have this vocabulary. Like, because again, cognitive fitness is so new. Like we know all this stuff now with physical fitness. Like, oh, I only let my baby drink apple juice and like all of her teeth got rotted. Or we just, you know, Captain Crunch is the only cereal we gave our kid and he's getting like overweight and he's sick. So like, we know now that's a problem, but we're just learning that now for this cognitive stuff.

Speaker 4:
[46:16] I mean, it's the same playbook run by cereal companies and everything before that, right? It used to be kind of a health food. And then it became like the sugar addicted, you know, variety that you just give kids. And we're going to stuff some vitamins in there and put it on the box and say like, oh, this is good for you. And I think the point you made here Cal, which is really important is we're at this point where we don't have the vocabulary to slice and dice apart kind of for parents easily what is good and bad. Or, you know, what has risks and what doesn't. The video game is perfect. We just kind of lump it all together. And the same with like parenting is like, are you screen free or, you know, do you allow screens? But the real key is like, what kind of screen in terms of like, is it addictive or is it like 1980s Mario or what have you? And those give different effects on the child. So I think like that vocabulary coming around is going to be such an important part for like educating parents and being able to make wise decisions.

Speaker 2:
[47:22] I think that claimed that we're fortifying with vitamins, you know, fruit loops, literally just sugar with dye like put into it. That's the equivalent right now. I'll be like, no, no, see the AI in the classroom is going to help kids sort of tailor their learning experience to exactly their strengths or weaknesses or whatever, which I think is such BS. That's not where we are. The bottleneck right now with kids and education and their brain development is not like, do we have a perfectly tailored plan? It's like, did you read a book this year? Like, are you capable of writing a paragraph? Right? Like, that's not it's so ridiculous. It's like if we're having like a childhood obesity problem, and we're like, yeah, but we need to keep fruit loops in the mix because the vitamins are good for you or whatever. No, we need to, we have such more basic issues here, right? That's like a nonsense argument.

Speaker 1:
[48:10] I also wanted to come back to the forklift metaphor really quick because I think we skipped over that. I think it's actually a really important point. And so I think it's worth drawing out. I've led some people through meditation before. And for those who are allergic about meditation, I'm going to expand this out. But the first thing they say when they sit down and meditate is like, I can't do it. I'm distracted. And the thing I try to make them realize is that feeling of being distracted is the exact equivalent of going to the gym and lifting a weight. You go to the gym to work with resistance to get stronger. That feeling of feeling like I want some distraction or I don't like where my head's going, like that resistance is the emotional equivalent of going to the gym and lifting a weight. So that's like a rep. And so if you go out for a walk without a phone or you go out for a run without listening to music, and you feel like you want to pull out your phone and listen to something, think about that's a rep. I'm getting in a rep right there. Or you're waiting in line and you're just trying to observe the environment by then getting on your phone and you feel that distraction. That's a rep. That is you building your cognitive fitness. And the same way when you go to the gym and you do a bench press or you do a pull up, that is you working with resistance to get stronger. You can do the exact same thing cognitively. And that's been really helpful for me is like, oh, that resistance I'm feeling is actually myself getting stronger working with it. That's been great for me.

Speaker 2:
[49:24] I love that way of thinking. Yeah. The strain is... We know that about gyms. Like, oh, good.

Speaker 3:
[49:29] Yeah. Strain is the point.

Speaker 2:
[49:31] Yeah. This hurt. This is great. Oh, good. I'm getting... I'm probably going to get some sort of gain off of this. Like, and then it doesn't feel... I mean, it doesn't feel comfortable, but it doesn't feel intolerable. It's like the sensation doesn't change, but your mind's reaction to it changes. Your mind's like, that's great. I love this burn. Where someone who doesn't exercise, they're like, this isn't tolerable. I have to make that go away. This isn't good.

Speaker 3:
[49:54] All right. Do we solve the world's problems? Are we going to start the cognitive fitness revolution? Is there anything else that we didn't touch on, Cal, that we should talk about before we wrap this one up?

Speaker 2:
[50:07] No, I think we covered good territory.

Speaker 3:
[50:10] The one thing that we didn't cover is if you are new to Cal and Cal's work, and you really want the, to me, the book that really is the pioneer of all of this over the last 10 years, you have to read Deep Work. It's a seminal read for everybody that cares about this topic. Stop what you're doing right now, go get the book. If you've already read Deep Work and you haven't read Cal's other books, go read them all. But particularly on this topic, if you enjoyed this conversation, you will find that book very valuable and also just fascinating to see the things that Cal was saying a decade ago, given the world that we live in right now.

Speaker 2:
[50:51] Yeah, I appreciate that. That was the impetus for that New York Times article was the 10-year anniversary of Deep Work. I will say I did a podcast a few weeks ago, you can find it, where I went back through the four main rules in Deep Work and then I updated them. I was like, okay, what was in this section? What would I change in 2026 that wasn't true 10 years ago? If you've already read the book, you should check out that podcast episode for sure.

Speaker 1:
[51:15] That podcast is Deep Questions with Cal Newport, right? Got that right? I listened to that episode, it was great. It was pretty validating. You got a lot of stuff right. You didn't have a ton of stuff to add.

Speaker 2:
[51:23] Well, it helps when I wrote the book and the episode. I was like, wow, this is great. This guy was on it.

Speaker 4:
[51:28] Did great.

Speaker 2:
[51:28] 10 out of 10. He was on it, 10 out of 10. No notes. It's just a lot of me going, reading quietly for 10 minutes and just going, no notes. No notes. Nailed it.

Speaker 3:
[51:39] All right. Well, if you thought that this podcast was a 10 out of 10, or even a 7 or an 8 out of 10, it's hard to be perfect. You think that there are people in your organization, in your family, colleagues, friends, that would find this discussion valuable, please send it along to them. We think this topic is massively important. It's going to be a lot less stressful starting this cognitive fitness revolution if more people are involved. The first step to any revolution is having a common language for what the problem is, and then also a common language for solutions. I think we covered a lot of ground today on those two fronts. Please pass on the episode, share it widely, have these conversations with your own community in your school district, in your workplace, in your teams, in your locker rooms, everywhere you are. With that, as always, be excellent to each other, and we'll catch you all next week.