Avoiding Distractions & Doing Deep Work | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

In terms of deep work and getting a little bit back

to kind of practical steps towards deep work,

Yeah. I also have to ask you,

'cause I didn't earlier, when you are on your laptop

in your library with your fireplace and these books,

it's a beautiful image actually

that you've drawn for us in our minds.

Is the wifi connection to your computer activated

or are you offline?

It's connected because it doesn't really matter to me,

you know, because what's drawing my attention?

I mean, the most important decision I think

I made, technically speaking, to be

a cognitive worker is the lack of social media.

Like I think we underestimate the degree to which

our problem with digital distraction

is not the internet, it's not our phones.

It is specific products and services

that are engineered at great expense to pull you back to 'em

When you take that away, the Internet's

not that interesting, like I don't have

a cycle of sites to go to, you know,

I can check my email, but I don't really know

where else to go, I mean, I could go

to the New York Times, I guess,

but then you've seen the articles, right?

They change it once a day, there's just not much...

I've set things up, so there's not much

that's that interesting to me.

We've all heard of FOMO, fear of missing out.

I feel like there's the other thing

which is fear of missing something bad, right?

There's sort of like an anxiety,

a more primitive anxiety within us

that if we are not engaged on social media

or looking at our phone often or texting often,

that it's not that we'll miss the party,

we'll miss the emergency.

You don't seem to suffer from those kind of everyday ills.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't happen that much.

I mean, I have a phone, you know,

A standard...

No, I mean, I have my phone,

I guess if I'm working away from it,

yeah, I guess it's true, if there's an emergency.

But this was the case for a very long time, right?

We didn't have smartphones 'til really relatively recently.

This is, you know, 15 years ago.

So we were just used to this until yesterday,

essentially, that there's just periods of time

where you're out of touch.

Like you're at a restaurant with someone,

you're out of touch until you get back to your office.

Like we were okay, you know, we weren't plagued

by emergencies that that led to disastrous results

because we couldn't hear about it right then.

You go to the movies like, you're out of touch, right?

And it'd be a couple hours 'til you were in touch again.

And so, you know, it's not something

that's affected me as much.

So maybe I'm working without my phone nearby,

a lot of people have this response,

they begin sort of catastrophizing,

like, what if this happens or this or that.

And I'm thinking, you know, I survived,

before that my parents survived without that,

my grandparents survived without that.

I don't worry about it as much, you know.

And some of this maybe is just,

this doesn't upset people as as much as it used to,

the fact I don't use a lot of these apps or have my phone,

but it really does upset people, right?

There's, well, what about this, what about that,

what about this, and I don't know how much of this

is just maybe I'm oblivious and how much of this

is people back sliding explanation

for why they do need their phone,

why they do need to look at it all the time.

But I get a lot of it.

Yeah, well maybe they're upset and you don't know

because you're not looking at your phone.

That's right, hey, I'll tell you what,

that's a blessing not knowing how upset people are at you.

Yeah, it's a blessing as a semi-public figure,

I'll tell you that.

Oh yeah, I can comment on that, but I won't.

I am on social media and I do enjoy it.

I sort of got started posting on Instagram

and then expanded to other platforms,

including the podcast, but there's a threshold

beyond which it becomes counterproductive,

for sure. Yeah.

I think there's information there that...

Like questions that people ask are often informative.

It's sort of like ending a class

and asking are there any questions?

Sometimes the comments that people bring back

are truly informative towards both

where they might have some misunderstanding,

but also sometimes some really terrific ideas.

Yeah. So there's that.

But I completely agree that this is a very precarious space.

And I'll just relay a quick anecdote.

Years ago I gave a quick lecture down

at Santa Clara University, south of Stanford,

and I was talking about this issue,

I recommended your book, and a student came up afterwards

and he said, "You don't get it."

At that time, I was in my early 40s.

He said, "You don't get it, you know,

"you grew up without social media..."

Yeah. "And the phone,

"and so you've adopted it into your life.

"But we grew up with it and when my phone,"

he's speaking for himself in the first person.

"When my phone loses power,

"I feel a physical drain within my body.

"And when it comes back on, I feel a lift within my body."

So I'd love your thoughts on whether

or not you think the phone

and, perhaps, social media as well are

in some ways an extension of our brain,

it's almost like another cortical area,

that contains all this information.

It's a version of us, this gets into notions of AI

that we can talk about as well.

I know you're involved in AI and writing about AI.

But, you know, to me, when the phone is used

in that way, it really is almost like

a piece of neural machinery of sorts.

Yeah, I mean, there's two ways of looking at it.

Yeah so there is the sort of cyborg image, I suppose, right?

Like you're extending, you're plugging into

this neuro sphere like you have

this sort of digital network extension

of information and what's going on.

There's also the much more pessimistic view,

which is, you know, that feeling is the feeling

of a moderate behavioral addiction, right?

So you'll hear the same thing from a gambler,

"When I'm away from being able to play, right,

"to make my bets or do whatever,

"like I feel not myself and then,

"when I'm around it and I can play

"and make some bets, play some poker, whatever it is..."

The feeling of the chips.

"I feel myself," that chips, right, like they would say.

So both of these things could be true.

I think the moderate behavioral addiction side

is more true than a lot of us want to admit, actually.

Like it does feel bad because moderate behavioral addictions

build these feedback response loops,

and then you get the dopamine system going, anticipation,

because what's on there is things

that have been engineered that you're going to get

this sort of highly engaging stimuli.

And then you see the deliverance of that stimuli, right?

This really nice piece of glass on a piece of metal.

I'm going to press this sort of carefully,

this icon whose colors have been chosen

because we know it's going to hit various parts

of our neural alert systems to be as engaging as possible.

And I'm going to see something in there

that's going to generate some sort of emotional response.

So of course, when you see that thing sitting there,

you want to use it and when you can't,

it's a stymied dopamine response.

You're like, "This is not good, I'm uncomfortable."

And I think that's a big part of it as well,

because, you know, I've had this argument with some people.

And, by the way, I see both sides of this.

Like there are great advantages

to what people are doing with these tools.

It's just that it's all mixed up

with all these disadvantages and it becomes very difficult.

It's like the alcohol in the neighborhood bar's too potent,

you know, and people are going there to socialize

and they're coming home at three in the morning, you know,

passing out, you know, it's like the balance is off.

Not that there's not something good there,

but the balance is off so it

becomes pretty difficult to navigate.

So I think some of that's what's going on,

especially with the younger generation

that was raised on it which is why, by the way,

I think the cultural norms are going to change around this.

I think we're going to think about unrestricted internet usage,

not as something that we just sort of bequeath

on youth as they become 10 years old,

but something that we're actually much more careful about.

Probably something that's going to be

post pubescence going to make a lot more sense,

once you've had more brain development,

once you've had more social entrenchment,

you sort of understand your identity, et cetera.

Because we recognize, you know, the flip side

of plugging this thing into your brain is,

yeah, you have access to more information,

but it also pumps that into your brain.

So, I don't know, I lean a little bit heavier towards

the pessimistic read because I know too many people,

because of my books, who've really reduced

the impact of these things in their lives.

And on the far side of that transformation,

they don't, typically, report

a great impoverishment in experience.

They don't report, I'm less mentally agile.

The information at my fingertips is less,

I'm missing out on life, there's typically this coming out

of the fog on the other side of it

where they're like, "Oh, this is fine."

So, you know, I'm a little bit suspicious about

exactly what this mechanism is.

Yeah, I think you're right about

the moderate behavioral addiction piece.

Years ago when I was starting my lab,

I had grants to write and I found the phone

to be pretty intrusive for that process.

So I used to give the phone to somebody in my lab

and announced to everyone in my lab that if I asked

for it back prior to 5:00 PM that day,

I would give everyone in the lab, I think it was $100 bill,

my lab was pretty big at the time.

Yeah. I was a junior professor.

They did not do... Sorry, academic institutions not

to be named, pay us very much

despite what people might think.

And it was difficult.

Several times Yeah.

Throughout the day or more I was like,

"Ah, I really want to look at that thing."

But at the end of the day,

I'll tell you that no one got paid, I got my phone back.

But it's wonderful the amount of work

that you can get done when that thing is out of the room.

I mean, it's my superpower, right?

I don't work that hard in the sense

that I don't do long hours,

like I'm not constitutionally suited for long hours.

This was never my thing, my brain tires, right?

I mean, I'm good for four, four and a half good hours

a day of actually producing good stuff

with my brain, probably, max.

But, you know, I don't use my phone that much.

I don't use the internet that much,

and I prioritize it, and a lot just gets done.

It just sort of piles up over time, you know?

And there's this sense of like, you must be burning

the midnight oil and you have all these things going on.

But again, people I think underestimate,

they underestimate the impact of this.

It's not just the accumulation

of time you spend looking on your phone,

it's also this network switching cost, right?

Because like the phone is very good at inducing

a network switch, and that's a expensive, time consuming,

energy consuming, neuronal operation.

Task switching? Yeah.

I'm going to switch my focus

of attention from this to that.

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