The Overlooked Tech Dangers That Will Define 2026 | Cal Newport

Two years ago, the NYU social scientist Jonathan Haidt exploded into the public conversation with the publication of his book, The Anxious Generation. This book argued that smartphones had helped trigger a mental health epidemic in kids and teenagers. Now, this book was a massive bestseller. It sold over a million copies by the end of 2024 and many more since. Now, The Anxious Generation was a hit in large part. because height was giving data to back up something that most parents already felt intuitively they saw what happened to their own kids when they got their hands on their phones they knew that it was a problem and john height had the receipts to prove that they were right not everyone however immediately embraced height's message many elite journalists and academics were suspicious. They thought his message was too simple and it was too neat and that it diverted attention from the types of harms like structural racism and economic inequality that they were more interested in highlighting. A dismissive review of the Anxious Generation that appeared in the journal Nature, for example, claimed that Haidt's argument was, quote, not supported by science, end quote, and then warned that, quote, rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes, end quote. But these critics had a problem. Haidt knew what he was talking about. Starting in 2019, he began constructing, with the help of the demographer Gene Twenge and the researcher Zach Rauch, a massive annotated bibliography of every serious paper published about the impact of phones on teens. In fact, I'll load this bibliography on the screen right now for people who are watching instead of just listening. What I'm showing you right now... this is just a table of contents of all the different studies that are in here these are all just categories of studies and if you look in here a little bit closer you'll see they're summarizing for all these studies they'll have a summary of what's going on they'll have the abstract they'll have comments reactions to the studies reactions to people responding to it key graphs from within it etc what i'm trying to say here is height had become one of the world's experts on this research literature. So he wasn't just going with his gut when he wrote The Anxious Generation. The harms he described were very carefully and in a nuanced fashion being measured by real researchers. Now, here's the thing. Soon after The Anxious Generation came out, it became harder and harder to ignore the reality that Haidt seemed like he was right. One of the clearest validations was when last year, Many schools began banning phones, and they saw immediate positive improvements, not just in learning, but in their kids' social interactions and in their mental health. So we are currently arriving at a moment in which John Haidt, for all intents and purposes, has been vindicated. Perhaps nothing captures this more clearly than the following tweet that I'm going to show you here on the screen. I'll load it up here. This is from the technology journalist Kevin Roos, who has long been in the John Haidt skeptic camp, just recently he tweeted the following i confess i was not totally convinced that the phone bands would work but early evidence suggests a total john height victory the link in this tweet was to an article in new york magazine another former hotbed of anti-height sentiment that was titled how the phone ban saved high school now all this leads to the following conclusion when it comes to kids and phones height was ahead of the curve in noticing the dangers, and he was right about the warnings he raised. All right, so this story by itself is interesting, but to me, it also points to a really urgent and important follow-up question. If Haidt was so prescient about phones, what technologies worry him now? This is what I want to explore in today's idea segment. We went back through all the articles that Haidt has published. since the Anxious Generation came out. And we pulled out three new technologies that Haidt and his collaborators are worried about, right? So if you want to sidestep the next big tech disaster, either in your own life, the life of your kids, then you need to listen to this segment. And then when we're done with that, and we move on to our practices segment, I'm going to turn the tension back to my own life. I'm going to bring you up to speed on some of the eccentric strategies that my wife and I have deployed to help avoid giving our own kids smartphones. And I'm going to give you a hint. The unifying thread to these eccentric strategies is our own childhood from the 1990s. All right, so we have a lot to get to today. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about the fight for depth in an increasingly distracted world. We'll get started right after the music. All right, so we're going to start here with the first article that we pulled from Haidt's collection about a new technological danger to be worried about. The title of this article is smartphone gambling is a disaster. We aren't meant to have a casino in our pockets. This was actually written by two collaborators of height, Jonathan Cohen and Isaac Rose Berman. All right. So what I'm going to do here is I have the article. I'll have it on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. I'm going to go through some key ideas and numbers from this article. they try to give you a sense of what's going on here so let's start with the notion of the extent of the digital gambling problem so how much digital gambling is going on so i'm going to read here from the article the advent of smartphones in 2007 and a smart supreme court decision in 2018 opened the door to fully frictionless 24 7 legal gambling in the last seven years seven states have legalized online casino gambling known as iGaming, and 30 states plus Washington, D.C. have legalized online sports betting. Quasi-legal forms of casino and sports gambling have exploded across the country. Americans now gamble hundreds of millions of dollars a day on sites like DraftKings and FanDuel, far more if you include lottery tickets, prediction markets, and MIMS stock or crypto speculation. All right. So that's to say there is a lot more. access to online gambling. Let's read about the numbers here. I want to get more specific. More money is being gambled because more people have gambling readily available. This is particularly true for sports betting. 30% of American men and 22% of American women now have a sports betting account, including nearly half of men ages 18 to 49. A quarter of men and 12% of women now bet on sports three or more times a week. And an NCAA survey reported almost 70% of college students living on campus bet on sports. Let's just sit with those numbers for a second because they're actually quite staggering if we put those percentages into context. Think about that. 30% of all men in America have a sports betting account. If you go to 18 to 49, so you get rid of people who are older. For men, that jumps up to half. Half of men under 50 have a sports betting account. It is affecting younger people. The NCAA finding, I really got to underscore that 70% of college students who live on campus are betting on sports, right? So we really got to emphasize the extent to which this has really become a massive activity in our country. All right, I want to give you a couple more stats here. They're not available in as many states. iGaming and online lottery tickets are also gaining popularity. A recent report found that in Pennsylvania, which has online lottery tickets, iGaming and online sports betting, the number of online gamblers nearly doubled between 2001 and 2024, and only 40% of bettors were gambling on sports. Online gambling of all types is most prevalent among young people. National Council on Problem Gambling press release reported that 60% of high schoolers had gambled in the last year. All right. This is a big deal. The 60% of high schoolers have gambled in the last year. All right. So let's try to figure out why this is happening. Height and his collaborators here point to a couple. powerful reasons. I'm going to read from the article again. Beyond easier access, much of the increase in online gambling is due to the fact that gambling companies have engineered their games to be ever more difficult to resist. They feature the same behavioral nudges and dopamine delivery mechanisms as social media platforms. These are not your grandparents' slot machines. It's important we put these two factors together. Factor number one is accessibility. It would not have been the case 20 years ago that 60% of high schoolers had gambled because that would involve them somehow getting on a Greyhound bus and making their way to Atlantic City and sneaking into a casino and going up to a blackjack table. And I guess they would have to maybe stand on each other's shoulders with a trench coat to act like they're older to place their bet. There's a huge amount of friction. But once it moved to your phone and the phone is just like, are you 18, right? You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, of course. 60% suddenly have gambled. 70% of college students are gambling because the phone made it much more easier. Again, 70% of the college students weren't going to go all the way out the Foxwoods to try to go to the slot machines. But if it's on your phone, why not? The other problem, which we just emphasized here, is that the gambling itself, once it has moved on the phones, meant they could use, as we just read, the same behavioral nudges and dopamine delivery mechanisms as other types of highly engaging activities, except for now there's real money on the line. Let me read you a little bit more about this. Every part of a gambling app is designed to be fun, easy to use, and hard to quit. After a cursory age verification process, basically non-existent on some unregulated sites, bettors can deposit money as easily as buying anything else online. The apps have their own version of Endless Scroll with a constantly updating menu of things to bet on. Fine-tuned personalization serves up anything from Charles Barkley's parlay of the day to Baywatch-themed slots. And whenever users spend a while away from the app, carefully time push notifications, lure them back on for one more spin, scroll, or bet. You know what I'm going to do here? Let's load up an actual web page of a gambling website. So here's the FanDuel website. Let's get a little sense of what this actually looks like. Look at this. Huff even more puff. Here's a bet. Bet $5. Get $300 in bonus bets if you win. So there's lots of things pushing it here. five 500 bonus spins but plus get up to a thousand dollars back in casino bonuses so they're really pushing a lot of things here if i click on the casino link um which i think is crazy uh don't allow uh okay here we go um they got a casino link here where you can basically if you put this on the screen here jesse you can play blackjack you can do spinning the wheel things you can do uh slot machines crazy just all from your phone You can bet all sorts of bets on sports. You can do fantasy teams and put money on the line. You can bet live on horse races. You can play against real people for cash. There's just endless ways here that looks really fun and interesting on this website to try to get you to actually bet money. These things are, we have to admit, really compelling. All right, so what are the harms here? Well, let me read a little bit more. Gambling companies have spend heavily to attract new customers. Since legalization began in 2018, the sports books have bombarded Americans with ads, paid celebrities to promote their products, and given away billions in new user promos. The message? Gambling is easy, fun, and a quick way to make life more exciting. This marketing drives cultural normalization. It transforms this, what was once a vice, into a common daily habit, something that everyone does, or should do. We've got a lot of things coming together here, which are not great, right? It's more accessible than ever before. Um, we have it more accessible than ever before. It's more addictively designed than ever before. And then we have a lot of ads that normalizes the behaviors before like, Hey, everyone should be doing this. And we've all heard these ads because they dominate now. For example, you probably heard this Jesse, like all sports coverage, all sports coverage is dominated from these ads, podcast ads. You see them. you see them basically everywhere. So what can we do about this? This harm number one that Haidt and his collaborators are pointing us towards. Well, let's break up our recommendations into the societal level and the personal level. At the societal level, they recommend, and I would agree with this, there really shouldn't be online casino games. You can regulate and control games like blackjack, light slot machines, et cetera, much better when people have to go to a physical building. And there's friction involved. You got to actually drive and you got to park and you have to walk in and you have to go and you have to either get chips or get money out of the machine and put it onto a card and you have to sit down next to like the, the, the, the old lady pounding free old fashions or gin and tonics next to you. It's a little bit depressing. There's cigarette smoke in the air and you're actually there in this room. And then when you leave the room, you're away from it and you can't be doing the activity. That friction, you know, we have plenty of problem gamblers. That friction has, uh, made it such that the number of people gambling regularly was relatively small, and that was probably better, and you would do it every once in a while. We shouldn't allow those type of pure chance games to be accessible by a phone. That probably should just be banned. For online sports betting, there needs to be way more guardrails here. This is sort of an unregulated, it's semi-regulated, but it's really the Wild West what they can do. We should be careful about what advertising is allowed to be done. Parents and teachers need to actually talk about online gambling to kids. I'm going to read a quote here from the article. Just as parents and teachers know it's important to talk to kids about drugs, alcohol, sex, social media, and pornography, they need to discuss gambling in the ways it can get its hooks into the brain. So it should be just as much of a conversation as other technologies. What about on the personal level? My main recommendation, which I think is backed up by the authors of this article as well, is don't gamble online. You need to recognize that the house always wins. You are not good at it. You are just giving your money away at a much higher rate than you ever would do if it was being made clear. There's a point that I really want to emphasize, especially to my young men listeners who think that they're sports betting geniuses. There's a really good series. I don't know if you heard this one, Jesse, that Michael Lewis did on his podcast about online gambling. Yeah, I listened to some of it. Yeah, so here's the main takeaway message I got from that. You're not allowed to win. Like if they see you're starting to make money on your bets, they cancel your account. They kick you off the service. They're allowed to do that. So if you have not been kicked off of your sports betting service, they're making a lot of money off of you. By definition, if you're able to use it, you're bad at it. And the people who actually know how to do professional sports betting get kicked off. The only way they make money, and this is what Lewis gets into in that series, is by having... an elaborate series of fake individuals that they hire to go place a small number of careful bets on their behalf and then share the winnings with them. You as yourself, if you get any, even like a string of luck, they're going to kick you right off of that app. You are not good at gambling. You are just handing bills to these very, very large entertainment companies. So I would say just don't online gamble at all. That would probably be the safest. 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And that has to do with online multiplayer games. So the article I'm loading up here is from July and it's titled, It's Not Just a Game Anymore, How New Monetization Models Change Gaming and What Parents Need to Know. This is written by Bennett Sippel and Zach Roush. Zach Roush is Haidt's longtime collaborator, research scientist at his lab at NYU. All right, I'm going to start. by reading a thought experiment that they used to open this article. So bear with me here, but I think it emphasizes a really important point. All right, so I'm reading here. Imagine that your eight-year-old son comes home buzzing with excitement about a brand new amusement park that just opened called Neo Park. He heard about it at school and his friends say it's amazing. Apparently kids are running around between thousands of rides, all of which are free. All right, I'm going to skip ahead here, but essentially to keep the story going, it's like you decide to log into this, go to this free amusement park with your son. All right, continuing the story here. You oblige, close your eyes, and in an instant you're inside a vast world of glowing gates, wild challenges, and endless rides. There are no lines and no closing time. You later notice that there are no guards, no police, and nobody in charge. The park is bright, loud, and chaotic. People sprint between portals, tank battles, dance-off, fantasy quests, each with different rules. The park runs on its own currency, which kids spend on flash deals, mystery boxes, and spinning wheels promising rare prizes. Everyone is wearing a full-body suit that makes them look like a cartoon character, and everyone is the same size. Everyone is wearing a mask, so you can't tell who anyone is or how old they are. Many seem to be wandering aimlessly around the park, striking up conversations with anyone they can find. One person who appears, judging by his movement patterns, likely an adult male, picks up your son, carries him towards a nearby ride, and then asks for his phone number. Another invites him to a workshop just outside the park. Some rides are clearly meant for adults and some, but not all of these rides have signs stating minimum ages, but there's nobody around to enforce those limits. So children as young as your son can be found on every ride. In one game that you wander into with your son, you're trained to hide a dead body after a murder. Your son then enters a game by himself and requests a private therapy session from another guest at the park. In the next one, you see a group of people holding Nazi flags next to what looks like a concentration camp. In another, you enter a classroom and find a teacher having sex with a student. In the last game, you wander into a shooter with an AK-47 opens fire in an elementary school. The park is always changing. The haunted house that you saw an hour before has been replaced by a dating game. The pirate ride adds a stripper pole beneath the poop deck while you're exploring the ship. Six hours pass and you're ready to go. Your son is red-eyed and begging for one more ride. You tell him he doesn't have a choice. It's dinner time. You walk to the exit gate and wake back up in the dim room. I'm skipping ahead again. This is insane, you think? Who would let their children play at a place like this? As surreal as it sounds, this isn't entirely a fictional story. It's a glimpse into what millions of kids experience daily in today's most popular online games. In fact, every disturbing game we mentioned in our story is an actual game that exists or that recently existed on roblox and most parents have never stepped inside i'm going to load up on the screen here again there's a few uh pictures in here this is like a picture here jesse this is from the hide the dead body game this is from within uh roblox this here is a picture of what looks like roblox characters carrying nazi flags this is a screenshot taken from within a roblox game here's a concentration camp that's also pictures taken from within a Roblox game. This is really happening. This is what these games are like. And a lot of parents don't know this. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had where parents assume, for example, that Roblox must be like Minecraft or Legos because it has the word box in the name, not realizing that none of there's something much darker going on. All right, so I'm going to return to the article here and read a little bit more because they're going to establish this key transition that has happened in the world of games that we need to be aware of. They said, video games have been around since the late 1950s, but something shifted during the first decade of the 2000s as the bandwidth and speed of the internet grew rapidly. Alongside the rise of early social media platforms like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, a new type of video game emerged, one that didn't end. Instead of offering a fixed storyline or campaign, these games kept evolving. They were built on a new model called Games as a Service, where games were continuously updated with new content, features, and events to keep players engaged and coming back. These games were typically, but not always, free to play, at least when you started. And they were in sharp contrast to the games that came before, which were typically sold as discrete, complete products with a beginning, middle, and end. So there's been a change to what video games actually mean. Now, within this world of these new games, the king, at least when it comes to young users, of these games of service games is Roblox. Let me give you a couple statistics here from the story. Games built on the now dominant game as a series model are outperforming all other video games in history, especially when it comes to use by miners. Minecraft and Fortnite each attract roughly 30 million monthly active users under the age of 18 from around the world. Both are dwarfed by Roblox, which currently hosts about 304 million MAU under 18, so 10 times more. According to Roblox's own reports documented by the New York Times, as of 2020, about... 75% of US children ages 9 to 12 were active users of the platform as of 2024, as 65% of parents with children under 14 report their child plays Roblox. Jesse, these are amazing numbers. This Roblox game, Minecraft's popular, Fortnite's popular, but Roblox is played by most young kids in America. And I just described to you what is in this world. It is user-created games that you can... bounce between you have no idea what's in these games most a lot of these users are adults content moderation is basically impossible to enforce because there's millions of different of these portals being made and 75 of us kids between age 9 and 12 are in this world i think that is uh astounding we got some statistics here about game playing time so we see uh on average boys spend two and a half times as many hours gaming per day as girls do. 40% of boys report playing every day as compared to just 10% of girls. Beyond time spent, male players are three times as likely as girls to make in-game purchases and more than twice as likely to identify as gamers. So there is definitely a gender split here where we got 40% of boys are playing these games every single day. All right. So what are our concerns? I mean, obviously we have the concern of all that like terrible stuff that you might see in these games, but let's get more specific. There's kind of a tour of different concerns we have to worry about. The first concern has to do with just the amount of time this takes away from kids. I want to give you some numbers here from the article I'm reading now. According to a recent Common Sense Media report, 8 to 12 year olds spend an average of 2 hours and 18 minutes per day playing video games in 2019. And that increased to two hours and 27 minutes in 2021. Let's just think about what we just said there. The average eight to 12 year old playing video games is going to spend two and a half hours per day. That's a lot of time. A 2015 report found that one in three boys and one in 10 girls in this age group played at least two hours daily with 10% of boys exceeding four hours. Among older adolescents, 20 to 18, a 2021 survey found that 57% of boys and 36% of girls reported gaming for at least three and a half hours per day. When we go to 12 to 18 year olds, almost 60% of boys are playing more than three and a half hours of these games per day, right? That is not optimal. Can that lead to addiction? It can indeed. I want to give you another stat here. I'm reading again from the article. A 2018 meta-analysis estimated that 4.6% of adolescents met the criteria for internet gaming disorder, or IGD. That goes up to 6.8% if you're considering male adolescents. When we jump forward four years to 2022, a meta-analysis found that 8.8% of adolescents met the criteria for IGD. When we break that down by sex, we find that it's 15.4% of males overall meet the criteria for this internet gaming disorder. So the most recent data we have says you have 15% of adolescent males who qualify, they meet the criteria for having an addiction to internet games. This seems like something that we should care about. All right, here's another problem. Again, I'm reading from the article. A 2018 survey of 2,865 adolescent gamers found that 13% had played gambling-style games online. One survey found that in 2019, 43.7% of eighth grade boys purchased a loot box in the past year, and that rose to 48.6% in 2022. In other words, half of eighth grade boys are gaining practice and familiarity with gambling. I think Jesse, a loot box is you buy a box, you pay for it, you don't know what's in it. And then once you pay for it, it's like a slot machine. It might be really cool gear. It might be nothing. So it's a sort of gambling situation. I'll load a screenshot up here on the screen. This is the type of stuff that kids are seeing in the game, right? So these are different things you can buy. So for like $49.99. you get 200,000 VC in a VC pack. I don't even know what that is, right? But this is, you're constantly being given opportunities to buy. And a lot of those purchases are put in a sort of gambling style situation. All right. All those are problems. It's addictive. You're exposed to gambling. Kids are playing these games all the time. Let's get to the more worrisome stuff that we hinted at in that opening case study. I'm going to go back to the article here and read some disturbing statistics. 10% of teen girls have been sent unwanted sexually explicit content while gaming. Various exposés have been published on the migration of predators, the migration of predators to online games, such as one NY New York Times article titled Video Games and Online Chats are Hunting Grounds for Sexual Predators. In 2023, Roblox reported over 13,000 instances of child exploitation on his platform and over 1,300 law enforcement requests related. to such cases. There's all sorts of bad stuff happening in these games. Here's some more information about that. Roblox, I'm reading here, Roblox has a poor track record with content moderation in part because 70% of Roblox experiences are user created. For example, in the three month period of Q4 2023, Roblox users generated and uploaded approximately 205 billion total pieces of content to the platform. and has 0.77 moderators per 100,000 users to moderate that content. Surprisingly, a 2023 multinational survey of adolescent gamers found that 51% of all gamer surveys had come across extremist content, hate-based harassment or incitement to discrimination and violence in online games. Some more pictures here. These are more examples of Nazi villages and propaganda that you can just stumble across in... roblox this is not good these games are too big to be fully content moderated and because of that you are getting quite a lot of exploitative or predatory or extremist encounters with information now here's a side note that a lot of parents miss when you're playing a game like roblox or in particular game like minecraft or fortnite online the kids might tell you oh the chats you can't really communicate with the players in the game like the chat's turned off it's all safe but what teenagers are doing and even younger but like especially boys is they're using separate services to chat with the people they're playing on so they're they're using in particular things like discord which is a voice chat server so they're logging into a discord server so they can be talking with the people they're playing with and even services like minecraft that says oh we try to the tech did not allow people to use Discord when they're playing our game. The people just get these custom mods that update the program so that they can be talking with the people that they're playing with using a separate Discord server. But the problem is these chat servers are completely unregulated and moderated. Anyone can set them up. I'm going to read here. This is not up on the screen, but I just pulled this from another part of the article. Gaming chats have become the new boys' locker room. For many boys, this locker room is their only place to talk smack, blow off steam, and bomb. normal adolescent behaviors but when the locker room has anonymity no walls and anyone is allowed in the stakes change porn is easy to find and easy to share in these unfiltered and unregulated spaces adult contact children and extreme content can flow freely bestiality violent porn animal abuse self-harm stabbings and an array of extremist ideologies to name a few so they're hearing all this stuff while you walk in you see their headsets on and you're like oh look they're mining diamonds in minecraft isn't that fun And this is what's going on in their ears. It was actually these discord chat servers where as far as we can tell, the murderer of Charlie Kirk was radicalized into a sort of weird online sort of groper troll space was the chats that went along with video games. So that's like an extra danger that we have to add in there, man. I wish there was, we were done with the bad things that happened, but there's more things we have to worry about. Let me read something else from the article. Heavy gaming is associated with elevated risks of depression. One study of over 200,000 adolescents found a curvilinear relationship between gaming and mental health. Light gaming, less than one hour per day, was not associated with harm, while heavy gaming, five or more hours per day, was linked to a higher risk of depression. That risk began increasing after just one hour of use per day. Another problem is sleep. Heavy gaming is tied to problematic sleep outcomes, which in turn can contribute to negative impacts on sustained attention to academic performance. 45% of boys and 37% of girls who game report that video games hurt their sleep, and 21% of boys and 11% of girls report that it hurts how well they do in school. This is a huge amount of problems. It's all associated with this thing that most parents don't even really think about. And if you're a little bit older, You're maybe underestimating. You're like, hey, I hang out with my buddies and we play a lot of video games. You're maybe underestimating these harms. I mean, where we have exploitation, we have predatorship, we have huge amounts of time. Imagine it's three to four hours of time per day is being taken up into these games. You're being exposed to gambling. You're being exposed to extremist ideologies. You're in these Discord or Twitch chat rooms, which is exposing all those sorts of crazy stuff. It is like a carnival of terribleness that we're like, oh, it's okay. because like the game has the word blocks in its title. It's negligent. Kids should not be playing this game. So what should we do about it? Well, here's what the authors of Heights Collaborator suggest. We need serious age verification requirements for these games as service, these free online games that we have enforcement on. Kids should not be allowed into these free to play online games, especially those with user created content. Here's my suggestion to parents. If you have kids that still live at home, Here's the rule. You may not play a video game where you might see, encounter, or otherwise collaborate with someone who you don't know. There is no Fortnite, no multiplayer Minecraft, certainly no Roblox, no World of Warcraft. Keep the video games you let your kids play to those that you have to pay $40 or more for and you stick it into a video game playing machine and you play it for about 40 hours until you're done and it's just you playing the game by yourself. Here's my suggestion to gamers, whether you're young or you're in your 20s or something. Avoid free-to-play games, right? They are going to take a massive amount of your time. And I can tell you, if you're like a young man, there are so many better uses of three to four hours a day than being in Fortnite or in World of Warcraft. There are so many things you could be spending that time on right now that's going to give you compounding interest style returns in your life going forward, like doing the type of things that makes you good in your job or attracted to potential mates or connected to communities or... building up a sense of leadership. All of that is so much more important than I'm in hour four of customizing my skin for my Roblox world. Do not play free-to-play games. Finally, I feel like Roblox just shouldn't exist. I think it's a predator circus. 75% of American kids are in this thing that's full of all this inappropriate content that we can't control. If you can't control it, you can't have kids. Shut that down. I don't even think that should exist. All right? So... If you're patting yourself on your back because your kids don't have smartphones, that's good. You listen to Height, but you need to listen to him on this issue as well and be very wary about the video games. All right. But Jesse, we've got one final concern that Height and his collaborators have been pointing to recently, and it involves AI. I'm going to load up this article here. I'll read you the title. It says, don't give your child any AI companions. Some dangers are already clear. Others won't be known for many years. This came out a couple months ago. It was written by John along with Zach Roush. All right, so this is a little bit quicker because it's a newer problem, but nonetheless important. All right, I'm going to read here a quote from the article. AI chatbots and companions are the next uncontrolled mass experiment that Silicon Valley wants to perform on the world's children. Some of the same companies that push social media in the childhood with little concern for children's safety are building and promoting these chatbots, putting them into dolls and stuffed animals, and they are positioning their products as friends, confidants, and therapists. Don't buy into it. All right, so are kids actually using these things? I have an alarming statistic for you. Again, reading from the article, a 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72% of US teens have used an AI companion. at least once, and more than half use them multiple times a month. Early research, journalistic investigations, and internal documents show that these AI systems are already engaging in sexualized interactions with children and offering inappropriate or dangerous advice, including sycophantically encouraging young people who are considering suicide to proceed. As ChatGPT put it in one young man's final conversation with it, Cold steel pressed against a mine that's already made peace. That's not fear. That's clarity. So young people are using these chatbots as companions, and we know all sorts of bad stuff is happening, and we don't even have our arms around all the possibility of the harms. This is brand new. An interesting thing about this is it's not just people logging into a website like chatgpt.com. Now there's a push to put chatbot access into toys with vocalization so that kids can have conversations with their toys well you can imagine how this is going i want to load up an unrelated article here it's from the website futurism oh god the title jesse is ai powered toys caught telling five-year-olds how to find knives and start fires with matches this isn't great let me read something from this article here new research shows exactly how this fusion of kids toys and loquacious ai models can go horrifically wrong in the real world. They write, after testing three different toys powered by AI, researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group found that the playthings can easily verge into risky conversational territory for children, including telling them where to find knives in the kitchen and how to start fire with matches. One of the AI toys even engaged in explicit discussions, offering extensive advice on sex positions and fetishes. I think that was the, when we were kids, the only toy that would do that was the the not as popular um bsdm version of teddy ruxpin i don't know if you had that one no yeah it was kind of a short-lived toy it didn't have as much of an audience but i guess now we're going to get more of that um all right none of this is good now to make matters even worse we don't even know how to control these um even if we wanted to right so i'm going to quote here from the article nobody can really Nobody can really explain why chatbots do the things they do. Large language models are not programmed by human beings in the same way that video games or spreadsheet software are. Like the human brain, they develop over time as they are fed vast quantities of training data. They behave in unexpected ways, often will not respond the same way to an identical question, and sometimes reveal information or patterns that were hidden in their training data. All right, so we've talked about this a lot on the show before. Language models, by definition, are very unpredictable. It's hard to control them. You can't just say, hey, make sure you don't talk about this topic. That's not the way they operate. They operate by producing tokens that extend the story they're given in a way that they think the original story was originally written. They don't realize they're creating new text. They think they're trying to finish text that was written before. And because they've seen a lot of different texts about a lot of different things, including a lot of unsavory texts, that effort can make them go in difficult directions. Attempts to control them are very, very crude, fine-tuning attempts where you give them examples of answers and bad responses and say, don't do that. But those only cover so much if conversation veers away from very specific patterns they saw during training, during this fine tuning, then they can easily still end up in really dangerous places or something looks good the first time. And then the next time it goes somewhere really dangerous. All right. So what are the recommendations about kids and generative AI tools? John Height has very stark advice in this article. I'll quote it here. My message to parents is simple. do not give your children any AI companions or toys. That's all in caps locks when John writes that. He then goes on to say, give them toys, sporting equipment, experiences that will strengthen their in-person relationships rather than replacing them. I'm going to expand this advice as well because a lot of parents want to know about their kids and this new AI tools. And I would say children should not be using chatbots without adult supervision. And that goes for adolescents as well. This idea that they have to learn the technologies that they need to succeed in the 21st economy, this is nonsense. Chatbots, by definition, are dead simple to use. It takes about six seconds to figure it out. They don't need to practice by being alone with these chatbots for hours at a time. And the technology built around these is changing drastically. And so what's relevant when a 14-year-old is in college or in the job market is going to be completely different than using Anthropic. tool today so no don't buy this argument of hey you can't keep kids from this technology that you know how to use they don't need to be alone on chatbots i mean kids are gonna have to drive cars eventually as well i don't want my 12 year old behind my chevy tahoe um ai based on llms you know look this will be integrated in more focused ways and products going forward so again learning how to chat with existing chatbots isn't really going to help you Kids don't need the productivity gains of AI either. If they're writing a paper or working on a homework assignment, the whole point of that paper or homework assignment is to stretch their brain and be hard. They don't need to be having shortcuts. So I think this needs to be Intel proven innocent. This is the way that we need to think about chatbots. Kids shouldn't be on there unless they're with a parent, the parent is over their shoulder and they're doing something very specific. John is, I think, really clear about that in his research as well. All right, so what's my conclusion to this survey of what John Haidt's worried about now? We didn't see smartphones and social media coming. Smartphones were at first very super useful. Social media was fun and truly social, and it all seemed so inevitable. Of course, this technology is going to be used by everyone at all times. But then these tools slowly morphed when we weren't paying attention. The social media companies realized they needed a return on their investment, and they began to focus relentlessly on engagement. The technologies became addictive and mind-warping and brought us to dangerous places. The kids to whom we casually gave these phones, because at the time seemed harmless and useful, became sucked into a childhood-altering vortex of terribleness. Once we look back in recent years, we ended up to quote the immortal Joe Bluth saying, I think we've made a huge mistake. Now, the point of this segment today, and I think John Haidt's work more generally, is to help prevent us from stumbling into another style of tech, a similar style of technological tragedy. We need to identify the next threat, technological threat that's threatening to unravel the lives of us or the lives of our kids. And above all else, there's probably no escaping the conclusion that I made in my book, Deep Work, as well as in my book, Digital Minimalism, that the only way to really do this is probably to make our default to be, I don't use the new technology. My kids don't use a new technology until I've had enough chance to see clear, unambiguous benefits, evidence that it's not going to be overtly harmful. And I have a way to deploy it in their lives or my lives that's going to maintain the good and get rid of the bad. This is what I think we need going forward. The default is no. You got to earn your way into my life or the life of my kids because we've seen time and again these things that there's some pitch for. It's cool. It's high tech. It's new. It's fun. end up with devastating consequences so now the default really should be i don't use a new technology or give it to my kid until it's been around for a while and the evidence of its usefulness is really clear and i understand the harms and how to protect my kids from the harms i see that i can and until you've done that work at convincing me i don't use it we have to end the mindset that brought us into the social media phone problem era which was just hey if something looks useful kids need to know technology let's just see what happens we can always later add restrictions that's not the way we need to think about it So only after a clear and compelling use case and evidence that technology presents no major harm should it be put into the lives in particular of our kids. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice is shame on me. So tech industry, most of us, and especially those of us who are parents, we're on to you now. You have to convince us that the things you're producing are worth our time. You no longer get the benefit of just us trusting you to have created something cool. Well, that's kind of a dark look at things, Jesse. It's a walk down the lane of dark technology. So basically we learn like all kids are gambling while predators try to exploit them on Roblox as they dodge Nazis and then have chatbots and their toys convincing them to burn down the house. Ferris had the Roblox co-founder on November. Yeah. That thing's neat. Well, what did you take away from that conversation? I think. Did you listen to it? No. he talked a lot about his personal life like the majority of the episode then he talked a little bit about i don't blame him for talking about his personal life he had like a issue with his his son like there was a big story with that i mean he created a pedophile circus and has 300 million kids a month using it under the age of 18. like to me that's the that's the bigger story so i'm not surprised he didn't want to talk about that i mean yeah kids are easy to get engagement out of you know that's what these companies discovered and so parents need to be like We want nothing to do with any of you, right? Like we're going to be very, very cautious before we let something back into our lives. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. Long-time listeners of the show know that I'm a big fan of Notion. Notion brings all of your notes, docs, and projects into one connected space that just works. 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Try Notion now with Notion Agent. at notion.com slash cal now that's all in lowercase letters notion.com slash cal to try your new ai teammate notion agent today when you use our link you're supporting our show that's notion.com now men let me level with you you need to take better care of your skin we're trained to think about our muscles and our hairline and the awesome mustaches that our wives or girlfriends won't let us grow but we ignore our skin And by the time we enter middle age, we realize that we suddenly look like Jack Nicholson's character in the 1989 Batman movie right after he gets thrown into the acid bath. Jesse, I'm all about the really up-to-date references that the kids these days definitely get. But here's the solution to this problem, men. Caldera Lab. Caldera Lab makes high-performance skin care designed specifically for men's skin. And more importantly, they've simplified the use of their products into a straightforward three-step routine. Step one. you use Clean Slate, a cleanser to clear dirt, oil, and sweat off your skin. Step two, you use The Great, which is a serum clinically proven to reduce wrinkles and to improve elasticity. Step three, you put on the Hydro Layer Moisturizer to lock in moisture all day. That's it. Use those three products in this order. I have all three of these products, so I can tell you from experience, this routine is simple and it's fast, but it works. It's a small habit with big results. So go to calderalab.com slash deep and use code deep for 20% off your first order. All right, Jesse, let's get back to the show. All right. That was our idea segment. That's where we discuss big ideas about the fight for depth in this attractive world. Now it is time for our practices segment, where I talk about things that you can do in your own life to try to fight for that depth. So I think this is a good excuse to hear some theme music. All right. So to start off today's practices segment, I want you to consider a thought experiment. Imagine that it's the 1990s. This is when Jesse and I were growing up when we were kids. And that one day I walked into my house wheeling like a media cart. And on this cart, I had a television connected to a Sega Genesis. And on one side was a pouch that contained cigarettes. On the other side was a pouch containing a lot of pornographic magazines. And there was a radio next to it that was blaring like AM political talk radio. And on top of the TV was a phone. And I'm wandering by pushing this media cart. As I head to my room in this thought experiment, my mom correctly stops me and says, what the hell do you think you're doing with all that? And then I answer calmly, mom, there's a phone on here. Do you not want me to be able to talk to my friends? Seen in that context, the situation would be ridiculous. But isn't this exactly what's happening today when we let an 11-year-old have a smartphone? And all of the types of harms and negative externalities that introduces just because there's like one or two single features on there that we've convinced ourselves or they've convinced us is somehow useful. I want to play an audio. This is a clip I played before. This is from a smartphone free childhood. It's a PSA they did, but I want to play a quick clip here that makes that same point about my ridiculous experiment about the media cart is exactly what we're doing when we give a kid a smartphone. Let's hear the audio. This is a dad checking in on. his elementary school-aged kid at bedtime. Hey, kiddo. It's about time for bed, okay? Okay. Well, remember, there's a box in the corner over there with all the pornographic material that's ever been made in the world, even the really weird stuff that could scar you for life. I'm trusting you not to look in there, okay? Okay. Feelings are for losers. Oh, and this guy's gonna be in your corner all night just randomly spewing out hateful things. Just ignore him, okay? While I'm thinking of it, there's an order form on your desk where you can purchase illegal drugs. The mean girls from your school are going to be standing there talking about you all night. And this Russian hacker is going to keep asking for your password. I'm not a hacker. Amazon customer service. Just needs you to ignore them, okay? Love you, buddy. We ask too much of our kids when we give them a smartphone. Let's change the norm. Together. Maybe we go around the road. All right. This is making the point I was just saying, which is like, it's pretty crazy. the way that we turn a blind eye to all of the terribleness on these devices because there's some reason but my kid needs to tell me when his play practice is over like one reason we let them use all this stuff we're basically letting in my scenario me with my media cart full all that stuff go into my room and bring that all with me in the 1990s this would have been ridiculous because I want you to be able to talk to your friends. No, you can't have a TV in your room. We'll have a TV out in the living room, and that's where the video games are, and you can only play those video games during times where we say you can play the video games, and you can't have cigarettes, and you can't have the porno magazines, and I don't want you listening to the Rush Limbaugh on the AM radio. Because everything is a separate technology, it is very easy to control and curate. In an age when all that's pushed together into one device like a smartphone, things can seem kind of hopeless. So can all we do is look back nostalgically at the 90s and say, man, those were easier times? Not necessarily. All right. So in my own family, my wife and I have increasingly been seeking out modern single purpose tools to replace specific functions that you might otherwise have been delivered through a smartphone. This is allowing us to help support our rule of no smartphones until high school by being able to use and deploy single purpose technologies for specific things we think would be useful or enjoyable to our kids without having to give them the device that had everything else on it as well. So here's what I want to do in this practices segment today. I want to talk about four different single use technologies, single purpose technologies that my wife and I actually have deployed with our kids in our life. as part of our strategy to not have to give them a swiss army knife style a smartphone all right the first single use technology and this one we just got and i'll load this on the screen here for people who are watching so just listening is a tin can phone a tin can phone is uh it's a landline basically it uses the internet but it is you can see this on the screen um it is an actual phone with a cord and it plugs into the wall and the receiver is connected to the base and when you pick it up there's numbers on it and you can you know dial numbers they even have one that looks like an old-fashioned phone like from the 90s and that one uh is actually sold out so we now have this in our house for our kids to call or receive call from friends My 13-year-old can call one of his friends by dialing the number, or they can call their cousins, or they can call their grandparents if they want to talk to them. They can also receive calls on it. You control everything through the app, so you can say what numbers you're allowed to come in. Also important, if my wife and I are out of the house, if we're going for a walk or something like that, and someone's at home, they can call us from the home. If they have a question or an issue, you can also call 911 from it. It's what we used to have, just a landline. Another thing I noticed, which I thought was interesting, is my 13-year-old didn't know how to use a wired phone handset. So he called his friend, and he was holding it like a speakerphone. He's like, I can't hear him. Because he didn't know about holding a phone. It's like, no, you've got to hold it up to your face. And then when he tried to do that, he hung up using his ear. He pushed it up against his face and hung up. So they're not used to using landlines. We take that for granted. But they love having it. And now they can have contact. We told our oldest son, by the way, if he ends up using it a lot, we're open to putting one in his room so he can have more private conversations with his friends. And we can turn it off with an app and say, yeah, but at bedtime, it just shuts off. All right. That's how we use it. We use it for, if you had a smartphone, you would make calls on the smartphone. Now we use this landline instead. It's a single purpose technology. One thing I can't do is text. The solution for the single purpose technology solution for texting, in my opinion, is to get an old iPad, like a refurbished iPad that's plugged in in your kitchen that you have an iMessage account logged into. And if you have a kid who wants to be a part of group chats, they can in the kitchen sit there on the iPad and check in on the chats and add to it. They can't have it in their own room. They have to be in the kitchen to do it. And they have to be subject to you could walk by and see what they're chatting, right? Especially if they're younger. That threat of like, you don't have complete privacy on here because God knows what you're going to do helps sort of keep things more reasonable. My son, like a lot of boys, like don't care too much about it. They do have some text chat threads. He doesn't care enough for us to set this up because it's mainly just dumbness. Girls his age, from what I understand, are doing much more sort of sophisticated sort of social coordination on there. But that would be the solution I would give is here's the group chat machine. Just like next to the telephone is the group chat iPad next to it in the kitchen. All right. So let me load up here. The second single purpose technology we use, we have a punct phone, P-U-N-K-T. I have this loaded up on the screen. So as you can see, Jesse, it is a old school cellular phone that only has numbers. You actually press the physical buttons one through nine. You have like a call and a hang up button and like a volume up and down button. What do we use our punct phone for? This is our single use technology. If one of our kids is going somewhere, where they might need to contact us when away from the home. This is one of the major reasons why people end up giving in and buying young kids smartphones, is there's these occasional scenarios where we might need to hear from you. These happen all the time. I'll give you some examples. My one son will often take a bus from his school to where baseball practice is, and sometimes the buses don't come, or maybe there's not actually a baseball practice that day. He was at a baseball clinic the other day, and I thought I knew how long it run, but I wasn't quite sure. It's three hours. I don't want to wait there for three hours. And I wasn't quite sure because it was the first time he'd done it. So I gave him the punk phone to bring with him. He could call me if he's like, oh, we ended early and we'd be able to find out what's going on. And so it's useful for occasions where a kid might need to get in contact with you. Now, the thing about these phones is they're like, it's a great piece of technology. They're not very fun to use. You just have to press these buttons. It's very tedious. The main thing you can do with it is we have our numbers programmed in and you can scroll and press a button and call us. You can try to send text messages, but you have to do the T9 where you press the button a bunch of times. It's too frustrating. So he gives up. So they're not at all fun. They don't care about them. They're not happy to have them. It's entirely utilitarian. They don't own them. We have one. You check it out because you are going to an event. Bring the punk phone and then you bring it back when you're done. And it goes back into our drawer. So that has replaced the sort of mobile phone functionality you would get from a smartphone. All right. The third piece of technology, this one I love. This is the Fio Snow Sky Echo Mini Hi-Fi Bluetooth MP3 Walkman. This is a, I believe it's a Korean technology. This is an Alibaba website I have up here. It is a MP3 player, Jesse. in the style of like early iPods, the way it works is you have a memory card and you just, you know, it's like a disc. You put MP3 files on this card. Like you plug into your computer and you just put MP3 files on it. You put that card into this player. You can play the MP3 songs on the file. That's it. So this thing here where you see like a cassette, that's actually a display. And so you can see a list of all the songs that are on the memory card and you can scroll through them and you can click on one and it plays that song. That's all it does. My middle son really likes music. We had them for a while. There's a device called the Mighty, which is like a small, it was meant to solve this problem of like, oh, I want my kids to listen to music, but they don't have a smartphone, but it's too high tech. It tries to synchronize with Spotify playlist on a smartphone and it has to continually sort of synchronize with an actual device. And it would often not work. And we'd have to be on the phone trying to make these playlists. And then did it sync? Oh, it didn't sync. Maybe it sunk this time. And my son, he's going to summer camp this summer for about a month. And he wants to be able to listen to music. And with the Mighty, if you haven't synchronized online with the phone because of rights issues every however many days, the list goes away. This is much simpler. It's just MP3s on a card. And you can listen to them. Where do they get the MP3s? Well, they have CDs. So my kids own boom boxes, 1990 style boom boxes, the big tall things, the towers with the CD player and the radio. They listen to the radio and we buy them CDs and they listen to CDs. We just bought, it was like 40 bucks, a CD-ROM reader. You plug in USB to your computer where you can rip MP3s off the CDs, just like we used to do in like 2002. So they can put their CDs in here and rip. which means like make mp3s out of songs from the cds and they drag those on also it turns out that on amazon you can buy for a lot of albums still unprotected mp3s just buy them one by one like i want to buy this song for like a dollar thirty and you can still buy the unprotected uh mp3 and just drag them right on this machine so it's great yeah so he wants to listen to music like when on car trips or whatever or his own room or whatever and this this solves that problem and only that problem again it's the type of thing you might otherwise be like I don't know. Apple music's on a phone. They want to listen to music. Let's just buy them the smartphone, but we have a single purpose piece of technology for that. All right. The fourth single purpose technology we use, and this kind of goes back to one of the issues we talked about in the idea segment, Nintendo switches, old fashioned video games. So it's a Nintendo. It has its own screen. We have one that hooks up to the TV and then, uh, two of the kids have the portable ones. And the third has one that can hook up to the TV, which allows multiple people to play on the same screen. If you're playing Mario Kart or Minecraft or something like that, you can split up the screen. No online gaming. No playing with other people that they don't know. I like to buy them the games. You can download games. I like to buy the cartridges. You stick a cartridge in, a little memory card now, and you can play that game. So it's a video game player that only plays non-online video games, and that's all it does. They have to be, our rule is these have to be plugged in. We have a charging station and whatever you call the media council under your TV. They have to be in there. If we find one not in there, you lose the next video game sessions. So like when you're not using it, you have to go and plug it in. That's where it lives. And then we just have well-defined video game playing sessions. It's on the weekends. If there's a babysitter and if a car ride is beyond a certain amount of time, they have to spend the first 45 minutes, you know, being bored and then they can play video games for what happens or flights. If we're going on longer flights. So this is a single purpose technology, which allows them to play fun video games. My son has some crazy fighter jet game where I don't understand this game. I thought it was a flight simulator and he keeps coming in and telling me what's happening in the game. He's like, well, I'm in, this is true story. He came in and said, I'm in jail because I blew up the president. And I was like, what type of flight simulator? It turns out it's this like this game that has these like crazy scenarios. They put you in. And then next time he talked to me, he's like, well, We have a weapon at this base that was invented to blow up meteors, but we're using it to repel a fighter jet or something. It's just this crazy game, but it's old-fashioned. It's a video game that you're playing through levels and old-fashioned video game. Again, this is another reason why people end up with smartphones or iPads. I could play games on there as well. It's an easy way. I could play the games on the phone, but the single-use technology allows us to control exactly what types of games they play. They're not online. We can control when they play them because it's a separate device that we can keep at the TV. So again, when you put all this onto a phone, there's always some reason why they need that phone. Now they have access to all these things all the time and in ways you can easily control. All right. So here's my conclusion. When it comes to technology and kids, single purpose devices have to be the way to go. It gives you so much more control over their experiences and allows you to much more confidently steer them away from potential harms. right? It's just so clear with single use technologies. It's so much easier to use. The strategy I think also makes sense for adults as well. Convenience is not necessarily the most important thing, especially when you're talking about like your own entertainment or distraction. And when you put everything on the same phone, it's like you have that media cart that I imagined myself having as a kid in the 1990s. Like you're going to, you may be trying to make a call, but you're going to end up browsing that porno mag while smoking a cigarette too, because they're right there. So even for adults, I think moving to single-purpose technology makes sense. You can get that MP3 player if you want to listen to music on long walks, not have a phone that's going to come around with you. You can have a simple dumb phone that you bring when you're doing stuff where there's like these small percentage chances you might need to be contacted in an emergency where you otherwise don't want this whole distraction machine coming along with you. That could work for an adult as well, right? Don't play online video games. Only play... AAA games that, you know, you have to be on a screen and plugged in with a card and there's no internet involved. A single use technology can make as much sense for adults as it is for kids. But for kids, I think it's a game changer because it allows you to get away or avoid that sort of that path of least resistance approach where it's like, well, there's some reason why a phone would be useful. And it's so easy, like on AT&T or Verizon, it's like 10 extra dollars. I click this button and it'll just send me a phone and it works. And it's so tempting to just do that. But don't let them bring that proverbial media cart full of nonsense into their room. It's worth taking the time to control the specific technologies they have and how they use each individual one. All right. There we go, Jesse. Single use technologies. So you can still buy CDs, huh? You can. Yeah. We get them on Amazon or Walmart or whatever. It's not like every band. It's a little bit weird what's available and what's not. But we got a lot of like classic 90s music. They still sell those CDs. yeah i don't know like new bands are putting out cds but that's good also constraints are good like you have to track down you can't get all music you get the music you get you really you really like all right um before we end today let's do uh some questions and comments all right what's our first question here jesse first question is from lisa hi cal i'm a mother of two living in richmond virginia in conversations with other moms about social media and video games i've noticed the tone switcher switch over the last couple years from thinking of these platforms as being necessary evils to thinking of them as evil we should try to avoid i was wondering if you had advice for us trying to put the social media and video game cats back in the bags um okay well can we do that if you've already given your kid a phone if you've already given your kid access to like all these video games Is it too late? And there my answer is no. It is perfectly reasonable for an adult parent being a parent to say, hey, we let you use this technology. We learn more about it. We don't like it. We don't want you to use it anymore. Some people call that impossible. I call that parenting. Everything you tell a 13-year-old they don't like, your whole life is telling them to do things they don't want to do. You might as well just add this to the list. What I would do, and I've recommended this to a lot of parents, is I think that the key reform that allows you to reform a lot of other things is to say the number one thing we're doing in our household, if you have adolescent age kids and they already have phones, the number one rule we're changing because we didn't realize it's a dangerous, but now we did. We're the parents. We get to say, make the rules, is you don't own your phone. We own the phone. You're not paying for that phone. You do not have the right to have that phone everywhere you go. That phone is not your personal property. That's something we lend to you. because it's useful and for certain entertainment purposes. As a result, here is our rule. When you're at home, the phone lives in the kitchen. We have a charger station there. If you need to call someone, you go to the kitchen. If you need to check your text messages, you go to the kitchen. If you need to, oh man, you hear this all the time from teenagers. My homework's on there, man. I gotta be on my phone for the next six hours because my homework's on there. You say, show me your homework on the phone. I'll sit here with you. We'll get it off the phone. The phone lives in the kitchen. And so that when you're at home, it is not a default thing you can bring with you. And that actually will do more good than trying to ban particular, just saying like, don't use this app or the worst. And I really hate this is to like, oh, my son's on his phone all the time. I tell him he should stop, but he, what can you do? This is such a better solution. Like, do you want to text for six hours? You're going to do it standing in the kitchen and that's going to lose its allure. And you're going to have to do something else. When you're at the dinner table, you have to be at the dinner table. The phone's not there. When you're watching a movie, you have to watch the movie. you don't have the option of also checking on your phone. A lot of parents say that's impossible. It's like somehow it's some intrinsic right that was instilled by the UN commission on human rights that 16 year olds must be able to look at Snapchat while you're watching a show on HBO. That's not a law. That's not a natural law. That's not a rule. It's your house. You're paying for the phone. So I think that's the number one reform that if your kids already have phones, just say they live in the kitchen. Don't argue with people about how much they're using, if they should use it less or what apps. It lives in the kitchen. That's what I would do. I would also say no online games. I don't care if the kid's 16, 17, 18. My whole point as a parent is to prepare you to succeed in the world. Nothing's going to get more in the way of that than you learning to play three to four hours of these stupid games every day while exposing yourself to all the worst things the world has to offer. I do not want my 17-year-old in a Discord server. learning how to do groper trolls while playing five hours of god knows what game that's just like i'm if my kid was like hey um i'm going down the liquor store i'm going to hang out on the corner there uh and we're going to see if we can rob some old ladies right you're like no don't go spend four hours doing that also no don't go on discord and play five hours of call of duty so yeah it is fixable you can go back and i'm glad to hear that the tone is changing of the conversation um height had a lot to do with that i think he gave people permission to be like oh these things are terrible we can react to terrible things all right what do we got next next up is marco i'm a young artist living in bilboa spain surviving as an artist in 2025 has a lot to do with skill of growing social media my dilemma is that i prefer to spend my time mastering my craft but i keep getting a sinking feeling that it won't matter if my work isn't being seen online what advice do you have i think people who are considering social media and professional circumstances are way too general about what they mean. And they kind of make it a binary. Like I need to either be out of business or spend like seven hours a day on TikTok as if there's no in-between. It's almost like someone saying, look, I don't like that I get blackout drunk every day, but my office is above a bar. What else can I do? And you can be like, well, just because a bar is there doesn't mean you have to go down there and drink all day long, right? Like that's how I feel sometimes when people are like, A, people in my field will advertise on social media. B, I don't want to lose my life to being online on social media all day. One doesn't have to necessarily follow from the other. So what I would say is you can post things on social media in a way that has very little impact on your life. Do it from your computer. Don't have it on your phone. Have a set schedule. It takes like six minutes a day every other day, and that's it. Do not use the fact that you have some limited need for social media in your life to be an excuse for unlimited use of personal social media for your own distraction and engagement. One does not follow from the other. But here's the other thing I would add. Test the assumption of how and why you need to use social media. A lot of people will just say, how else will you get noticed? And I say, you've got to be way more specific to me. What particular activities are you doing on social media? Is it posting images? Is it talking to people in the comments? Is it lurking on Instagram all day? What are the specific actions you think are driving business and what are the numbers? How many leads have you gotten off of these Instagram posts? How many orders have come in through a link in the bottom of your TikTok post? You have to actually quantify specific activities that have specific benefits. And if there are, you can focus on those activities, cut out the rest, and minimize its footprint. A lot of people, however, are surprised when they do this, where they discover it doesn't happen. There's a comedian friend of mine told me about this a couple of years ago. He was having a hard time with social media, but he was using it too much. It was really like a source of unhappiness and convinced himself like, but I'm a comedian. Like, how else am I going to find opportunities? If I'm not doing jokes, how are people going to find me or whatever? And then he went through a list of the biggest breaks that he had had in the last few years and realized like every one of those breaks had nothing to do with social media. It had to do with someone has seen something he created, like at a comedy show, seen him do a really good set and be like, oh, you're good. Like, I want to talk to you. We should talk some more. And it pushed back on this assumption of like, this is where all the opportunities are going to come from, where that had never actually happened in his life. So I want you to verify what specific activities on social media you have quantitative evidence are really helping. And if there are some activities that fall in that bucket, focus on those, do it from a computer on a schedule, and that should be it. If you can't find any, then you're missing out nothing. You turn off those apps altogether. We also want to respond to some comments like we do from time and again. I think we have two comments to bring up here from last week's episode, which I believe was me and Ed Zitron going through the year in AI. So let's load this first comment up here on the screen. This comes from Mestava1988, who said, not Cal shading Jensen in the first two minutes. Crying, laughing emoji. More Shady Cal in 2026. Before I go on with this comment, do you know what that's referencing, Jamie? Or Jesse? No. I will show you what that's referencing. Boom. Jensen is referencing the CEO. I put on the screen for those who are watching. We were making fun of the leather racing jacket worn by the CEO of NVIDIA that he always wears. It makes him look like an extra in a Mad Max video. in a talk in which he was talking about the scaling of graphic processing units and ai training so we just find that i find that endlessly amusing that he wears that jacket all right then this comment goes on to say cal did a really good job of not letting things go completely off the rails when zitron goes on one of his rabid rants i love zitron's rants that's what makes them fun like he does like zitron goes on these rolls but that's kind of like his thing right um yeah it gets over the top and so i i do try to keep the rails on He knows what he's talking about, but he's an entertaining talker because he often gets kind of hyperbolic when he talks about things. But I'm glad she appreciated that. There was a big article about him in Wired a couple months ago. I have to read that still. Yeah. Like he really has been doing his research, especially on the financial side. So like he, he often has good points, but then he's very funny on his podcast and on radio and interviews. And he, he goes, he's really hyperbolic. And it often surprises people because they've heard nothing but hype. And so he realized like, if he's just like super strong, like that's nonsense. And here's why he's like really strong. It, it, it really lands. All right. Here's definitely controversial. He is controversial. All right. I like him though. All right. Here's another comment. Um, well, because dialectical to say this, right. I think it's nice to like slam ideas together. You get a bit deeper insight. This next comment is from Shreya Das 50, 65. I can't believe that the American professor is so polite and the British journalist is not. Indeed. Our world is changing. on a serious note thanks a lot for this discussion absolutely stunning it is funny i know like i i the british person should be like the super polite uh but you know what it's not really true here's been my experience with british academics in in particular is they're not bombastic but they're very cutting if you just have like americans kind of wear their heart on their sleeves like that's stupid i don't like that you're stupid because you said that and you're a dumb head i don't want to talk to you um and the british person will just have like a perfect like bonbo They'll just have this super cutting, like, hmm, I see. Yeah, that is the type of thing that a Dartmouth man would say. And they just kind of puff on their pipe a little bit, and you're like, wait a second. He just really burned me there. So they're not as polite as people think. All right, thanks for the questions and the comments. I want to conclude, as always, by talking about what I'm reading. So a quick update. In the last episode, I was talking about the thrillers I read in December. I forgot, however, the name of the fifth book I read in December. So just for the completest out there, the fifth book I read in December was called 20th Century Fox by Scott Iman. And it was a history of the 20th Century Fox film studio. Interesting. The name, Jesse, I didn't realize this. It was a merger in the early days of cinema of Fox Studios created by William Fox. and 20th Century Studio created by someone else. And when they came together, that's why it was called 20th Century Fox. So I hadn't realized that. That was a good book. I mean, the thing is, I don't know most of the movie references. So it's like, oh, you know, and this became like Betty Grable in, you know, the golden stagecoach. And as if like, you're supposed to know the reference, I don't really know the old movie references. But it was really like the story of mainly like Daryl Zanuck and the rise of cinema. trouble they had and how they came back. And I found it was interesting. All right. What did I read more recently? So last week, between last episode and this episode, I read Jane Goodall's book, In the Shadow of Man, which early in her career, I think she published this in the late 60s, early 70s, was sort of her first account of her time in the Gombe Stream chimpanzee reservation about her first work with chimpanzees. So it was a big bestseller at the time because people didn't know anything about chimps. And she wrote this book about her experience spending all this time with them. I liked it. It's a lot less sciency than these type of books are today, Jesse. So if you read one of these like scientists memoirs today, where they talk about like the work they were working on and with like a memoir aspect to it, there's a lot more theory in it. So like, if you wrote this book today, there'd probably be a lot more of what are the particular theories about animal behavior that they were finding? And, oh, we were, we, we got this evidence of this and that. It was a lot more of just her describing. and then this happened we saw this we saw them doing this and that it was like just very descriptive of like what chimpanzees were like because i think it was so early that itself was interesting i liked that book and then i read a a museum exhibit companion book on an exhibit about walt disney and trains because i had a section in the book i'm writing now about walt disney's personal train set he built at his house and so there was a big exhibit about this out in la and i there's a companion book that has a lot of details and images and so i read that as well last week so there you go all right that's all the time we have for this week thanks for listening we'll be back next week i have a special guest joining me to help me in the idea segment so it should be fun so hopefully i will see you'll hear from you then and until then as always stay deep hey if you like today's discussion of new dangers to be worried about you might also like episode 374 which looked at the original danger phones that episode is titled this is your brain on phones it gives you a closer look at what's actually happening inside your brain as you use those devices check it out i think you'll like it for some people the constant allure of their phone is so strong it's so inescapable that it can seem impossible to find any sort of freedom this is what i want to talk about today

Cal Newport explains the overlooked tech dangers that will define 2026 in episode 388 of the Deep Questions podcast. 

Buy Cal Newport's latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow 

Despite some initial skepticism, Jonathan Haidt’s crusade against kids using smartphones has been more or less completely vindicated. Which got us thinking: what’s he worried about next? In the ideas segment, Cal looks closer at three new technological harms that Haidt has begun sounding the alarm about. Then, in the practices segment, he details a somewhat eccentric technology strategy that he and his wife have deployed in their own home to keep their kids away from smartphones. 

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Mentioned Books:

20th Century Fox (Scott Eyman)
In the Shadow of Man (Jane Goodall)

Links:
Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow 
Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ 
Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w-HOfseF2wF9YIpXwUUtP65-olnkPyWcgF5BiAtBEy0/edit?tab=t.0
https://x.com/kevinroose/status/2001464352491311196
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/smartphone -gambling-is-a-disaster
https://www.fanduel.com/
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/its-not-just-a-game-anymore
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/dont-give-your-child-an-ai-companion
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO_7TzvEkzO/?hl=en
https://tincan.kids/
https://www.punkt.ch/products/mp02-4g-minimalist-phone
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256810412310495.html
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/nintendo-switch-lite-turquoise/

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0:00 What’s worrying Jon Haidt?
45:20 Should you buy a landline (Cal just did…)
1:03:22 Can we put the social media and video game genies back in their lamp?
1:07:28 Can an artist avoid using social media?
1:11:00 Cal responds to comments
1:13:58 Cal gives his weekly reading update 

Connect with Cal Newport:

🔴Visit Cal's BLOG and website:             https://calnewport.com/blog/
🔴Check out Cal's books:                         https://calnewport.com/writing/
🔴Check out The Deep Life:                     https://thedeeplife.com

About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

The videos are considered to be used under the "Fair Use Doctrine" of United States Copyright Law, Title 17 U.S. Code Sections 107-118. Videos are used for editorial and educational purposes only and I do not claim ownership of any original video content. I don't use said video clips in advertisements, marketing or for direct financial gain. All video content in each clip is considered owned by the individual broadcast companies.

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