Ep. 371: Is it Finally Time to Leave Social Media?

We seem to be stuck in a purgatory when it comes to the worst of the social media platforms. We know they’re not great, but it’s hard to muster enough motivation to bother to leave. In today’s episode, motivated by the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Cal puts on his technology critic hat and offers a step-by-step technical explanation for why these platforms are strictly and incessantly making your life worse and why the only reasonable response is to quit them. He then answers listener questions on the topic and reacts to some recent news about the US Congress getting involved. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: Is it Finally Time to Leave Social Media? [0:40] How do I find everything I should be blocking on my kid’s phone? [38:59] Is it okay that I make YouTube Videos? [43:39] Shouldn’t we focus on using social media better? [49:13] CASE STUDY: A musician and social media [58:00] CAL REACTS: US House panel asks internet CEOs to testify after Charlie Kirk assassination [1:10:42] Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?reuters.com/world/us/us-house-panel-asks-online-forum-ceos-testify-after-charlie-kirk-assassination-2025-09-17/youtube.com/watch?v=gjVm0K_ETX8 Thanks to our Sponsors: calderalab.com/deepmiro.comgrammarly.com/podcast1password.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Cal Newport?

  Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I sent a short essay to my newsletter. I wrote it in about 15 minutes, but it was about as raw or as pointed as I ever get. The essay started like this. "Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, Twitter is not real life. But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter or Blue Sky or TikTok do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific. This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms. They are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible as much as any other force

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  for the unraveling of civil society that seems to be accelerating." All right, then later in the essay, I reached the following conclusion. "After troubling national events, there's often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Well, here's one option to consider. Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news or spread ideas or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things, someone who serves real people in the real world." And over two decades or so that I've been writing that newsletter, I don't think I've ever received as large or as positive of a response as I did for that post. I'm at something like 200 email replies and counting and nearly 100 comments.

• 1:27Cal Newport?

  The vast majority of this feedback is saying the same thing. "Thank you. This was the final push I needed to finally quit these apps." Now, this got me thinking. Our biggest problem with social media right now is not convincing people that it's bad. People know this. People don't love these platforms. They don't defend them the way they used to. But they're stuck in a sort of purgatory where they know it's bad, but they're not sure exactly why or whether it's something that maybe could be fixed or maybe something that's worse for other people than it is for them. So they stay where they are. They stay in the status quo, waiting for someone to push them into a different pattern. Well, today I want to provide that push.

• 2:09Cal Newport?

  I'm going to put on my techno critic professor hat and provide a precise and detailed explanation of how exactly the worst of these platforms impact us and why these problems are fundamental to these technologies and not something that we can easily fix. I want to give you the ironclad case for why the most reasonable response for most people is to do what I recommend in my essay, to quit for good. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions.

• 2:50Cal Newport?

  Today's episode, The Case for Quitting Social Media.

• 2:59Cal Newport?

  All right, so we need to start our conversation here by defining some terms. The phrase "social media" can mean a lot of things and then that creates confusion because you might have one thing in mind and someone else has something else. So let's get really specific. Today, I'm going to be referring to a specific class of social apps that I call curated conversation platforms. Right, so these are platforms in which you have a lot of people joining in conversation, be it through text, images, or video, using curation algorithms based on optimizing engagement to help select what each individual user sees. So some obvious examples of curated conversation platforms include Twitter and Blue Sky and

• 3:42Cal Newport?

  Threads and Facebook, those are classic. There's other things that people call social media that don't fit into this particular category, so probably like Pinterest doesn't fall into there. It's not a conversation platform so much as you're looking at things that people posted. Snapchat doesn't fall into here. It's a conversation platform, but it's not algorithmically curated. It's you talking to groups of other people. WhatsApp wouldn't fall in here either. Again, it's not algorithmically curated as conversation, but not a massive platform. And then there's some platforms where depending on how you use them could fall into this category or not. So I think things like Instagram or YouTube, depending on how you use them, could fall into the category of what we're talking about today or not. So just to be clear about our definitions.

• 4:25Cal Newport?

  Now, I want to focus on curated conversation platforms in particular because I think they lead to uniquely awful harms. I also think they are the social platform most responsible for the rise in violence that we've been seeing recently, be it political or otherwise. Alright, so let's talk about these curated conversation platforms. So what are the harms? If you ask people, "Hey, what's wrong with like Twitter, Blue Sky, or Threads? Like, what are the harms that we care about?" They'll eventually probably list some combination of the following three things. I'll put these up on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. They're probably going to say, "Okay, distraction, that's a common harm." This is the one I talk about a lot in my books on this show. It's the idea

• 5:09Cal Newport?

  that there's an addictive element to these platforms so that we use them more than is healthy and to the detriment of other things that we seem to be are important in our life. Another harm people will often mention if you talk about these platforms is demoderation. This is where you begin to lose any sense of moderation around a given issue. It's where you become increasingly strident, see less room for good faith, or even basic humanity on the other side of the issue in question. There's a lot of tribalism when it comes to demoderation. You become part of a tribe that's fighting some sort of epic fight. So because of these stakes, there's a lot of sort of furious policing of your own tribe. The third harm we often hear about these things is what I call disassociation. This is where things really get scary. This is where you begin to make a complete break

• 5:52Cal Newport?

  from normal associations with human community. You lose connection to normative ethical constraints. This is the state in which violence to others or to yourself becomes a possibility, or where you become numbed to seeing such violence being perpetrated against others. There's really two major flavors of disassociation. There's one that's based around overwhelming rage. "Well, I am so mad, I have to take action regardless of the consequences." The other flavor of this association where it leads is nihilistic withdrawal. The idea that the world is so dark and unredeemable and meaningless that you might as well cause some chaos on the way out. This nihilistic variation of disassociation is one that we've really been feeling the consequences of recently.

• 6:35Cal Newport?

  Earlier this year, the FBI began using a new term when talking about mass violence incidents. They call it nihilistic violent extremist. It's become so common to have violence caused by a sense of nihilism that there's a new term for it that the FBI uses. Part of the issue with nihilistic withdrawal is that if it is online platforms that have driven you to disassociation, you begin to think, oh, all that matters is attention and respect on online platforms. Here's Derek Thompson writing in a Atlantic piece that he wrote a couple of years ago. "For many socially isolated men in particular, for whom reality consists primarily of glowing screens and empty rooms,

• 7:20Cal Newport?

  a vote for destruction is a politics of last result, a way to leave one's mark on a world where collective progress or collective support of any kind feels impossible." Right? So, online disassociation can lead to violence because you're like, why not? And the only thing that really matters is views, and this will get me attention. Alright, so these are the harms that people would normally talk about. If you then say to someone, alright, given these harms of curated conversation platforms, why are you still using them? Why don't more people quit? Well, this is because if you ask people how these harms affect them, they're going to give an answer that looks something like this, and Jesse, we can take this off the screen for now. They'll say something like, "I may suffer a bit from distraction."

• 8:03Cal Newport?

  Like, most people will cop to that. "Yeah, I use these more than it's useful, but I could probably get that under control with, you know, some better habits, or I can brick my phone," or something like that. Then they'll say typically, "Yeah, the demoderation thing, that is a problem, not really for me, but for the other tribes." It's like, whatever groups I'm affiliated with, like, we're just being reasonable. We're reasonably upset, and we're kind of right, but the other, I get it. Other people on the other side, they have problems with the moderation. Probably the fix for that is, depending on what side of the political spectrum I'm on, maybe it's something about more aggressive content moderation. So if they don't see the crazy stuff, they won't act so demoderated. Or maybe it's a community note, like, well, if we could just correct things that are false, then people would be a little bit more reasonable. But that's kind of a other person problem.

• 8:47Cal Newport?

  And then disassociation, well, people would say, "Yeah, that's scary for sure. Like, look at these nihilistic extremists. That's scary."

• 8:55Cal Newport?

  But that's not even really happening on the platforms I use. Like, when I think about, whenever I hear about these mass shooters, you always hear about them being on, like, Rumble, or Kick, or on some sort of, like, Groiper server on Discord, these sort of weird, semi-dark web-type platforms. So, maybe we should shut those down, but what does that have to do with me?

• 9:17Cal Newport?

  That's sort of how people respond to these harms. And I think that response goes a long way to explaining why we're sort of stuck, why more people aren't making major changes about the role of these technologies in their lives. But here's the thing. Is that interpretation of these harms right? I don't think it is. What I want to do here is outline a different way of understanding how these curated conversation platforms hurt you. And it's going to be a way of understanding them that is not going to let you off the hook so easily. All right, I'm going to do some drawing here, so beware. If you're listening, you might want to turn on the YouTube version to see my brilliant art. All right, so what I have up here on the screen is the three harms we talked about.

• 10:00Cal Newport?

  Distraction, demoderation, and disassociation. The right way to think about how we interact with these is to imagine that there is a slope. So, I'm going to start drawing a slope. And I'm going to start... I've got to get my artist hat on. Starting with distraction, we start sloping downhill. And then we'll switch over to demoderation. That slope continues. Then finally, we get to disassociation. That slope continues. And I'm going to draw here a sort of dividing line between, I'm going to label this here, mainstream...

• 10:45Cal Newport?

  Oh, look at that handwriting, Jesse. Whew! Mainstream internet on top.

• 10:50Cal Newport?

  Dark web below. Alright, so let me explain this beautiful picture I just drew. It's pretty colorful, actually. I give myself a lot of credit for that. It's a slope sloping downhill. It starts in the distraction zone, then the slope goes through the demoderation zone. And then finally, the slope goes through the disassociation zone. I've drawn a ground across this slope diagram. So right around the place we go from demoderation to disassociation, the slope goes underground. Above ground is like mainstream internet. Below ground, now we're in the world sort of of the dark web.

• 11:24Cal Newport?

  So let me explain my model here. When you first start using these type of curated conversation platforms, it's pretty easy to fall onto the slope, that is into the zone of distraction. So you sort of fall into the top of the slope where you're like, you know what, I'm using this probably too much. I'm using this a lot, whatever my platform poison of choices. I'm kind of on this more that is healthy, right? Like, oh, this is not good. You know me, I'm addicted to my phone. So we're kind of in that territory. Here's the thing, though. You start sliding and you're in this distraction zone long enough, gravity is going to pull you down into the demoderation portion of the slope. And now you're not just using these services too much, you're demoderating.

• 12:06Cal Newport?

  You're losing your ability to see the other side, any sort of good faith. You find yourself in dehumanizing tendencies. I just hate those people. I can't, anyone who supports this person, I just can't even imagine that, right? Like, they are wrong. And wait a second, wait a second, you're on my team. You said the wrong thing there. Don't you realize? We have, we're at war here. We have to close ranks. All that begins to happen. And it gets worse and worse as you slide down the slope. If you continue down the slope and the pressure is pulling here, you'll end up in the disassociation zone where you say, you know what? Screw it, right? The world is unredeemable. And once you're down here is where people bounce off of the primary mainstream platforms.

• 12:50Cal Newport?

  You begin to bounce off those into like whatever mixture of things like Gab or Kick or Rumble. Like now you kind of like end up roaming around these barely regulated sort of Wild West semi-dark web type services. And that's where like the really bad stuff happens.

• 13:07Cal Newport?

  This is, I call this the slope of terribleness. This is actually the right way to understand these harms. They're all connected. You start with one, but gravity is pulling you down towards the next and then towards the next. Now, your question might be, can we fix this? Maybe if we just fix these services, where there's a way that we can, we can maybe put up some roadblocks on the slope of terribleness and prevent this from happening. But I want to argue that actually, this is not the side effect of some mistakes in the way these services were implemented that can be fixed. But actually, the slope of terribleness and the tendency to slide down it is actually fundamental to how these technologies function. Let me get a little bit into this. All right, let's start with distraction. You start using a curated conversation platform.

• 13:49Cal Newport?

  Part of the problem is, the curation means that the algorithm is looking for engaging material, what actually catches your attention. Whatever that is, it will get pretty good at finding that. It represents it as sort of weighted data points in a multi-dimensional space. But it figures out what type of content is engaging for you, because that's how they make their money. Now, the issue with this is the stuff you're seeing on the phone is very compelling. This will pretty soon begin to overwhelm your short-term motivation centers in your brain. So we have these circuits in our brain that are making predictions. They're looking at activities that are available to you in the moment, and they're making predictions based off past learning. What are the different outcomes going to be of these various short-term activities?

• 14:32Cal Newport?

  And if the brain has learned, oh, there's a really positive outcome that's going to happen from a particular activity, you get a flood of dopamine in that motivation circuit, which activates it and then makes that, that activity seem irresistible, right? This is something we often get wrong about dopamine. I noticed this in like the, the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox's comments in the aftermath of the Kirk assassination. A lot of people think of dopamine as a pleasure chemical of like, oh, once you do something, you get a splash of dopamine and it feels good. No, no, it's a motivation chemical. So these short-term motivation circuits have learned through past experience. For example, when I eat that cookie, there's all of these things I feel that are good. And the circuits learn from that and they say, great, when I see a cookie again, dopamine

• 15:17Cal Newport?

  will activate that circuit because that circuit recognizes the cookie and give me a sense of intense motivation to eat it. Well, algorithmically curated content really plays to those circuits very well. And if you're using the phone all the time, you build a very strong prediction circuit that when it says a phone is nearby, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine in that circuit saying, "Pick up that phone and look at it. We're going to see something that's going to cause a reaction that's interesting, be it pleasurable or outraged, but it's going to be interesting, an interesting reaction." That is very, very strong. And the problem is, the phone is always with you. So that circuit is just constantly being bathed in dopamine. It becomes very, very hard. You can resist it sometimes, but it becomes very hard to

• 16:03Cal Newport?

  consistently resist it. So you go back to using those services again and again and again. That's just the basic sort of feedback reinforcement loop. It would be like trying to quit cigarettes. You're like, "Look, I don't want to smoke, but I'm going to carry in my hand at all times a pack of cigarettes that's right there." That's a very hard way to cut back on smoking because those circuits are constantly being bathed in dopamine, saying, "That will give us a reward. You need to smoke it." All right? So this is fundamental brain chemistry. You have algorithmically curated content accessible in your hand at all times, you're going to use that more than you want to. So that's how you begin sliding down that distraction slope as soon as you begin in any sort of regular way using one of these curated platforms. Why does this bring us into demoderation?

• 16:46Cal Newport?

  Well, two things happen with these platforms once you start using them all the time. Another side effect of the algorithmic curation is the echo chamber effect. And we say this sort of loosely, like, "Oh, don't be in an echo chamber," but I'm saying it in a sort of a techno-determinist sort of way. It is an unavoidable side effect of an algorithmically curated information experience. The way these algorithms actually work, and I don't want to be too technical, but basically, they have these huge, multi-dimensional points, so just large vectors of numbers that describe, it's an embedding of content into, think of it as like a bunch of little descriptions. I have a thousand categories I can use when I'm trying to describe something. And I take a thing and I go through and give it a number

• 17:31Cal Newport?

  in each of these categories. And that combination like describes it really well. And what it does is it learns spaces, the multi-dimensional spaces in which these preference vectors exist. It sort of learns these regions where content here does really well with this person.

• 17:48Cal Newport?

  That creates an echo chamber. I mean, it's not, no one's sitting there programming, create echo chamber, execute, or there's an echo chamber knob. It is just an unavoidable consequence of using this type of, I'm going to observe your engagement and then use that to try to figure out where in the space of possible content, things create the most engagement. So you're going to start seeing a lot of stuff that's similar. So if there's a, something you lean towards on an issue, you're going to be seeing a lot more of stuff about that side of the issue. And you're going to see stuff that's more and more engaging within that space, which will typically be the stuff that's a little bit more strident. We like that. Okay. The other issue is, so we're hearing kind of the same stuff, you, algorithmic echo chamber. These are conversation platforms. Remember I mentioned it's important that it's people

• 18:32Cal Newport?

  conversing, not just like you consuming content from experts.

• 18:37Cal Newport?

  That is going to fire up in your mind, the tribal community circuits. Yeah, these are these people that we're talking back and forth. I'm in community, the social circuits come up. So you have echo chambers, plus tribal community circuits fired up. And these things come together and they create in your mind, this virtual tribe that has a very strong cause. That's where demoderation comes from. It's not a lack of willpower on your point. It's not a sort of knob that can be turned in the, the algorithms that run these social networks. It is a unescapable consequence of how these platforms function. Those tribal community circuits are incredibly powerful because throughout most of our modern history as a homo sapiens, so let's go back 200,000

• 19:19Cal Newport?

  to 300,000 years, this is how we survived. Our tribe was everything. The other tribes, we had to be very, very suspicious of it. You are not from my tribe. My tribe is what matters. If you're not, I worry that you are gonna, you're gonna kill me or steal our food. I do not like you. And I need to be, there's nothing more compelling. Then those tribal community circuits, you can think of like the entire history of of human civilization, Yuval Harari is good about how we used abstractions to do this, is an effort to try to overcome the tribal community circuits that are so deep in our mind. And this is basically the point of the book Sapiens, if you want to sort of go down a rabbit hole here, is that humans' abilities to organize around abstract causes

• 20:02Cal Newport?

  in tribes basically hijacked our tribal circuits and allowed us to expand the scope to which they applied them. So now they could apply to like our entire country, or everyone who shares a religion, and it's what allowed humans to work together in large numbers, which was key to our success. That is Yuval Harari's argument. But the point is, our success came from figuring out, how do we actually like hijack, overwhelm, or otherwise redirect these tribal circuits? Because they are so strong. Curated conversation platforms, just get back to Paleolithic, let's go. Right? And that's where that demoderation is so strong. And it's not because, oh, that's a bug in the system, we need to turn that off so I can get the real value out of these platforms. It is the value for most people.

• 20:44Cal Newport?

  That is what's creating the most engagement. That's the thing that's feeding into our, to the addiction loop on it. But it's very difficult to avoid demoderation if you're using these things a lot. Right? But now here's the problem. The more increasingly demoderated you get, and look in the mirror, you know you are, like whatever issue it is, you care about, these tribes are almost, by the way, random what you end up echo chambered in. It's like your slight preferences, plus whatever the algorithm pushed you in. Like, it could be pretty arbitrary. But just think about right now, whether it's like it's political, and you're, you're like on the left and thinking about MAGA people, or you're on the right, and you're thinking about like the blue hair people, or you know, you're like a super health mom who's thinking about, man, these pharmaceutical companies are poisoning my

• 21:28Cal Newport?

  kids because they don't care, or whatever the issue is, right? Think about the, the push to dehumanize that other, that other group. Like, man, they're just terrible. Look at the stuff I'm reading. I just cannot imagine how they exist. When you are in that mindset, you keep sliding down the slope of terribleness. That is what eventually gets you to disassociation, because you get to a point where you say,

• 21:54Cal Newport?

  The other thing, the side I don't like is so terrible and yet nothing is happening about it. We're not, you know, cutting off half the country or whatever it is. Like they're not seeing that I'm just riot and changing their views to align with mine and no one seems to care, uh, whatever the issue is and nihilism, either nihilism or rage follows. Like I just, I can't fathom this and it sort of breaks it. To make matters worse, especially if you're younger, a side effect of a conversation platform is that it's taking the place of actual human interaction. So you're also going to become more actually socially isolated. So huge demoderation plus more of social isolation, whether you're young, this also happens a lot with older people as well, who are sort of retired and older in life.

• 22:36Cal Newport?

  Man, that gets you to disassociation. Before you know it, you're showing up at Comet Pizza, uh, you know, someone's got to free the kids from the secret caves underneath or you're a nihilistic shooter. One thing leads to another and it is built into the technology. So we can't fix this. You can't, this is not, there's no version of Twitter that doesn't have this because the point is, is the two things that drive this is the fact that it's people coming together, it's virtual interaction that is algorithmically curated. You turn it off, you don't have those services. You can't have a version of those services without a conversation and algorithmic curation. That is the service. That's like saying to Pizza Hut, "Look, we, we, we don't want to put you out of business, but is there a way

• 23:21Cal Newport?

  you can exist without selling pizza?" Like that's what we do, right? This is what these conversational algorithmic platforms do. You have a huge number of people come together onto a platform to have conversation. You have to have algorithmic curation because what else are you going to do? You have 500 million people submitting tweets a day. You have to curate it. And if you're going to curate it, you're going to curate it on like what people want to see and you put those forces together, you slide down the slope of terribleness. There is no technological fix to this. It is a unavoidable side effect of these technologies.

• 23:52Cal Newport?

  Alright, so you're probably saying, "Yes, but I'm not going to end up at the bottom of this slope." I've used these things. Most people don't. A lot of people use these services, but they don't end up on, you know, Rumble or Groyp or Discord servers, right? And it's true. You can resist the pull of gravity. But let's think about what that costs. I'm going to bring up this picture one more time on here. So we have the slope of terribleness here. So yes, I'm going to draw a little picture here. It is true. You can, you know, at some point, hold on. I don't know. Does that look like a mountain climber holding on, Jesse? Yeah. Doing something. Alright, so you can arrest your fall at some point.

• 24:37Cal Newport?

  But here's the issue. There's two issues with this, alright? Number one,

• 24:43Cal Newport?

  imagine over here we have a scale. Think about this as like a scale of flourishing, right? The higher up you're on the scale, the more you're flourishing as a human. I'll label that flourishing.

• 24:58Cal Newport?

  I'll pull that down there. So here's the problem.

• 25:02Cal Newport?

  Yes, you stop yourself somewhere on the slope of terribleness, but the farther you've gone down, the lower you've gone down on the scale of flourishing. So maybe you arrest your stop somewhere here in the demoderation area, but you've arrested your life in a place that's worse. You're flourishing less than if you weren't on the slope at all. To make matters worse, resisting further slide down this slope requires a lot of mental energy. To not be demoderated when you're using the services all the time requires like a real application of will. When you're demoderated, not to make that final slide towards disassociation requires a lot of will. To be fully disassociated and resist the call to come join other disassociated people who understand your disaffection on these sort of dark web type services,

• 25:44Cal Newport?

  that takes a lot of mental energy. So yes, you can maybe prevent yourself, and most people do, of course, from getting to the bottom of the slope of terribleness, but they get stuck in a place where they have reduced flourishing and it's eating up a lot of mental energy that you could otherwise be spending on stuff that matters to you more in your life. So why is this worth it? To be less happy and to waste huge amounts of mental energy needed to prevent yourself from descending into what is essentially a sort of living hell? Once you realize the real dynamics at play here, it becomes hard to justify why you're still spending time.

• 26:19Cal Newport?

  With these curated conversational platforms. You want to stay up to date on the news? Subscribe to actual media. You want to hear information that you think is otherwise being suppressed? All right. Subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to podcasts, do the old fashioned work of here is a real individual. Here is why I think they are a good person to listen to. Here is their credentials. Here's how they convinced me and I will listen to them writing out a thing once a week and there's no curation and it's not conversation. Great, do that. The internet can help you here. You don't have to be on the curated conversation platforms. You want to be a part of something? That's great. Being on those platforms just tricks you into thinking you're a part of something. You're not. You imagine often if you're engaged in combat on these platforms, you imagine you're at

• 27:03Cal Newport?

  the front of the crowd marching on that, that bridge from Selma. In reality, you're in an attention factory. Punching with your time clock while your billionaire overseers laugh as their net worth goes up due to your efforts. You want to be a part of something, actually go be a part of something, not on a screen. And maybe you're using it because you're bored. Find better entertainment. Even on your phone, there's better, high quality entertainment. Do whatever, literally almost anything else. I know it presses these buttons. Find other things to press the buttons. You can listen to podcasts, read newsletters, read books, watch movies. You have streaming media. You have literally something like a half a trillion dollars worth of CapEx expense and entertainment available at your fingertips for like a $30 a month. Like there's plenty of other things you can do to not be bored, that doesn't put you on

• 27:48Cal Newport?

  the slope of terribleness. All right. So that's the way I see these things. So why don't we do here, like we always do, is move on to our takeaway section. Does he have a little takeaway music here? We do. Let's hear this.

• 28:13Cal Newport?

  All right. So let's get to my takeaways here. When it comes to these curated conversation platforms.

• 28:20Cal Newport?

  We've been telling ourselves a reassuring story. Yeah, they're not great, but most of the worst harms don't impact me and you know, there's some nice benefits. What's the rush to change? But in reality, these harms are all connected to a common slope of terribleness. You use them and you'll start sliding down this slope. It'll make your life worse as you move further. You'll likely stop yourself eventually before you get to the hellish bottom, but this resistance requires energy, mental energy you could be spending on things that matter or people you love. This trade off is not worth it. I want to end this deep dive by reading from the conclusion of the essay that I published on my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. Here's how I ended that essay.

• 29:01Cal Newport?

  "To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with curated conversation platforms. We tried them, they became dark and awful. It's time to move on. Enough is enough." Alright, so there we have it. There's a lot more coming in this episode. I'm gonna talk to Jesse about his reactions to this deep dive and then we have a collection of questions from my listeners about exactly this issue of social media in their lives. We'll get into how people are grappling with this, so stay tuned. But first, we just need to take a quick break to talk about one of the show's sponsors.

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• 30:08Cal Newport?

  Alright, so what do you think? Slope of terribleness? That gonna catch on?

• 30:14Speaker 04

  I like the colors.

• 30:15Cal Newport?

  I'm a great artist is what I think the uh what it is there. I mean, what I was trying to do there, Jesse, is, you know, this is what I noticed in the reaction to my emails, the email I sent out is people are like, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's bad, but they needed a push. And it's one of these things where just people knowing like, I think this thing is bad, doesn't always lead to action. They need to know why is it bad? And in this case, this is what I think is going on. This is why it's bad is because you're constantly being pulled down the slope. And it's like hard to, it feels bad. The farther you go, the worse your life is. And to stop from going to hell, you have to like expend all of this energy. And the question is like, well, why?

• 30:55Speaker 04

  What about Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest? How do they factor in?

• 30:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So I mean, what I was saying earlier were, you know, it depends on how you use these things. The things that made the slope inevitable was it's conversational and it's algorithmic curation. It's like, that's why I didn't include Pinterest is probably not there because it's not really conversational. Right? Like you were looking at a board that someone else made, but you don't feel like you're, so it doesn't activate those community circuits necessarily. YouTube or Instagram, I think it depends on how you use it. So Instagram, and I guess LinkedIn would be similar. One way that you use it, it tends to have a higher concentration of a sort of like expert community. Like Instagram is where I go because there's like a comedian, I want to see their funny videos and like a really fit guy. And I want to see fitness advice or like authors. I know a lot of authors on there like, yeah, I like, I like their writing.

• 31:44Cal Newport?

  I want to see, you know, like clips from Ryan Holiday or whatever. So like his writing. So it's, there's more of that non-interactive element to the lot of way people use Instagram. So you can get the compelling aspect, which is a problem, but without that, we're all kind of conversing about things or giving our takes. It can arrest that slope way earlier. Now, some people, if you're using reels and like getting to certain corners of Instagram, it can have that problem. YouTube is sort of the same thing. Like a lot of people use it as I listen to podcasts on there. There are certain creators I like, and I use it like a cable channel. Like, hey, I want to see like the latest Cal Newport podcast or something. Again, there's no interactive conversation. But if you're like on YouTube streams and you're in the comments, like there's ways to use it where you can get some of the slope of terribleness effects.

• 32:29Cal Newport?

  But it's really like the offenders that drive people all the way down the slope into the place where like nihilism or rage-based violence comes out. The pure algorithmic conversation platforms, and I think those are probably the worst offenders.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  You've kind of been mentioning this theme for multiple years. Did you used to get a ton of hate mail about it?

• 32:50Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, it's weird how this changed, right? Like, it used to be, because I've been on this beat for a long time. What's going on? Why do we all feel like we have to use social media? I don't think early on I was saying it's going to lead to violence. That's kind of that things got worse. But I never bought this idea that these were ubiquitous technologies that we all have to use. Because I was a big early internet booster. I liked the early internet. I liked the internet as a concept. I didn't like the idea that three companies were going to take over the internet. And to use the internet meant we had to use an app by like from one of like a small number of companies. To, you know, enrich a very small number of people. That was sort of like anti-internet. So a lot of early internet people were very suspicious of social media. I used to get yelled at. People say, no, no, no, they'll defend social media.

• 33:34Cal Newport?

  Like, no, these things are bad. I mean, it's bad to not use it. These things are great. It's, you know, whatever it is. It's how you're going to meet new people and new ideas. It's where activism exists. It's going to bring democracy to the Middle East. And then as things got worse, I really usually around 2016, 17, people stopped defending them. Like, well, yeah, there's some problems here. But I still get some benefits, but you know, if you don't use them, good for you, right? And now I think with the political violence, this again, clearly being driven by these. Now people are like, no, I don't, I have, let's, let's go, let's get, I have no, I'm, I'm, I agree, like, these are bad, but they're stuck. And I think the reason why they're stuck is this analysis of like, there's all of these harms.

• 34:17Cal Newport?

  Most of them don't affect me. They can probably be fixed, but the things that affect me are more minor. And like, so I, I'm in no hurry to leave. I probably should. Because when you see these as isolated harms, and I'm only affected by the distraction harm, not these, you're like, yeah, whatever. I'm distracted by a lot of things. But when you see them connected as a slope, like, no, no, no, no, that distraction is pulling you down a slope. And it's going to keep pulling you down there, and it's going to get worse and worse. Until you have to expend a huge amount of energy to try to stop your, your descent. So it's interesting how it's moved from you are dangerous for saying social media in any way is bad. To, I completely agree with you, but like, I need a push to actually take action on it.

• 34:59Cal Newport?

  So I've been talking about this for a long time, but what I've been focusing on has really shifted. I mean, my early Facebook articles were. Just me responding to people, what they thought were like airtight arguments for why you had to use Facebook. I had these early essays where I would just go through their arguments and be like, I don't think that's true. Or like, that's not, there's other ways to do that. I mean, it was basically, you know, a lot of, I don't think you need to use Facebook. People like, you are crazy. And I would say, explain why I need to use it. And they're like, well, this or that or this. And I would just very calmly be like, I mean, that's not a great argument. You know, that doesn't make me want to be, it's weird. It's this, I'm clicking in relationship status and there's these like buttons, like,

• 35:44Cal Newport?

  why, this is weird. You need a better argument than this. So that's how I started.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Pictures of dogs.

• 35:49Cal Newport?

  Pictures of dogs.

• 35:52Cal Newport?

  Poking, a lot of poking going on early Facebook. I was like, I'm a grown, why are we poking each other on a computer screen? Come on. People are like, I gotta use these things because it's, it's, uh, I mean, it took like six minutes for people to be like, all hiring in business happens on social media and there's no other way that people will ever discover you, hire you, or you'll ever find a client again. It took like six minutes before people were convinced.

• 36:17Cal Newport?

  If you do not have videos on Instagram, there is no way your dental practice can succeed. Like, we got there so quickly. I was like, well, how do we ever have commerce before, before we had social media? All right. So I want to hear what you, the audience has to think as well. So Jesse, we pulled some questions here from the audience about this topic.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:35Cal Newport?

  Let's hear what you, my listeners wanted to know or are wondering about this.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  All right. First question's from Sarah. My middle-aged son has a smartphone. I told him we'd be using access controls on it until he goes to high school. I know the obvious sites and apps to block, but I worry that I'm missing some of the more fringe options that young men seem to get lost on. Is there some up-to-date list somewhere on what I should be blocking?

• 36:59Cal Newport?

  You know what's sad? I think you skipped a word and said middle-aged son. But you know what? Like, that would also be a relevant question. My middle-aged son is on social media too much. I mean, that's kind of part of the problem.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Little school age.

• 37:12Cal Newport?

  But I could see an older mom being like, yeah, my middle-aged son is in the basement and he's like the captain of his, uh, I don't know video games well, his Mario League.

• 37:25Cal Newport?

  What's the one where they command gun, whatever, Call of Duty? He's just on Call of Duty and doing social media all the time. All right, so middle school age son. This is a, this is actually is a good question, right? Is when you got to the bottom of that slope of terribleness, where the, the transition into violence happens is where you then sort of ski slope off the bottom into these much less regulated platforms that just don't care. They're usually funded by things like gambling advertisements and whatever, like they're, they're funded in, in sort of shady ways and they get closed down a lot and then other ones open up, right? And this is kind of a problem. It's like, okay, if I'm a, running the, the blocks, like here's the sites you can't use, how am I supposed to know about like the latest sites where like disaffected young

• 38:10Cal Newport?

  men are finding themselves? I have a couple of points here. One, I don't know, your model for phone moderation with your kids is not actually the, the model that I would typically recommend. So just to cover what I would typically recommend would be no phone in middle school, no smartphone. You can have a dumb phone, logistics, sure, not yours, but you can take it if you need to take the bus or something and you need it in case of emergencies. But the model I would normally push is no smartphone till high school. That smartphone is going to be really locked down until 16 and then we'll, we'll take a lot of that off and that's when you can begin. You've gone through puberty, you've established your social identity, you've established your social circles, you're just older and now we're going to start giving you sort of more free rein. All right, so during that period where you have a smartphone, but it's highly restricted,

• 38:55Cal Newport?

  how do you find these sort of sites that are at the bottom of the slope of terribleness? If you understand the slope of terribleness, I think it changes the way you think about this because no one starts at those sites at the bottom, right? No one is like, oh, I don't, I got a smartphone. I can't wait to get on Gab. I can't wait to go to some weird Discord server where like Nick Fuentes is going to be talking about Groper movement, something like that. You get there by sliding down the slope of terribleness. You start with distraction. It's, you know, you're the 12 year old who's talking about, you know, all these memes you know about. You're kind of like clued into sort of fun internet culture and then that drags you into demoderation. You get into these influence communities and now you begin

• 39:39Cal Newport?

  to get really caught up in some particular issue or not. And because you're young, you're like, yeah, man, I social groups is everything. I need my group. I need to fit in. I found my group. This is firing up all of my developing like, sort of like early puberty brain networks. This is my group. And then you get disassociated eventually because you're like, I'm so worked up now that like, I now, you know, I'm isolated because I'm on here all the time and I'm so worked up about this. I feel like disassociating. And that's when you hear someone in one of the mainstream communities say, hey, hey, hey, hey, the real conversation about this is over here. Like they're, they're the man, and you can fill in so many other things for what that means. They're going to censor us, but this is where the real conversation is. And then that's when you make your way over to the really dark places. So if you

• 40:23Cal Newport?

  are blocking the mainstream curated conversation platforms for your 14 year old, they're not going to enter the slope. So you don't have to worry as much about these sort of weird, those are weird, weird places. If you wander there fresh, it's, uh, it's like Harry Potter and Nocturne Alley. How do you like that reference, Jesse?

• 40:43Speaker 04

  I like it.

• 40:44Cal Newport?

  He's like, this is no good. This is no good. The, the witches have on the weird hats and they're selling the like bad spells and Malfoy is doing meth. Like, I gotta get out of this alley. It's, it feels like that. It's like, oh, stranger danger uncomfortable. It's a weird place. It's not, it's not Disneyland. But you gotta get there down the slope. So anyways, what I'm trying to say there is if you are preventing till your kid is ready for it, access to the curated conversation platforms, they're not going to probably make their way to the weird things. You have to kind of, the slope has to pull you there. It's not a place where people, people like to go. All right, who do we got next?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Next question is from Eric. I have several different jobs, but the one I'm struggling with big time is my job of making YouTube videos. Two questions. Should I be doing this at all? I'm thinking about your disqualifications and so good they can't ignore you. And if it is okay, how to organize the deep work required to come up with an idea and script, filming it, then editing and publishing it.

• 41:42Cal Newport?

  All right, so yeah, YouTube, because again, we said YouTube is in this sort of interesting liminal space, right? So question number one, should you be making YouTube videos at all? As all of my YouTube watchers know, I think it's a terrible thing to do. I guess it depends on, I guess it depends on the channel. If you were doing like some, maybe if your channel was about, you, you, you have like a football field with one of those like long-term measuring things they use to see with the rollers, so you can see like knockoff yardage to see how far someone throws a ball. And what you were doing was you were punting puppies from the, the end zone and seeing who could punt the puppy farther and it was all, yeah, that you probably shouldn't be doing that YouTube thing. But if you're doing something useful on YouTube, like a deep dive on Harry Potter's Nocturnali,

• 42:28Cal Newport?

  I have a lot of questions. Then maybe, you know, it's okay. So here's how I would think about YouTube. Video alone is not bad.

• 42:37Cal Newport?

  I think video, independent media in video versus audio, I think independent media itself is something that is valuable. And there's three main forms of independent media. There's writing, we'll see this in things like blogs or newsletters. There's audio, which you see primarily in podcasts. And there's video. Now YouTube is the easiest platform to use to sort of make your video seen. And I don't think it by itself is a problem. But what you need to be aware of, if you're creating an independent video on YouTube, you have to be very wary of capture. So there is an algorithm lurking on YouTube. It's lurking in the recommendations. And you see this as a creator in those view numbers and those subscriber numbers.

• 43:22Cal Newport?

  And it really, the thing you have to be so careful about is capture, which says, "I am going to just explore the slope of how do I make those numbers higher and higher and higher." And then you, you end up in algorithm land. Now, again, YouTube tends not to be as dangerous for people as these other, these other platforms. It can be, but it tends not to be. But that can put you into, now you're chasing the algorithm. It puts you in the sort of weird, sort of engagement farming type of land. And you don't like what you're creating, you don't even feel that strongly about. And it could be sort of hollowed out. I mean, this is what like Mr. Beast did, is he just straight up followed what makes more people watch. And then he kept ratcheting that up and ratcheting that up.

• 44:04Cal Newport?

  And where he ended up as the highest subscribed YouTube channel on YouTube, is these like multimillion dollar videos where every seven seconds is aimed at, like there's no block of more than seven seconds where there's not something compelling being promised to you or that promise being delivered on, like do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Visually amazing, stakes are high, right? So like, you know, I don't know, it's not terrible, but it's kind of weird where you end up if you follow the algorithm. Or you end up like a lot of people, like in political waters, like, okay, I'm going to get more stride in on this issue because more people view it, you know? I'm going from, "I'm Mr. Health Advice," to like, "If you look at a vaccine, your child's hair is going to fall out." Like because it, you get more and more like attention for it.

• 44:49Cal Newport?

  So you gotta be careful about capture. But if you, you're producing something you're proud of and you want it to do well, but you're not willing to completely follow the algorithm, then you know, I think it's okay. In terms of how you actually schedule doing YouTube creation, Jesse will attest to it. I mean, it's just time consuming, right? Don't underestimate. The principle that's at play here is the principle from slow productivity of work at a natural pace. It takes a long time to do this. Don't pretend like it doesn't. Just because a YouTube video is quick to watch, don't delude yourself like, yeah, I'm gonna put aside an hour before work and then after work on Friday, and that's how I'm gonna run my YouTube channel. You have to think of it like I'm building a chair. It'll

• 45:30Cal Newport?

  take a lot of time. I gotta get this wood, I gotta plane it and shape it and glue this, wait for that to glue, I'll clamp this, there's a lot of skills involved to come back to it. It's gonna require a lot of time for me to do. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. To do this well, requires a lot of time. It's not, you know, you're not gonna just stumble onto a camera and everyone rushes to watch you. It is brutal. I mean, you'll attest to that, Jesse. It's like impossible to get people to watch things. It's, you know, and you really, you really gotta do a good job. So, no, I'm not mad at you for making YouTube videos. Don't get algorithmically captured. And be realistic about how hard it is. It is a major, major commitment. And if you don't have that time, don't pretend like you can squeeze it in. I always tell my kids, don't, you don't wanna become a YouTuber. I was

• 46:15Cal Newport?

  like, it's a, there's a full-time job. It's like, that's a hard job. That's a hard, it's hard to make money. It really is brutal. It's like stressful. You have nothing else to fall back on. There's so many easier ways to make the amount of money that like most full-time YouTubers make. But they have this idea that it's easy, and that everyone's making millions of dollars. I'm like, six people are making millions of dollars. And it's not gonna be.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  But like you said, if you're not using it to make money, you can take this slow productivity approach and

• 46:42Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  occasionally put out videos.

• 46:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like independent media. But yeah, if you think you're gonna become the next Mr. Beast, it's a problem. All right. Who else? We got another question?

• 46:52Speaker 04

  Yep. Next up is Mark. "I can't help feeling like it's too late to put the social media genie back in the bottle. It's fundamental, how do we share information on the internet? Don't we need to focus instead on how to use it better?"

• 47:05Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I get this question a lot when I give talks about social media, especially to young people or to parents of young people. Is the, like, come on. What we need is to learn how to, like, use whatever it is, you know, responsibly. I don't buy it here. And here's, here's what I think the fundamental mix-up is. The social media companies completely hijacked the web 2.0 revolution.

• 47:32Cal Newport?

  So the web 2.0, for those who don't follow like internet trajectories, web 2.0 was about the world wide web, making it easier for information to both be published and consumed, right? But mainly making it easier to publish information. So instead of having to go and manually edit a website, or to have a sort of complicated database driven, like I'm going to pull out the Amazon listing and put it on the screen. But basically, it was like, it was hard if you weren't, had a serious website or a serious web developer. It was hard to update or put information on the web. And the web 2.0 was like a collection of different advancements. Typically, it was a lot of stuff that was actually advancements in the JavaScript language that ran and the new version of HTML that made it easier for

• 48:15Cal Newport?

  like things, like I can type something into a form and it shows up and everyone can see it. So blogs were like one of the first early web 2.0 things. It was like, yeah, you can publish information on the web without having to code, without having to hire like a web developer, right? But we got things like blogs and like these kind of early social network type things like Friendsters, where like different people could post things. We had places where you could build websites online using an online interface without code. And so that was the web 2 revolution was basically the web 1.0 said, here is a place to post information that anyone can consume it. It's a common protocol. All you need is a browser and anything that's been posted, you can, you can, you can, you can

• 48:59Cal Newport?

  consume. Web 2 is like now anyone can produce stuff to be consumed as well. Great revolution. Super important. One of the more important revolutions in the last 100 years. Then the social media companies came along and said, oh, people publishing information is interesting because that could be a lot of information. If you have a lot of people publishing stuff, you can create amounts of information that you would never be able to hire people to come anywhere near there. If you want to hire people to create content like newspaper writers or whatever, it's expensive and it's like pretty limited how much stuff you've produced. And this was, these models were going on. You had like Nick Dinton and Gawker and people saying like, hey, can we hire like 20 people and have them write 10 blog articles a day and then we can try to monetize it. But the social media companies say that's

• 49:44Cal Newport?

  amateur hour. You're hiring like 10 people at Gawker to publish 20 things a day and you have 200 things published a day that you're selling ads on. Why don't we get 200,000 people for free to write information for us? Like this is the real secret of Web 2. So they took over Web 2 by building these beautiful websites, right? Facebook, Facebook's triumph early on was in part because they, Mark and the original programmers he worked with, really understood these cutting-edge new Web 2 type of capabilities. They understood the new technology, things like Ajax, which was allowed for, you know, asynchronous in JavaScript. So you could have a static website and pull information to put without having to reload

• 50:28Cal Newport?

  the whole webpage. They were on top of that technology. Early Facebook websites was like beautiful Web 2 products. Now it was like very, very easy for you to publish stuff for people to see. They took over Web 2. Forget blogs, forget like interactive creative websites, just come to our gardens, our social media gardens, and it's easy there to publish your own material. Then they figured out another thing, which was people get bored publishing their own material because what happens is, and anyone who had a blog in like 2005 knows this, well, what happened is you would publish stuff and no one cared. It was the equivalent of like putting stuff on the bulletin board at the coffee shop. No one's going to read your essay. So people would get bored.

• 51:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I published stuff, no one came, so I'm going to go, you know, play a video game, right? Like people didn't care. So the second innovation the social media companies had was we'll offer you attention. We'll have this social compact, like Facebook, I write about this in Deep Work. Facebook was like, we'll have this sort of collectivist type of social compact that everyone will post nonsense, but everyone will look at the people they know's nonsense. In fact, we'll bring it to you because we organize it on these walls and you friend people and we can tell you like, hey, so-and-so just said something. And then you go over and do this performative thing where you're like, give a thumbs up or like you leave a comment like, that's great. And later they don't like, but hey, I like that or whatever. And now what you're offering people is it's easy to publish content and you'll feel like people are paying attention to you.

• 51:55Cal Newport?

  And boy, that is powerful. People love that. And that's how social media took over Web 2. Anyone can publish and will make you all feel like you're important. And so everyone started doing it. And now you have massive amounts of content that you can monetize with advertisements. Right? I'm not going to hire 20 writers. I have 200 million people publishing all day long because their friends will like on it. And we can put ads in the middle of all that. So that was, that was how social media took over web two. And then social media had its own revolution where after everyone was using these services, they said, we're no longer going to use this model of people are going to pay attention to you. Now we're going to bring an algorithmic curation and say, well, once you have this

• 52:36Cal Newport?

  app here, we're just going to pull from the billion people who are using this, we'll pull stuff that's going to press your buttons. And now what we're selling you is like, eh, it's not your friend liking something. You're kind of bored with that, but we'll just give you something. Every time you open this, it's really interesting. Once we already captured you, we'll switch you over to algorithmic engagement because now you'll use it 10 to 20x more per day than when you were just looking for likes because you only look for likes after you publish something. That took over all of web two. But that not fundamental to the internet. That's a very successful, but very specific business model. People publish for free. And in exchange, algorithms show you the most compelling stuff that other people published. It is a very specific business model.

• 53:20Cal Newport?

  That is not synonymous with the internet. If you shut down the five major social media companies tomorrow, the internet would still be there. And a lot of other cool things could emerge. Web two technology still exists. Apps and sites where you can, you can gather with like-minded people, you can publish information, you can receive information, you can find niche experts or communities, you can find cool tools. All of that is still there. The underlying protocols that allow anyone who can access any of the networks and networks that makes the internet can talk to anyone else and read anything else that's accessible from this network. All of that is still there. This is just one thing you can do with it and one that happens to create a slope of terribleness that we all hate. So, no, I don't think social media is fundamental. I think the internet is.

• 54:02Cal Newport?

  So I'm not, I don't buy, we have to just accept this particular use of it. The other thing I would argue is, okay, let's say you did believe that you needed to use social media to be successful in the world. These are low friction, consumer-facing products. They are very simple to learn. They're made to be something you can pick up immediately. You can learn how, you know, TikTok takes like nine seconds to learn how it works. I did this for The New Yorker last year. I signed up for TikTok and documented like what the process is. So it's not something you need to teach people about. And in terms of like, oh, let's teach you how to use this. Well, good luck. You're not going to compete with the slope of terribleness. You're just not going to compete. It's just more compelling. You can say, don't use this too much. Good luck. Reward circuits, dopamine saturation. You are going to use it too much.

• 54:47Cal Newport?

  You can say, you know, don't like be too strident, you know? Listen to people from the other side. Good luck. You're talking about 100,000-year-old Paleolithic circuits that are being pushed on again and again and again. That advice ain't going to stick, right? So I'm not a believer. Like, we just, we have to use it, or we need to be practiced how to use it. Or if we just give people literacy, they're going to use these things better. I mean, it's, you know, good luck. All right, we got a case study here. Case studies where people write in to talk about their experience about using type of stuff we talk about on the show. We found a case study that was about someone's experience leaving social media. It seemed appropriate. Get some case study music to get in the mood here, Jesse.

• 55:41Cal Newport?

  All right, today's case study is from Scott. Scott said, "I stumbled upon your excellent work after purchasing Deep Work on a whim and wanted to congratulate you on both defining and providing workable solutions for one of the biggest challenges of our always-connected, modern age. I was one of the first musicians to use social media to build a large following in the early 2010s as a pianist and founder of a popular music group. For a long time, I was a champion of social media tools, in particular, the way they granted artists the ability to build a worldwide audience while bypassing record labels and other traditional industry gatekeepers. I even got a book deal out of it." Fast forward to now, and it's clear to me that social media has actually had a net deleterious

• 56:25Cal Newport?

  effect on the arts. Just as we see in knowledge work, engagement-based algorithms prioritize the cheap dopamine hit of a shallow content rather than the kind, deep, thoughtful artistic work that nourishes the soul. Some of the true masters of their craft today are reduced to performing inane TikTok dance challenges or parroting trendy ideological talking points instead of creating the brilliant work that they are uniquely suited to create. I could go on and on, but I'm certain I'm preaching to the choir here. I deleted my own personal socials with the exception of Substack in 2021, and I think it has greatly improved my creative output at the expense of my own cultural relevance. I think that is the trade, it is, I think that it is the trade-off that artists and academics and

• 57:08Cal Newport?

  everyone else will have to be incentivized to accept if we were to reverse what the last decade or so of McLuhan's Global Village on Steroids has wrought. Alright, so I think that's a great case study for this musician. Social media was everything. A great case for it. Worldwide audience, get past the gatekeepers, go straight, you know, get music straight to people, great Kevin Kelly arguments, thousand true fans. Then, he's like, it got worse, and the net effect was a negative. He quit it, he's never been, never been like prouder of his work. One thing I want to point out in there, so what's going on here? A lot of people repeat something similar, and I mentioned this in my last answer, but just to emphasize it one more time. What social media is has changed.

• 57:52Cal Newport?

  A lot of the things that we really liked about social media, the access to new people, the access to new ideas, right? That got worse when the companies made what I call the algorithmic turn. So again, as I talked about before, the early social media model was not so heavy on algorithmic curation. It was about conversation, it was about, it's just interesting enough to talk to interesting people, to follow interesting people, to friend interesting people. But it wasn't so much about algorithms. And it's because the original goal, if you're an early stage social media company, was user growth. User growth is built on experience.

• 58:34Cal Newport?

  Like you need to be something that feels like it's super culturally relevant and offers a good experience, so people will sign up. They wanted those numbers to grow. It didn't matter how much you used it. They needed you to subscribe. They needed like users. So it was, you know, it was less, less important because they weren't even really selling ads yet, that you use it all day long. They just wanted everyone to have to use the service like Facebook. So it used to be at first, again, let's do the evolution real quick. Early Facebook and social media was people I know. I friend people I know. We like each other. There's no like button, but we comment on each other's stuff. And it like, we feel it's interesting and we feel like there's a little bit of attention. Like I'm publishing something and people care about that. Feels good. We know it's a little fake, but whatever. Then they went towards, uh, let's get famous people on here and interesting people on here.

• 59:19Cal Newport?

  Twitter was really big on this as well. And then it was like, yeah, it's not just about your friends. You can also follow a friend, really interesting, like creative people or thinkers or artists. And again, that's the stuff you would see. So like now I see what my friends are up to, but also I see what this like political thinker is saying. And that's like an interesting person. What are they reading? What are their ideas? Like that was pretty interesting. No algorithms, right? Twitter was reverse chronological. Here are all the things that have been tweeted by people that you follow in order of when they tweeted with the most recent thing first. Facebook was a similar things, right? Like here is your, at first you had to go to other people's walls. You'd go to their sites and they gave you this feed, but the feed at first was just strict. Here is reverse chronological.

• 1:00:03Cal Newport?

  This person, this friend just did something, that friend just did something. And some of these friends could be interesting people. That was sort of the sweet spot era where it was non-algorithmic, but you had a lot of interesting people on there and it was like a cool hang. Like a cool hang. I could just follow on Twitter or on Facebook, someone who was like an author I admired or a musician or something and kind of see what they're up to. And this was kind of cool. Like what a cool technology. Like this is when people were like pretty happy about this stuff. Then they had the algorithmic turn. The algorithmic turn, which began like around 2012, right around 2012 to 2015. This was the turn, these companies had gone public. They hired the grownups, you know, Zuckerberg brought on Sandberg, et cetera.

• 1:00:48Cal Newport?

  And they said, look, we have to actually make money. And to make money, we have to care about how much these users are using this, right? And we want them to use it all the time. And iPhones now big, right? 2012 was this tipping point where we had more than half of the adult population using smartphones in the US. It was this key tipping point. Everyone has these phones now. We can move this over to apps. They now have constant access to these services. So now we need to worry about engagement. And that began the algorithmic turn. We are going to select with algorithms or with the assistance of algorithms, what you see, so that you get more consistent brain rewards and those short-term reward circuits are going to get more exposures to positive learning. And then you're going to

• 1:01:32Cal Newport?

  look at it more. It's going to be this virtuous loop. That makes us a lot of money. And we've been in the algorithmic turn for the last decade, increasingly pushed towards algorithmically curated content. You need that piece for the slope of terribleness to be there. You don't have that piece, these companies would disappear. Because you can't make money in 2010 Facebook, right? It's not going to be worth a trillion dollars anymore. But all the terribleness goes away. Without the algorithmic curation, it's like, you know, it's a cool hang. And sometimes there's nothing interesting on there. But sometimes someone has published something cool and then I've learned I got an early drop of a Taylor Swift song or something. This was great. It was like a cool hang. I wasn't going to look at it a thousand times a day, but it was a cool hang. As soon as

• 1:02:14Cal Newport?

  we made the algorithmic turn, that's when social media turned. So that's why we hear stories like this. We're like, man, this was great. And now it's not. What happened? Curation's what happened. Once we began that shift, that's when these, that's why we have this feeling of like, why do these things make me feel dark? Because we are at the top of that slope of terribleness. We're all happy up there. And then at some point, we looked up or like, I'm sliding. And that wasn't happening before. So it's good to understand, I think, that these changes that happen.

• 1:02:46Cal Newport?

  All right, so now we know what you think about this issue. In our third and final segment, we can say, well, what is regulators going to do? What is the government going to do? Well, there is some news about this that I want to get into about some recent news about Congress taking on some of these issues of social media. I want to give you my reaction about this. But first, let's take another brief break to hear from a sponsor.

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• 1:03:26Cal Newport?

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• 1:03:44Cal Newport?

  So you heard my thoughts about social media. We heard your thoughts about social media. What are the government going to do about this? Well, I have good news. The House of Representatives is on it. And we know the House of Representatives is really good at technology. Just to remind you of how savvy they are, I want to play you a little bit of audio here from a couple of years ago, when the House of Representatives brought in the leaders of TikTok to interview them. Here's a clip from that past discussion.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Mr. Chu, does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network?

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  Only if the user turns on the Wi-Fi. I'm sorry, I may not understand the...

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  So if I have TikTok app on my phone, and my phone is on my home Wi-Fi network, does TikTok access that network?

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  It will have to, to access the network to get connections to the internet, if that's the question.

• 1:04:41Cal Newport?

  Basically, what I'm saying is we're kind of screwed. The US House of Representatives does not know a lot about technology, but they are trying because here's the news that we just heard about. I'll put this on the screen here for people who are watching. A US House panel asked online forum CEOs to testify after Charlie Kirk assassination. So they are trying to do something here, but let's think, I just want to look at this for a second. Who do they have coming in? I'm going to read from the press release here. A US House committee on Wednesday asked the CEOs of online platforms Discord, Stream, and Twitch and Reddit to testify at a hearing following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, citing the radicalization of online forum users.

• 1:05:24Cal Newport?

  All right. I had some thoughts on this. First of all, as indicated by that TikTok clip, not exactly a bunch of technical wizards, and we're sort of seeing why this is a problem already. Let's kill this, Jesse. There's a lot of ads on here, by the way. That's somehow like metaphor that like the website for this article is so covered in ads, it's kind of unusable technology. But we're seeing here the issue, not just that Congress necessarily doesn't know a lot about these technologies. When you understand things like the slope of terribleness, they're talking to the wrong CEOs. They're talking to the CEOs of companies that are at, their services are being picked up by disassociated youth at the bottom of the slope of terribleness.

• 1:06:09Cal Newport?

  I mean, yes, great, we should talk to the existing companies and have them turn off this behavior, but more ones are going to come. Because what you need, these sort of, I think of them as like loosely regulated digital conversation spaces. These are the end game of falling down the slope of terribleness, distraction, demoderation, and disassociation. And then finally, when you're disassociated, you want to be around other disassociated people and you egg each other on.

• 1:06:36Cal Newport?

  There have been plenty of sites to do this. They often get shut down and then other ones come along. And because it's not, this is not hard technologically to have a place where people can do like voice chat, like a Discord server that anyone can spool up on their own machine or you have some sort of forum. And they shut these down, like remember 4chan? Well, that got shut down, but then they started 8chan and then that got shut down. And now that's gone. There was like the Nazi website, Der Stormer, and that got shut down. And often the way these get shut down eventually is they become such a cesspool. It's actually the infrastructure providers, like I'm not going to do business with you. I mean, I think what took 8chan down was CloudFlare, which is, you know, you need that to prevent denial of service attacks. Like you need it to keep, in general, your website up and running.

• 1:07:21Cal Newport?

  And they eventually were like, oh, we don't want to be in business with you. And so with no one to protect them, the site became unusable, right? So like, it's sure, it's good. I mean, existing forum companies, keep the pressure on. Do not be a cesspool for disaffected youth. You are a specific company. You should be responsible for what people are talking about. Or if you have to be accused of being censorious, be accused of being censorious. Do not let disaffected youth to be on there. But anything can function here. And so I think that's the wrong place to look. The right place to look is what is tumbling people down into these below-ground depths of the loosely regulated web? And that's curated conversation platforms. That's where the concern is.

• 1:08:04Cal Newport?

  And it's almost not even worth bringing in CEOs of these companies, which they do. Let's bring Zuckerberg in, you know, sure, you can bring Musk in. I mean, the current administration won't bring him in, but you could, right? You can bring these people in, but what can they say? Right? Again, it's like bringing in the head of Domino's and being like, look, you know, pizza's bad. What can you do to help us out here? And they're like, this is our business, is pizza. What do you want us to do? That's what we do. We sell pizza. Curated conversation platforms is they use algorithms plus large groups of people in conversation to generate lots of eyeballs that they monetize. Like, that's the business, right? So if you really want to step in here, I don't even know what the exact solution is, but there's a couple of things to catch my attention.

• 1:08:45Cal Newport?

  I'm definitely interested in Australia's model of a nationwide ban on social media writ large. Be expansive instead of contractive here for 16 or younger.

• 1:08:56Cal Newport?

  We can do that if we know the slope of terribleness is inevitable. Let's keep people off it until at the very least their brain has developed more because you know what makes that slope super steep? Having a adolescent or prepubescent brain. Do you remember being a teenager? Did anything matter more to your brain than social inclusion, social grouping? What group you're in on and out on? What was going on with your friends? Pleasing your community? Being a part of a tribe? Those parts of your brain get supercharged during those years in your life. You combine that brain with algorithmic conversation platforms. I mean, what was like a blue trail becomes a black diamond. You just fall fast.

• 1:09:39Cal Newport?

  So at the very least, yeah, let's keep them off. We do this with lots of other things with kids. Nicotine is very addictive. It's super addictive in like a 12 year old's brain. So we're like, you know, no, kids can't. They cannot consent to the lifetime addiction they're going to get by using this. They cannot make that decision. They're way more, they were more prone to it. So no, you have to be older to smoke cigarettes. It messes with their brains with alcohol. Let's wait till your brain develops before we're going to allow you to, you know, to drink alcohol. You're not making good decisions yet. So we don't want you behind the, the wheel of a car until you've gone through training and you can be older. And sure, for all of these things you can argue, but no, you're holding people back. You don't let a 15 year old drive a car.

• 1:10:20Cal Newport?

  You're restricting their freedom of movement and you can't restrict the freedom of movement of people in America, but you can't for kids. They can't fully consent to these things. Why can't a kid smoke a cigarette? Well, because their brain's not ready for it. They can do it when they're older. Why can't they go to an R rated movie by themselves when they're 15? Because we think kids aren't ready for this material or they're not going to make a good decision on their own. So no, you just can't do it. I think we should do something similar for social media. Maybe section 230 reform. It's a complicated issue. There's not a simple answer here, but Section 230 of the Internet Communication Decency Act has the effect of basically giving legal cover to social media companies for you are not liable for the material you publish. And this is very different than,

• 1:11:01Cal Newport?

  say, a newspaper. The New York Times publishes something, they're liable, right? If they say something to defame someone, they can be sued, right? If they incite some sort of action that is like highly negative for an individual or company, they can sue them and say, you know, you were wrong. This happens, by the way. This happens all the time, right? The Washington Post had this issue a few years ago. Remember the Covington kids at the mall? It was like a group of kids, you know, all these high schools visit DC. And so kids from some school were visiting DC, and they had bought MAGA hats because they were selling MAGA hats, you know, the street vendors

• 1:11:42Cal Newport?

  or whatever. And there was like some, they got into some incident with someone that was there, I think it was like a Native American doing some sort of protest. And anyways, a picture got captured of like one of the Covington kids with a MAGA hat sort of in the face of like this Native American person. And it just fit a pattern. The Post, this was like the Washington Post at peak sort of, you know, peak woke time. And there was this like, this kid is the kid from the omen, basically, like it's Satan's spawn and is, can, you know, whatever. It's just the worst possible thing. And he went and just like went with whatever felt right seeing this photo. He went and tracked down this person because they were marginalized, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:12:26Cal Newport?

  The problem was, that's not really what happened. Actually, like, the kids were just taking a photo, and this other person was like bothering them and coming over them in the photo. And they were trying to like, you know, that person was confronting them, and the photo caught them at whatever time. And the kid was like, well, you can't just say that stuff. You're liable. Like, this has been a huge issue. And the Post had to give them millions of dollars. So, most people, you have to actually care a little bit. Like, I have to try to be accurate, I'm liable, and that's good. Social media companies don't have to. They say it's not, we're not responsible for what's published on here. And that's Section 230, more or less, giving that protection. So, there have been arguments for reforming it, which would basically, no one has those protections. If you want to use Free content, like get a lot of people to create content on your platform, have a billion

• 1:13:10Cal Newport?

  users creating content that you then like algorithmically sort and use to make money? Sure, we don't care where it comes from. You publish it, it causes harm, it's on you. Now, of course, the result of this is the business model for these massive social media curated algorithmic platforms disappears. You might not be able to exist under such a world. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Now, I know it's more complicated than that, but that might be the closest hammer you would have from like a regulatory perspective to say like, I think this is a bad thing to have these like massive, if you have these massive conversation platforms or algorithmically curated, you're going to create things like these slope of terribleness. It's just really bad for people and you

• 1:13:53Cal Newport?

  can't control it. And if you are responsible for everything that's published, then you can't have those type of platforms. Like, no, you're responsible. If you want people to publish, it has to be more moderated and curated and it matters what's on there and you have to have standards. And I don't think it's a bad thing. People still come together. They still spread ideas. You're still accessible. You can still express yourself. We don't necessarily have to have like a billion people on the same platform to see the benefit of the internet. So maybe that's it. I put an asterisk there because, look, I'm in digital ethics and academic context. I know it's a very complicated topic, so I'm oversimplifying it there. But, you know, that's the type of thing that's worth looking at. The most important thing we could do, though, is cultural. This is why I'm trying to do what I'm doing.

• 1:14:35Cal Newport?

  Make social media not cool anymore. Make it seem like, wait a second, wait a second. You're like a grown man who's like spending a lot of time swiping this piece of glass and like typing in these things like other people. Like, what are you doing? We should see it. We should culturally change it. When we see people that are like really engaged online in these social media platforms or whatever, we should see it as if they wore like a straight up Captain Kirk costume to work and were just like, um, the Starfleet knows what's going on. Like, this is weird and you're weird for doing this. You have a Starfleet pin on at your job at, you know, Kinko's or whatever. I'm going to kind of make fun of you a little bit. Like, this is not something a grown man should be doing.

• 1:15:20Cal Newport?

  That's the way we probably need to think about social media. There's a cultural fix here. Change the zeitgeist on it. That's why I'm out here saying, doing things like the slope of terribleness. It's like, this is not innocent. This stuff sucks. You don't need to be on here. I mean, unless you have either a lot of stock in one of these companies, or you own some of the land left in Hawaii that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't bought yet, and you think you're going to get a good price for it if he gets a little richer. Like, if you're not in those situations, come on. Why are we on these things? Seeing what we saw a couple of weeks ago on all sides, the what the role of social media into creating assassination of a 31-year-old dad. The reaction on all the sides is just terrible, right?

• 1:16:02Cal Newport?

  The the the instinct on the far left to like, I don't care about this at all. And it's all, you know, it's and I'm celebrating it. Or like, I have no empathy. The reaction, the right, you know, not just the censorious stuff, the far right, hey, surprise, surprise. Far-right social media, guess who they're blaming for Charlie Kirk's death? Yeah, it it rhymes with booze. The, you know, it's always the same people. Somehow, like, the Jews in Israel are involved. None of this is good. Why are we like, we we need to marginalize people who are spending a lot of time on these platforms by getting off of ourselves first. So I don't know. I maybe I'm biased because I've been there for a long time. And then people yelled at me, and I'm happy that people are listening now.

• 1:16:45Cal Newport?

  But sure, block it for kids. Yes, phones out of schools. Yes, Section 23 or 4, maybe. I'm tempted. I'm interested. I don't know the company because I'm interested. But mainly, there's a cultural fix here. It's time to walk away. It's time to say enough is enough. It's time to treat the people who are still like really on there. And be like, that doesn't make you some sort of like fierce investigator or warrior or protester. It's the guy with the Captain Kirk pen, who, you know, just showed up at the the company photo day. It's a little bit embarrassing. That's where I think we need to get. It'll help our civil society. And I can tell you, life offside of those services, you're not on those slopes at all. It's nice up at the top of the hill. It's sunny up there. There's real people, as the governor of Utah said. You can touch some grass. It's a pretty good thing to do. So there we go. That's my rant for today. Thank you for listening. Be back next week with another episode.

• 1:17:30Cal Newport?

  And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:17:37Cal Newport?

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