Why You Should Quit Social Media in 2026 | Cal Newport
Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais
Dr. Michael Gervais
4.7 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you’re trying to be productive, what if the answer isn’t to do more… but to do less, better?
On today’s episode, we welcome back Cal Newport — Georgetown computer science professor, bestselling author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, and one of the most influential voices on focus, sustainable achievement, and the hidden costs of our digital lives.
Cal and Dr. Mike pick up where their first conversation left off — exploring why the human brain can’t do its best work while juggling five active tasks, how context switching quietly crushes output, and what leaders can do to build cultures that protect focus without adding headcount.
On the human side, Cal dives into digital fatigue, rethinking our relationship with phones, and how parents can create healthier tech norms at home. Finally, he looks ahead to AI — not with fear, but with clarity about how it can remove friction and restore our ability to think deeply.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why doing fewer things at once leads to faster, better results
- How to reduce context switching and build deep work into team culture
- The difference between true productivity and “pseudo-productivity”
- How to counter digital fatigue at work and at home — with different strategies for each
- What parents should know about phones, social media, and attention
- How AI can actually protect deep work when used wisely
The heart of this conversation: mastery in the modern world isn’t about speed or volume — it’s about depth, clarity, and choosing what truly deserves your attention.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We could be doing 10 things today instead of five if we were just willing to do it. |
| 0:03.5 | So the real question is, how do I get the most productive output out of this brain today? And there, the answer is rarely, let's give it as many things as possible to work on. That actually reduces the amount of useful output that brain can produce. I hear it all the time. So many of us feel overwhelmed and scattered and behind. But what if it's not because you're doing too little, but because you're actually doing too much all at once? If I have five tasks that I'm actively working on, I have to contend with the overhead of five tasks. And that is going to jam up the whole cognitive apparatus. If I instead work on one thing and then when I'm done, take on a next, then take on a |
| 0:37.7 | next, I'll get those five things done much quicker overall. The quality is going to go up. |
| 0:41.9 | We are excited to be back for a fresh start in 2026. So as ever, welcome back or welcome to |
| 0:48.5 | the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. |
| 0:53.5 | I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jerva, by trade and trading, a high-performance psychologist. |
| 0:57.9 | And the idea behind these conversations is simple. |
| 1:00.1 | It's to sit with the extraordinarily, to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. |
| 1:05.6 | Today's conversation is with Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown University, |
| 1:10.1 | best-selling author, and one of the most influential voices on focus, productivity, and deep costs of our digital lives. |
| 1:17.4 | TikTok wants you to use it as much as possible. They make more money, the more you use it. You have to completely change your relationship with devices. You have to be in control, not letting like four or five large companies that run these |
| 1:28.2 | attention to companies run your attention in your life. We unpack digital fatigue in both work and |
| 1:33.0 | life, the dangerous trade-offs being made with smartphones and social media, and how parents can |
| 1:37.6 | make clearer decisions about technology in the home. I think the evidence here is really clear. |
| 1:42.5 | Don't have a smartphone until high school. And even then it's a lockdown smartphone. |
| 1:45.5 | Like that's really like 16 plus or post-puberty. And then even after the kid has the phone, my argument is like as long as you live in this house, when you're at home, the phone is plugged in in the kitchen. You don't get it while we watch TV and you certainly don't get to bring it up to your room to have until 3 a.m. |
| 1:58.9 | And we look ahead to the future of AI. |
| 2:01.3 | Not with fear, but with clarity about what it should and should not replace. I have a vision of AI that I think is much more gentle and controllable and productive. It's not scary, but there's a lot of things in our lives that are easier, just like the web made a lot of things in our lives easier. Like, I don't have to look up this company in the yellow pages and call them to see when their hours are. I can go to their website. So I think there could be big booms from AI that aren't |
| 2:22.5 | sonic booms. So as you listen, I want you to consider how might your work, your family life, |
| 2:28.0 | and your sense of peace shift if your attention became something you fiercely protected. With that, let's jump into this |
| 2:35.4 | week's conversation with Cal Newport. Cal, it's been a long time since we've been able to connect, |
| 2:45.2 | and what a great excuse to have a podcast to be able to do this. So it's great to have you back on the show and |
... |
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