The Ledger, every show

“I know all their tricks and I will tell you they're good. They're not that good. They're not causing addiction.”

“Turns out those people are much more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do affiliate with some kind of religious community.”

“Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me.”

“The flip that we need to change in people's minds is this ridiculous belief That technology is hijacking our brains. There's nothing we can do about distraction. That our focus is being stolen. It's not being stolen. We're giving it away.”

“People who measure themselves the way I espouse of people who say, I'm just going to measure myself based on, did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said, I will without distraction, regardless of whether I finished the kicker here is they act…”

“We know that the only reason we do everything and anything from a neurological perspective Is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It is all about the desire to escape discomfort. Everything you do, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations, the carrot is the s…”

“And it turns out that these studies around ego depletion could not replicate. We couldn't find the effect. And so there was one exception to this, and that exception was in a study done by Carol Dweck. She's one of my research heroes. She wrote the book Mindse…”

“The worst piece of personal productivity advice is, if you want to be better at time management, you need to learn how to say no. What kind of stupid advice is that? Only a tenured professor who can't get fired would give you that kind of stupid advice. If you…”

“Human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing. All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, e…”

“My take on it is that it's equivalent of if Steven Spielberg called Jaws a documentary. It's you really have to see it. It's so, it's sloppy to the point of negligence. It's so silly.”

“What I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us. But rather distraction begins from within what we ca…”

“Time management requires pain management. Time management requires pain management. You'll always be distracted by something, right? If it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. Something is going to distract …”

“He goes into the operating room, and the doctors, for 55 minutes, cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, All through the power of his mind.”

“If all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means, therefore, That time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort.”

“How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money? Or Fox News or CNN? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention.”

“There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise,…”

“What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood, It still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety, all the good things come f…”

“Chronic pain, you know, pain that doesn't have a physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So we're talking fibromyalgia, we're talking insomnia, we're talking chronic back pain, all these things. Turns out they are what we call neuroplastic pain.”

“The standard advice is if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress it. Turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story, but if it's chronic pain …”

“Well, it turns out it's not true. That when we try and replicate those studies, and this happens in the social science, this is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate, …”

“We have external triggers. These are things in our outside environment, the usual suspects, the pings, the dings, the rings, all this stuff in our outside environment, which we tend to blame for distraction. But studies find that's only 10% of the reason we ge…”

“Like, I hear people say, like, oh, just form a writing habit. I think that's ridiculous. I don't know what they're talking about, right? A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. I don't know how to write out of habit. Writing …”

“You cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from. I'll say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from.”

“To-do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list.”

“Fundamentally procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. It's not a character flaw.”

“Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction. And when it comes to the workplace, if you don't give employees that psychological safety to say, hey, you know, how do we deal with this problem? Just like any other problem, th…”

“Now that's about three to five percent of the population is pathologically addicted, but we toss out this word addiction all the time.”

“The leading cause of distraction and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us, but rather distraction begins from within what we call the internal triggers. That is the le…”

“So don't believe these chicken little tech critics that say video games are melting your brain and Facebook is melting your brain and everything is melting your brain. Ridiculous. The science doesn't support that at all, right?”

“So they interviewed me for three hours for this documentary. So I sat down with the director for three hours. We did this super long interview, and they completely cut me out of the film, and I don't really care.”

“What they haven't talked about is, for example, that LGBTQ suicide has dropped, largely because one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons is that people from disparate groups, if you lived in that small town and nobody was like you becaus…”

“You didn't invent Facebook. You didn't invent Twitter or Slack or any of these tech companies. You didn't invent that stuff. It's not your fault. But lots of things in life are not your fault, but they are still your responsibility. And so the price of progres…”

“Turns out neurologically speaking, this is not true. That human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing. All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort.”

“The time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Any distraction can be turned into traction by simply making time for it in your day.”

“To-do lists turns out most people use, the way they use to-do lists is completely destroying their productivity.”

“For frequently occurring external triggers, meaning if you can't if you can't remove the external triggers from your environment, abstinence doesn't work. Okay. In fact, abstinence can backfire.”

“This is why digital detoxes don't work, right? Because we're not learning how to deal with that discomfort.”

“What I'm saying specifically is don't run your life with a to-do list. Don't wake up in the morning and look at your to-do list as the first place you look. You should be looking at your calendar. Your calendar is your best to-do list.”

“One of my pet peeves in the personal productivity community is this horrible advice that I'm sure we've all heard a million times, which says, if you want to be more productive, if you want to focus, if you want to not get distracted, you learn, need to learn …”

“I think the blowback would be so severe if they tried to do something about it that I can't see that on their radar.”

“Everything that kills kids, everything that harms kids, not just kills kids, it harms kids, is down to record lows. Homicide, record lows. Truancy, record lows. Drug use, record lows. Pregnancy, record lows. Incarceration, record lows. All these things are at …”

“And I think the reason we see some of these mental health outcomes that, that, you know, these the deleterious outcomes is not the technology itself. It's what the technology is displacing, namely sleep, right? That that is the big culprit.”

“An addiction is a compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance, and it's always bad, right? So addictions by definition hurt the user”

“Those authors, Seligman and Meyer, declared that they had gotten the study a hundred percent backwards. That the study results were a 180 degrees the opposite of what they thought. That we don't learn helplessness, that's our default.”

“The rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 240 times more persistent.”

“Successful people are the biggest losers. Meaning in terms of number of failures, it's the successful people. Why? Because they persist.”

“You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist.”

“Because people, people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychologi…”