Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep 383: Why Is Everyone Talking About “Against the Machine”? (w/ Tyler Austin Harper)

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Earlier this fall, the activist, novelist, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth published an anti-technology polemic called “Against the Machine.” To say it hit a nerve is an understatement. In the months that followed, Kingsnorth has been everywhere; profiled, among places, in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and The Atlantic. In today’s episode, I want to find out why Kingsnorth’s take on technology is resonating so strongly. To help me answer this question, I’m joined by the journalist and scholar Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote a great review of Kingsnorth’s book for The Atlantic. We dive deep into Kingsnorth’s ideas and explore what they teach us about our current moment more generally.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmediaINTERVIEW: Why Is Everyone Talking About “Against the Machine”? (w/ Tyler Austin Harper) [0:00] Is the simple awareness of a notification as harmful as full context switching? [1:15:49]Is there an “ideal ratio” for consuming information across different mediums? [1:17:12]How can I effectively implement your shutdown routine and not keep checking emails? [1:20:21]How can I manage my social media obligations with my marketing job? [1:23:52]CASE STUDY: Reframing a career to utilize career capital [1:26:07]CALL: Dealing with conflicting views about digital minimalism in a relationship [1:30:21]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?theatlantic.com/books/2025/11/paul-kingsnorth-against-the-machine/684848/Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is sponsored by Better Help:betterhelp.com/deepquestionsshopify.com/deepmybodytutor.comexpressvpn.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

At some point last year, I received an advanced reader copy of a book titled Against the Machine. It was written by Paul Kingsnorth, a former environmental activist, turned novelist, term poet, turned essayist. And the first thing that caught my attention about this was actually the cover. It's really cool. It features what looks like a primeval green forest, but as if it's being displayed through an old analog computer monitor that's starting to distort it. It also had a sort of stranger thing style 1980s font. So it was a really cool looking cover. It's like, you know what?

I'm going to read this book. And I did. And you know what? I was captivated. It was about technology, but it was also about culture and it was also about politics and the environment. Kings North talks about techno capitalism and how it's choking civilization and destroying the earth. It's not a politically careful book. It is skews jargon.

It doesn't align with preexisting tribes. It embraces its own hypocrisy and lobs its share of rhetorical bombs. It reminded me less of the sort of hand-wringing anti-technical. technology opeds that we see today and more like those sort of confident full-throated polemics of past voices like Lewis Mumford or Jacques Elool or Neil Postman. It was in short exactly the type of book that someone like me was going to enjoy. But then earlier this fall, the book actually came out. And when it was finally published, it turns out that Kings North hit a much bigger nerve

than I would have expected. he was basically everywhere. The New York Times ran a long profile of Kings North. It opened with a description of the author, spending his 50th birthday in a cave in County Clare, Ireland, as a storm drove, quote, great nails of rain, quote, into the ground. Kings North, and the article tells the reporter, I want to know what's real.

And the reporter went on to call the book, a searing indictment of a society hooked on technological innovation. Soon after, Kingsnorth was profiled in my own home publication, the New Yorker, the author, who also named Cal, called the book Part Summa, part Broadside, part testament. And then there was a recent review in the Atlantic, which called Against a Machine, quote, one of the most insightful works on culture technology and the environment published in some time, end quote. So what's going on here? Why is this particular book about technology making such an impact? And what can we learn as people who are struggling to cultivate deep lives and distracted world? What can we learn or take away from this book?

These are the questions that fascinated me after I saw Kings North was everywhere. These are the questions that I want to answer today. I'm going to have some help. I'm bringing on the show to help me get into who Kings North is and why his book hit. The journalist Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote that big review of Against a Machine that I cited before from the Atlantic. Harper is a great writer. I really like his writing. And he's someone who used to actually teach Kings North when he was a professor.

So he really knows what's going on here. So I'm going to bring on Tyler. He's going to help me make sense of why this book was so big. And then I will go to my virtual chalkboard and we'll figure out together the big ideas and what you should take away from this book to make your own life better. So without much further ado, I'm Cal Newport. And this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, why is everyone talking about against the machine? All right, Tyler, thanks for joining me here to help me figure out what's going on with Paul Kings North.

I'll be honest, when I first saw this book, and I got an early copy of it, and I read it and I read it and was like, whoa, this is cool. I kind of recognized the name, but I didn't really know what was going on. You've crossed paths with them. I used to assign Kings North to your students when you're a college professor. Who is he? Like, what do we need to know about this guy? Yeah, Paul Kingsnorth is a former green radical, former radical environmentalist who, after being very active in sort of the fringes of the environmental movement for many years, became disenchanted with it over the course of the 90s and ultimately wrote this semi-famous essay called Confessions of Recovering Environmentalist, which is also the title of a very good book of essays he put out. He came to feel like, you know, at its origins, the environmental movement was this movement that was very anti-tentat.

technology that was very pro-limit that had this sense that we need to take a kind of ascetic posture and restrain ourselves in the face of this consumer society that's always saying more, more, and more. And he felt like over the course of the 80s and 90s, environmentalism shifted toward this movement that was much more centered on sustainability. And he saw sustainability as just this idea that we can keep living the way we live now, except we'll make it sustainable through technology, right? So no longer asking you to ride your bike rather than drive, but we'll just, we'll make the car is green, right? And he saw this as a kind of betrayal of the environmental movement. So when I was a college professor, my PhDs in literature, but I taught in an environmental studies department,

I signed Kings North because I think, you know, most young people who are interested in the environment think about sustainability as like the end-all be-all, right? And it was very challenging for them to read this guy who was trying to call attention to the ways in which sustainability is kind of a corporatized model of environmentalism that we've been all sold over the last few decades. Oh, interesting. So he was around before that. I mean, I always think of sustainability, I mean, you were the environmental studies professor, so tell me if I'm wrong. But this emerges once you have the sort of co-option of the environmental movement by political parties. And it's like, oh, okay, this is no longer the monkey wrench gang against the governor of, you know, whatever. It's like, yeah, we're the Al Gore, we're green. And they had to make it palatable. Okay. So he was from this old school. I mean, I read somewhere, maybe it was even in your review. Like he was from the old like chain yourself to. the bridge type of like yeah yeah yeah interesting okay so he gets disillusioned he writes these manifestos and again tell me this was in the 2000s like the tell me the timeline yeah i think confessions of recovering environmentalist comes out uh late oz or maybe around 2011 i think the book is

around that oh interesting um and then so he makes a radical move right this is when he's like i'm i'm gonna disappear i'm gonna go to a farm i mean he becomes a wickin for a while like what What happens to Kings North once he kind of gets fed up with the environmental movement? Yeah, you know, he seems like a guy who was kind of on a sort of spiritual quest. I think the early version of the environmental movement where he's chaining himself to trees and so on and so forth. Gave him a real sense of purpose, is my sense, right? And that as that movement became corporatized, he went looking for meaning and purpose elsewhere. You know, at a certain point, I think he became a wikin.

He, you know, moved to, you know, the countryside. eventually more recently he's converted to Orthodox Christianity, but clearly he's a guy who's been on a kind of a quest for meaning in a society that he feels like is sort of like hedonistic and overdetermined by, you know, the constant intrusion of technology into our lives. Yeah, and you've read a lot of his work. So my understanding is he's a smart guy. Like he wrote a novel in a trilogy of novels, actually. In like an old form of English or something like this. He's a poet. Like he's written like really good essays.

Like clearly he's got a mind that's going at high horseback. power, which is probably driving some of the frustration. Okay, so he sort of disappears at some point. So when does he emerge as like a substack? That's kind of his thing now, right? Like, that's how he reemerged in our current culture is through substack. Yeah, I mean, he did write some novels. He wrote another work of nonfiction at some point in the teens or maybe early 2000s.

And he did start substacking in the early 2000s. I believe this is when he launches his substack around the time of COVID, I think, or maybe a bit before. And he started writing the subtext called Abbey of Miss Rule. And he started writing about what he calls the machine or machine civilization. So this idea, and he's indebted to a bunch of other sort of critics of technology of who have, you know, sort of referred to society as a machine. But his basic kind of insight is that, you know, our society is increasingly organized around using technology to remake, not just nature, but human nature. And I think that's where we see the connection to some of his earlier work. His earlier work was really focused on the way that the environmental movement went from being a kind of degrowth Luddite movement to being a pro-tech movement.

We're going to use sustainable green technology to solve the climate crisis and all these problems. And his central insight is like actually that move is just all across culture. Like our entire civilization has become organized against the idea of limits. And that just comes to see technology as a way to remake nature, but also human nature in service of our whims and desires. So he's, okay, so he's kind of disillusioned from the environmental movement. He's got this view of like, why are we giving up on a sort of more aesthetic, sort of anti-growth type of mindset? COVID comes.

He's online. He's riding substacks. And he's like, I'm going to take an even bigger swing here. This critique of the environmental movement is a critique of culture. And so I guess that's what he's working out on his substack in the pandemic, which there's some irony here because I have to imagine because it was, you know, he's on a farm during COVID, that a lot of what he's reacting to is what he's probably encountering online.

So it's almost like he's reacting to like a digitized, sort of bastardized version of the world. Okay. So he's writing these essays and then he pulls it together into this book. Is it right to think of this book as, I mean, are these actual adapted essays from the substack or is this inspired by? Yes. Okay. A lot of it's from the substack.

Yeah, there are parts of it that are definitely new. There are parts of it that are pulled from the substack. but it's sort of his magnamope. It's the substack plus some new stuff pulled into a kind of cohesive package. And his substack's popular, it looks like. Like he was hitting your nerve. Okay. Did you know, were you following this or aware of this before you did this review for the

Atlantic? Yeah, I've been following his work for many years because I think he is one of the more interesting, unusual and challenging sort of environmental writers at the moment. I mean, he calls himself a recovering environmentalist, but I mean, I think it's a bit tongue-in-cheek. I mean, he is a guy who is deeply committed to the natural world and against the sort of constant human intrusion into the natural world. So, you know, to say he's no longer an environmentalist, I think, is to say he's abandoned a certain style of mainstream environmentalism.

But yeah, I've been following for, I mean, you know, 10 years or are more following his work because he is, I think, really interesting idiosyncratic. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but he is, you know, persistently thoughtful. I have to say this is just a brief aside. You know, I'm not an environmental thinker, but it feels like something right up his alley, is that something that's caught my attention about 21st century environmentalism is that it somehow has negotiated itself into a position where the right way to be an environmentalist is for upper middle class people to take on consumer debt. That's an amazing. It's an amazing transformation. It's like, yeah, take on this loan to buy this car that's like way more than you would normally pay for a car to finance like solar panels that you have this complicated formula where with the right rebates in 17 years I'll be making back whatever.

but basically somehow the solution for saving the plan is upper middle class people to pay interest to banks. So, shocking. Shockingly, yeah, it's not spend less. It's, you know, work out on a spread. This is upper middle class technocratics like me. It's our favorite thing to do. We worked out on a spreadsheet that by year nine with this tax credit we're going to make back or whatever. Exactly.

Just consult this chart. Yeah, exactly. All right. Okay. So then this book comes out. Before we get into the reaction, I have some theories about it. I want to get a little bit more into the book. So you mentioned, you know, he uses this phrase, the machine.

And, you know, this is, he's drawing from a long tradition here. Doesn't Louis Mumford actually use literally the word the machine in his. Yeah, the machine, the mega machine, exactly. Yeah, the mega machine. So he's drawing on Mumford and a whole host of people. Yeah. For a little, it's technique. Kevin Kelly, the technium.

Let me give you, all right, I'm going to give you my take. I'm going to give you my short summary of what I think this sort of intellectual move is. And then I want you to tell me, like, why this is not quite right or like the way you see it. it. So what I see like the technical, because, you know, I love the big polymissist, 20th century tech polymissist, right? I just think it's, it's just muscular rite. It's like, let's just go for it. Right. Like, they don't care. They're just swinging. Louis Mumford, I love this story. If you read, like, the author's notes to techniques and civilization, and he's like how I wrote that book, there's such a different time for the internet. He's like, well, I went to Europe for like two years

so that I could, there's all of these museums of industry in small towns, like all throughout Germany, They were like, here is our tractor, whatever. And he's like, so I just spent like two years going from museum to museum, constructing from scratch a history of technology. And then I came back and wrote my book. Like, that's, you know, that's not today. Now it's like I had a tweet that did well and I'm going to riff on it. But anyways, okay, so here's my theory, right?

Is that those writers are in the tradition of this, like a Yuval Harari ID, but they're in this tradition of like, look, their human civilization is defined by commitment to very, abstractions is what allows like, you know, Neolithic, post-Neolithic civilization to exist. You have, like, governments and God and human rights and, you know, liberalism or whatever. These are like ideals that are abstract. You can organize activity around and that you get in sort of a post-Marxist world,

a lot of these technological critics having this idea of like, you know what, like Marx was pointing out about economic systems, you can have these abstractions that arise that are kind of ruling us or that we live by that we didn't really choose or maybe they're a little bit more emergent or it's not. We don't even really have a name for it. should name it and be careful about it and maybe we need to reject some of these. And this is where we got this line of critique. It was all about identifying these sort of emergent abstractions around technology and culture that, that, hey, let's recognize these. It's not what we want.

And so you have the machine or you have, you know, the technique or whatever it is. And this is the tradition that Kingsnorth is going back to. You're like, yeah, that's the right way to talk about it. I think it's different than the way we've been writing about this recently, which we can get to. But is that, am I over, from a literature perspective, am I oversimplifying there? What am I missing there about like this intellectual tradition this belongs to? No, I think that's entirely correct. I think he's in the sort of Jacquelol, Mumford, Martin Heidegger,

sort of tradition of criticisms of technology. You know, that's, that seems spot on to me. I think that's the, it's very self-consciously. That's the intellectual lineage he situates himself within. Okay. So then you say really the right way to understand the machine and his push against the machine, And you say it's really an argument about limits. What do you mean by that in your review?

Yeah, I think he's really trying to say that most of human civilization now is organized around a rejection of limits, which is another way of saying that most of the arguments we have right now are arguments about the place of nature and human life, right? So whether that is something like gender issues, right? That is what seems like a superficial culture war is actually an argument about like, okay, what role should nature play in human life? how much deference should we pay to nature? Is nature something to be overcome or is it something to be sort of like worked within? And he like I said, he comes at this, this version or of thinking

about the machine out of his prior sense of like the failings of the environmental movement, which went from being a pro limit to sort of like an anti-limit movement centered around. How do we find a way to keep our current level of material comforts sustainable, right? And we can do that by wind farms. We can do that by nuclear power. We can do that by increasing intrusions into the natural world. And one of his early books, he has this great phrase where he's like, you know, it used to be the case, you know, that clear cutting, you know, mountain tops was bad. Now we clear cut mountain tops to put solar panels up in the name of the environment, you know. And his basic insight is that maneuver is all across culture now.

And most of the arguments we are having are about whether we should or should not be limited by our human nature. I mean, for Kings North, you know, what a human is is a creature that is born with a sexed body and a brain capable of seeking wisdom and then eventually it dies, right? Like, that's what we are fundamentally. And he sees a lot of modern life and particularly technology as oriented around making those fundamental facts about our sexed bodies or about our intelligence seeking nature or even death negotiable, right? I mean, you only have to look at all the Silicon Valley startups centered around longevity treatments for, you know, life. extension to sort of see what he's on about. So that's kind of his central insight that he's working with, is we have organized society entirely around a rejection of limits as our kind of ultimate good. All right. We're going to take a quick break from my conversation to hear

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This allows you to focus on your therapy goals and not the headache of finding a practitioner. This December start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash deep questions. That's better, h-elp.com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's get back to my conversation with Tyler. So even though his general intellectual approach is similar to some of these past books, this feels what's new about his details. to, you know, if you read like the Mega Machine and Mumford, I guess there's really more an argument about like political power.

It's like the way the pharaohs organize the entire culture around the production of the pyramids, right? Or a lull falls more, I guess. I mean, everyone's read that book, but it's also kind of hard to fully make sense of it. But like like a lull, you know, when we talk about technique, it's more about, oh, this obsession with like process and efficiency. Yeah. Yeah, but it's sort of more of, you know, it's very French. It's like, well, that's, that's, you know, this is not, this is not a culture. This is the wrong culture, whatever.

But it's not really about limits, right? It's about the, don't, like, the wrong people, you know, are in charge. The wrong people are taking, you know, advantage. So this, I guess this is where the environmental strain, if I understand this right, is making Kingsnors argument more unique. Because that, he's coming at it from a degrowth perspective, which is very different than some of the other. the other 20th century thinkers. Okay. Okay, so interesting.

So he writes this book. It's, yeah. And this is, by the way, why, like, part of us fascinating about it if you read this book is that, like, his politics are incoherent in, like, a 21st century context. They're very coherent in terms of what you just said. But as you mentioned, if you're, if you're like, we need limits the return to, like, what we are as a core as humanity, you're going to have things in there that the right

will really dislike, like anti-capitalism, you know, like, look, economic growth is no good. We need to, like, push back on that really strong sort of aesthetic environmental messages, which you're not going to like if you're on the right. But if you're on the left, you're really not going to like him saying, like, a lot of gender experimentation is, like, that's the same as, like, unlimited economic growth, right? Like, it's just transhumanism. It's transhumanism. Yeah, that we throw that in there.

And he's, you know, there's sort of like a nationalist strain in there. like we need this sort of return to, you know, our, what, you know, we're part of a particular place and we're, like, connected to that place. He's anti-mass immigration. It's so he's because if you're thinking about things through limits, just like everyone goes everywhere and it's this global cosmopolitan community. You know, like, that doesn't make sense. Those politics are incoherent on like a modern scale. So how is that, I mean, I thought you handled it really well in your piece. You're basically like, yes, let's not get in the weeds there.

Like, what matters is, like, what is the policy? what is the framework he has that like maybe leads to that seeming incoherence. Let's stick with the main argument. I think other coverage had a little bit harder time with it. So how did that affect what's going on when this thing, when this book landed? Yeah, I think you're right. I think people view the politics of the book is incoherent. I actually would make the inverse case that the politics of the book are very coherent

and that the politics that dominate particularly American society are extraordinarily incoherent, right? I mean, the point I always make is that, you know, other people before me, I mean, Michael Lind has made this point, but like the Republican Party historically, like pre-Trump is very anti-limit on the economy and very pro-limit on culture. The left has been very anti-limit on culture and very pro-limit on the economy, right? And so you have this, like, schizophrenic mismatching on each side of like a pro-limit disposition on the economy or culture, married with an anti-limit disposition on the other hand, right? And Kings North is like, just anti-limit across the board, right? Because the left and right are often like libertarian

about culture economics, but anti-libertarian about the other term, you know? And he's just like sort of like anti-libertarian across the board. We need to draw limits. We need to have limits to our economy. We need to have like, you know, work within a national context and culture and a nation state. We need to be opposed to the constant intrusion into both, you know, human nature, viewing our bodies and the natural world alike as things to be engineered and optimized, right? So I think as politics are actually remarkably coherent and I think it's only the the basically ideological disorder of you know American politics in particular that make him confusing you know I think you see that confusion in some of the reviews I think

people like people just literally confused like I'm not quite sure what to do here like I like this but this doesn't make sense wait is he a bad guy but maybe but maybe he's not maybe I need to condescend you know my my home publication the New Yorker tends to do that That tends to be our M.O. sometimes is like, oh, I'm going to have to kind of condescend to this about this person because, like, he, let me, I'll just point out the ways that like he is incoherent or hypocritical and then on the cool guy. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. So, but what is his, all right, so the book comes out. I want to get to a second and why it picked up so much coverage. But sticking with what he's saying, in the end, what is he pushing towards? Like, what is the program beyond a descriptive program? I think what is provocative about against the machine in particular, and you see this going back in his other work, but in particular really acutely and against the machine is that there is no program. He is saying really clearly, he's a bit of a fatalist, I think, in a certain way. I think this is partly probably informed by his Christianity, where it's sort of like a leave to Caesar, what is Caesar's kind of thing. But he really does think probably not a whole lot we can do to sort of like at a macro level resist the pace of technology. If you just like look at the course of human history, it is just like a relentless, you know, march forward of this, this machine. And so the task at hand is to figure out, like, where to draw your limits. And that's kind of where he sort of ends is like, you know, you might not agree with everything I say here about transgenderism or about transhumanism or about like X, Y or Z. But like the question you need to ask yourself is like, where are my personal limits? Where am I going to say, no, like this intrusion of technology into my life is too much. Maybe it's, I'm going to get rid of my smartphone or I'm not going to let my kids have screens. Maybe if you live in a city. And this is where I think he's like a really, there's a way in which he has this romantic streak. But at the same time, he's, he's kind of pragmatic. He's like, look, the limits you can

draw if you are a professional class guy with a laptop job in a city, the limits you're going to be able to draw are different than maybe what I can draw on my subsistence far. Maybe you need your smartphone to work. Maybe that's not the limit to draw. But he is really trying to say, like, we probably can't stop the progress of this thing, but we can create these pockets of resistance and our own personal lives where we are trying to carve out some space for sort of, you know, fundamentally human modes of living that aren't just drenched with the sort of, you know, march of technology. So I think it's a really anti-programmed book, you know.

So, and in his life is supposed to be, let's just give an example of that to an extreme. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're going to get fitness advice, you kind of want the guy who's an incredible shape, even though you're like, look, I can't, I'm not going to look like the Peloton instructor because they do this professionally. but I really want someone who looks like the Peloton instructor, you know, giving me the advice and that maybe I'm going to exercise more.

Yeah. If not, so let's make sure I have all of his limits right. So he lives in, Ireland, Galway County somewhere. He's on a farm. They grow their own food.

Kids are homeschool. Homeschool kids. No smartphones. He, he secretly makes his living, not secretly, but substack, I assume.

Ironically. Yeah. But he kind of leans into that a little bit. Or like he doesn't avoid it. He's like, yeah, I'm on here. I don't know. It's all terrible. I mean, he's not like running from it.

He's not trying to justify it. Then they, and he's Orthodox. He used to be Wiccan. He likes to be outside. So nature's really important. He spends a lot of time outside and is now he's Orthodox Christian. So he's sort of, which is a more, you know, that along with Catholicism are the two real sort of ritualistic Christian denomination. So it's really like heavy on ritual.

the nomination where so he's trying to connect to whatever the transcendent and and find these like deeper more mystical spiritual meanings in his life that's basically okay yeah and that's a big that's a life of limits yeah and it's like pro-island and anti it's crumudgeonly in some ways and like anarchic in another it's an anarchic promulgin is sort of like an interesting type in the world of ideas like on the one hand it's like it's very anarchic on the other hand, he's like, you know, kids these days and with their like pronouns and open borders. And like, it's like, he's all over. It's interesting.

You know, he is. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, the thing I think is important, though, is he is. And the reason I think I find him especially compelling is that even when he talks about a frot cultural issue, like gender reassignment surgery, he is. And perhaps it's that his thinking has taken a kind of sort of more religious bent,

but he is kind of kind of compassion forward where he's like, look, I'm not interested in scapegoating people who have questions about their gender identity. They are not causing the problems in, you know, in Western society, regardless of whatever the conservative say. But like, I want us to think about, like, what does it mean to actually think of sex as something open to technological negotiation, right? That's a huge shift in how we think about what a human being is born with the sex body, right? And so his approach on a lot of even these issues where he is curmudgeonly is very much like, you know, this is actually a huge shift in how we've historically done things. And like, what is the price of that? And what comes along with it?

You know, and I do think part of what makes it harder to dismiss him, and I think why he's gotten more of a, particularly with this last book, more of a mainstream reception, is that he does kind of, even as he has some conservative positions, I think, he really eschews a kind of like politics of cruelty, you know. Yeah. And that's part of what makes him, I think, compelling, you know. Right. He's not a political polemicist. So what, why did this book? I mean, am I correct? My impression was it was everywhere in a way that like any author would dream. Yeah. All the mainstream publications and not just reviews. Like the Times is. not just a review, but like a long profile, a long profile in the magazine, you know, in the New Yorker. You wrote a big splashy review for The Atlantic. He's on stage with, you know, big names, et cetera. I'm seeing him pop up.

He's on Ross Dew Hutz podcast. He's everywhere, right? Okay. So assuming I'm correct, this book was everywhere. Why was it everywhere? You know, I think something I've been really fine and compelling, fascinating lately. I'm not an especially released person. I was raised Presbyterian, but I don't go to church every week or anything like that.

As was I, sir. As was I. I know Presbyterianism, we connect on that predestination, but they don't talk about it. Exactly. So, I mean, I think one of the reasons it's landed so much is to me, I've been really frustrated with a lot of the critiques, particularly of AI. And I think it's worth noting so much of this book is about like the coming of AI and the way that's just another turn of the screw and this sort of like anti-humanist halt of technology.

I think one of the reasons it's like, landed so well in the mainstream is that, you know, he really has an account of AI as a kind of and tech as a crisis of human meaning, right? I think when the left in particular tends to focus on an issue like AI or big tech, right? They're like, this is bad for the environment. This exploits laborers, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the people, the owners are bad. The people who in the companies are bad. And for what it's worth, all of those critiques I agree with. But I think it still doesn't attend to the fact that, like, this stuff isn't just bad because it exploits the environment and it exploits labor and it's their oligarchate companies run by billionaires.

It's also bad because this technology is, like, a real threat to, like, human purpose, human relationships, you know, human meaning. And I think it's, it's not a coincidence that some of the better critiques of AI that are attendant to that element of human meaning, right, have been from some sort of like religiously infected, inflected thinkers. And I think that's why this is, hits so hard is that that's what Kings North is focused on. Yes, he abhors, you know, he is a kind of, you know, an interesting sort of conservative. He totally abhors sort of the, you know, corporations and the oligarchy class and so on and so forth. But like for him, the fundamental fact of the matter is that this is, the world we live in is increasingly nihilistic. And it's

nihilistic because of the way we've allowed technology to shape it, you know. And I think that speaks to something that people feel very deeply. But that hasn't been as articulated as well by by some other folks. That's fascinating. All right. So let me run with that for a second. Because I think you're on to explain something that makes a lot of sense to me. And it's helping with some confusions.

I mean, so obviously I know the world of like tech criticism, tech writing well because it's the world in which I've also existed for many years. And, you know, it seems like in the sort of post-smartphone age, we just think about like the last 10 years of tech criticism. There's really two major lenses that it falls into. I think there's like a political lens,

which is basically I'm aligned with a. particular type of like political or tribal identity and we're sort of seeing the technology through that lens. So the things that we already pre-care about, how does it fall against those things? And this is where you get like the critiques you're talking about. It's like, well, I'm going to see AI through the lens of environmental issues, which I care about. I'll think about it through like, you know, capitalism, anti-capitalism issues.

I'll think about the people involved. Like, who are these leaders? Are they like, you know, are they sufficiently on our team or not that team? Are they friends of the wrong side, et cetera, like that? The other lens that is very popular is a psychological lens, right? I think this is the direction that really like Nicholas Carr kicked off at the beginning of the 21st century where like you're jumping from a world of Neil Postman, which is very much like cultural critique to a world of like, let's look at what the brain science says about the internet. And that kicked off like a new engagement. And, you know, like John Haidt would be probably like the leader of this movement right now.

But like really thinking about we're looking at the data about what this does to your brain. So it's a very sort of professionalized, medicalized, like look at the technology. And those seem to be the two major frames. And I kind of agree with you. They both, they're both really lacking for people, right? They're kind of messy. The political frame is no good because it's just confused because, you know, both sides have their issues with technology. Both sides really use the technology.

You get a lot of incoherence, I think especially with things like social media where the political frame makes you if you're a tech journalist, you're kind of already addicted to these tools. you use them all the time. It's a critique of yourself to say, like, let's not use this. You really want the focus to be like Elon Musk is bad and not also why are we using a global conversation platform. Like maybe that's a bad way for humans to interact. It's like it's about the people involved. It's about what's on the platforms.

This has always been my fight since I, even since my book, Digital Minimalism, which is like the people writing about technology think the real problem is like what's on the platforms where the people who are upset by technology think the real problem is the platform's existence. and like how much they're using it. And then psychological is fine, but it's like, it's sterile.

And I think it would be very successful, but at the same time, it is kind of like dry and sterile. And it's sort of everything is just reduced to we want these lines on graphs of mental health to be better or something like that. So, so Kings North is coming in and say, well, what about like the humanist approach? Like just what it means to be a thriving human being and we want them to be in there. That feels pretty novel. I mean, I'm thinking this through. I mean, that feels pretty novel, even in like the classic big, I mean, I guess the big polemical tech, anti-tech books of the 20th century were like, this is bad for humanity to be like obsessed with technique. But it's not like their goal was necessarily this like richer vision of flourishing as a human.

It was just like this is not a reasonable way to live or it's serving like the capitalist but no one else. All right. That's interesting. So you think the AI, now do you think it's true that the AI moment, here's my theory then on the fly, the AI moment is more open to this type of human. humanist turn because the last big moment, which was the social media moment, was too confused culturally that it was the problem was this technology was also supposed to be for a while like the savior of culture and like the tool for, you know, overturning to dictatorships and new activism and expression and like it would it was like coded with all these other things

and it was really confusing and then the lead, then Mark Zuckerberg wasn't mean enough to Trump and now like, well, maybe these technologies are bad but but or maybe there's doing them wrong. We need our own versions. Like, I think social media really should have been that moment, but it was too, it was too confusing culturally. But AI, like, who's really on, I mean, some reporters are excited about it. But, like, it's not, no one is looking at this and saying, I don't know, it's coded differently. It feels like it's coming out of nowhere. The use cases are murky.

And everyone is like, like, not, but like, er, like a little bit uneasy, kind of shrugging their shoulders. So I don't know. It's just a case. Let me throw this back to you. I'm just rambling here. AI, this is this turn, we're ready for a mirror humanist approach? Like, what's going on? Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to think about, because I think this relates to the return of the humanistic question that you're bringing up, right? I mean, it's important

to think about, like, what is the basic financial model of social media versus, like, what is the basic financial model and set of presuppositions that underline AI? The basic model of social media, right, is that we're going to convince you that you need an algorithmic layer to mediate your human relationships, right? Facebook, you need this algorithm in between you and your friends, right? It's going to help optimize your friendships, keep you in touch. I mean, I think you see this even more acutely with Tinder and, like, dating websites, right? Like, which have totally remade human courtship such that people don't even feel like they can date outside of the apps, right? We need this algorithmic intermediary that is going to help me make human connections, right? That's the whole

business model. And so much of social media and so much of like tech in general in the, you know, 2000s, is about like, okay, where are some places where we can insert, like, what are some industries, what are some dynamics where we can insert an algorithmic intermediary between people, right? I mean, Uber, it's the same thing. You don't hail your own cab anymore. You have this algorithmic intermediary. What is novel about AI, right?

The chain for social media, if you think about it like a chain, is human, uh, algorithm, human, right? Um, what AI is aspiring to do very clearly, right? Like, what it's actually aspiring to do, as opposed to what the kind of the kind of, companies say, right? Like Sam Altman will say, we're going to get this digital paradise of milk and honey and it's going to remake our economy and we're all going to have universal basic income. And the robots are going to do all the work and blah, blah, blah. But if you actually look at like the use cases that are taking off right now, they are all predicated on creating algorithmic

substitutes for human relationships. So no longer human algorithm, human, just you and the algorithm and no human on the other side. You see this with the rise of AI therapists, right? therapy is very expensive. But if you don't have good insurance, why don't you try a chatbot therapist, right? The rise of AI companions, AI sex bots, AI romantic companions. It's the same thing, right? Why go through the process of Tinder and trying to find another human being when you can just have this relationship directly with the algorithm? I mean, same thing with even senior citizen care, right? There are now these companies that are trying to like do senior care with, oh, seniors are lonely. Maybe their family lives across the country. Actually talking with a chatbot can really help a lot. alleviate some of that loneliness. So I think one of the reason there's been such a humanistic backlash to AI is I think under the social media model, there was still this sense that like, oh, they're trying to foster human connection and this algorithm is helping optimize that. And now that pretense, and that was always a lie, but that pretense is now totally gone. And I think a lot of people can see what the game is now where they're like, oh, okay.

So like there are all these people who have like AI boyfriends now. I see what's going on here, you know? And so I think that's part of it. I just think AI is touching these fundamental parts of human life in a way that social media did, but in a more oblique way, and that was harder to interpret and read, and where it was possible to at least initially read more charitably, you know, and that's just not possible here, I think, for a lot of people at least. Right. Because you're interacting directly with the algorithm. It's not, it's not a hidden substrate. It's, I'm just talking, and the thing I'm talking to is using fluent language. So it's just directly attempting to be human-like.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, I buy, I do buy that, right? But it's kind of an AI is an interesting case because, I mean, I buy that that it has these flashy, flashily worrisome use cases like the AI boyfriends, like the companions for old people. I also don't think these use cases are going to end up being major economic sectors. Because like ultimately, like what it's really selling for most people right now, and it's a

problem from the AI companies is distraction, right? Like, this is interesting, right? But the problem is the short form video algorithmic curation companies have really, really gotten good at distraction. Like, I mean, a conversation is interesting even with like a, you know, a sex bot is yeah, surely interesting. But man, TikTok has really refined that art of like capturing your attention in a way that like the predictions keep paying off with values and your short term motivation

system is like, this is what we want to do. I mean, it's just so much more, it's just so much more pure. But, okay, so but you think the humanistic impulse, whether AI in that form survives like a major thing, the humanistic impulse that AI creates, can that carry over to these other technologies, which to my mind are right now have been doing so much more high impact damage, you know, the culture. Does it carry over like a King's Northean type of program? Or is that like, no, just I don't want something to, don't uncanny value me. I just don't want the thing that talks like a human or looks like a human. And maybe we need to like reject chatbots that we like are friends with. But everything else like that's just here.

Or can the humanistic impulse spread? I think there's a real gap or lag time right now between where the American public is at in terms of their patience for Silicon Valley and tech and where the political class is at. You know, obviously this is all anecdotal, but I write a lot about tech. I talk to a lot of people about tech. And everyday people are so furious and the constant intrus. and the constant intrusion of screens into their lives, and especially people with kids into their kids' lives. And there are so many people around the country who are white, hot, mad

at this just constant creep of more and more and more technology, right? I mean, you can see it in the takeoff of anti-tech K-12 schools all around the country, right? And so, you know, in the recent election, I voted, of course, at the polling station, there were all these people outside with, like, you know, booths or whatever. And by far, the line, the longest line at any of these booths was this woman who worked for an anti-tech, anti-screen, K-through-12 organization, just handing out information packets. And people were like a long line just waiting to get information from this woman, you know. So I think there's a real gap between where the public is and where the political class is. I think, you know, I don't like to subscribe to the great man theory of history.

But in a certain way, I do think we were waiting for a major American political candidate, whether it's a presidential campaign. candidate or someone with a large political platform, taking a strong anti-tech stance, I think, you know, the voter base is absolutely, is absolutely there for that. I think a lot of people are sick and tired of it. People don't believe the lies coming out of Silicon Valley anymore about, you know, like, you know, improving the human, you know, our lives. No one believes that. And so I think that's the big problem, I see. It's not that I actually think people are pretty impatient with all of it. That doesn't mean they've given up the technology. They feel addicted, right? They, they, they're, they're, we are not very successful at putting our phones down or getting off Twitter or whatever it is.

But they want someone to come along and say, I'm going to regulate those people so it's not going to be so easy for us all to be addicted. What does that political program look like? Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I mean, I think in particular they have to regulate the availability of these apps for kids, right? I think they should 100% be focused on getting technology out of the classroom, which is, you know, destroying learning for all parties involved and making the jobs of teachers harder, right? I think they should ban, you know, dark patterns and algorithms, like these features of platforms that are designed to be habit-forming are addictive. I mean, one of the least discussed but most crucial parts to me is like the video game industry, which is literally just run like the gambling industry. And they have all of these tricks.

Oh, if you don't log in every 24 hours, you're going to lose half your cows. That should be illegal, right? Like these ways of just trapping people in these dark patterns in the attention economy, like those are all. problem is susceptible to regulation. I mean, to take it back to Kings North, this is one place where I actually do, I think he's too fatalistic because some of these problems are actually problems that politicians could solve if they weren't so interested in getting money from Silicon Valley, right? Like, there are some issues here that can be fixed with legislation. And so, yeah, I just think we haven't, we haven't gotten a political class yet who's willing to mobilize,

but I think the grassroots support for that's there. What do you feel about Section 230 reform done in such a way that it basically becomes like economically unfeasible to have a company that makes its revenue off of millions of users contributing free content that it algorithmically curates. I've become fascinated by this. I think there's, I'm going to have on an expert to help me understand why this is hard. And maybe this is from a market perspective not the right thing to do. They basically just turn off an industry because, but I don't know, what have you, have

you heard these, these type of options where you basically say, look, like you're liable. I would hit AI too. like you're liable for the things that are produced from your apps, the content that you're produce. I don't care where it comes from. Like, you're just liable. So you can be a newspaper, no problem. But you can't make a living off of 100 million users and we'll just sort of sort

their content and show it the people. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, I think that's totally reasonable. I mean, I tend to be very heavy-handed with this kind of thing. I think, you know, there's a way in which I think one of the things that the state should do is save people from themselves, you know, I think there is a libertarian ethos that even non-libertarians often apply to technology where they're like, well, if an adult wants to be on Twitter or if an adult wants to play video games, that's their free will that they're exercising. It's like, okay, but like, what if the thing in question is designed to curb your free will and make you keep returning again and again and again and again and again?

Or what if it is designed to take the political views you start with and then radicalize them and ratchet it up and ratchet it up and ratchet it up, right? Then we're out of a territory where it's just a question of like free will and you're freely choosing to engage something. So yeah, I really think we need to be much more heavy-handed about technology. And I think we need to think about, I think we need to recognize. Look, if you, whether or not you want to see, you think addiction is the right terminology for our relationship to technology. It's the one that gets thrown around a lot.

I know some people who specialize in addiction who think, well, it's not quite right, right? Because you don't die from a smartphone withdrawal and the way that you die from a, They talk about the blood-brain barrier and whatever. Yeah. I've gone down this road. But if you call it a moderate behavioral addiction, then like the psychologist are okay with it. Yeah, yeah. So like, whatever you want to call it, I'm totally agnostic on that.

But like, I think, you know, we need to, we need to be more heavy-handed about saving people from these, these dark patterns, these sort of addiction economies. So we need a Kingsnorthian mindset to do that because it requires this idea to say human flourishing matters. Yes. Yes. And I think, I think something related here is that a huge frustration. I have is that when you take an anti-tech attitude in that way, the rejoinder often is, but look at the last hundred years of human development. There are less people starving than any time in history.

The GDP is up around the world. There's less poverty than any time in history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, all of which is true. I mean, you can quibble with the details around the margins, but that picture is basically true. That has nothing to do with Facebook. That has nothing to do. You know what I mean?

But there is this constant bundling of like all technology into that story of the alleviation of suffering over the 20th and 21st century such that any time you critique something that has nothing to do with that project of human improvement. It's like, well, you're taking this anti-tech stance, but look at all these other good things technology has given us. Yeah, there's a logical fallacy there. I get all the time. It can go either way. But like one way I often get it is like we can often find for past technologies overreaction that we later thought, but it's a huge logical fallacy to go from the existence of those cases to the universal of All negative reaction

that technologies is an overreaction. Like, well, that's just like a clear philosophical blunder. I mean, you put that reducto out of sardom, no technology could ever be bad. Like, clearly there has to be

some technologies that are bad. You can't leap from, I got this. This was on, God, I remember when I was doing digital minimalists. I wrote about this and he wrote me about it. I was on Brian Copplement's podcast,

which I like. But he was not really feeling my book at the time. And he was like, isn't this like phone social media stuff. This is just like kids in the 50s and their parents being like rock and roll music is bad for them or something like that. Yeah, moral panic. Yeah. But the problem about moral panics is the very fact that you have to add that modifier to it indicates there's other types of panics that aren't.

Right? Because there's so there must exist then if we have to differentiate out certain types of panics. Yeah, there's plenty of issues. Like people will be like, hey, we have these same complaints about TV and to which the answer was like, yeah. And like all those complaints were true. Like it was a big deal by the by the, Have you considered things are getting worse? Yeah.

Like, you know, they're always like this, we had a panic about this thing in the 80s. It's like, that was bad and it's worse now. Like the fact that this other panic, like, what if it was right and things are just on the decline?

Yeah. TikTok is just worse TV. Like no one was ever happy about. Yeah. Okay. I like it. Okay. So we're kind of on the same.

Now I'm really sort of, I'm grooving with Kings North. I mean, I grooved with that when I read it. And I like that major publications are covering him. You know, And I've talked about my past with this before. This is a change.

But there was a time where major publications were like openly antagonistic of me because of stances that today you would consider to be like, oh, that's like a fair. Like just being saying social media is a problem. That was a real problem as recently as like 2016. You know, like the I got really scolded by the New York Times or writing an op-ed about that. Be like social media is not as important as you think for kids. and they commissioned the response op-ed two weeks later. It just went through my op-ed quote-by-quote to say why it was wrong. Like there was such a blowback back then.

Like, this is not our sort of like liberal technocratic, like whatever, requires us to this is on our good list or whatever. And then it just like flipped like that. You know, there's like this interesting change because, you know. So I think it's really good news then that like the Atlantic writes a big review. The New York Times writes a big profile. The New Yorker writes a big profile that people are more open to this sort of humanistic critique. And I think the key thing you're saying is for Kings North's impact to be pronounced, the key is stripping away the fatalism. Yeah.

Bringing his core of humanism is stripping away the fatalism. Like are we really consigned to having to look at short form video or chat with, you know, chat with a companion? You know, do we have to? I mean, that was in your piece. I don't remember if that was you quoting Kings North or if that was you saying it. but you gave all these examples, right? Will you watch television shows written by language models? Will you let machines craft your emails and college essays or obituaries for your loved ones?

Will you get an AI-enabled girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life know that data centers are metastasizing and parched deserts are drying to cool them? I guess was this Kings North you're quoting here? No, no. That's you. Okay. Yeah. So these are like the key questions.

But you can actually answer no. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's why I find his fatalism frustrating because, you know, there's actually things we can do about a lot of these problems. Maybe not all of them, right? I mean, certainly not overnight. But it's not as though they're totally intractable, you know.

And I think he is somebody who's motivated by like the sweep of human history is like, militates in favor of the inertia of what he would call the machine. Yeah. This human intrusion into technology into human life is just going to grow and grow and grow and grow. And that's a perfectly reasonable point. of view, but I do think it undersells the degree to which some of these problems are actually things we could get a handle on, right? And we're seeing this right now with schools, banning smartphones. It's working, right? It's it's like actually working. It's improving social cohesion. It's improving face-to-face contact. It's making kids more curious. Kids are going to the libraries when they

weren't previously using the libraries, right? We have examples of this working. And so, yeah, I don't think we should be so fatalistic. Right. So there's a difference here between like the industrial revolution. I mean, it seems like when it comes to these sort of like technological transformations and whether we can push back or not, there are certain transformationals which are like these, I guess the term would be general technologies or general use technologies. The Industrial Revolution was a new substrate on which the economy ran and it was a substrate that could produce 100x more whatever. I'm making up that number, but you know what I mean, like 100x more economic activity than before and that spreads out. But what's happening with technologies that we're worried about is not really a general use technology. the internet's a general use technology. If you turned off the internet, that could be a problem.

But really like TikTok and Facebook and SORA and even chat GPT, like none of these are right now general use technologies. They're actually like very siloed. And they, something I wrote, which I quote a lot because I was like, this is the most important thing I read about technology that no one's read was I did a New Yorker piece a few years ago where I said this is a really big deal. It's like 2023 that the other social media companies are following TikTok's model because in the short term they're worried about user migration. And they're switching away from things that are connected to sociality and connecting the people you know or the people that you chose to follow. And they're switching to purely algorithmically curated video as being their main thing they offer, which now they have done, right? We now know Derek Thompson talked about recently that from the FTC filings with meta from the summer, they now say like 7% of Instagram activity involves people who you know who they are. Right.

So like they made this transition. And my thing I wrote back then when this was first starting to happen is like this is really the beginning of the end for those massive monopoly platforms. because once you really have become just a pure distraction source, you're playing the game of just pure distraction, you're precarious. Like, there's nothing fundamental about you. You can be swapped in for something else. Someone else can come along just more interesting.

You can be regulated out of existence. Like, you're no longer trying to make a case that you offer something really important. And you no longer have a lock-in advantage like Facebook used to have, where your friends were on this platform or nowhere else. So no one could ever build a competitive Facebook. But if Facebook is just showing you stuff that algorithms are selected, well, it doesn't matter what platform I'm on. It doesn't, I mean, there is no user mode.

And so, like, a lot of these companies we're worried about. They're very precarious right now, both culturally and, like, economically. They're not a substrate on which growth is, you know, built. They're not core to, like, how the culture functions. It's, you know, television, just in a more portable form that's more useful. And that's something that we're willing to do without or to really change your relationship to. So, yeah. It's also bad.

Yeah. Like a lot, like, in terms of quality, not just like it's bad. for us, but it's often just slop. And I think that's part of the thing here, too, is like, you know, a lot of this is just garbage, you know, and I think people don't have a sense, like, I think there was a time when people believe that Facebook had a use case, right, where it's like, oh, it's improving my life in a way and it's keeping me in contact with XYZ or, like, Instagram, I get to see photos of my friend's kids.

And I think that, like, since that there's some, like, inbuilt purpose to these things and my needs are being served, that is totally gone. And, like, people just know that, like, oh, I'm returning to this thing because I'm addicted to it, not because it's like giving me anything back, you know? And I think even recently there was this set. So I agree. That makes them more precarious, right? Because, like, I think people know they're not getting anything back out of this, you know.

And I think people care about quality, right? Like, I think we've seen this, you know, again and again. Like, as soon as, like, cable television and premium television made the golden age of television possible, it did really, really well. Even though we were coming out of a period where, like, early cable television, uh, greatly increased a number of options and greatly increased, like, the, the slop that was available, right? We began to get just like really low-in reality shows and just a lot of like following people with cameras. It just did, you know, whatever, that fixed fish tanks or whatever. But as soon as premium television model became a thing, like it was just huge.

People like, I would rather watch better shows. Movies have survived all of these things. You know, I was just reading a book about the history of 20th Century Fox, for example. Oh, interesting. Movies were struggling in the 50s because television was gaining a foothold. And, you know, okay, hey, this is this, people are saying this is getting better. we don't need to go to the movies as much. How did they regain their economic footing?

Is it like they switched to cinemascope? They switch to a 70 millimeter prints. They switch to much higher quality film stock, more spectacular type of movies. They just made the product better where it used to, you know, it was in a smaller frame and it was more just like where else you can see visual entertainment. They just made it better and people like, oh, I want to see better things. And like the industry became really successful after that as people were saying, I'm happy to see really good things. the television's at home. So yeah, people care about quality. All right. So that makes me optimistic.

All right. So then what would you recommend that? If someone is thinking about reading this book, how should they approach it? Like someone in my audience who's like, yeah, I'm also kind of about technology right now. But I don't know who Jacques-ulul is and the red mumford. And I don't know. This political stuff sounds weird. Like, how should they approach Paul Kings North to get the most out of it? Yeah. So I would say the first thing I would do is I would read that short essay. You can find it online. I think on Orion Magazine. confessions of a recovering environmentalist because I think that gives you like a and they think that's something where it's less contentious and I think people there's like that's a good way into sort of like his basic disposition his way of thinking about sort of problems around modernity

it's very thought provoking so I would start there it's short and then in terms of approaching against the machine you know I mean I would I think the the main point he's trying to get at and it's a beautifully written book and I actually don't think it's you know he cites you know Charles Taylor and and you know all sorts of you know academic and so on and so forth, and Heidegger and so on. But it's certainly not impenetrable by any means. I mean, I think that's why his subtext popular. He's a very good writer and it's very readable. But, you know, I think the takeaway is that what he's really trying to say is that what we think of as culture wars or wars about nature, right? Like all of these debates we're having over social media and algorithmic polarization or gender or immigration are actually debates about like, what does it mean to be a person?

What does it mean to be a person in it rooted in a place, right? And so I think if you go in with that disposition and that like I don't need to agree with this like particular take on every one of these issues, but that he's trying to push me to think about like, okay, what are my personal limits? And have I really thought about actually the stakes that come along with changing our conception of what it is to be a human in this way, right? And I think, you know, reading him as a provocateur. And I don't mean that to intellectually cheap in what he's doing. I think he's very sophisticated. but I think he's really trying to, there's a way in which I hate the self-help genre, but there's a way in which, like, deeply buried in against the machine is a kind of self-help

book that is asking, like, what are your personal limits? What do you care about? Where are you willing to draw the lines? Where are you able to draw the lines in your own personal life, right? And so, you know, you're going to disagree with things as you get through the book, but I think I'm going in with that frame of mind that this book is about, you know, forcing me to look more squarely at, like, what areas, of my life, have I accepted the intrusion of technology? Am I comfortable with that intrusion?

And if I want to put up some limits, what limits look realistic for me? And I think that's the central question. He's asking, it's an important one. I think we can all relate to. He's shaking things up and saying, hey, if you don't have strong limits about stuff, forget what they are, but if you don't have strong limits that are like intended for your life to be flourishing the way you think, then you're really not living life all out. Yeah. And I think there's another message in there too around, I think our fetishization of happiness. I saw the other day, Taylor Lorenza, some of her, the journalist, some are things I like, some less so, but she was complaining about an article, I believe, about work from home. And she's like, well, if you look

at data, like studies suggest people who work from home are happier than people who don't, right? And I work from home, so I'm not going to get up on some soapbox about working from home, right? But because I work from home, I definitely have less friends than I would if I was in an office, and I definitely have less social interactions on a day-to-day basis. But the argument was like, well, people who work from home are happier. And like setting aside how good people are at judging their own personal happiness, right? I think one of the things that Kingsdor was trying to say is like, are we just happiness maximizing flesh bags? Like is a human just like a happiness maximizing suffering minimizing device or is there more to human life, right?

I mean, the people in a brave new world eating soma by the fistful would certainly score very high on their happiness surveys, right? But part of Outis Huxley's point was that there's more to like. than just like the endless and infinite pursuit of happiness, you know? And so I think that's another thing he's trying to get us to think about is like, if you put up some of these limits, they might be uncomfortable and unpleasant. And maybe they will increase your happiness, whatever exactly that means. But I think they, you know, they might put you more fully in touch with what it is to be a person, you know, and that seems, you know, happiness isn't the same thing as well-being.

And I think that's one of the core messages of the book in a way, you know. Well, then I think it's fitting, like the way to the end's conversation is that we were talking about it before the camera. we turned on the cameras, but, you know, one of the key limits in Kingsnors' life is that he's sort of, he's out of the sort of economic growth cycle. He's living on a simple farm. They kind of survive off of his substack. He spends a lot of time outside. And because of this book, he had the sort of enter, like the highly online jet traveling,

sort of come to America, do a tour, be everywhere. The thing that we sort of fetishize is like the machine would say, this is what you should be doing. And it literally broke down his body. and he gave up on the tour and said, I'm going back to Ireland and I'm not, you're not going to hear for me again until January. And so like, there we go. That's Paul Kingsnorth being Paul Kingsnort. That's the example in action. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not. Yeah, totally. If there's not a sacrifice is not a limit. He's like, I'm not going to do the second half of my book tour. Yeah, that's a sacrifice. I'm going to make less money. But like that's, I don't want to live this way where proverbially we all have just been living this way, whatever that means. Okay, I love it.

All right. Well, Tyler, this was really helpful. Thanks for helping us make more sense of the book. It sounds like we're- Yeah, we're recommending them. People definitely check it out. It's going to shake things up. And it definitely fits with the way we talk about things here, you know, working backwards from huge human flourishing and the depth, you know, depth in your life and not working forwards towards whatever. So great. Tyler, thank you. Great conversation. Thank you. All right. So that was my discussion with Tyler Austin Harper. I thought that was really useful. I think we really got to some answers about why exactly this book was making such a big impact of what ideas were most important. So what I want to move on to next. is my takeaway segment where I'm going to go through and isolate the big ideas and conclusions

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All right. And with that, let's get back to our takeaways. All right. So what I want to do here is summarize my takeaways from our investigation to the question of why Paul King's Norse book is having such an impact and what lessons we should learn from it. Here's some of the big ideas I picked up. First of all, there used to be back in the early 20th century, as I talked about with Tyler, there used to be a way, and I'm going to draw this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. I'll bring out my chalkboard here. It looks nice, right, Jesse? It does. Provisorial. All right. So there used to be this way that we would talk about technology's impact where we would have some notion of a machine. So some sort of like abstractions, some sort of techno, cultural, economic abstraction that we didn't create but sort of exist.

And it's dictating the way our lives unfold. So there's sort of like particular paths I'm drawing here that come out of the machine. and we don't realize it, but like our lives are kind of being dictated by this amorphous abstraction type of thing. Like this is the way we used to, commentators used to think about technology. And so here we would have people like Jacques Alol

or Louis Mumford. Like they would talk about these big abstractions that we didn't realize existed but controlled the way we actually, our lives were unfolding, our societies were functioning. Then this transitioned at some point, right? And this was one of the ideas that came to this conversation that really caught my attention

is at some point in the 2000s, maybe I'll just label this like the 2000s over here, we went away from this way of thinking about technology as being part of these like big hidden systems that dictated our lives. And we kind of fragmented these impacts. This is what we talked about in the conversation. We kind of fragmented these impacts into like a lot of little things. You know, so maybe we have like mental health as like a separate thing.

Oh, we're going to measure the mental health impact of a, you know, a smartphone with a particular group and be like, oh, there's like a negative impact there. Or we're going to look at what's the environmental impact of like an AI data center? Oh, you know, it uses a lot of power, a lot of water, and maybe that's going to be a problem. Or maybe there's a sort of civics issue, sort of misinformation on social media is going to create problems with cohesion around certain topics, like in public health or something like that. So in the 2000s, we sort of fragmented our understanding technology's impact into like all these other little impacts. And this was not, it kind of lacked a big kind of oomph, right? Now we were sort of, oh, there's this and that and this and this affects me, but this one doesn't. It's an environment where no one's like super happy with technology, but it's also not an environment that's necessarily going to inspire a lot of major changes because there's too many little things, some of which affect you, some of which don't.

And that was kind of the state of affairs. I sort of put that the turning point from this more fragmented, very narrow understanding. of techno issues. I put that turning point maybe right around Nicholas Carr in the early 2000s where he was right in the

shallows, which took the internet technology and said, let's look at its impact on the brain. And be like, oh, there's like a specific neurological or cognitive issue here.

We're using this technology study show makes it harder to do this type of thinking. And now we were off to the races. We're now, we were seeing technology through these relatively

narrow frames. Then we have Kingsnorth come along. And I think the way to imagine King's North is he's going back. He's like, no, no, no. I want to understand technology, again, as part of one of these, like, big systems that he calls the machine.

One of these big systems, like we used to talk about with the big tech polymists from the early 20th century, that, like, really affects how our lives lead. So we're sort of back, we're back to that view again. And I think this is partially why we discovered, you know, he's beginning to catch. our attention because like this is a bigger vision, right? This is like there's this big system that's controlling so much about our lives. But here is where he gets different than what we saw back in this treatment of it from the early, the earlier in the 20th century. His complaints about the machine, they're much more about their impact on us as humans,

the kind of humanistic impact. If you read a sort of like Lewis Mumford talking about the mega machine, it's about like how we implicitly organized like labor and machine so that like the pharaohs could build the pyramids. There are often arguments about power and control about if like a lull is more about the sort of the colonization of a sort of like arts type approach to the world with a sort of scientific worldview kind of sucking the the inspiration out of like the way we approach things and letting like. economic forces have much more power. And these are really kind of influenced by Marxian type of impacts. But Kings North is more saying like, no, no, no, here's the thing about the machine that he's talking about. It makes your life impoverished. It makes your life as a human worse.

It's a fiction about like what we should be doing as humans that leads you to have a worse life. And because of that, he says, I have a response. if the machine is removing your humanity, you can fight back from the machine against the machine to make your individual life better. And you do this like Harper talked about by setting limits. Like you do this by like he, of course,

did this to an extreme, right? But, you know, like he has some cabin somewhere, a little farmhouse in County Galloway and in Ireland somewhere. And he plants crops. and, you know, he's an Orthodox Christian and he used to be, he used to be a Wiccan, and he's, there's trees, and, you know, this is expertly drawn, as everyone can see. And, like, he's really happy. He said a bunch of, he doesn't use smartphones.

He homeschools his kids, right? And he's kind of built his own life out of this by setting a lot of limits. He said, by resetting limits, I'm able to, like, create a more human life. This is why I think this caught on. It was this two-fold thing. We used to be, you know, we had these big think guys. and they're all guys at the time like writing these big think books that were like really cool theory

but like in the end it was like capitalism you know is bad or so like there wasn't much you could do about it and then we fragmented into this world of let's think about anti-tech as just like all these little narrow things and you would care about some and not others it's not something that's like motivating a lot of action right you're like oh maybe I should use my phone less or whatever

then we get Kings North and he gives a different approach here no no let's go back to the idea of like these big abstract techno cultural economic systems that are controlling our lives and we never signed up for it and then we never even really chose them but they are it's all focused on like growth and the breaking down and barriers and the denial of our corpality and humanity and you say but once you recognize that and it's making our lives worse you can fight back by setting limits again that limits actually allow you humanity to be expressed like what technology do I want to use how do I want to live

maybe I don't want to use AI at all why do I have a smartphone why it gets rid of this sort of fatalistic, like everyone has to use every tool. What else are you going to do? And said, no, no, no. Human flourishing is about setting these limits. Acknowledging, as Harper summarized, King's North View, that we are, humans are sort of like biological sex beings who, like, grow up, seek wisdom, appreciate creativity, and eventually die. And that is like the reality of the human experience.

And so we don't want to deny that. I feel like we can live forever or get rid of biology. We can actually embrace constraints. and try to actually flourish and, you know, be in nature and touch grass and not be about growth at all limits. Anyways, there's a lot of points captured, but I think this gets to the core of why this particular book was big. It gave us a much more sweeping, ambitious view of technology like we used to have,

but then connected it to what individuals could do, this idea that human flourishing could be returned if you're willing to set limits, at least to take a stand, the fight back against a machine. And in that way, I think it fixed flaws of both, of the prior models. It's also just different than we've been seen. So that's why it caught attention.

Not all the coverage is positive. We talked about it in the show. There's all sorts of like issues or this or that or that. Or hypocrisies or politics that people don't like. But man, it got people thinking because that's a big swing. This picture right here, right,

of going from, you know, you have this like really big, you have this like really big philosophical, theoretical idea and you have these like really exciting like solutions based on limits. I think this caught people's attention. and it should catch yours as well.

So as you remember, Harper ended our conversation by saying like, yeah, read the book. It's going to shake things up. He's not giving you a prescription, but he's given you a vision. One where you take control of your life and through limits you allow your humanity to be expressed in a world where no limit growth technology is trying to take that all away from you. Take it or leave it. At least it's an exciting book. So I can see why it is so popular. Interesting point, Jesse.

I don't know if you, we talked about this. I guess I talked about it briefly in the interview, but he left his book tour, Paul King's North. He was like enough of this. I don't want to like travel all over the place and like be, this is really exhausting. And I want to go back to my farm. And he just stopped this book tour and went back home. That's incredible. Yeah.

So there you go. Living the talk. Walking the talk. What's the expression? Walking the talk. All right. There we go. All right.

So that's that's our, we answer our deep question for today. Now let's hear what you have to say. We'll move on to our second segment of the show in which we answer your questions. Who do we got first, Jesse? First question is Father Brian. Is it still considered context switching if my phone vibrates my pocket during a deep work session, even if I don't check the message? No, it's not the same as if you checked a message or looked at an email inbox or a chat channel. And that's because the real cognitive harm that comes from context switching is when you actually expose your mind to new information that triggers it to switch its state.

So when I see the unread messages in an inbox, I'm being exposed to a particular context, a particular context, a particular. semantic context. Now my brain has to start firing up circuits that are relevant to those people and those requests that I'm seeing in my inbox. And it's that firing up of new circuits that creates the cognitive confusion and leads to the reduced cognitive capacity. So just feeling the phone vibrate won't have nearly that big of an impact because you're not being exposed to specific other context. Your brain doesn't know what to load up. Now, it's distracting. It's not optimal. It's still a little distracting because you're like, I'm a little, there's something someone might need me. There's a psychological cost.

Like, oh, what if someone needs me? I'm ignoring them. Like, it does distract you. But it doesn't create that cognitive catastrophe you get from actually looking at a specific different context than what your current work is. So I would turn off my phone so it doesn't buzz. But I want to think of as like, oh, I forgot to do that. And my phone just vibrated.

You haven't just destroyed your capacity to concentrate there in a moment. All right. Here's next. Next up is Ben. How should we think about the quality of information intake across formats, physical books, online articles, audio books, podcasts, interviews, and videos? Well, I have a hierarchy I think about it, but I'm going to preface all this by saying, don't have too complicated of a formula you're trying to optimize information. You know, just like read and watch stuff that's interesting to you and be exposed.

Got my pencil there. Be exposed to interesting things. I don't want you thinking I need 30% of my time has to. be books versus, you know, 50% of my time versus this. Just have a good mix. That being said, if you want a hierarchy, I would say books from a quality and perspective are going to be top, right? Because typically it's an idea that the author has thought about or knows about for years and years. And then they spend a year or two just doing nothing but trying to get their thoughts down for this particular book as clearly as possible,

writing, editing, copy editing, having things be fact checked. Right. So it's like the the most long-term sustained application of cognitive effort towards the delivery of an idea for you, the most sustained effort you're going to see is in the book form. So it's just going to be the highest quality format of ideas that you're going to encounter. The difference between physical and audio, it depends. I like both physical and audio books. Physical tends to be better if it's more of like an intellectual or idea book. We underestimate the degree to which we will slow down, speed up,

go back, let me read that idea again. Wait, now that we got this new point, I want to go back to the top of the page to make sure that makes sense with what I read before. It's not just a linear scan when we're reading idea books. And so in audio, you're stymied because it is linear. But if it's like an interesting, like nonfiction book, like a historical nonfiction book or a book that's like about the history of a company or something like this or maybe like a simpler self-help book, that's okay. Like you're not going to lose too much going linear and you're still getting those. You're getting really good information that's been well curated either way. But if it's complicated ideas, physical will be a little bit better there.

The next thing I would move down to would be long form edited articles. Like you might see like a New Yorker piece. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience. A lot of effort goes into that. Thinking about it, crafting it, editing it, the idea just right, crafting the language to deliver it with like perfect accuracy. So a well edited long form article, it's kind of like a single chapter from a book. It's going to be really, information has been really thought through. and then carefully presented.

After that, I would go to longer form podcast. This is not as polished, but because it allows someone to talk for a while about something they know about, you can come away having learned quite a bit and you can get quite a bit of nuance because the conversation is so long focused on something. At the very bottom would be things like social media

or short videos or other types of takes. Typically, this is very much focused on just the distraction, like what's going to make the algorithm perform well. And because of that, the information quality becomes a little bit more suspect. So think about that more like watching a fun TV show. Not really where you want to be gathering a lot of information. I cover all the media.

Yeah. Phonograph records. I don't know. Talkies versus silent films. All right. What have got next? Next up is Amanda. I keep trying to implement your shutdown routine, but repeatedly fail.

I just want to get through my inbox or finish up various tasks. And so I end up saying it worked probably an hour or two longer. The positive side of the. this is that I start the morning with a pretty clean state. The negative side is that I miss hanging out with my kids in the evenings. All right. Well, Amanda, that's a common issue. So I'm glad you bring it up. Just so people remember my shutdown routine, I argue that the end of your workday, you should have a routine you do to close any open loops so that your brain trust you're not forgetting something. So it really can move on from work in the evening

without you having to ruminate it. Like, what about this or what if I'm missing something? So it's about getting mental relief. It's why my time block planner has an actual check box that says shutdown complete that you check after you've done your shutdown routine at the end of your workday. Now, what Amanda's talking about, and this is a common problem, is that she's not just doing a shutdown routine. She's just doing another work block. She's basically just added another like 90 minute block to the end of her day for clean out

my inbox. Yay, there's advantages to clean out your inbox at the end of the day because you start the next day with fewer emails in there. But it's a work block like any other. It takes the time it takes, whether you write it down or not. And there's a difference. That's why we want to differentiate. There's a difference between cleaning out your inbox and a shutdown routine.

And this is what a lot of people get wrong. A shutdown routine is not about let me clear, deal with everything that's still open. It's let me deal with open loops. And what open loop means is like here is an obligation that is not captured in some sort of trusted system. It's an obligation that I need to kind of keep up in just my head. I don't want to forget it. It's hanging in limbo. That's what you're trying to take care of.

So if you have a bunch of emails in your inbox, those aren't open loops. They're in your inbox. They're not going to be forgetting. Next time you check your email, they're going to be there. Like, that's not a problem. You don't have to answer those emails to be able to enjoy your evening. But if there was an email in there that says, I need to know today what's going on. Well, that's like an open loop.

that's something that needs to be resolved that has it, like that needs to be dealt with. If there's something that you remembered, but you haven't written down anywhere, that needs to be resolved or it's going to stick around your head or it's going to distract you. So there's a difference between making sure there's nothing that's just in your head. Do you have a plan for the next day that makes sense? There's nothing you've forgotten. That's different. Then let me just keep doing work.

And so you can leave those emails as fine as long as you have a reasonable plan for the next day that involves plenty of time to check your emails and they catch up on. bottom. Or if you like finishing your day with your emails empty, you got a time block starting before your day ends. And you got to acknowledge the reality that might take 90 minutes and that if you want to end work at 5, then at 3.30, you have to start cleaning that inbox. But don't mix up doing work with shutting down your work. Shetting down your work is just convincing yourself that nothing bad will happen if you stop now and start again in the next morning. Man, people are going to look back at this period, this like two-decade period. And this, this idea that we just sat there

they're like wrangling messages all day. They're like, wait. So is everyone like a switchboard operator? Like, why are people spending hours moving messages around? It's just the way, this hyperactive hive mind way we work. And we just like, yeah, I guess this is what work is. Like I'm constantly just trying to keep up with an avalanche of stressful messages. It's such a stupid way to use human brains to create value.

But I don't know. It's hard to change. Hard to change human nature and the way we work. Even though I've been trying. All right. Who do we got next? Next up is Natalia. I use social media for my marketing job.

It's still perceived as the must have area of focus for most clients. Do you have any advice on how to reconcile this tension? Well, I think there's a couple things going on here. So you do social media for your work, but you don't like social media yourself. That's okay. That's like saying, look, I work for like Anheiser-Busch, but I don't drink myself. Like, it's okay. There's plenty of people there who don't drink, right?

So you can be around the technology you don't use without that having to be like a real problem, unless you have like a real moral qualm about it. In fact, the way that's... social media is used professionally is instructive. I often tell people about this. There's a whole chapter in digital minimalism about this concept. Where I say if you have to use social media for like your business, use it like professional social media people do, which is not I look at and scroll things all the time. They're usually on like computer interfaces and they're scheduling things in advance and it's like it's all pretty like automated and boring. We got these many posts.

They go out at set times. We have them all set up in time. Do we have like statistics going on on the comments. It's not about distraction at all. It's just sort of like a boring marketing activity. So you doing those type of boring marketing activities is not really a problem. And it's how other people who need to use social media made for like their small business or whatever should think about it as well. Don't let your need for like once a day at four. I'm going to post like a quote carousel to Instagram.

Don't let that somehow justify that at noon you're just scrolling through Instagram looking at sort of short form videos that are being algorithmically curated. Yeah, but I have to because I need Instagram for my work. If we go back to our drinking analogy, it would be like if you were completely drunk at lunch hour at your Anheiser Bush job, you're like, it's okay because we work. It's a beer company. It's all right, everybody. It's a beer company. It's all right that I've had five beers at lunch.

Right. It's the same type of thing. Don't let the fact that your company deals in this technology mean that you have to be drunk on it. So, you know, professional social media is professional social media. It's your job, do your job. Personal social media is personal social media. There you need to be responsible. There you need to know, need to do what's actually right for you.

All right. We got a case study this week. This is where people write in the talk about their experience using a type of advice you talk about the show in their own life. This one actually is a case study with a question on the end, so we'll get a stealth question. But the main reason we do case studies is so that we can hear the case study theme music. All right, today's case study comes from Eric. Eric says,

Heating the principles of your show, I reframed my approach to my career in two major ways. First, I formulated a more clear vision of what I would like to accomplish with my career and what ends it should serve. Second, with that vision in mind, I leveraged career capital I have accumulated during the last decade to move from a consultant role to a quite qualified position in a government research institution.

While this on paper can look just like a standard career step, The key lesson here is intentionality. Earlier in my career, I worked mostly with a frantic furor to provide for my young family and develop professional skills. While this achieved my material goals, I ended up with an unsustainable and partly dissatisfying lifestyle. This is when the principles of vision and career capital became key, and here's how I applied them. I'd listed my professional strengths and rated them by one. I rated them by, number one, what people actually pay me for. number two, what I feel particularly drawn to is subject in methods, and number three,

I then search for organizations and roles, which could provide opportunity to focus harder on my preferred strengths while minimizing the parts I do not enjoy as much in my current position. This set me up to have both my radar calibrated towards certain opportunities, as well as being well prepared to be a top candidate for a competitive position. There's also an unplanned side effect. I became even better at my current job since focusing on my strength, further increased my career capital, the process of searching for a new job made me better at my last. Now, there's a question, but before we get to the question, let's just briefly reflect

on what's cool about Eric's case study here. Most people do what he did early in his life, which is, I don't know, I have this job and I want to just like hustle and move up the ladder. Like, I want to get more responsibility. I'll use my salary as a scoreboard. I want that just points to rack up. But what made Eric happy, that was unsustainable. He didn't like his lifestyle was he did lifestyle-centric.

planning. Wait, wait, wait, what do I actually want my day-to-day job to be like? What are the things I'm good at that I like to do within this general sort of professional context? What am I trying to avoid? All right, great. How do I move towards doing more of the former and less of the latter? And then by getting better at the former, that will give me career capital, give me more leverage and allow me to have even more control over my job in that sort of virtuous cycle of career capital autonomy. That's the type of way we like to think about creating a deep career in a distracted world. And it's different than the like, I followed my passion, or I crushed it types of culture.

So I think it's a great case study. But here is Eric's question. How would you investigate the appropriate metrics for productivity value in a new context? I'm coming in with a niche expertise to both help in ongoing projects and develop new capabilities for the organization. So any ideas and how I could approach the task of finding out what really matters in a new context would be much appreciated. So in other words, when you're in a new job, how do you figure out what things are really

valuable in this job so that you can get good at those things. and again, get more career capital and get more leverage. There I always say talk to people. Talk to people who are actually there. Talk to people who are doing better or in a position that you admire within your organization. Take them out for coffee and ask, what is it that you do that gave you this option? What is it that you do that is actually valued by the company? And in doing this, you'll get the answer to the real question, the real answer to what's really valuable in this world.

If you don't do this type of investigation, you'll just write your own story about what you want to be popular. like, hey, I got really good at prompt engineering for chat GPT and the future's AI. So like, do I get a work from home now? And we have no interest in that. Who told you that was valuable? But when you talk to actual people about what's valuable, you realize like, oh, I didn't recognize that like understanding statistical analysis is like a super skill here. And if I could do that, then I'm going to have my say.

You pick up this information by talking to real people and getting evidence. I call it evidence-based planning, getting evidence of what really matters. All right, Eric, that was a cool case. study. Do we have a call this week, Jesse? We do. All right, let's hear what we got. Hey, Cal, living a life of digital minimalism is a core value for me currently. However,

it's not for my partner. So I was wondering if you had any advice about how we can reach an agreement point about digital usage, because just because I believe in digital minimalism doesn't mean I get to force it on

to him. So I want to respect his values, but I also would love for him to be a little less distracted. Thank you. Well, you know, it's a tough one. We get these calls quite a bit where you have a mismatch on something like this. Well, you're right. You can't force your values onto him.

And in fact, even pushing it too much, you might get that type of resistance. Well, just because you're pushing this, now I really don't want this to be the right answer. So you might think, let me just give him a, like a copy of my book or put him towards some of my podcast episodes, but, you know, that could backfire. Like, I don't want this being forced upon me, you know, I don't want to admit that I have a problem. You see what works here is partially being the change you want to see in the world. You be a really good digital minimalist. Be very intentional about what technology do or don't use.

Take advantage of that reality to live a deep flourishing, intentional life or you're deeply connected with people and causes and stuff that happens in the real world. And when you're watching something, you're watching something. When you're reading, you're reading. And, like, make your life very admirable. and you can be, you know, clear about what your influences are there, how your philosophy works, but not really pushing it on him. Like, that's kind of the best you can do. You don't want in the meantime to let resentment begin to bubble up. It's easy, like once you realize the gospel of digital minimalism, you start practicing it, like, why would anyone not do this?

You can start to become resentful when you see, like, guys, he's on his phone all the time. Like, that's so, like, ugh. Doesn't he realize that all the value that he's losing there all the time? you could be doing more things. Don't let that resentment grow. That's how most people live their life. You are the outlier here for now. You've got to have some sort of empathy and compassion.

So build the best digitally minimalist life you can. Find digitally minimalist people to hang out with and see how much of that begins to wear off. But that really is kind of the best you can do. That or I do offer a service where for a fee, I will come to your apartment and berate them. So that's, that works pretty well. That works pretty well, I guess. We come. Jesse and I come and we just, we put the pressure on.

We let you know We use cool phrases Like I see you got the TikTok monkey on your back there, don't you, junior? We talk a lot like old Italian boxing coaches. It's boxing. You got that old the TikTok monkey on your back. You're right in the Instagram highway right down the Twitter lane. There's stuff like that.

We say like kind of like really convincing things like this. can convince them. Like, wow, that elderly Italian boxing coach really seems to know what he's talking about. I think I'm going to stop using my phone. All right. Anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you to Tyler for joining us to help us answer our question. We'll be back next week with another episode.

Wow, we're getting close to the holidays, Jesse. Maybe we'll have to break out the holiday outfits. Yeah, we got the blinking lights. Maybe we'll have a holiday episode coming up at some point over the break. So stay tuned. Keep listening. Keep watching. Until next time, to stay deep.

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 got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.