The Rich Roll Podcast - Cal Newport on Digital Minimalism: Why Focus Is the New Superpower

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

It's become increasingly harder to just put the phone down. Because the latest apps and digital platforms are specifically designed to addict, we have become slaves to their irresistible allure. Our precious attention is being hijacked. The ability to focus — to concentrate on that which is most meaningful — simply cannot compete with the magnetic pull of our Instagram feed. No longer need anyone ever be bored. Alone with one’s thoughts. Or simply present with one’s self.  The result is a global epidemic of distraction. A fomenting of loneliness and isolation. And a degradation of our humanity. The solution isn't Ludditism. Instead it's agency. We need not be victims of technology. We have the power to liberate ourselves from the tether of digital dependency. And the freedom it creates isn't just the salve to what ails us, it's the gateway to that which we seek most. Meaning. True human connection. And a reconnection with our innate humanity. Indeed, there is no substitute for real relationships. Boredom is useful. And focus is the new superpower. Cal Newport is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking deeply about these issues. An associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, Cal is the author of six books, many of which focus on the impact of technology on society. The primary focus of today's conversation is rooted in his latest New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World*. Cal’s work has been published in over 20 languages. He is a frequent guest on NPR and has been featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and Economist. Regular listeners know I have a penchant for dropping Cal's name with regularity. I became acquainted with his work in early 2016 by way of his seminal book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in A Distracted World* — pages that profoundly impacted how I think about and apply my attention. We struck up an e-mail friendship. And I’ve been trying to track him down for the podcast ever since. People often ask me which books have influenced me the most. The aforementioned two rank close to the top — manifestos of great practical import for our modern age. Similarly, I estimate that this episode rates among the most consequential conversations I've had in the 6+ year history of this podcast. Packed with practical, actionable steps, Cal's message will empower you to free up precious time. Declutter your mind. Connect you more deeply to the work and relationships you care most about. And profoundly improve the quality of your professional and personal lives. It was an absolute pleasure to spend time with Cal. I sincerely hope you not only enjoy the listen, but heed his message, and put his advice into action. The visually inclined can watch our entire conversation on YouTube here: bit.ly/calnewport447 (please subscribe!) Peace + Plants, Rich

I was trying to understand why people were feeling this creeping unease and why that had changed, what was in the last few years that had made people increasingly uneasy about their technological lives. And you talk to people, it's really not usefulness, right? It's not, oh, this tech is useless and I hate spending time on it. In fact, if you're using one of these apps, there's some reason why you're doing it. There's some reason why you download it. There's some value you get. So people's complaint was not this is useless. It was more about autonomy. So people worry that they're using the tech too much. And that's what I was picking up, that they're looking at the screen

instead of doing things they know are more important. They're looking at the screen sort of way too much, more than they know is healthy. And so it's the sense that they're losing control over how am I spending my time? What am I trying to get out of it? And so that's what's so unique about this current circumstance is now that we can pull out this wirelessly connected device everywhere, we can banish all those moments of solitude. So what's weird is not the call for solitude. The thing that's very, very unusual is the fact that we have banished solitude. That's what's incredibly rare in the entire history of sort of human civilization is it's only like seven or eight years old, this idea

that it's now possible to get rid of all solitude. So to get solitude in your life is as easy as just some of the places where you used to have it. Even when you're really busy, you get it back by just not using your phone. That's Cal Newport, this week on The Retroll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Okay, so if you're like me, you're probably finding it increasingly harder and harder to just put the phone down. And there's a reason for this. It's because so much money, so much science has been funneled and dedicated into creating these apps and these digital platforms that are just so irresistible, so highly intentionally and purposely addictive that it's almost like we've become powerless, slaves to their allure. And the uncomfortable truth is that

our precious attention is being hijacked. No longer is there ever a reason to be bored, to be alone with one's thoughts, to just be still, to be present with oneself and with others. And although our devices purport to create and cultivate community, and don't get me wrong, on some level they do, I'm not a Luddite, but the truth is more often than not, they leave us feeling more isolated and alone than ever

before. And worse yet, they're really robbing us of our time, of our ability to concentrate, to focus, robbing us of our ability to become immersed, immersed in that which is most meaningful. writing a book or making a film, creating music, performing research, or simply honing an idea, compete with the magnetic pull of Instagram. And I think it begins with understanding that technology itself is neither good nor bad. Like anything else, it's a tool. And it depends on how we use it because we do have agency. We don't have to be pawns or victims of our mobile devices. And that there is great power in breaking away from our increasing digital dependency because there is freedom in minimalism, because boredom is useful. And the ability to focus, to really focus, is truly the new superpower. My name is Rich Roll. This is my podcast. And today's guest, Cal Newport, is somebody who has spent a lot of time and energy

thinking deeply and writing about these issues. Cal is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, and he is the author of six books, many of which are focused on the impact of technology on society, including his most recent New York Times bestseller, Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, which is going to provide the focus of today's conversation. Cal's work has been published in over 20 languages. He is a frequent guest on NPR

and has been featured in many major publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post, and The Economist. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, Cal Newport. So if you're a regular listener to the podcast, then you already know that I've mentioned Cal's name many times on the podcast. He first came on my radar a couple of years ago

through his amazing book, Deep Work, Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, which I gotta tell you had a profound impact on me and how I think about and approach what I do. I struck up an email friendship with Cal and I've been trying to track him down for the podcast ever since. Of all the podcast conversations that I've had, I'd say that this one ranks right up there at

the top when it comes to very simple, actionable things that you can do, that we can all do, that we can implement into our daily routines. Things that have the power to not only free up precious time and declutter our minds, but also to really profoundly alter and improve the quality of our professional and personal lives. So with that being said, here it is.

This is me and the great Cal Newport. Delighted to talk to you today. I think we started emailing each other like three or four years ago. Yeah. It's been a while. It's been a couple of books. For sure. So long time in the making and really excited to dig into all of this stuff with you. I think you've really hit on a nerve here and you're doing really important work in a world of distractions and social media. You've all know Harari recently said famously that clarity is power. And things like solitude, focus, and the deep work that you talk about really have become superpowers, but are quickly, you know, without a lot of

diligence on behalf of the individual becoming, you know, going the way of the dodo. Yeah. Well, it's a more practice skill than I think we realized. Concentration, it just seemed like something we all know how to do. Like, we all know how to focus on things. It's just a matter of, are we doing it enough? And I think we're now learning that it's a practice skill. And we didn't realize how much practice we were actually getting doing this and how much we get out of practice when we introduce new technologies that can keep our attention. Yeah. I mean, in my own personal experience, it's undeniable how much more difficult it has become and how much more diligence is required in order to set aside the phone and focus on the work that is actually going to move the needle,

like in my own personal life. And as somebody who, you know, struggles with addiction, I'm in recovery. I'm just a junkie for anything that's going to give me that hit. And it's very difficult for me to create, you know, to have the rigor and create those rules around use so that it doesn't just infect every aspect of our lives, you know, in an era in which, you know, boredom is now no longer required. Yeah. Which, by the way, is incredibly novel. I mean, it really is the first time in human history that you can get rid of every moment of boredom, or I would say even solitude, right? Time alone with your own thoughts. I mean, this was completely unavoidable throughout human history. Just throughout your day, you're just going to have regular moments where it was

you alone with your own thoughts. I mean, so it's just hardwired into the human experience. And it's really the last, what, seven years that we've said, okay, let's put billions of dollars and the smartest minds at work at getting a sort of worldwide high-speed wireless internet network and these devices in our pockets that can tap into it at any moment and all these algorithms behind it that can get us the perfect bit of distraction at any moment that we need it. And so we can, for the first time in human history,

actually banish all boredom and all solitude from our lives. So it's like a wild experiment, a radical experiment. But I think the results are it's not going well. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I think we've been presented with this choice. Either we become this neo-Luddite where we just dispatch with all of it all together, or we're a denialist where we just say, well, this is the way that it is now and we just need to adapt as a species. And you found a different path into this. Yeah. You hear this neo-Luddite charge a lot, but I'm yet to find one. So, it seems like this is off and thrown, right? Like, okay, your only option is, right, you're a denialist or you're going to be this neo-Luddite or you'll have to say, okay, I'm no neo-Luddite,

but I can't actually find anyone who is. You're kind of a neo-Luddite. Well, I guess so. I mean, I'm a computer scientist. You are. Yeah. That's what creates this whole conundrum around this because you actually understand the technology that goes into all of this. And yet, you know, I don't know anyone else in your age bracket that has never had a social media account. And yet, I don't know anyone else in your age bracket that has never had a social media account. And yet here you are breathing and you're alive and you look healthy and happy.

Yeah, and I have a couple of friends. Yeah. I know what's going on in the world. You seem to be functioning. Yeah. And the proof is in the pudding. Like how many books have you written? Six.

Six books, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what I tell my publicist sometimes. Like, okay, maybe we could sell a little bit more copies of this book if I was active on social media, but I'd probably have written 20% less total books. Well, you've made the New York Times bestseller list. these heights in an era in which we've been told it's required that you have these accounts and this presence in the digital space in order to move the needle on sales in an analog world. Well, I mean, I think something that's going on here, and I think food's a good analogy, right? So in food, we're used to this idea that you might say something like,

I don't eat this type of food. I don't think it's good for me, right? I mean, obviously, this is a message you've talked and written a lot about. And no one comes back and says, you know, well, Rich Roll is a sort of anti-food guy. He's not into eating or nutrition, right? We're used to it and the idea of food that there's different qualities and you get different results out of it. And so, I'm a tech guy. I mean, I'm a computer scientist. I'm an internet nerd.

I was using the net before, you know, there was worldwide web browsers. I've been blogging for over a decade. And so, I look at certain things like social media platforms, and to me, it's junk food. And so, I don't see it as a stance of neolitism to say, for example, I don't use Facebook. I see it more like saying, I don't eat Doritos. And that you can love tech like I do, but not necessarily embrace all of the trends. And so, that's a lot of the message I'm out there preaching is that you have to be intentional, you have to be selective.

Yeah, how do you counter the argument that just leveraging my own personal experience, like I'm totally on board with everything you're saying and yet I can't deny that social media has benefited me in certain ways. Like it has created the foundation upon which I've created my career in many ways.

And it's allowed me to connect with and contact a lot of interesting people that are now like friends of mine in, in, in my, in IRL, in my real life. Yeah. Well,

I mean, this is part of the issue when you're talking about things like social media is that in some sense, the, the people from whom you might be hearing about these topics is actually a pretty rarefied group, right? So it's people that maybe have large media brands, right? I mean, so this is core perhaps to your business.

You have a sort of a large brand and a lot of businesses use social media very successfully. There's a reason why Facebook is worth $500 billion. You know, for example, if you're trying to advertise, it's like a miracle what Facebook allows you to do. But I don't know that circumstance applies to most people. So for a lot of people, they're trying to connect more with their family, their community, they're trying to do well by their job. They're trying to build a life that has certain elements of meaning to it. They maybe don't need or have any reason to have a large

audience. And yet they still feel compelled, well, I think I just need to vaguely be on these services. And then they step back and look at what's going on and they realize it's one, two, three hours a day that they're glancing at these things. So at the core of minimalism, for example, is this notion of there's no good or bad tech, but

intentions are really useful. I look at it along two different spectrums. One is creation versus consumption. Like, are you using the platform to create something, to put something out in the world versus just scrolling to see what everyone else is doing. And then the other thing that you explore pretty deeply in your book is this idea of utility versus autonomy. So can you explain that a little bit? Well, that's what I noticed, right? I mean, so when I was looking into this issue, I was trying to understand why people were feeling this creeping unease, right? And why that had changed, what was in the last few years that had made people increasingly uneasy about their technological lives. And you talk to people, it's really not usefulness, right? It's not, oh, this tech is

useless and I hate spending time on it. In fact, if you're using one of these apps, there's some reason why you're doing it. There's some reason why you download it. There's some value you get. So people's complaint was not, this is useless. It was more about autonomy. So people worry that they're using the tech too much. That's what I was picking up, that they're looking at the screen. Instead of doing things they know are more important, they're looking at the screen sort of way too much, more than they know is healthy. And so it's the sense that they're losing control over how am I spending my time and what am I trying to get out of it. This is the pushback I used to get. So I've been sort of a public critic of some aspects of social media for a long time.

I've been sort of a public critic of some aspects of social media for a long time. And before about two years ago, I used to get much more ferocious pushback when I would, like, say, write an article in the New York Times or something saying something critical about social media. And that really has actually shifted. Oh, big time. Which is interesting. But back when I used to get the really aggressive pushback, the core of the argument was always a usefulness argument, right? So they would say, well, wait a second. Here is something useful that you can do with Facebook. So you need to stop complaining about people looking at their phones too much, right? That was the argument.

It's this binary thing. Either it's completely useless or there's some use. And if there's some use, you have to stop complaining about it. And so that's what I used to get pushed back at a lot. But people, that's not the core of people's issues today. I mean, they know there's something useful with this, but what they're worried about is doing this an hour a day, two hours a day, three hours a day when they know there's things that are more important. Yeah. I mean, I find myself doing that and just powerless to stop, you know, and I know, you know, I'm a, I'm a junkie. So perhaps that reaction is a little more pronounced than it would be in the average person, but it really is difficult to put that thing down.

And that's somewhat by design. I mean, to me, one of the more interesting things I uncovered is that we've become used to the constant companion model of the phone where you just have it with you all the time and you look at it all the time. We think of that as just being fundamental to the technology. I mean, that's how you use a smartphone. It's there for you to have a companion and all the time you can look at it, get information, get entertainment, or what have you. But it's actually much more contrived than we realize. And it was really the social media companies

that led that charge. And so maybe about six or seven years ago, maybe eight, depending on how you do the calculus, there was this moment when, if you're Facebook, and Facebook was one of the oldest, largest venture-backed companies here, so they really led the way here. And they're saying we have to get our revenues numbers up, right?

I mean, they're the IPO looming. Their investors needed their 100x return. So they got serious. How are we going to get our revenues numbers up? And what they came up with was this radical reengineering of the social media experience. And so they reengineered it to be away from just I post information about myself, my friends post information about themselves, and we sort of look at what each other's up to. They re-engineered it away from that and towards this stream of incoming social approval indicators. And so, the like button, which seems fundamental, was actually a late arrival to social media, right? I get into this

in the book. It was a late arrival, and it was a boon for their bottom line because now the dynamic has changed. I post something. Now, if I go back to my app, I can see if it got likes, right? Maybe it got a lot of likes, but maybe it got none. But then a little bit later, it gets more. Maybe this thing gets more likes and maybe I've been tagged in some people's photos and maybe I've been favorited on Instagram. And this was actually a radical re-engineering of the experience. So it was less about posting things and seeing what other people posted and more about receiving the stream throughout the day of social approval indicators, indications that other people were thinking about

you. Now, this exploits psychological vulnerabilities in our mind. It makes it almost impossible to not go back and hit that app one more time. And that was purposeful. And that was also the foundation of the constant companion model of smartphone use. That's what really changed the way we thought about smartphones from something that you use as a tool. Like, oh, I need directions. I have this wonderful tool. I can bring it out and I can get directions. It can be very useful and into something that you looked at all the time. So it's not fundamental, right? I mean, it was largely invented by a small number of companies. Right. And you talk about this in the book when you track back to Steve Jobs's initial keynote when they launched the iPhone, which, you know, I guess this is why memory is so unreliable, because I would have

thought at that time, Steve Jobs would have had a comprehensive global vision of what's actually happening today. But in fact, and what you point out is that his whole thing was like, this is an iPod where the killer app is to actually make phone calls. Yeah. I mean, you didn't have to have two devices in your pocket. That was the major sales pitch. And I went and talked to one of the development leads from the original iPhone to confirm all of this. And he said, yeah, Jobs saw this thing as an iPod that made calls. But Jobs was a minimalist, right? So he was all about, let's take things that are really valuable to people and then make that experience even better. And so music was something people really cared about.

I mean, people were listening to iPods all the time. Jobs really, really was into music and thought music was very important. And so he wanted to make the music playing experience better, which is what he actually spends a lot of that keynote talking about, is showing these new features. Look, you can swipe through. This was the first touchscreen iPod. You can swipe through the album covers. Look how nice this is. And people cared about making phone calls. And he thought it was egregious how clumsy the existing phone interfaces were on cell phones. He said, I can make making a phone call into this more elegant experience. I can combine these into one device. It was a very minimalist idea. Let me take two

things that people really like to do and then make the experience aesthetically even more beautiful. There's no app store. He didn't trust the idea of third-party people developing apps for you. No, forewalling the Apple experience was the whole thing. He told this lead developer, the quote that he gave me was, you know, if someone else puts their app on here, it's going to crash the phone just when that person needs to call 911. That was the fear he had. And so this notion that it was something that you would look at a lot was not on his radar. The idea that it was even going to be heavily used for internet-style communications, he doesn't get to that until about 35 minutes into the keynote.

The first 30 minutes is phone and iPod features, which is not to say that technology shouldn't evolve, but it's also just to help underscore this idea that the smartphone wasn't fundamentally something that was meant to be a constant companion. That's actually more an instantiation of a small number of social media companies' business models than it is some sort of emergent phenomenon that as this technology came along that we all decided that this was a better way to use it. Well, this turning of the tide against Silicon Valley and this brewing distrust that we now have about the motives and the intentions of these oligarch founders was really initiated in many ways by the work of Tristan Harris and him kind of going on 60 Minutes.

And that's really how you open the book here, by setting the stage about what's really going on so we can really understand the gravity of what these apps represent in terms of hijacking our precious time and attention. Yeah. Well, I mean, he was a whistleblower is the best way to understand it. I mean, he had trained to figure out how do you capture and manipulate people's attention with applications. He studied in B.J. Fogg's lab at Stanford in persuasive technology. Then he had a startup. The startup was acquired by Google, and they got very aggressive about using the technology to help capture eyeballs and make things more sticky. And then Tristan did this sort of Cameron Crowe, Jerry McGuire type moment where he wrote a manifesto. It was essentially like, we need to protect our

user's attention, right? I mean, it was like right out of Jerry McGuire, like this isn't good. We're exploiting our users. We're exploiting their attention. We're turning the gadgets. And this thing gets passed around Google, gets passed up to Larry Page. So like, okay, we're going to make you the, whatever it was, czar of ethics or something like this. And then nothing happened because there's just billions of dollars at stake. So he left and said, okay, I'm going to try to spread the word. And he was on 60 Minutes and he was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper. And he pulled out the smartphone and said, this thing's a slot machine in your pocket. And I think that was sort of- That was the moment.

That was the moment. That was the moment, yeah. Yeah, and it's one of those things where everybody who saw that, despite whatever pushback was happening at the time, like we all intuitively know it to be true, right? So it struck a chord and it really resonated with a lot of people. But what Tristan did, which I think is important, is, I mean, up to that point, a lot of people thought about this being as

a slot machine from a perspective of lack of personal willpower control. Like, I look at this thing too much. It's just me being lazy. And what Tristan was saying is, no, no, no, this is engineered to get that effect. I mean, he was one of the first people to say, hey, we've been borrowing ideas in Silicon Valley from Las Vegas casino gambling where they figured out once they went to digital slot machines, you could actually hard code in the reinforcement schedules, right? When it was digital, you could exactly figure out at what rate you got different awards in the slot machines, right? Which back when it was analog, it was a little bit more random. And so back when they made that transition in Las Vegas, they did a lot of studies to figure out what's the reward schedule on the slot machine that's going to keep you pulling the handle and this stuff is published. And so they're looking

at that research in Silicon Valley when they're trying to think about, except for now, instead of it being triple cherries, it's 20 likes versus five likes. But they were studying these same ideas and putting these into play so that you had this thing that you hit and it would just be like a slot machine handle pull. So what Tristan was saying is like, look, when I say this is like a slot machine, I'm not just being hyperbolic or metaphorical. I mean, we're literally engineering this thing to be like a slot machine.

You're not just lazy. The reason why you're looking at this thing so much is that we have people who are very smart who are figuring out how to make that happen. They're subtle too. And they're nefarious. One thing that always gets me on Instagram is when I open up Instagram and you'll see a quick flash of a photo They're subtle too. And they're nefarious. Like one thing that always gets me on Instagram is

when I open up Instagram and you'll see a quick flash of a photo and then it disappears to update it to the newest one. And then I'm like, wait, what was that one? And then I'll scroll until I get to that. It's like, that is insane. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Well, I mean, there's so many subtle things, right? Like the fact that when Facebook first was going mobile, they're working on the graphics. And so one of the graphics they needed for the app was a little icon that said you have updates. And so the graphic designers, they're good graphic designers, say, here's the Facebook palette, it's grays and blues, and we have this nice update button. And the attention engineer said, no, no, forget the palette, it has to be alarm red. You get two extra

more clicks, right? Because our brain can't ignore it. Or this innocent feature on Twitter where you pull down, you stretch it down and then release, and then it updates the Twitter feed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's really no reason to have that, but it gives you a slot machine handle effect. That's so true.

If it just was kind of updating, you can kind of see what's going on, it doesn't give you the same effect. Yeah, you really feel like you're pulling the handle. A lot. It's so subtle. So both Tristan and then someone else, NYU professor Adam Alter, have claimed that Facebook and Instagram also were supposedly

doing artificial holding back of likes and favorites so they can make it more intermittent. Because we know this from behavioral psychology, if you sometimes get the reward and you sometimes don't, it short-circuits the dopamine system in a way that gets you to go back much more than you should. That's why the pigeons will peck forever if they sometimes get the pellets and then sometimes don't.

And so there's been accusations that they started artificially batching likes and favorites so that you would sometimes see them and sometimes not. Because if it was a steady stream, it's not nearly as compulsive as like, I i almost had the cherries but didn't get the last one and then this time i got right so now you can check your facebook then you check your twitter then you check your instagram then you go to slack or whatever in your email and then you just go back to the beginning again it's a cycle yeah and we wonder why like the non-industrial productivity metrics in the american economy have been stagnant over the last 10 years. Right. Well, let's talk about that. So, the sense is, or the idea behind all of this, is that these tools make us more productive members of society. So, myth or fact?

Well, which tools are we talking about? Let's talk about things that really are designed to enhance productivity like email and Slack and these technological innovations that are supposed to create seamless workflow. Yeah. So the problem with email and Slack, and this was really at the core of my last book, so not digital minimalism but deep work. Deep work. Right. Was this notion that as the knowledge economy in particular, so let's just look at knowledge work. Right, was this notion that as the knowledge economy in particular, so let's just look at knowledge work. And as you get past the entry level, knowledge work is really built on concentration.

Because what you have to do, literally speaking, is take an information, think about it, produce new information that has value, right? I mean, that's the gristmill of knowledge work. So you introduce something like email, and it seems like a no-brainer. We write memos. It takes a long time. If we could do it electronically, it just has massive advantages. It's cheaper. It's faster. It's more stable.

I can access it when I'm away from the mail. We don't need a whole mail room. It just seems like there's all these advantages to it. But there's unexpected consequences. And in particular, what happened is once we introduced things like email, it shifted the way we worked. happened is once we introduced things like email, it shifted the way we worked. And so subtly, our workflow shifted to something that I call the hyperactive hive mind, which is, let's have a constantly ongoing unstructured conversation. And so this is how a lot of knowledge work now unfolds. You can use Slack or email or whatever tool, SMS is now integrating

the office a lot more, where we can just, anyone can reach anyone at any time. So it's like we have this ongoing unstructured conversation, which wasn't possible before, but this technology makes possible. It's not an unnatural thing to do. It's basically how we would coordinate if we were in like a small group of Paleolithic hunters, we would just sort of have an unstructured conversation. You go that way, I'll go this way. We just scaled it up, the large organizations by using these tools. The problem is if you have to tend this ongoing unstructured just scaled it up, the large organizations, by using these tools. The problem is if you have to tend this ongoing unstructured conversation, it forces you to have to keep changing your attention back to the communication tools and then back to the thing that you're

actually trying to produce value on, then back to the communication tools. You have to context switch a lot. And the psychology literature tells us that that context switching just completely reduces our cognitive capacity. It makes it very difficult for us to actually concentrate and produce value with our brain. So it was an inadvertent externality. But by introducing these low-friction communication tools, it changed the way we worked. It made things much more convenient. But by doing that, we actually got much worse at the core business of knowledge work, which requires concentration and producing value. And so this is why I think our productivity metrics have been stagnant for over a decade, is even though the tech has gotten more advanced, we have fragmented our attention to the degree that

we're actually really bad at the core thing that we need to do, which is actually sitting there and writing the legal brief, or the article, or the marketing strategy. We put that at the bottom of the list instead of the top. And we're so easily, I think just by way of how we're wired and how we've evolved, that when there's an incoming message, even if you don't have notifications set up, there's that pull like, I need to attend to that because my standing within the tribe is dependent upon how immersed I am in that communication flow. It can be dangerous, right? If you're in the tribe and someone's tapping you on the shoulder, I'm going to ignore you.

You can get a spear in the back. We're wired for that. But we don't know that. We see that there's an email waiting for us in the inbox. That deep part of our brain doesn't see that any different than there's the guy with the spear tapping you on the shoulder. Right, so we don't know how to prioritize how to deal with all these things. Yeah, our brain is not meant to have a thousand emails in an inbox, each of which needs an answer. To them, it's short-circuiting an ancient instinct of sociality. We have these ancient social instincts that have been built into our brain through evolution over millennia,

and very complicated. Large portions of our neuronal hardware is dedicated towards the subtle act of how do you manage communication among groups? How do you manage social dynamics? How do you keep your tribe together? If you start messing around with it, with technology, you know, say, well, let's just, let's take the tribal conversation, but now it's a thousand people within the company, or now you have a hundred thousand fans who are also trying to reach you through these same means. Or let's get social media, which is 20-year-olds in hooded sweatshirts just hacking with sociality in some incubator somewhere. Let's completely change social interaction. But we have this hardware that's been evolved to do it one way.

Of course, we're going to have unexpected consequences. I mean, we shouldn't be surprised. It's just like when we started messing around with food, with industrial and processed food in the mid-20th century, everyone got unhealthy because our bodies had evolved for thousands of years to expect very specific things out of food. It didn't know about high fructose corn syrup. And so we shouldn't be surprised when we got an obesity epidemic. I think the same thing's going on with our social cognitive lives right now. Yeah. I mean, I walk around with a low grade anxiety all the time because I know there's so many like sort of unattended to incoming messages coming at me

that I can't possibly respond to all of them. And, you know, for years there was this movement of inbox zero, like here's all the hacks you can, you know, get to the bottom of your, and now it's just, well, forget about that. Here's how you can be sort of calm and content, pulling out thousands of unattended to email messages. Yeah. I mean, the funny thing about Inbox Zero is that the guy who came up with the concept and gave the famous Google talk, Merlin Mann, got a book deal to write a book. This was years ago. Write a book on Inbox Zero because he had given this famous talk that you could find online, I think at Google, about here's how you process your inbox and you

get it down to zero or whatever. So, he got the book deal and eventually the book deal fell through. He couldn't write the book because at some point he realized it's not about getting the inbox down to zero, right? Actually, that's the wrong game. And he's like, I can't in good conscience write this book. And then the book deal fell away because he had this epiphany like, oh, wait a second. This isn't the right game. The right game is not, okay, how do I stay on top of this like mounting mountain of communication? The right game is how do I produce good things? At the core of everything you do is an appreciation and a respect for what you call deep work, the immersive experience of doing really what you're here to do, whatever the case may be, and appreciating the extent to which these externalities aren't just jeopardizing or threatening our ability to do our best work,

but appreciating the extent to which they're constantly degrading it. And, you know, built into that is an understanding like, like we tend to, I guess what I'm getting at is we tend to think like, hey, what's the big deal? I'm going to take a break and answer a few emails and go back to the work. But it's really understanding that when you do that, making that cognitive switch, there's a huge cost that gets paid to try to get ramped up again so that you can become in that immersive state of mind. Yeah. Well, that cost, I think, is one of the big under-emphasized storylines at the intersection of psychology and workplace productivity. Because we had this movement in the late 90s, early 2000s, where people began to realize that pure multitasking didn't work. Because we had this – remember, that was a big deal.

When we first got personal computers in the office, people were like, yeah, I'm on the phone while doing email and typing the memo. So productive. Yeah, I could do three things at the same time. And it didn't take long. Some good research came out that said, no, of course that doesn't work. You're just switching between all the things and doing them all pretty bad.

And so then people said, great, I'm a single tasker now. And I'm only doing one thing at a time. But what they weren't factoring in was this context switching cost. Because you're saying, hey, I'm not multitasking because I only have one thing open. Sure, every 10 minutes, I maybe jump over to the Gmail tab, but just for like a minute, and then I come back to this thing. So I'm not doing two things at the

same time. And so it felt like you were being productive. But what we didn't realize is there was this context switching cost. So it's called attention residue. But essentially, when you leave your primary task, go to an email inbox, you see all those messages, most of which you can't answer right now. And the Paleolithic mind is getting worried. Someone's tapping me at the fire. And then you go back to, let's say, the main thing you're doing, which is writing a legal brief or whatever. There's a residue left from that switch, which reduces your cognitive capacity.

And it takes a long time to clear out. I mean, it's easy to test in the lab. You have people do puzzles that you can quantitatively measure, and then you distract them for one minute. What they do is they say, oh, you forgot to fill out this page on the form, right? And then they go back to the puzzles. You watch the performance drop. And it takes a while until it comes back up. And so what's happening is in the standard knowledge work situation, even when people are elite-level knowledge works, they're creative workers, they think they're single-tasking, they do these quick checks frequently enough that they never leave that state of attention residue. So now it's like we're all taking a reverse nootropic that makes us dumber, and we don't recognize it, right? And

this is why the people who prioritize really unbroken concentrations seem like they have a superpower. It's essentially just relative to everyone else, which is in the state of self-imposed attention residue, which is keeping their cognitive performance artificially low. Yeah. Today, if you can just be somebody who can carve out even two hours a day of undistracted, focused attention, you really are like a superhero. Yeah. Yeah. Because that would just be the norm even 30 years ago, 20 years ago.

You see it in all these industries. I've noticed it with book editors, right? That email came along, right? Because book editing is a great example, I think, because it hasn't changed much, at least what the ultimate goal is. The last hundred years, if you're a book editor, you have writers who are writing books

that you're helping to edit and bring into fruition, right? I mean, the end result is the same now that it was 50 years ago, a hardcover book. Except for you've seen the shift in the post-email age where basically book editors do all their editing at home. They've lost the entire work. Right, because during the day it's meetings and email. Yeah, I mean, and so how can that possibly, how could they possibly be more effective at it if they've now, they've taken this core idea of working with the book and making it better, and now it happens sort of at night or maybe early in the morning. So all they're doing all day long

is stuff that they never had to do before. Well, I think that carries into, you hear this from a lot of people, anybody who's trying to do focused work, they'll do it at a ridiculously early hour because that's when the phone's not ringing and there's not a lot of incoming messages or very late at night.

And I think writing is perhaps the best example of this idea of how delicate, you know, deep work and focus is. Because anybody who's trying to sit down and write something knows that, you know, if someone knocks on their door and says, hey, you got a minute, when that exchange is over with, it takes a good half an hour or maybe even longer to get back into that concentrated state again. Yeah. Well, this is why writers care so much about their rituals.

Because it's really clear. They can see pages. So maybe it's a little bit more ambiguous in a different knowledge work job. I mean, you're always doing things. You can't directly see the impact. But if you're writing, you say, I only produced this many pages today. And someone knocked on the door. Hey, when I was out at this cabin somewhere, I produced this many pages. It's a lot easier to quantify. To gauge it. Yeah.

But so then we have this other issue though, right? So we have the issue of interruptions and distraction within knowledge work. It makes our brains work worse. But then we have the issue of what happens outside of knowledge work, right? What happens when you're home? What happens when you're just looking at your phone at dinner whatever, when you're not at the workplace? And this also has an effect. And so if outside of work, now we're engaging with these highly palatable sort of processed food equivalent, attention engineered social media platforms on our phone all the time, that's also hurting our cognitive fitness. So that even if the next day when you go to work, you have the Faraday cage that's on top of the mountain

and no one can reach you, you're going to have a harder time doing the cognitive work because it's like you were eating Oreos at night. And then when you get to the training camp the next day, you can't perform as well. So we have both of these forces are coming together. So like my book, Deep Work, was really about what's happening in the workplace.

It's making us worse at this. And then digital minimalism in part is about, well, what's happening outside of the workplace? This is having all sorts of negative consequences, including on our ability to focus when it comes time. Yeah, I'm experiencing that directly. I mean, when I wrote Finding Ultra in 2012, it was pre a lot of this kind of stuff.

And I didn't have nearly as much going on in my life. I didn't have that much trouble finding the time to focus and putting in that work required to get that book done. And now it's like a battle, you know, because the phone is always there and, you know, I'm doing a lot of other things that are competing for my time and my energy. But I feel like I really have to be more diligent than ever and create really strict guidelines and rules around that time and the preciousness of it in order to get anything done. Yeah. And I feel like, sorry to interrupt you, but I feel like getting back to that earlier point that years of being on my smartphone has made me dumber in certain respects. It's rewired my brain where now it's

harder to drop into that state. Yeah. Well, part of the reason I've never had a social media account is that my day job is I'm a theoretical computer scientist. And so I have to solve theorems essentially for a living. And so I really can feel the difference. So for me, I'm really, really worried. But you don't know the difference because you've never actually been on. Right, right. But it's like when you're doing ultra endurance athletics, right? You're really careful about what you eat and how you sleep, what you put into your body, because it's really going to make a difference, right? And so I guess being a theoretician is sort of the ultra endurance equivalent of cognitive work. And so a lot of theoreticians really care a lot about this. And so I had always had that awareness

in a way I think that other people in other jobs that want to be quite so natural because I'm just used to this. Theoreticians worry a lot. Concentrating is their number one skill. I mean, it's how they pay the mortgage, right? And so I've always really worried about what's going to be the impact

of these things on my ability to concentrate. Because if I lose that, you know, that's the whole thing. That's like my 95-mile-per-hour fastball, right? Well, it's one thing for somebody like you who deals in theoretics or somebody who's writing a book. But I thought it was really interesting. open digital minimalism, which is with Andrew Sullivan's kind of, not really a manifesto, but kind of a manifesto of him saying, as this hyperactive, uber blogger writer guy, how much his social media attention had drained him of the joy of life and his ability to be the best at what he does, which is thinking deeply about important issues

that impact politics and culture. Yeah. Well, and it wasn't just, and what he was saying was not just, I can't do my work. He was worried about humanity. I mean, the line was, I used to be a human being. Right.

And that was a big part of the transition from deep work to digital minimalism, is that I had been talking about the impact of technology on people's professional lives, these unintended consequences. And people kept coming up to me when I was on tour for deep work and saying, maybe that's fine. But what about these unexpected consequences of technology outside of work and what it's doing to our humanity, actually our ability to live a flourishing life? And on the surface, it seems like it's similar. Yeah, it's tech having these unexpected

consequences. But in a lot of cases, the dynamics are really different and so that Sullivan piece I used to have to open the book because that's what I was picking up from from people when I was on the road from deep work is the stuff happening in the office is is is an issue and I'm not as productive as I used to be this can't be the right way to work I mean doing emails all day there's got to be something wrong with it just saying but what's happening outside of work where I'm constantly doing this instead of other things, people were just getting the sense that their humanity itself was being degraded. It's a quality of life type issue.

Right, so the solution, right? Rather than becoming a neo-Luddite or a denialist, you have this idea of digital minimalism that's really routed in orienting your digital diet around your core values. So, elaborate on that for me. Right. Well, I mean, minimalism itself is an old idea. So, you can go all the way back to Marcus Aurelius and this whole through line through the ancients into Thoreau, into the voluntary simplicity movement of the 1960s.

All the way up to Marie Kondo. Yeah, that's minimalism. That's where Klein called you the Marie Kondo of digitalism. Yeah, exactly. It probably wasn't to describe my physical appearance or physical similarities. No, no, no. But it is, yeah. And Thoreau echoes throughout the book. Yeah. Yeah, I like to say I'm Marie Kondo without the book sale numbers. But it's a through line, right? And so minimalism itself is this ancient idea that can apply to lots of different things and the basic idea behind minimalism is

in many cases it's better to focus most of your energy on a small number of things to give you a large amount of value as opposed to the alternative which is maximalism which is trying to spread your energy over everything you can find that might give you some value. And so, these two things are set up, this is like a dialectic, right? You have minimalism and maximalism. And so, in all different parts of our life, the sages have told us minimalism, less is more, is better than trying to spread your attention widely, right? So, this is like when Marie Kondo says, take everything out of your closet and just find the things that you really care about or spark joy or whatever. She's saying, focus on the things that really matter. Don't get caught up on the fact that, well, I kind of like this T-shirt or maybe there's some value I might get one day out of it.

The clutter is costly. Focus on the things you really care about. So I'm just bringing minimalism into people's digital personal life, basically. What do you think is going on rather than beyond the obvious that we're talking about right now that's happening culturally as much in the analog world as it is in the digital world that has made minimalism like a thing right now?

Like suddenly Marie Kondo is like a celebrity and you have Ryan and Joshua, the minimalists and their documentary and the work that they're doing and people are super interested in decluttering their lives, their mental, emotional, and, you know, and physical lives. Like what is, what is, why is this the moment? Well, in American culture, it's cyclical and often it's, it's tied to the economy. We get these booms and busts. We get these periods of exuberance, you know, everything's going well.

Everyone, the economy is going well. Everyone's buying things. Everyone's looking to purchase their way into happiness. And then there'll be a down cycle where people get fed up with this and they embrace sort of minimalist ideas and there'll be an up cycle again. And so I think we're on one of these down cycles still where people are sort of fed up with, let's just exuberantly go out and try to acquire more things to make us happy. It probably began, if you time it, it really goes back to the crash, the recession. You see right around that period, that first decade of the 21st century, is where you begin to see the minimalism movement online, for example, pick up.

It was right around 2005, 2006, where you get like Zen Habits and Joshua Becker and Courtney Carver, and then Joshua and Ryan came along a little bit later, and then after that you get like Zen Habits and Joshua Becker and Courtney Carver, and then Joshua and Ryan came along a little bit later. And then after that, you get Marie Kondo. What's different is that the tech side of it is new, right? It's the first cycle that we've had. So we're just coming out of this period of initial exuberance that really began with the iPhone's release in 2007, where it was all just interesting. I mean, it really is miraculous technology. I mean, the iPhone, we didn't have anything like that before. And so that you could have all these apps and it was interesting and people were experimenting with it. And let me try things.

Isn't this fun? Like just trying to get their arms around how do we use this technology? And so when it comes to personal tech, we're having sort of one of our first down cycles of the wireless internet age where we say, okay, we're done with the exuberant experimentation. This has gone too far. I'm sort of losing autonomy. Now I need to step back and say, that period's over. Let's get a little bit more mature about our relationship with our tools and figure out what do I really want to do with this going forward. Right. Talk a little bit about the importance of solitude. So solitude's an interesting idea.

It has different definitions, but the one that caught my attention came from another book called Lead Yourself First, which was about solitude and leadership. But the definition that these guys used, which was – it's actually an army officer and a really well-known circuit court judge, federal judge. So it's an interesting pair of guys who came together to write about solitude. This judge actually, he writes his legal briefs in a barn in Michigan that has no internet. So he's after my own heart, right? But anyways, right, they had this definition of solitude. And they said it's not, don't think about it having to do with physical isolation, right? Don't think about, you know, are you alone on a mountainside or not?

They said it all has to do with what you're processing. are you alone on a mountainside or not? They said it all has to do with what you're processing. And so their definition was freedom. Solitude is freedom from input from other minds. So if you're processing something that was generated from another mind, you're not in a state of solitude. Anytime you're looking at this or anytime you have the earbuds in,

unless it's music, if you're listening to something, if you're reading something, if you're talking to someone, it's not a state of solitude. Your brain is in input processing mode. Our brain takes very seriously the idea that, okay, this input we're getting right now came from another human being. And that turns on all sorts of different centers that don't turn on when you're just, let's say, looking around at nature. If you're not doing that, you are in solitude. So you can be in a very crowded coffee shop.

But if you're just sitting there alone with your own thoughts, you're in a state of solitude. So it has nothing to do with physical isolation. And why is it important? So it turns out it's crucial for humans to have solitude on a regular basis. One is just maintenance mode. I mean, it takes a lot of power for our brain to, okay, all hands on deck. There's another human mind that we're processing right now. All hands on deck, right? We've got to know, there's another human mind that we're processing right now. All hands on deck, right? We've got to fire up all these systems. It's complicated, right? Like when I'm talking to you right now, one of the things my brain is doing, some of the research I got into, is something called mentalizing. Which means I'm building a simulation of your brain within my own brain.

So that I can then start doing experiments in my own mind of, you know, how is my ritual simulation going to react if I say this versus this? It's incredibly complicated. It uses a lot of energy, right? So if you're always doing that, the brain doesn't get down cycles, right? So you're going to get anxiety and other types of issues. It's also crucial for self-development and insight generation. If our brain is in processing mode, it can't actually be making sense in any sort of significant degree of the information that it's processing. And so, you know, someone listening to this interview is in processing mode. But if they really want to get insights out of it, what they also then need is after they hear this interview, some time just alone with their thoughts, thinking about what they heard. And

then that's when the brain makes sense of it, right? And compares the insights against their own mental schemas, their own understanding of the world, figuring out where it might apply or not fit into their life. You also need it for personal development. You can't have insights into what am I all about? What are my values? How's my character going to develop? What do I want to do going forward? All of that requires solitude. Your brain just has to sit there, has to think, things have to bounce off of each other. Like we need it. But I think a lot of people would contend that it's a luxury, right? Like, I'm just, look, man, you know, I got, I got, I got, you have a bunch of kids. Like, I got kids, you know, I'm going to my work, I'm trying to make money, I'm trying to get through the day.

Like, I don't have time for solitude. And that self-reflection is the purview of, you know, somebody who's living a life that's not mine. Yeah. Well, see, I think that's because we've put solitude on this pedestal. We think about Thoreau and his cabin. Right. Like, when am I going to have time today to get out to my cabin? But there's an illusion about that as well that you talk about in the book.

Yeah, which is not really what he was up to. Right. But we're no busier now than we were 10 years ago. But 10 years ago, we had lots of solitude. And the reason is that when you have this precise definition of solitude, all you need is freedom from input from other minds. This used to happen all the time. You couldn't avoid it. There's nothing on the radio and you're driving to work.

Solitude. You're waiting in line at the pharmacy. It's solitude, right? Now you look at that person and you're like, what's wrong with that guy? What's wrong withitude, right? Now you look at that person and you're like, what's wrong with that guy? What's wrong with him, right? And so that's what's so unique about this current circumstance is what I mentioned before

is now that we can pull out this wirelessly connected device everywhere, we can banish all those moments of solitude. So what's weird is not the call for solitude. The thing that's very, very unusual

is the fact that we have banished solitude. That's what's incredibly rare in the entire history of sort of human civilization, is it's only like seven or eight years old, this idea that it's now possible to get rid of all solitude. So to get solitude in your life is as easy as just some of the places where you used to have it, even when you're really busy, you get it back by just not using your

phone. So, okay, on my commute today, I'm not going to put on the podcast for the first 20 minutes. Or when I'm walking a dog, I'm not putting to put on the podcast for the first 20 minutes. Or when I'm walking a dog, I'm not putting in the earbuds. Or when I go to the store, I'm leaving the phone in the car. So it's stuff that you're already doing. Just do some of those things without the slot machine and the constant access to solitude, busting information. What's your sense of what society is going to

look like 20, 30 years from now when a whole generation of young people who have no memory of life experience without a cell phone in their hands, a smartphone in their hands, have never really had that experience of solitude to begin with? Well, I mean, that generation is sort of wildly more anxious than any other previous generation. This is correlational, but it's sort of a hypothesis I make in the book is we take Generation Z, which is the first generation to enter their young adolescence with sort of ubiquitous access to smartphones and social media. They use it a lot, a lot more than we do. I mean, they're constantly, they really have banished all solitude. And demographically speaking,

anxiety and anxiety-related disorders just jumps off the charts. As soon as you get to the first cohort that was born late enough to have access to ubiquitous smartphones and social media, it's a jump that's literally off the charts in the sense that the demographers had never seen a jump that large before on anything they measured from generation to generation. So it's literally off the charts. And it's probably because of what's happening with the phones and probably in part because this is a radical thing to do to a human mind is to banish all solitude. So they're definitely much more anxious, which is problematic. much more anxious, which is problematic. Sherry Turkle at MIT has this book, Reclaiming Conversation, where she talks a lot about how in the workplace now, this generation coming to the

workplace is having a very hard time just interacting because they've done most of their communication digitally. But actually, face-to-face communication is very complicated and nuanced in practice. And that's what you're supposed to spend your adolescence doing is sort of navigating awkward social situations and trying to figure out how to do it. And so they're having a really hard time doing things like sitting down with a boss and talking to them. They're trying to keep all the communication electronic, which doesn't work because, I mean, there's no emotional nuance in emails. And everyone is, you have no idea. I mean, if I'm sitting across from you, I know if you're mad at me or not. I can tell by subtleties in your face.

But if you send me an email, I don't know. And so I might read it as like you're furious at me, or I might read it as because there's no nuance in it. So this is certainly a problem. Well, forget about it. I mean, young people don't even email. They just do text. And I just know from dealing with a lot of young people, it's like, listen, you need to call this person or set a meeting and go talk to them and sort out whatever problem you have.

That's a big ask. And that is anxiety. Yeah, it's like, no, I just wanna send this text and I'll, well, let me read the text. And I'm like, this is not gonna solve your problem. But there's a fear of that analog interaction. Well, the reason there's a fear is because it's just really hard.

So I spent a lot of time trying to understand the literature on the intersection between sociality and neuroscience and psychology. Our brains are set up to do this, right? The whole thing about our brains, human brains are to be these social processing computers, but it's incredibly difficult. Like a face-to-face conversation is an incredibly complicated dance of all

sorts of mental systems. It's hard to overestimate how much neuronal processing goes into this. And it's very hard. And so you have to practice it a lot. And it's what you're supposed to be doing. Babies practice this. You're supposed to be practicing as children. Your entire teenage years are socially awkward, in part because you're practicing, right? You're getting a sense of what's appropriate, what's not, how to read facial cues. You learn about things like limbic consonants, which is trying to actually match the intonation and pacing of the other person's voice because that makes it more comfortable. This is really, really practiced.

And so for most people, by the time they get to adulthood, they have their 10,000 hours. But if you don't get those 10,000 hours because you did this instead, you looked at the screen, and then you throw someone into the major league game, it's really scary because they're not good at it. You illustrate this with the rock, paper, scissors story in the book. Can you tell that? Yeah. I mean, it turns out that you can be good at rock, paper, scissors, which, you know, it seems like-

Seems like a game of chance. It seems like it should be a game of chance. But if you get there, there was a period that unfortunately is no longer with us, but there was a period in which rock, paper, scissors tournaments were a thing and ESPN, you know, eight would cover them. And I watched a bunch of these videos. But the champions would repeatedly win, right? So if you wouldn't see this, if you were chanced that the people who did really well tended to do well consistently in the tournaments. And there's these videos online of these professional, I'm using air quotes here, rock, paper, scissor players that would go do essentially pick up matches with people on the street, and they would just win all the time.

You can get good at rock, paper, scissors. And it turns out what they're doing is they're taking a lot of the things that our brain does in social processing, in particular, like mentalizing, simulating the other person's brain. And they just get really good at it. And so they can actually, they really are trying to understand, like if I do this, you'll do this, but you're probably thinking I'm gonna do this,

so I'm gonna counter that with this. And they have these back and forths and they're playing these mental chess matches. But the tool they're using to play these mental chess matches are this incredibly sophisticated social processing hardware that we have in our brain. Right. Is there a conscious awareness that they're doing that?

Or is it so deeply embedded in our conscious mind? No, they're systematic. Yeah. From what I understand from the research is they're actually thinking through pretty systematically. I mean, they're listening instinctually to these processing centers in their brain, but they're going back and forth. They also do things like plant words. So like the match I talk about in the book is the, I mean, it's kind of dumb. They get up on a boxing ring.

They have the, you know, with the cards, these guys and khakis in the boxing ring. But the one guy says, all right, let's roll. Well, he's saying let's roll because he's trying to get the semantic connection to rock in the other player's brain right but then the other player recognizes this right and says oh he's trying to get a semantic connection to rock so i'll be more likely to play rock so i'm gonna play scissors because i think he's gonna he would then play paper but then the original guy is assuming that he was going to make that leap and so he's probably gonna play scissors so he does go to rock and that's what he plays and he wins that particular match. That's amazing.

All right, so put me on a digital minimalism protocol. Like how do we, if one wants to begin this process, what does it look like? What is your program? Yeah, so I have one, I have a 30-day thing, which is a little bit outside of my typical style, right? It's a, I mean, the idea of having like a 30 day program is something that's maybe a little bit. Makes you queasy. It's a little more self-healthy. Yeah. It's a little bit more

self-healthy than I normally am. But what I found is that you, you actually need it. You need something like it. The, the tips and the tricks aren't cutting it. The forces are so powerful that when I'm experimenting with different things, the thing that seemed to actually work, and nothing shorter than this seemed to be as effective, was saying we're going to take 30 days, and you're going to step away from essentially any of the optional stuff in your personal digital life. So not the work stuff, that's a separate debate.

I can't get you out of answering your boss's emails. But the social media, the online news, the video games, the streaming YouTube videos. 30 days, you're stepping away from all of that. During those 30 days, what do you do? Well, at first, there is a detox effect. But I'm not a big believer in digital detoxes as a standalone thing. To me, it doesn't make much sense. It seems like it's a weird sort of evolution of detoxing from substance abuse, where

the idea of a detox is just the first step towards building a new life that doesn't have the original sort of offending behavior. But in the digital world, we have this idea that like, well, you just need to take breaks and then go back to what you were doing before. Right. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I mean, I do think the idea of doing something hard just because it's hard has inherent value in it and that creating space in between you and the behavior is instructive and important, but it has to be followed up with a protocol that's going to set you on a different trajectory, which kind of gets into, I mean, look, if you, if you canvas, you know, the blogosphere about how to manage this, it's all about these little tricks and tools.

Yeah, take a break, go back, grayscale your phone, take certain apps off of your phone. That doesn't work. I've tried a lot of that stuff, but I always end up lapsing back and just doing what I've always done. Well, it's the same as fitness, food and fitness, right? I mean, so when we got hyperpalatable foods,

everyone was getting unhealthy, obesity was rising, we had a metabolic syndrome rising, everything was going up. We tried the tips and tricks, right? I mean, so when we got hyperpalatable foods, everyone was getting unhealthy, you know, obesity was rising. We had a metabolic syndrome rising. Everything was going up. We tried the tips and tricks, right? Eat better, you know, eat less, eat better. We put food pyramids up, you know, in the school nurses. Do a diet. A diet is sort of like a detox. Yeah, do a diet. And you go back to doing whatever you were doing before. Yeah, eat grapefruits for a month or whatever it is. Yeah. And none of that was really working. So then you think, all right, who are the healthiest people we know? So like you're probably one of the healthiest people I know.

How do the healthiest people you know got there? Almost always they have a philosophy, right? Like it's plant-based, right? You know, I'm vegan or paleo or whatever it is, but it's usually something much more consistent and coherent than just tips. Right. A set of guiding principles. Guiding principles based on their values they really believe into it, right?

That's what we need in digital. So I think the gray scale, the like do a digital Shabbat, take a break every once in a while, that's like the grapefruit diet and the food pyramid. It's tips and tricks, eat less, move more.

It's not going to get it done. You actually need a philosophy. And so that's what digital minimalism is basically like veganism for your digital life. So spell out like a typical philosophy that would be workable in this context. Right. Okay. So this is what you develop during this 30-day process, right? So I call it the declutter instead of a detox because it's more than detoxing. And so what do you do during these 30 days, right? So you're away from all this optional tech, you're getting some space, but you have work to do. And so the work I recommend is in

classic minimalist fashion, you try to get back in touch with, well, what do I really care about? What do I actually want to spend my time doing outside of work? And you actually experiment, you go try things, right? You go back out, you get books out of the library, you join things, you invite people over for board game night. You try to rediscover. You become your parents. You become your parent. You think, what would my grandfather do on a Saturday afternoon? Let me try that, right? Let me go build a canoe or something. So, you actually are doing a hard work of figuring out, well, what do I actually value? Because people don't know for the most part, what do I actually care about in my life outside of how to work because we filled that void with the screens.

Then when the 30 days are over, you say, okay, just like Marie Kondo took everything out of the closet and the only things going back in are things that I really care about, it's the same thing with your digital life. You don't just go back to what you were doing before. You say, now that I know what I'm all about, I have this high bar, which is if I'm thinking about downloading an app or returning to some service, the question is,

is this thing going to really help one of these things I really value? Is it going to give one of these things a really big boost? If so, I'll let it back in my life, probably with some rules about how I use it, but I'll let it back in. If not, I'll miss out. And I don't care if it has some small value or some small convenience. And so it's about building the foundation of values that you need to actually have a minimalist approach to your tech. So it's, I want tools to be used to really boost a small number of things I really care about and really value. And that's the whole ballgame for me. I don't care that this has some small benefit or some minor convenience.

I want to use tech to get big wins. And that's sort of a classic minimalist approach. Yeah. And in order to be able to fairly adjudicate what those values are, you do need that clarity. And that clarity can only come with the decluttering process. You need the time. And what I found, so I ran this experiment where I talked to my readers about a year ago, a little more than a year ago. So December 2017, I said, is anyone willing to do this declutter process? Because I want to hear about it from different walks of life. And because it was a big ask, I thought I would get a dozen readers.

To the point where I was like, it'll be great. I'll go hang out with these people. I'll be journalistic. I'll hang out with my declutterers. 1,600 people signed up to do it, which was a sign that, okay, people are hungry. So, hold on. let me just interject here. What's Georgetown saying at this point? Because you're a professor at Georgetown. You're running this side hustle situation where you're doing experiments on people. They're cool with everything, all of this whole other life that you have?

Well, this wasn't, yeah. I mean, technically speaking, from a Georgetown perspective, it wasn't an experiment, right? For it to be an experiment, I would have to be having a protocol for gathering data. It was more like I was encouraging readers,

hey, you should try this thing. And let me know. I'd be curious to hear what it was like for you. And so then 1,600 people signed up to do it. Yeah, I don't know what Georgetown thinks. But actually, you know what? In fairness, I'm a computer scientist i'm a technologist but i i i also write public facing about the impact of tech on culture like i think

there's a through line there and i think georgetown's a great place to do it because it has this old history of of uh studying human flourishing um but yeah so i do this right i i do this experiment people start sending me reports. And one of the things I noticed is that there's a huge age split. So people who are old enough to have gone through their teenage and young adult years without ubiquitous smartphones and social media, for them, that 30-day process was a lot of rediscovering. It's like, oh, yeah, the things that I used to do, I remember this now. It's just sort of like dusting off whatever. For the young people, it was terrifying because they had never had those answers before.

So they were starting from scratch and it was like an existential void to the point now where I actually recommend to young people, before you do the declutter, maybe spend some time for a couple months just trying to get back in touch ahead of time. So you don't have a full-blown existential crisis. People were. I mean, it really was. People you don't have a full-blown existential crisis. People were. I mean, it really was. People were, especially younger people. That's concerning. Yeah. About humanity in general.

That first day without the phone was, you know, that's Nietzsche right there staring into the void. Like, what am I going to do, right? Put you in a straitjacket. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Like, full-blown panic at just not knowing what to do with yourself. Yeah. One young woman told me that for 10 days,

she was compulsively checking the weather app because it was the last thing she had left on the phone that actually like had some information. Like you could click on it and you could get new information. She could get her hit. Yeah, yeah. So she was like a meteorological expert for about 10 days.

Yeah, no, I read that, but then she said it faded and then she was okay. It took about 10 days, yeah. Right. Yeah read that, but then she said it faded and then she was okay. It took about 10 days, yeah. Right. Yeah, it faded. And so that I appreciated. Also, a lot of people told me that they, you know,

some people kind of disregarded the rule and said, okay, when this is over, I'm going to go back to everything and it lost the taste. And so after 30 days, they're like,

oh, I'm going to put everything back on my phone and then they go and they click and they realize how arbitrary some of this is. Like, wow, this is like scrolling these pictures and hitting these whatever and then they stopped using it right like it doesn't take long to lose your taste for some of this behavior and how many of

the 1600 didn't make it through the 30 days probably a lot um i mean i only heard from whatever subset like a few hundred right and the people who reported i didn't make it through so i actually had some sense of why they didn't. It seemed to be for one of two reasons. One, if they were just treating it like a pure detox, like I just want a break before going back, that was very hard to succeed. Their brain was like, this is painful. We know we're going back to all this again. Why bother suffering like another couple of weeks?

And then the other people who had trouble were those who really didn't take seriously the charge of figuring out what I want to do instead. If you don't have an answer you really believe in and like, this is what I actually want to do with my time, then it just seems like arbitrary deprivation. Well, it goes back to the philosophy issue, right? Yeah. So if you can connect it to real values, changes can be very sustainable. But if it's just, I don't like doing this,

and so I just want to do this less, and I'm just kind of committing to not doing this, you know, I want to look at the screen less because, I don't know, it's kind of unfavorable.

I don't like the feeling of it. That's actually very hard to sustain. But if instead you're saying, I really care about XYZ, and so I've built a digital life that really boosts

these things I care about, it's much, much easier to stick with it. One of the ways that you illustrate this value-based approach to adoption and use of technology is through the lens of the Amish community, which I found fascinating. I didn't know anything about this. So explain that, because that was really cool. Yeah, the Amish are interesting

if you want to understand why minimalism often works, right? Like why we end up happier, even though we are avoiding some things that might bring us small amounts of value. And so the key thing about the Amish is people often incorrectly think that they essentially froze their technology, like maybe in the late 18th century or something.

Like, okay. Yeah, you just drive through that part of the country and you see the buggies. You see the buggies. And you're just like, what is going on? Yeah, so you think that for whatever reason that their religion must have told them that tech reached its peak in whatever, 1790,

and they're going to stop. But that's not at all actually what's happening. And if you spend time among the Amish, you'll keep seeing all these incongruous things. And so I write about, so Kevin Kelly, the technologist, spent a lot of time when he was younger among the Lancaster County Old Order Amish, and he writes a lot about it. And he talks

about, for example, you know, you show up at the... He has an Amish beard, doesn't he? He has an Amish beard. Well, and that's why he spent a lot of time with the Amish. Yeah, yeah, it's purposeful. But he talks about how weird it is at first because you'll show up and like an Amish kid will go by on rollerblades. And the moms are using disposable diapers

and they have solar panels. And, you know, I write in the book about this Mennonite family, which is, you know, very related to Amish, that has a computerized, you know, $200,000 CNC routing machine out there. Yeah, it seems to not make sense, like a mishmash. It's a mishmash, right? So what's really going on?

Well, it turns out that the Amish are incredibly intentional about how they use technology. And their rule is pretty simple. The main thing they care about is the strength of the community. And so their rule is, if a new technology comes along, we will evaluate it based solely on whether it helps this value or not.

So if it helps our community, keep it together, okay. But if it hurts the community, it pushes people apart or hurts the social fabric, then we don't want to use it. And they'll often experiment, right? Kelly calls it the Amish alpha geek.

So they'll have like, someone said, great, smartphones are a thing. You know, all right, Jebediah or whatever, try it, let's watch you. One guy go out and like, you know, go nuts. Go nuts. And then they'll watch it and say, okay, I don't think that's a great idea.

That seems to be hurting the community, so we're not going to do it. Or something like disposable diapers, like they're just not hurting the community and it seems convenient, so we will use it. And so this is why, for example, they can have generators. Electricity doesn't bring the community apart, but being plugged into the power grid, that was worrisome to them. Because now you're kind of connected into the utilities, and you have to interact more with the outside world. It's why they use tractors.

But cars are really, almost no community uses cars. And all the communities make their own decisions. They have a local council that makes these decisions. Cars, when almost any Amish community tried them, what they found was that people would leave the village. Instead of visiting people on Sunday afternoon, they would go drive places to do things that are more interesting. So like cars. Splintering the connectivity of the community. Most Amish communities have phones, but it'll be in like a communal phone booth. When people had phones in their house, they stopped visiting each other.

Right. So to drill it down into their philosophy or their value-based culture, it's a prioritization of community and that community connectivity is paramount. It's paramount. And so they're betting that being intentional is going to be more important than convenience because obviously their decisions are incredibly inconvenient. And yet the older Amish communities have survived. Sort of surprisingly, they have survived. I mean, it's not like they're isolated on some island somewhere, right? I mean, it's surrounded by Eastern seaboard civilization. Most young Amish go on this rumspringa a year where they go out there. So, it's not like they don't know what's going on.

Like 80 to 90% of them come back. Yeah, 80 to 90% come back. So, they know what's going on, and they know what they're missing out, and yet these communities survive. And so, to me, the interesting conclusion there is that intentionality is incredibly powerful. Right. me, the interesting conclusion there is that intentionality is incredibly powerful. And so you can carry that over to your digital life and say, yeah, you might lose some convenience if you don't use this particular app that has a couple of use cases that are useful. But if the reason you're not using this app is because it's not part of your intentional plan to make your life better, the value you're going to get out of being so intentional is going to swamp what you've lost in these minor inconveniences. Right.

But the key thing is having extreme clarity about what your philosophy and your values are. Because everything orients around that. And if you don't have that, then you're not going to have a clear direction about how to manage all of these things. And that's the hard part. And that's why I say 30 days. And you need the deep work to do that, right? Well, right. You've got to be comfortable with deep work yeah but it's a vicious cycle but like you could do this minimalism thing over a weekend right in theory like why not just take a weekend

and and you know mary condo you can she does it in one episode right i have to add the 30 days why do i have to add the 30 days is because it actually takes a lot of time to figure out yeah what are the values yeah it takes time you need that time to figure out what are the values. Yeah. It takes time. Yeah, you need that time. Back to the diet context, there's people that do these nutritional protocols where they have a cheat day once a week. And for me, just knowing my self-awareness is that that's not gonna work for me

because if I could go off the rails one day a week, then that's gonna be two days a week and that's gonna be pretty much every day. Similarly, in the technology space, to be able to have that option at arm's length at all times, I think fails to address the core issue that you're trying to get to. Yeah, so once it's based in values,

as opposed to just, I want to weigh less or something like this. If it's just like, oh, I want to weigh less and so a cheat day on paper shouldn't affect that or something like that. But when you go to values, this I think is the right way to live. And so do you have a protocol for how people can get clarity on those values for themselves during that 30-day period? It's a lot of reflection. So to me, it's reflection plus experimentation. So you sit and you think, and you come up with some, I think this might be what I care about. Then you go out

there and you experiment, and you come back and you revise. And then you should just have the confidence that what you come up with during those 30 days is not the final answer. It's not going to be etched in the stone. You're allowed to keep changing this and evolving it, but at least it's enough time to get to something that has some thought behind it. Right. And then in a very pragmatic, logical way, you can evaluate each app that you're considering downloading from the App Store against that value-based system to adjudicate whether that's going to bring enough value to buffer against whatever negative consequences it also brings. Yeah, that's right. And it can be subtle, right?

negative consequences it also yeah that's right and it can be subtle right and so something that a lot of digital minimalists do is they always go one step further than the binary question of what i use they often always add the second step of how and when i use it and so because it can be a little subtle so like one of the examples that came up a lot in the book was visual artist really depend on Instagram because if you're a visual artist, you have to do creative insight. Creative insight, you have to have a lot of exposure to other creative work. That's the fuel that fuels creativity, which is why it used to be artists all lived in the same small number of neighborhoods, right? Because that's where the galleries were and they had to see what other people were doing. So Instagram is this big boon for visual artists.

That's what I learned because now you don't have to live in Greenwich Village. You can still see what other people are doing and get that creative input. So when a lot of visual artists do the minimalism procedure, a lot of them say, okay, Instagram definitely passes that test for me

because I really value creative output and this really helps my creative output. But if they just stopped at the binary, I use it or not, it could also become a crush. They're using this thing on their phone all the time, and maybe it's actually going to take their time away from doing the work. And so what a lot of the visual artists I talked to did is, after deciding to use Instagram, they said, well, what's the how and when? And almost always the answer was, there's no reason for it to be on my phone. That just serves the stock price of the company. It's fine if it's on my computer.

And I'll carefully curate who I follow. Like these 10 artists are particularly influential. And they often have some sort of schedule. Like, yeah, I go on Sunday and I see like what they've been doing. And it takes about 20 minutes. And so it's that sort of intentionality. And you can put a little bit of structures or rules around it. Then you really start to get big wins out of the tech.

Yeah, I like that. I mean, I think the pernicious delusion is that, you know, whether you're an artist or whatever it is that you're into, that we use these apps and we use our, you know, digital diet in a way that we delude ourselves into believing is actually moving us forward, but it's actually just procrastination from doing the actual thing. Like I've had days where I've sat for five hours and done emails, gone through all this stuff, which I suppose on some level has some value. And then it is like that junk food thing.

I'll go to bed that night and I think, I don't even know what I did all day. Like, I feel like I just wasted the entire day. And then the next day, there's just a million more emails to deal with. Well, that's what makes it complicated. And there's that built-in like little dopamine rush or whatever that makes you feel like you're accomplishing something, but you're not actually doing anything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's also definitely out there, which is why I think having these rules about how you use things

instead of just the yes-no is actually usually pretty instructive. Because a lot of times you'll use the general idea that this technology could be useful to me as the excuse that allows it to become this constant companion, this thing that you're always using. Like for example, roughly speaking, the people who reported back to me from the declutter experiment, I would say 50% of them kept some social media in their life. And 50% essentially got rid of all of it. When they went through the exercise of what am I value, 50% had some values to which social media served. But of those 50%, it was like 90 plus percent took it off their phone. Because when they actually went through, well, what is the value

I get out of this particular social media platform that's really important to me, almost never did that value require them to check it 100 times a day. And so this was a really common thing among the minimalists who use social media is that they don't have it on their phone. And that alone gets rid of sort of like 90% of the cost. Yeah, because the experience on a desktop or a laptop is just inherently different. Yeah, and they put the money, when it came to the compulsive use, they put the money in the mobile. That was the bet they made around 2011, 2012, is that this thing

is with people all the time, and so we need to make this addictive because it's with people all the time and we get a lot of eyeballs. It was a little bit less useful for them to make the desktop versions as addictive. One of the things that I use on my laptop when I want to write is this program called freedom yeah about this yeah it basically turns off the internet it's impossible to get online for a preset time yeah but still that's like a band-aid you know that's not really addressing the underlying like if you can solve that underlying need and drive by doing the things that you're talking about,

then the need for something like freedom will be less acute. I think that's true. So freedom, what I found is a lot of people use it as like a training tool. You use it for maybe a month at a time, right? Because you essentially are trying to lose the taste. So where people use it very successfully, I think,

is for training themselves out of the web surfing habit. Because that's one of these things where, well, it's just there. I'm on my computer. I've got 40 tabs open. Yeah, you have the browser. Yeah, you can't. Maybe you don't use Facebook, right? You can not use an app, but the web is always there.

And we build these web surfing habits where you go through the cycle of the 20 sites you always look at or something like that. So a lot of freedom, for example, you go, let's say a month of you actually block those sites while you're working, you can't do the cycle. You find after a month, you know, more often than not that you turn off the freedom blocking and you've lost the taste to have to do that. Right. I mean, I went through the similar exercise real early on in sort of my working career where I found that I had this web surfing cycle and I sort of trained myself out of web surfing. And now I don't know how to web surf, which is a huge boon, actually, if you don't have a stable of sites that you go through. Like, I just go here, I go here, I go here, I go here. If you lose that taste, it's like a huge boon to

your productivity. Yeah. Have you noticed a difference between somebody who is living a life more as a manager of people versus somebody who is a more creative type, somebody who's creating content, producing things that come out of deep work? Because Ryan Holiday talks about this a lot. He wrote a blog post about the difference between managers and makers. Somebody who's a manager, they're generally in a corporate culture. There's a lot of people involved in things like Slack and email and meetings. That's their whole day is like moving pieces around a board

and that's productive in the construct of what they do and how they kind of advance within their own world versus somebody who's writing a book or people who really need to kind of engage with solitude in a fundamentally different way? Well, I think there's two things going on. So one, we have moved more of that managerial work into the work cycle of the creatives. And so this is something that there's an economist named Peter Sassoon who wrote this paper back in the early 90s when the personal computer was really becoming well-used in the office place.

And he had this effect he documented called the diminishment of intellectual specialization. What was happening is that network computers made it possible. There's a lot of administrative type of managerial tasks that used to be hard enough that you had to have dedicated people to do them. They became easy enough that now, like in theory, anyone could do them.

And so we began to merge roles. So now even the typical creative worker, someone who does high-level cognitive work, is doing tons of administrative and managerial type of activities all the time. They're interacting with HR and this and that and all these committees. And we've merged those two worlds. And so I think one thing that we have to do is re-separate that much more clearly.

Right now, they're too merged. Everyone's just sort of in this general pool of we have inboxes and answer things. But two, I think the way that a lot of managing happens today is itself probably very ineffective. And so a lot of managing today is this sort of hyperactive hive mind, let's just keep this unstructured conversation going. And we're trying to talk here, talk here, talk there, what's going on here, connect this to that.

But in an age before email, there's a lot more structure to what it meant to manage, right? And so I think that's also problematic. We've gone down to this sort of least common denominator approach to managing where it's, let's just kind of keep everyone talking. If I can reach you at any time and you can reach me at any time, we can have this ongoing, unstructured conversation and just try to figure things out on the fly. And so, yeah, if you're a manager using that approach to work, you have to constantly be connected because if you're not

servicing these conversations, the whole thing falls apart. The wheels grind to a halt. But something I've been arguing, I'm working on a new book about this, is that that's not necessarily the only way to do this. We could be more structured. I mean, I think there's a lot of innovation to happen in understanding, I call it attention capital theory,

understanding the best way to sort of hire a bunch of minds and get value out of it. We're in the early stages of this. And what we're doing now, it's like the primitive factories in the early industrial age. Before we really figured out how do you actually use industrial capital to build things efficiently, we're in the early stages, I think. Yeah. At least that's my claim. Now, I heard you say that if you were running Google, that you would just make sure that anyone who's programming is completely there.

You cannot contact these people. Like, we're paying these people a lot of money to, like, do what they do. Like, leave them alone. Like, let them do what they do. But if you're bugging them every five minutes, then you're not getting the value out of them that you could be getting. Yeah, to me, it's crazy. If I ran Google and I'm paying, whatever, $500,000 or $600,000 for a 10x programmer,

I don't want to have an email address. I'll hire someone. I'll hire someone that can do, like a 22-year-old that can do nothing but. Put them in his own Faraday cage. Yeah, with their team, right? So they can collaborate. I'll hire a 22-year-old to have 19 screens open and do everything on their behalf. But, yeah, I have an article in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education where I'm basically making this claim about professors.

And I say, this is crazy. They titled it as email making professors stupid. They say that the whole point of this profession is to sort of think deeply and teach really well. And all we do is email. And I was like, but there's no reason for this. University is not a really competitive business. It's very stable.

We can experiment. We'll be okay. I think higher education, that was the point of this article, higher education should take the lead in radically reforming how we work so that professors essentially spend most of their time actually thinking

and trying to teach the best classes and produce original research. But now we all have to go on 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreats to get that. Yeah, okay. But then we come back, and we still have to answer the email from HR

and go into the intranet to enter our expense receipts. Yeah, I just don't think we have this. We don't have this figured out yet, and I think there's going to be a first mover advantage. I think it's going to come out of Silicon Valley. This is where a lot of innovation is happening in workflows is in software development because, yes, it's digital and on a screen, but it's pretty close to an industrial metaphor because you're producing a product. And they're

really starting to experiment now with like agile methodologies, like Scrum, and you see things like Kanban, where they're trying to get creative about how do we actually structure work? How do we communicate with each other? Where are tasks actually track as opposed to just, we're all in our inboxes, we're all just talking to each other. And I think when the first Google comes along and says, our programmers don't have email addresses anymore, and they make whatever, two X more revenue, then it's just going to be this tipping point where everyone is going to, everyone's going to do the same thing. I can see that happening. I mean, we were talking before the podcast two days ago, I was up at Jack Dorsey's house in San Francisco. I had him on the podcast. And it was a super interesting experience for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was just getting a glimpse, like being in his home and

spending several hours with him, getting a glimpse on how this guy who's the CEO of two of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley actually lives his life on a daily basis. And I was struck with the extent to which that lifestyle is driven by purpose and value that correlates directly with minimalism. I mean, his house is oriented around a very sparse, stoic, streamlined, minimalistic lifestyle. The guy meditates at least an hour every day,

an hour every morning. He's eliminated distractions. He works two days a week from his home where he literally sits at his kitchen counter overlooking the ocean. I mean, he sits at his kitchen counter the way a lot of people do. He could be living extravagantly, but he's really not. I got a

glimpse of it. And just the grounded, very intentional way that he communicated to me about how he makes decisions about how his time is allocated was profound, I think. And I think it's what allows him to have the equanimity and the ground up to create more efficient work systems that are oriented around getting the best out of people in the most holistic way. Right. I mean, really the main issue is convenience. But this is always the tale when you look at innovation and how we do commerce in different technological periods. Usually the pushback is against convenience, right? So the assembly line was an incredibly inconvenient way to run a factory. It's a giant pain. A, you've got to spend more money. There's all these hard edges now.

We don't get this just right. This piece is going to pile up at this piece, and now we need more managers. We have to put in all this new technology. It's a huge pain, but it produced cars to next faster. It's going to be similar if we try to restructure knowledge work to focus on getting a return on attention capital, so to focus on people producing value with their brains in a sustainable way. It's going to generate tons of inconveniences, right? Because I can't now just reach you.

It's incredibly convenient if I can just reach you. And we don't have to think about structure and channels. And I spent some time recently going back and learning about the structure they use in the Apollo program, right? So how did we send the man to the moon without email? And I got into like how they actually did this, right? I mean, it was all these teams all around the country, like billions of dollars. And how did they send the man to the moon without email? And I got into how they actually did this. It was all these teams all around the country, billions of dollars, and how did they actually coordinate

because they couldn't just send emails back and forth. And it's a huge pain. You have to have these interfaces and protocols. But it worked. And so that's what we're up against now. So the reason why a lot of these efforts have failed is if you're not Jack Dorsey, if you're not at the very top, what you're doing is going to make life inconvenient

for someone above you, probably make life inconvenient for some people at your level as well. And so how do we overcome that? It's like a chicken and the egg problem. And I think that's why we're at this stalemate where people increasingly recognize this is not the right way to work. But no one can really take the first step because making the jump from the old way you build cars to the assembly line, it sort of required a Henry Ford to say, what the hell, let's just do it because I said so. And it's going to be a huge pain and I don't care. And so the next book is World Without Email.

And so what does that look like? Well, I mean, that's the basic idea is moving past this sort of generic hyperactive hive mind workflow, which is we're all just in conversation all day long unstructured and actually figure out a workflow that makes sense for your business. And so you think about the main capital resource and knowledge work as being human brains. And so like in any sort of capital industry, how do we get the best return on that capital? Well, now you have to really care about things like context switching. Now you have to care about sustainability. I mean, you really do burn people out pretty fast

when they have to do these second shifts at night to try to catch up on all their email or this or that. And so I'm still early in the research for the book, but basically I'm arguing that this bet we made that just making communication faster and more flexible was going to make us all more productive turned out to be a failed bet. And so now it's time to try something else. So I foresee in the future, I'm not quite sure what it'll look like, but I think we're going to have much more specialization, much more specialization of roles, much more sort of structured and bespoke systems for how information moves in between places, much more respect for psychology. So how does a brain stay happy? How does a brain produce a lot of value? And so we're going to see a lot of these type of properties,

a lot more of a separation, I think, from cognitive production and administration. I mean, there's a lot of different ideas we're going to see, but hopefully what we're not going to see is just a generic inbox that has a thousand emails and that your main work activity is just trying to churn through the inbox. Right. Well, I also think, I can't help but think that the maturation of AI is going to play a huge role in how we navigate all of that as well. Well. Some of these human cognitive skills can be offloaded onto supercomputer brains.

Yeah. I mean, that's the end game. But it's actually, not only is the end game, there's a lot of money being invested right now in doing exactly this. Can we essentially have AI play the role that Leo McGarry played for President Bartlett in the West Wing, like a chief of staff? It manages all the communication for you, manages all the passing back and forth information. It can just tell you, like, Rich, here's what you should be working on today. I've gathered all the things you need. I'll get it to the person who needs it when you're done.

But this is going to be the sort of good news, bad news thing, right? A lot of money's being put into doing this. Let's say we succeed. And now all creative workers have essentially an AI chief of staff that talks to each other as AI chief of staff. Now as a creative worker,

mainly what you're going to do is think hard. It'll take care of everything else. It'll just, this is what you should be working on. I've got it all here for you. That sounds like good news, right? I mean, you don't have to do email all day, but because we're doing email all day, it's going to make you much, much more effective.

And so now if I'm running a company, I'm thinking I don't need 12 people, right? I don't need 12 ad copywriters anymore. Six will do it because they're not spending their time doing email all day, or I don't need 12 people, right? I don't need 12 ad copywriters anymore. Six will do it because they're not spending their time doing email all day. Or I don't need this many lawyers. This many can get the same amount of work done. Or I don't need these many programmers because with AI offloading all the context switching, they're much more effective. So it's possible that the creative class that feels like they're immune from AI because what they do directly can't be automated is not as immune as they think.

Because if the AI can take out all of the other stuff that's making us really inefficient, we're not going to need as many of us anymore. Yeah. That's something that Yuval talks a lot about as well. I mean, I think that dawn is coming soon and things are going to get messy and interesting. Yeah.

So either it's going to be terrible, like we're going to need a lot less creative workers, or we'll have some sort of creative destruction and figure out many more domains to use high-level creative thinking. We'll see. But yeah, it's going to be disruptive. So talk me through your own information

and technology diet. You know, as somebody who's written all these books and somebody who, you know, is in computer science, teaches computer science, is also blogging, like you're not completely offline. So how do you get your news and your information? What does that diet look like? So I have no social media. I read a paper newspaper every morning. The Washington Post gets delivered to my door. So that's how I- Such an old man. I am an old man. I know I'd be good. 150 years ago, I'd be a great,

sorry, small town lawyer or something. You and Ryan Holiday should have, you're both born out of time. Yeah, but he actually, he bought the ranch. So he's a step ahead of me. Yeah. I'm not shooting boar off my back porch. Yeah, but you're taking long walks in Tacoma Park. Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, you're right. It's like Ryan Holiday without killing the boars, yeah. So I get my news of the world primarily from the newspaper, which I actually like because the articles aren't algorithmically selected for me. So I end up reading things I wouldn't normally have clicked on.

So you sort of learn about interesting world and local events. I read a lot of books. It's sort of part of what I need to do for my job is that I'm just constantly reading books. And this maybe is unfair because it's not generally replicatable, but I have this email address called interesting at calnewport.com. Because I have these great readers. I've been blogging for over a decade. I'm a huge blogging fan. There's a lot of reasons why I think this was probably the way to do the social internet, not these big platforms.

So I have this great readership and incredibly smart and really has their finger on what's going on. And so this address, if there's like an article online or something I really should know about, send it to this address. And so it's kind of not fair because that's not generally replicatable. But this is where I often come across interesting things that are going on relevant to my work is that my readers will send it to me. Like, oh, you got to see this article in the New York Times. So it's sort of like my own ad hoc social media network. Yeah, you've just created your own social network. Yeah, except for it's not attention engineered, so I can't look at it 150 times a day. But also, a lot of the other tips I get about what I should be reading or what I should be doing

comes from the old-fashioned type of social networking, which is, you know, I have good friends, especially in the industry, like other writers and stuff I know about, and we talk. And we get together and they say, you should read this. Have you heard about this? And so, it's just old-fashioned social networking. Yeah. And that seems to work. I mainly don't web surf. I don't entertain myself online very much. I have no bookmarks. When I work, I'm very scheduled. So, when I work, I'm very intense. Like when I work, I'm very intense. Like I'm doing this right now as intensely as possible. And then when I'm done working, I'm done working. So I don't really have idle time for, you know, I don't have time to fill with sort of.

But when you are working, especially in the research phase of putting these books together, I would imagine you have to have some tabs open because you're researching things and you're trying to find out information about this and that. It can't all be in print books yeah right so so uh i do get useful leads uh i do do some internetting to find articles often i really separate them so like on this trip to california for example i have a folder on my computer full of pdfs and they're all stories on latest psych research on social media's effect on positive well-being because I'm writing this article where I need to know these things. And so I had a gathering step where I gathered all of that. And now I have these articles with me, and I was reading them on the plane. And so the processing I see, which is something that in academia is very normal.

So in academia, if you're doing academic research, especially in math like I do, the typical structure is you sort of, you find the articles, you print them, then you have the articles with you. And then there's this long period of sort of tangling with the articles. And because it's so complicated usually to figure out math proofs, it's a completely separate activity

is trying to tangle with a printed article and figure it out. And so that separation is very clear to me. There's gathering stuff and a completely separate activity is trying to make sense of it. And what kind of phone do you have? So I just got a new one.

So I had my wife's old iPhone, and then it started clicking on its own, which I discovered when I'd be in Uber, and it would just change the route while it was still in my pocket. So I don't know. I just, I don't know what number it is. So you have an iPhone. I do have an iPhone, yeah. You have a certain number of apps on there, but just no social media apps. Yeah, yeah.

So for example, you took an Uber out to my house, long drive. Like, what did you do in the car? Like, were you looking at your phone? No, I talked to Oscar. Did you? Yeah. It was fascinating. We learned a lot. I learned about his daughter.

I learned about- It was so engrossing that he took some wrong turns, right? We missed a couple exits. He didn't seem to notice. I noticed because, hey, I learned about. It was so engrossing that he took some wrong turns, right? We missed a couple exits. He didn't seem to notice. I noticed because I could see it. Hey, we got here. Yeah, well, the phone. So if you take off the apps in which someone makes money every time you tap on it, it really

does put the phone back into that original Jobsian vision, which is this beautiful tool that you take out to do certain things. And it does it really, really well. Like you can call an Uber, you can look up a map, you can, you know, look up a movie time. Like maybe I want to go to this movie theater or something like this. Or if you're meeting someone, like I can text them, like, yeah, I'm around the corner. Like it's great for that. But it's such a different relationship because it's not the constant companion model.

Right. Let's talk about parenting. We both have young kids. Let's talk about parenting. We both have young kids. How do you think about and talk about how we should effectively parent our children around these devices? stage of relevance, but I've been looking into it a lot, talking to a lot of parents who are, that try to find out. And a couple things I'm noticing is, one, there really does seem to be an issue, especially with adolescents. Oh, it's huge. It's huge. It's massive. And there's this weird kind of tit-for-tat thing going on in the research literature, in the psych research literature, where someone will publish something that says, this is negative. And then someone else, because it's all about pushing back on trends,

will say, no, no, you're looking at the numbers wrong. It's not so negative. You talk to any parent and there seems to be no confusion. Like this is negative. It's not debatable. Yeah. But it's tricky.

It's very tricky, yeah. Because I can't tell my 15-year-old daughter that she can't use her phone. And even to the extent that I want to police behavior around that, it becomes very tricky. Yeah. Well, you have the bad luck of timing because this is new. And so my conjecture is culture is going to change on this. I think so.

I mean, I have two boys that are 22 and 23, and I would almost put them in the neo-Luddite camp. Like they don't, they're really analog. Like they're not interested. I mean, they have Instagram accounts. They almost never post. They don't look at it. It's, they don't, you know, if I text them, it takes forever for them to text me.

Like they're just not online. And then I look at my two daughters, completely different picture. Yeah. Well, but they're right in the sweet spot from like a timing perspective, a cultural timing perspective. We're sort of at the height of like teenage,

especially teenage girls, social media, smartphone use. And this is their vernacular. This is the vocabulary. This is, you know, a 15-year-old girl, the most important thing in her life is her social life, right? And that's not going to change. And if you, the phone is at the vortex of all of that. And this is how they communicate.

And so it's not a simple matter of like, okay, you know, phone the way I think the culture is going to change is I think the idea that adolescents use these sort of highly appealing social media applications, I think that's going to change. I think a move towards maybe simpler phones, I think that might change as well. Because we have two things happening right now. We have the health research that's saying it's starting to get scary. Even though there is some debate on it, there's some pretty scary numbers on what happens once you get widespread social media use. Mental well-being, you mean. Mental well-being and the corresponding hospitalizations for self-harm and suicide attempts goes right up with it. But two, I'm picking up when I'm on the road from parents talking about there's this growing emergent resistance from the teenagers themselves.

That they're starting to get, just like people of our age and older are starting to get tired of how much they're looking at their phone, the teenagers are not happy about having to maintain their Snapchat streaks or whatever it is. I mean, it seems like work. They know too that it's a problem. And so what I think Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has this sort of this great idea, which is because he really cares about this as well. He's been on the road talking about this. And what he's saying is we don't need to convince, let's say, everyone in your daughter's class to stop using social media and a smartphone before it's palatable for her. What you need is like three people. The cool people. It's positive deviance theory, right? It just makes it a

possibility. Some people don't do it. Now that makes it a legitimate option that you don't have to do it. You wouldn't be the only one not to do it. And so his take, which I find optimistic, is getting from everyone does this to there's young people who are really unhappy about what's going on on here. And so anyways, that's what I'm hoping. If my kids were just coming to that age right now, I think it would be hard. I mean, I think I would be really, because of the work I've done on this, I'd be really reluctant to let them have a smartphone. Yeah. It's deeply concerning. The train's already pulled out of the station in our house, you know, and there are times where I feel powerless. Like I really just don't know what the right thing to do or say is. Yeah. Well, and it's also arbitrary. I mean, the actual sort of activities on some of these apps is so oddly contrived, like with these streaks and these pictures and you tap on these things and it's attention engineered, the whole thing just feels a little bit sort of unsavory.

I know, man. Yeah. But you're optimistic? It's because I'm sensing this groundswell. I don't know. I said in GQ Magazine, I said that we were going to look back in 10 years at giving a, whatever, a teenager a smartphone like we would giving a teenager a pack of cigarettes.

And that got me into some trouble. Did it? Yeah. I read that article. It was a very long article. And it was pretty straight, pretty point blank, straightforward on that point. Yeah. So, so I know it's more complicated, but I've decided the role I'm going to play is I'll advocate for the, one of the extremes. Yeah. But when you contextualize that against, you know, kind of how you talk about the progression of these technologies over time in the book,

kind of how you talk about the progression of these technologies over time in the book, starting with Samuel Morse and Morse code. And the gestalt of these things is constant forward progression and acceleration without ever taking that moment, that beat to say, why are we doing this? Or how is this serving us? And that's the human condition.

And the constant forward momentum picture is a little bit, it's more complicated than that, right? Because actually it's this bifurcations. We try all these things and some of them keep moving on and some of these bifurcations are dead ends. And so like a lot of the work I do is trying to separate, let's say, large social media platforms from the social internet project in general. And so it's completely reasonable to think about a lot of these social media platforms as just being a fork, right? That's kind of a dead end, right?

A lot of the different things, messy things that we're trying when we have internet and people are trying to figure out the right way to use the internet, we're going to try a lot of things. And the idea that five years from now, we don't use Snapchat anymore doesn't necessarily represent an end to forward progress.

It could actually be completely consistent with a narrative of forward progress. That's part of progress in technology is this sort of evolution and experimentation to try to understand. Think about the first dot-com boom in the late 90s. It was about, okay, the internet should all be about e-commerce. That's what the internet's going to be. Everyone's going to have a store, and everyone can tell that everyone is going to unlock. And it didn't work. It turned out that we only need one store amazon and so this wasn't going to fuel the economy and so we try it again like well maybe the internet's all going to be about social and like that's what's going on now it's not about uh the first.com crash was not about i guess an

into the forward progress of the internet i think it's part of this sort of more when you're in the moment it's much more messy and so that's why i think we have to keep critically engaged like well what are we doing with this tech do i I really need to be doing this? What could be better? Is blogging better than Facebook? Maybe, you know, these type of questions, I think, locally might seem like tech versus Luddite or something like that. But it's actually a big part of the process of actually trying to evolve how we use tech in our culture. Well, you can telescope up from technology in general. I mean, technology is what is consuming our focus and our attention at the moment,

but really, ultimately, fundamentally, what you're talking about is living an intentional life versus living a reactive life. Yeah. And technology is the template upon which you're explaining these things, but it does go back to stoic philosophy in certain respects. Like, what does it mean to live a meaningful life? We always have to keep coming back to this

question. And there's all sorts of cultural forces that require us to come back to this question. And so, yeah, right now, I think you're right to point out that like right now, technology is one of the things that's making us having to re-examine this question. Just like we had in the one of the things that's making us having to reexamine this question. Yeah. Just like we had in the sort of the 80s and 90s, maybe heightened consumerism had to make us think about this question. The secularization of Western culture has forced a lot of people in the last hundred years to rethink about this question. There's all sorts of forces that keep bringing us back to this fundamental question. Right. And to kind of tie it to the book that preceded this deep work, this idea that deep work is what gives our life meaning, right? So, can we, let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah. I mean, I ended on that quote that something like the deep life is a good life, which was a more general observation. I mean, one of the things that was interesting about that book is that it was supposed to all be just professional productivity, right? That's what this is about. And I ended up adding this chapter about deep work is meaningful because I kept running into all these different sources that were from all sorts of different disciplines that all were making the same argument that focusing intensely on something that's really valuable is a huge source of satisfaction. It's a huge source of meaning. And when you get away from that, you lose that satisfaction and meaning. And so, even though that book was supposed to be a business book, I couldn't help having this chapter in there where I was talking about

philosophers. And we were really understanding the value. It got a little bit head in the clouds when I was talking about the value, the wheelwright, the wheelwright who understands the intrinsic properties of the wood. And that's like, now he has this system of values that's cited outside of himself. I mean, what makes wood good or not good is not his own decision. It's a part of it. And then in that, you actually get this founded sense of meaning. I mean, it can get pretty heady. But the pursuit of mastery.

Mastery, yeah. It's like hero dreams of sushi. In pursuit of mastery. Mastery, yeah. It's like hero dreams of sushi. You know, like somebody who devotes their life in pursuit of mastering a certain thing, there's inherent value and meaning and that will like drive your life forward with purpose. Yeah, yeah. And can help you make decisions about, well, I don't use this and I don't answer email or whatever it is. don't use this and I don't answer email or whatever it is. And you can do that with complete confidence because you don't need busyness, for example, to try to convince yourself that you're

doing something meaningful because you're making the sushi. And you know that's what's meaningful. I mean, in deep work, I spent some time with a blacksmith that makes swords. I was like, what about, the question was, what about this resonates? Like, I have no interest in making swords. Like, I'm not going to live. He has this open air barn up near one of the Great Lakes where he sits in there. His name's Rick Furr and hammers on these things. And he's a specialist in ancient methods. So, like, he really understands ancient steel and how to make swords.

And I watched this documentary about him. And the question is, like, why does this resonate with everyone? And it's mastery, right? Like, he does this thing and he does it really well and you can watch him do it and his whole life is focused on you know what at the moment like focused on this thing that he finds really important yeah and i think we've lost our connection with just how important that is um and i think that's a big reason why free solo was such a big deal this time did you want did you see this documentary?

I haven't seen it yet, but I've written some about Alex. So Alex is a master. And that documentary at its core was really about a master in pursuit of mastery in the most fundamental traditional way and in a very tactile way in which the stakes could not be higher. And I really believe that the movie is gripping, not just because he's hanging on by a fingernail on this wall, but because you're seeing somebody in real time pursue something with such pure intentionality and purpose, and it's become a rarity. And what's interesting about Alex

is that for something like a month before his major climbs, he stops using social media. Yeah. Because he's eliminated all distractions. He's living incredibly minimally and intentionally. There's nothing in his life or in his van that doesn't serve the purpose that he seeks from his existence. Yeah. So that's pushing this idea to an extreme. from his existence.

Yeah. So that's pushing this idea to an extreme, but I think there's a core idea there that's so fundamental, which is doing something that's hard and that you find meaningful is like a huge source of satisfaction. And that these other things, the busyness things,

the things that push us towards our screens all the time, are in contrast to it. It gets in the way of it. I mean, he's okay, the fact that he's not on Facebook for this month before whatever. I don't think he worries about it for a second. it. I mean, he's okay, the fact that he's not on Facebook for this month before whatever. I don't think he worries about it for a second. No, and I think he would be a good example of a digital minimalist because he is on social media,

he's on Instagram, and he shares, but he does it in a healthy, appropriate way. Yeah. So, I love these stories. I mean, so I've written that Chronicle Higher Education article I was telling you about. It opens on this sort of emeritus professor at Stanford who's writing, he's been writing since the 60s, this sort of definitive series. It's called The Art of Computer Programming. He basically invented all the big ideas for algorithm theory. But he got rid of email in the 90s. He said, I've used it for 20 years and I think I've done enough. And so, he has this setup where he has this assistant. He got, wait, so he'd been using it for 20 years, and I think I've done enough. And so he has this setup where he has this assistant. Wait, so he'd been using it for 20 years. He'd been using the early internet email protocol.

Yeah, he's a computer scientist. I've been using it for 20 years. When everybody else is first discovering it, he's over it. He's over it in 1992. He'd used it for 20 years. And so he says, this is what I care about. He has this great quote. He's like, for some people, their goal is to be on top of things.

For me, I think my goal, where I most serve the world, is to be on the bottom of things. And so this is what I'm doing. I'm working on my books. And if you need to contact me, here's my mailing address at Stanford. It goes to his assistant who goes through it all, prints it out. And once every two to three months, they sit down and they go through the things that have been mailed through. And it frustrates everyone. Like he says on his website, please stop emailing other professors in this department and trying to get them to, he's like, I will get very mad. I'm not going to answer you. Don't bother them to do that. And so, yeah, sure, he's missing out on opportunities and connections and this and that.

But like that's his solo El Capitan is this book series. And like, I'm glad he's doing that. Yeah. The world is better with him doing that than fielding emails. Yeah. Or Neil Stevenson, my other example, the novelist, right? The science fiction writer who I really enjoy his work. He has this great famous essay called Why I'm a Bad Correspondent. And he was saying, I know I'm a sci-fi writer, so I know you're my fans and you really want to interact with me. But he's like, if I do that, like if I'm doing emails or this or that, what do I end up with? I have a lot of these interactions that are only relevant to the people I'm talking to. So maybe like in two years, I talked to a thousand people. But if I instead put that attention on

writing a book, I could have a book that a hundred thousand people are going to read and it's going to last for decades and decades. And so like, I think that's a better use of my time is focusing on doing one thing that's really important as opposed to all these small things that have a little bit of value. And so I love these examples. I mean, I think there should be more of this. There's something inherently terrifying about making yourself difficult to reach. At least that's what I feel.

Like that's what comes up for me when I start to think about what that would be like if I was to take that leap. You are. And I don't know what, from where that comes from. You know, what is that about? Well, one of the things I've discovered, I mean, I'm pretty hard to reach,

is people don't get as mad as you would think. It seems to me that clarity is more important than accessibility. So what upsets people is if they're not sure whether or not they can get in touch with you, and they're not sure if you're going to respond or not. But I have this sort of, I call it a sender filter, which is now a thing, right?

Where it's like, okay, here's the different reasons. You can send messages to these addresses for these reasons, and here's what to expect. Like, if you send things to this, like, don't expect for me to respond. People don't actually get that mad because they have clarity. They're like, great, I know I have clear expectations.

Like, I know I can't reach Cal for these type of things. But also, people aren't entitled to connect with you. Yeah. But people don't get as mad as you would think if it's clear. If it's like, you know, I don't know, Neil Stevenson's like, I want to write books. Like, I'm sorry, you can't reach me. And you're like, ah, that's frustrating in the moment. But you know, people aren't mad at him about it. If on the other hand, like, you are kind of accessible, but you sometimes answer, and you sometimes don't. And you're like, well, why didn't you get back to me this time? That's where I'm at. And it's created, a friend of mine says,

Rich, you're in a constant state of free form, free flowing overwhelm. Yeah. It's like my persistent state. Jackson Pollock of overwhelm. That is exactly true. And I have a very haphazard relationship with how I manage what's coming in. Sometimes I respond and sometimes I don't.

Sometimes I stare at that email inbox and I'm just like, I just can't just forget it, man. I just feel like deleting the whole thing. But then I'm like, then I'll sit down and respond for hours and hours and hours on another day. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure it. You know what I'm doing now? So in nonfiction writing, there's a lot of people that no longer manage their own inboxes. Yeah. I'm still trying to figure it. You know what I'm doing now? So in nonfiction writing, there's a lot of people that no longer manage

their own inboxes. Yeah. And so I've been gathering, I'm curious. I've been gathering stories. A lot of people are doing that. Yeah. They hire virtual assistants

to do that. Yeah, or just real assistants. I think it's not cheap. But I've seen it and I'm curious. So now I've been interviewing people just for my own edification. Like how does this work logistically?

But I'm seeing that more, where it's basically just, you know, eventually you have to wipe your hands clean of it. Yeah. But there is something inherently flawed about having to hire another human being to deal with a technology platform on communication. That doesn't seem efficient. I mean, you're a computer person, right? Like, doesn't that seem flawed? Yeah. Well, maybe what that's a recognition of is, like, in nonfiction writing now, if you're writing a certain type of book, I guess you're like a mini business.

Yeah. And, like, any type of mini business is just going to have a big inflow. Right. And then eventually someone needs to manage it. But, yeah, I agree, like, fundamentally. Yeah, if you have to hire. I mean, I wrote a piece about this a long time ago, this article where I contrasted two different entrepreneurs. And they both had the email overload problem.

And I guess the one entrepreneur hired an assistant and trained them up and wrote this really long article about an incredibly complicated system of how they did it and got to them the things they needed to respond to. And the other entrepreneur said, I don't do email. It was kind of like an easy answer to the same problem. And they both ended up doing fine. They both were running web-based brands, like podcasts plus blogs, right in the type of work that we're talking about here.

One guy said, you know what, here's my mailing address. And the other guy has this incredibly highly trained assistant and this sort of 20-page instruction manual for how to deal with it. And you know what, they're both doing fine, and probably the cheaper option was option A. So maybe we'll see more of that as well. I mean, I basically do that. I don't have a general-purpose public email address. There is no just, I want to hear from you.

Here's my address. I'm not on social media. There's really no way. It's very hard to get in touch with me normally. You can send me things, which I appreciate. People send me links and stuff, which I appreciate because I look at them. But it's very clear I'm not going to answer. And that's kind of it, right?

If I have a book launch, my publicist is available. You can contact my publicist. And for, you can contact my publicist. And for speaking, there's a speaking agent. Right. So you have people that are fielding. Like my whole thing would be that I'm missing out on opportunities. Yeah. Maybe you are, maybe you aren't.

You are, yeah. But I guess if somebody, if it's a real thing and it's important enough, somebody will figure out how to get in touch with you. I did have that happen recently. You found out later, like, you could have done this cool thing. Well, I did something for CBS this morning around this book. Because for this book, there was a publicist I had to just take in contact. But the producer was like, you know, I'd read this thing of yours like a couple years ago. And I was like, oh, that's great. We should get him on the show.

He's like, but I didn't know how to get in touch with you. And so I was like, ah, whatever. And then now when this came up, he had a way to do it. So yeah, that happens. It requires some trust, right? And a healthy relationship with FOMO. But see, that's maximalism, though. So if we go back to the minimalism-maximalism

sort of dichotomy, like maximalism is about not missing out on value. Right. I'm going to spend hours and hours and hours scrolling. So I don't miss CVS. Just so that one thing. Yeah. That's maximalism, right? Because maximalism says if I'm missing out on something valuable, it's almost like someone took that value from me.

It's like someone took that out of my pocket and I don't want to lose things. Minimalism says, well, I already know for sure that, you know, my books are really impactful and working really hard on this book is going to make a big difference. And I already know for sure that like I do these articles and these are really, and so I want to put all my energy there. And so minimalism would say, what you get for missing out on some of those opportunities is that you're able to put more energy on the things that are more valuable. But because those give you such a high return, you know that energy is gonna give you a high return, you end up better off.

Right. As long as you really are taking that time to do the deep work and you're not becoming a dilettante. Which is why I'm not on social media because I don't trust myself. Gotta get rid of the temptations. All right, well, let's round this out with maybe some practical takeaways for

people. So if somebody's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm inspired. I'm going to pick up the book. I'm going to check it out. What are some things that I can do today, though, that might improve the quality of my existence? Some simple things that are easily implementable. So if you're contemplating making the shift to digital minimalism, there's some things you can do to kind of get in shape before you consider the big 30-day transformation. So three things. One, take off your phone, anything where someone makes money

every time you tap on it. So you don't have to quit anything. You're not losing access to anything, but you just can't have it as a default thing on your phone. You have to go to your... Doesn't somebody make money off anything that's on your phone now? Well, okay, where someone makes money off your attention every time that screen is open.

So basically like social media, online news feeds. Take that off your phone. That alone is going to make a big difference. Two, introduce solitude back into your life. So just try once a day to do something where you don't have your phone with you or the phone is with you, but in a mode where it's in the bottom of your bag

and do not disturb or something like this. So just your brain starts to get a little bit of breathing room. And three is start aggressively reinvestigating the type of high quality analog leisure activities that whenever our grandfathers and grandmothers used to do when they had downtime, start introducing that back into your life, just getting a taste again for these sort of higher startup cost type activities that give you more meaning.

All of that gets you in shape so that if and when you decide to do the big 30-day marathon, it's going to be a lot less terrifying. Right. That's pretty good advice. Yeah. Do you listen to audiobooks or podcasts? Yeah. You do? Yeah.

I like podcasts. You do? Yeah yeah i've been doing them for a long time yeah um cool man i really enjoyed this yeah thank you thanks um you are doing the deep work this is uh i really think that um that this issue is uh is really the epidemic of our time. I mean, we have a lot of problems culturally right now, but I think we're only gonna see the maturation, the long-term impact of our relationship

with these mobile devices and technology in general is gonna continue to manifest in malignant ways. So I really appreciate you being the sound of reason and caution in the context of this conversation. And I think we're going to see more and more people speaking out about this and hopefully innovating new ways, healthier ways through all of this, because technology is certainly not going away. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we need philosophies. And so digital minimalism is one. But yeah, I think that would be the bigger legacy is not that everyone becomes a digital minimalist,

but that other people start thinking, if not that, then what? Right, we need a Manhattan Project around this, I think. I don't know if anything like that is going on. Like where's the council of digital minimalists getting together to debate the future of technology. But I certainly see wisdom in compiling just such a group of people. Yeah.

Well, good. Well, I share your- So get on that. I'm working on it. All right. Good. Yeah. Well, Tristan Harris, of course.

Yeah. He's got a nonprofit. They're doing this. Yeah. They're working on this. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

All right, man. So thank you so much. Pick up the book, Digital Minimalism. If you want to connect with Cal, you can't. It's impossible to do so. Just trying to get to me through Rich, right? You can hit me up and maybe I'll read it. Maybe I won't.

I'm impacted by today. So I'm really going to start looking at ways that I can change my own behavior around these things. Yeah. Cool. Great. Thanks. All right, man. Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, all the other books, calnewport.com. Yeah. Cool. Great, thanks. All right, man. Digital minimalism, deep work, all the other books,

calnewport.com, check them out. Thanks, man. Yep. Peace. I think that was a pretty damn good podcast. What do you guys think? Pretty great, right? If you dug it and you wanna connect with Cal, I got bad news for you.

You probably already guessed that you cannot let Cal know what you thought of today's conversation on any social media. He will not see it. He does not have social media accounts, but you certainly can learn more about him at calnewport.com, on the show notes, on the episode page at richroll.com, of course, where we have tons of links and resources for you. Check out his blog, Study Hacks, and I highly, highly recommend all of his books, including his latest, of course, Start With Digital Minimalism. From there, read Deep Work, and you can go down the rabbit hole from there. And I got links in the show notes to everything that

this guy has written and done. If you would like to support our work here on the podcast, just tell your friends about the show or your favorite episode, that one-on-one interaction. That's really the best guerrilla marketing out there. Share the show on social media. Take a screen grab of the episode that you're listening to. Share it with your friends. Make a comment. Make a little video about it, all that stuff.

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at richroll.com forward slash donate. Thank you to everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiello, as always, for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and so much more. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for their masterful videos that they create together for the show.

Jessica Miranda for her beautiful graphics. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Analema. Appreciate the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with a very hotly anticipated podcast. It's with somebody I've wanted to get on the show from. Day one, the very top of my dream list,

his name is Rusty Rockets. That's right, Russell Brand joins us next week. Looking forward to that. Until then, take a break from the social media, put down the phone, breathe, meditate, enjoy your family and your friends, connect with nature, do what you have to do, but just detox a little bit from your digital life.

Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.