Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] 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 books sure so a long time in the making and really excited to dig in 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 a Harare recently said famously that clarity is power yeah 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 mmm-hmm concentration it just seemed like something we all know how to do if we all know how to focus on things it's just a matter of where 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 you know 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 gonna give me that hit and it's very difficult for me to create you know to have the rigor and create those rules around around youth 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 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 in 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 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 this is the way that it is now and we just need to adapt as a species and you found a different path in into this yeah you hear this neo let I charge a lot but I'm yet to find one so it seems like this is often thrown right like okay your only option is right your denialist or you're gonna 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 mean somebody a peer scientist is what you are yeah that that's what creates this whole conundrum around this because you actually understand and yet you know I don't know anyone else in your age bracket that has never had a social media account yeah yet here you are breathing and you're alive and you look healthy and happy yeah I have a couple friends seem to be functioning you know you want any the proof is in the pudding like not how many books have you written six books right yeah yeah that's what that's why I tell my 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 so well you've made the New York Times bestseller list like you've demonstrated that you can achieve these Heights in an era in which we've been told you know it's required that you have these accounts and this presence in the digit space in order to move the needle on sales in an analogue world well I mean I think something that's going on here and I think Foods a good analogy right so 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 I don't think it's good for me right I mean obviously this is a message you've taught written a lot about and no one comes back and says you know well rich role is a sort of anti food guy he's not in the eating nutrition right we're used to it and the idea of food that there's there's different qualities 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 world wide 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 you know neo-luddism to say for example I don't use Facebook I see it more like saying I don't eat Doritos mm-hmm and that you can 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 out there preaching is that you have to be intentional you have to be selective you know how do you counter the argument that you know just leveraging my own personal experience like I 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 is 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 and you know in my inner ear 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 rarified group right so so it's people that maybe have large media brands right I mean so this is core perhaps to your business you 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 five hundred billion dollars you know for example if you're trying to advertise it's like a miracle what right what Facebook allows you to do but I don't know that circumstance applies to most people mm-hmm right I mean so for a lot of people I mean they're they're trying to whatever they're trying to connect more with their families our community they're trying to do well by their do well by their job they're trying to build a life that it 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 mm-hmm 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 they're glancing at these things so at the core minimalism for example is this notion of there's no good or bad tech but intentions are really useful yeah 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 yeah so can you explain that 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 have 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 for some reason while 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 it too much that's what I was picking out that they're looking at the screen instead of doing things they know are more important they're looking at this 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 right you know I used to this is the push back I used to get so so I've been sort of a public critic of some aspect 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 no social media and that really has actually shifted a 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 you it's completely useless or there's some use and if there's some use you have to stop complaining about and and so that's what I used to get pushed back at a lot but people that's not the 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 yeah you know and and I know 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 or you just have it with you all the time you look at it all the time we think of that as just being fundamental to the technology I mean that's I 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 is this moment when if your Facebook and Facebook was that's one of the oldest largest venture backed companies here so they really led the way here they're saying we have to get our revenues numbers up right I mean they're the IPO looming their investors needed 100x return so they got serious how are going to get our revenues numbers up and what they came up with was this radical re-engineering of the social media experience and so they reengineering I post information about myself my friends post information about themselves and we sort of look at what each other is up to they reengineering it away from that and towards this stream of incoming social approval indicators mm-hmm and so the like button which seems fundamental was actually a late arrival the social media reading 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 and maybe it got a lot of likes but maybe 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 and maybe I've been favorited on Instagram and this was actually a radical reengineering of the experience so is 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 get directions can be very useful into something that you looked at all the time so it's large it's not fundamental right I mean it was largely invented by a small number of companies right and you you talk about this in the book when you track back to Steve Jobs as initial keynote when they launched the iPhone which you know I 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 seller but I went and talked to one of the development leads from the original iPhone to confirm all of this he said yeah job saw this thing as a knife and iPod they 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 I thought music was very important and so he wanted to make the music plane 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 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 know the quality of experience was the whole thing he told he told this lead developer the quote that he gave me was you know if someone else puts their app on here it's gonna crash the phone just when that person needs to call 9-1-1 that was the the fire 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 gonna be heavily used for certain internet style communications he doesn't get to that and tell about thirty five minutes into the keynote yeah the first thirty minutes his phone and an iPod features which is not to say that technology shown it evolved 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 you know 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 Tristen Harris and him kind of going on sixty 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 you know represent in terms of hijacking our precious time and attention yeah well I mean he was a whistleblowers the best way to understand it I mean he had he had trained to figure out how do you capture and manipulate people's attention with applications he studied in BJ Foggs lab at Stanford persuasive technology then he had a start-up 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 interest on did this sort of Cameron Crowe Jerry Maguire type moment where he wrote a manifesto it was essentially like we need to we need to protect our users attention right I mean it was like right out Jerry Maguire like this isn't good like we're or we're exploiting you know our users we're exploiting their attention returning the gadgets and this thing gets passed around Google gets passed up the Larry Page like okay we're gonna make you the whatever it was Czar of ethics or something like this and and did nothing happen mmm-hmm because there's just billions of dollars at stake so he left and said okay I'm gonna try to spread the word and he was on sixty minutes and he was being interviewed by Anderson Cooper and he pulled out this this 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 you know 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 know it to be true yeah 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 to be 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 what was digital you could exactly figure out at what rate you got different awards and the slot machines right what's right back when it was analog 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 holding 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 it's 20 likes versus five likes uh-huh but they were studying these same ideas and putting these into play so you had this thing that you hit and it would just be like a slot machine handle pool 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 we're figured out how to make that happen they're subtle too and their 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 I'm like wait what was that one and 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 mhm and so one of the graph they needed for the app was a little icon that said you have updates and so the graphic designer is there good graphic designer so 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 right you get 2x2 more clicks right because our brain I brain can't ignore it or this this innocent feature on Twitter where you you pull down the stretch it down and then release and then it updates ya the Twitter thing yeah right there's really no reason to have that but it gives you a slot-machine handle effect where that's right if it just was kind of updating you kind of see what's going on it doesn't really feel like you're pulling the handle a lot 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 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 and then sometimes don't and so there's been accusations that they started artificially batching likes and favorites so that you would sometimes seem and sometimes not because if it was a steady stream it's not nearly as compulsive right as like I almost had the cherries but then it 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 and your email and then you just go back to the beginning again it's like yeah and we wonder why like the non industrial productivity metrics in the American economy have been stagnate over the last ten 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 well let's talk about let's talk about things that really are designed to enhance productivity like email yeah and slack and you know these these technological innovations that are supposed to create seamless workflow yeah so the problem with with email and slack and this was really at the core of my last book so not digital minimalism but but deep work right what was this notion that as 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 taking information think about it produce new information that has value right I mean that's the that's the grist mill of knowledge work so you introduce something like email and it seems like a no-brainer like we we write memos it takes a long time if we can do it electronically 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 mailroom right there 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 and so subtly our workflow shifted to something that I call the hyperactive hivemind which is let's have a constantly ongoing unstructured conversation so let's have 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 its it's not an unnatural thing to do it's basically how you know we would coordinate if we were in like a small group of Peel with the 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 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 the context switch a lot and the psychology literature tells us that that context switching just completely reduces our cognitive capacity 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 conversation 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 fragment that our attention to the degree that we're actually really bad at the core thing to we need to do which is actually sitting there and writing the legal brief right or the article or the market 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 notification setup there's that pull like I need to attend to that because you know my standing within the tribe is dependent on how you know immersed I am in that yea munication flow to be dangerous right if you're in the tribe and and someone's tapping you on the shoulder you know I'm gonna ignore you alright you need a spear in the back we're wired for that but we don't know that we see that there's a email waiting for us in the inbox that deep part of our brain doesn't see that any different then there's the guy with the spear right as you know how to prioritize yeah our brain deal with all these our brain is not meant to have a thousand emails in an inbox each of which needs an answer to them it's just it's short-circuiting an ancient instinct of sociality and we have these ancient social instincts that have been built into our brain through evolution over millenia it's 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 I say well what's just let's let's take the tribal conversation but now it's a thousand people within the company or now you have a hundred thousand fans you're also trying to read you through these thing means or let's get social media which is you know twenty Roald's and hooded sweatshirts just hacking with sociality and 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 gonna 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 twentieth 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 things 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 tended to incoming messages coming at me I thought I can't possibly respond to all of them and you know for years there was this movement of inbox ERL like here's all the hacks you can you know get at the bottom of here and now it's just well forget about that like here's how you can be sort of calm and content yeah when you know 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 man 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 was 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 you 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 he was like I can't in good conscience write this book and and the 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 mountain mountain of communication the right game is how do I produce good things yeah at the core of of everything you do is an appreciation and a respect for you know what you call deep work the immersive experience of of doing really what you're here to do whatever it is that your focus is and whether that's you know as a member of a large organization a corporation or writing a book or you know 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 gonna take a break and answer a few emails and go back to the work but it's really understanding that when you do that that you know 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 the big underemphasized storylines at the intersection of psychology and workplace productivity because we have this movement in the late 90s early 2000s where people begin to realize that pure multitasking didn't work right because we had this remember that was a big deal and that when we first got personal computers in the office people like yeah I'm on the phone while doing email and typing the the memo and 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 right 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 right 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's this context switching cost so it's called the tension residue but essentially when you leave your primary tasks go to an email inbox you see all those messages most of which you can't answer right now and the Paleolithic Minds getting worried you know it's almost half of me at the fire and then you go back to let's say the main thing you're doing which is like right you know the Aubry for 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 we forgot the you forgot to fill out this paper on the form right and then they go back to the puzzles you just you watch the performance drop and it takes a while till 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 no atrophic that makes us dumber uh-huh 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 mm-hmm yeah today if you can just be somebody who can carve out even two hours a day undistracted focused attention you really are like a superhero yeah yes that would just be the norm even 30 years ago ago you've seen all these industries I've noticed it with book editors right that 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 you're a book editor you have writers who writing books that you're helping to edit and bring in the fruition right I mean it's the the end result is the same now that it was 50 years ago a hardcover book except for you've seen this shift in the post email age for basically book editors to all their editing at home mm-hmm they've lost the entire entire work during that yeah its meetings in email yeah I mean and so how can that how can that possibly how could they possibly be more effective at and 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 and 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 focus work they'll do it at a ridiculously early hour yeah 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 because 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 someone knocks on their door and says hey you got a minute yeah 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 is there it's really clear they can see pages so so it 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 produce 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 the quantification yeah but so then we have this other issue though right so we have the issue of interruptions and distractions within knowledge work 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 looking at your phone you know a dinner or 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 process 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 gonna 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 what was a late my book deep work was really about what's happening in the workplace it's making us worse at this and the digital minimalism in part is about what's happening outside of the workplace right this is having all sorts of negative consequences including on our ability to focus when it comes to yeah I'm experiencing that directly I mean when I wrote finding ultra in 2012 it was you know it was pre a lot of this kind of stuff and I didn't have nearly as much coming out of 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 pression of preciousness of it in order to get anything done yeah you know 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 but it's like 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 gonna make a difference right and so I guess you know being a theoretician is sort of the ultra-endurance right equivalent of cognitive work and so a lot of irritation is really care a lot about this and so I had always had that aware in a way I think that other people other jobs that want to be quite so natural because I'm just used to this theoreticians worry a lot mmm concentrating is their number one skill I mean it's it's 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 I lose that mmm 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 and this is how you open digital minimalism which is with Andrew Sullivan's kind of his not really a manifesto what kind of a manifesto of him saying you know as this hyperactive you know 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 well and it wasn't just and what he was saying was not just like I can't do my work he was he was worried about humanity I mean the line was I used to be a human being right and 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 said 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 that 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 productively 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 Justine but what's happening outside of work where I'm constantly doing this instead of other things people were just getting this sense that their humanity itself was being degraded right 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 men ilysm that's really routed in orienting your digital diet around your core values yeah so you know 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 thorough into the voluntary simplicity movement of the 1960s and remarry Kondo yes yes that's Marin Klein called you the Murray canto yeah yes exactly yeah it probably wasn't the script described my physical appearance or physical yeah but it is yeah and and Thoreau echoes throughout the book yeah yeah I like to say I'm Marie Kondo without the book sale numbers but but it it's a through-line right and some 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 that 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 it might give you some value mm-hmm 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 two things that you really care about or the spark joy or whatever is you're 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 right what do you think is going on rather than you know beyond the obvious that we're talking about right now that's happening culturally you know 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 and often 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 the purchased Irwin the happiness and then there'll be a down cycle where people get fed up with this and they embrace sort of minimalist ideas and they'll be an upcycled again and so I think we're on one of these down cycles still where where people are sort of fed up with let's just exuberant ly 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 for a first stuck in the 21st century is where you begin to see the minimalism Movement online for example pick up right right it was right around 2005-2006 where you get like Zen habits and and Josh Becker and Cortney Carver and then Josh when Ryan came along a little bit later and then after that you get Marie Kondo what's different is that the 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 iPhones released in 2007 where it was all just interesting I mean it really is a 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 are experimenting with it and let me try things isn't this fun like it's trying to get their arms around how to 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 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 periods 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 is an interesting idea it has different definitions but the 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 interesting pair of guys that came together the right about salted this judge actually he does he writes his legal briefs in a in Michigan that has no internet so she's after my own heart 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 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 any time 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 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 an age right if you're not doing that you're 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 there's nothing to do with with physical isolation and why is it important so it turns out it's 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 like we're processing you know there's another human mind that we're processing right now all hands on deck right we got fire up all these systems as 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 could then start doing experiments in my own mind of you know how is my rich role simulation going to react if I say this versus this it's incredibly complicated it used a lot of energy right so if you're always doing that the brain doesn't get down cycles right so you're gonna get anxiety 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 is processing and so you know someone listening to this interview is in processing mode 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 that's when the brain makes sense of it right and compares the insights against their own mental schema as 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 can develop what do I want to do going forward all of that requires solitude your brain just has to sit there have 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 if 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's living a life that's not mine yeah well see I think that's because we've put solitude on this pedestal and we think about the row in his cabin all right like what am I gonna what am I gonna have time today to get out to my cabin and but there's an illusion about that as well that you talk about in the book yeah which is a not really what he was up to 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 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 it's you know there's nothing on the radio and you're driving the work solitude you're waiting in line at the pharmacy it's solid you right now you look at that person you're like what's wrong with it that's wrong with them 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 to think that's very very unusual is the fact that we have banished solitude that's what's incredibly rare in the entire history of of sort of human civilization is there's only like seven or eight years old this idea that is now possible they get rid of all solitude so to get souls 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 the podcast for the first 20 minutes or when I'm walking a dog I'm not putting in the the earbuds we're when I go to the store I'm leaving the phone in the car right so it's it's stuff that you're already doing just do some of those things without the slot machine and the constant access to solitude you know busting information what's your sense of what society is gonna look like 20 30 years from now when a whole generation of young people who have 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 the young adolescents 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 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 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 human mind is to banish all solitude so there's definitely 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 and practice 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 the boss and talking to them they're trying they're trying to keep all the communication electronic which which doesn't work because I mean there's no emotional nuance and email yeah and everyone is you have no idea I mean if I'm seen 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 there's no there's no nuance in it so this is certainly a problem well forget about I mean young people don't even email they just do text and I just know from dealing with a lot of young fields 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 big and it's it's that is anxiety yeah it's like no I just want to send this text and I'll let me read the text and I'm like this is not gonna solve your problem but there's a fear of that yeah 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 the 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 and 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 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 alright you're getting a sense of what's appropriate what's not how to read facial cues you you learn about things like Olympic 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 to get to adulthood they have their 10,000 hours but if you don't get those 10,000 hours because he 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 and you tell that yeah I mean it turns out that you can be good at rock-paper-scissors which you know it seems things 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-scissor tournaments were a thing and ESPN you know eight would cover them and and I watts a bunch of these videos but the the champions would repeatedly win right so if you wouldn't see this if you were a chance then the the people who did well tended to do well consistently in the tournaments and there's these videos on lines of these professional 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 right 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 going to do this so I'm going to counter that with this and they have these back and forth and they're playing these these mental chess matches but the tool they're using to play these mental chess matches are this incredibly sophisticated social processing right hardware that we have in our brain right is there a conscious awareness that they're doing that or is yeah so deeply embedded in oh they're systemic yeah from what I understand from the research is they're actually they're actually thinking through pretty systematically and they're listening instinctively to these these processing you know centers in their brain but they're going back and forth they also do things like plant words so like the match I talked about in the book is the I mean it's kind of dumb they get up on a boxing ring 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 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 right so he's probably play scissors so he does go to rock and that's what he plays and he wins does it's that particular match that's amazing all right so put me on a digital minimalism protocol like how do we if if one wants if one wants to begin this process what does it look like what is your program yeah so I have one I'm a 30-day thing which is a little bit outside of my typical style right it's a mean the idea of having like a 30-day program is something maybe a little bit makes it queasy it's a little more self healthy yeah it's a little bit more self healthy that I normally am about what I found is that you actually need it you need something like it the the tips and the tricks aren't cutting it right the forces are so powerful that you know 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 gonna take 30 days and you're gonna step away from essentially any of the optional stuff in your personal digital life right so so not not the work stuff that's a separate you know it's a separate debate I can't get you how to answer in your boss's emails I like the social media of the online news the videogames the sort of 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 detox is as a standalone thing I mean it to me it doesn't make much sense it seems like a it's a weird sort of evolution of detoxing from substance abuse where the idea of a detox is is 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're doing before right yeah I do think the idea of doing something hard just because it's hard has inherent value in it and at creating space in between you and the behavior is instructive and important but it has to be followed should be the first or the protocol that's gonna set you on a different trajectory which kind of gets into I mean look if you if you canvass you know the blogosphere about how to manage this it's all about these little tricks and tools yeah take a break go back greyscale your phone you know take them off you know take these certain apps off of your phone doesn't work I've tried a lot of that stuff but I always end up lapsing back yeah just doing what I've always done well it's the same as as fitness food and fitness right I mean so when we got hyper palatable foods everyone's gained 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 he eat less eat better we put food pyramids up you know in the school nurses they can do it a diet a diet is sort of like a detox I do a diet back to doing whatever yeah he great 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 you know how did the healthiest people you know got there's almost always to 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 instead of guiding principle a principles based on their values they really believe into it right that's what we need in digital so I think the grayscale the like do a digital Shabbat take a break every once in a while that's like the grapefruit diet and the the food pyramid tips and tricks eat less move more not going to get it done you actually need a philosophy and so that's what digital minimalism is basically like veganism for right digital so so spell out 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 text 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 you get books out of the library you join things you invite people over for board games and I you try to read um your parents you become your parent you you think what my grandfather do yeah 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 Mary Kondo took everything out of the closet and the only thing is going back in or things that I really care about it's the same thing with your digital life you don't just go back to what you're 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 I'll miss out and I don't care if it has some small value 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 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 young 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 they said is anyone willing to do this declutter process because I want to I want to you know hear about it from different walks of life and because it was a big ask I thought I would get like a dozen readers right to the point I was like it'll be great like I'll go hang out with these people no I'll be like journalistic I can I'll hang out with my D clutters 1600 people signed up to do it right which was a sign that okay people are hungry so hold let me just interject here what's Georgetown saying at this point cuz your professor at Georgetown you're running this like you know side hustle situation why are you doing experiments on people yeah yeah they're cool with everything well okay other life that you have well this wasn't yeah I mean technically speaking from like at 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 uh-huh X I'm Kurian let me know you know here used to sort of hear what it was like for you and so then 1600 people signed up to do it yeah I don't know what to works down things but I'll actually you know what in fairness I'm a computer scientist so I'm a technologist but I also write public-facing about the impact attack on culture like I think there's a through line there yeah and I think Georgetown's a great place to do it because it has this old history of studying human flourishing but yeah so I do this right 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 like their teenage and young adult years without ubiquitous smartphones and social media for them that three-day process was a lot of rediscovering like oh he had the things that I used to do I remember this now is to sort of like dusting off whatever for the young people 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 and substantial crisis it'll work I mean it really was yet people were especially young concerning yeah about humanity and Jeff first day without the phone I was you know that's that's Nietzsche right there staring Freud what am I going to do right it's good no 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 for me every hit yeah yeah so she was like a meteorology meteorological expert for about 10 days yeah no I read that but then she said it faded and then she was ok took about 10 days yeah right yeah it faded and so I that I appreciate it also a lot of people told me that they you know some people kind of just regarded the rule and said ok when this is over I'm gonna go back to everything and it lost a taste and so after 30 days they're like I'm gonna put everything back on my phone and then they go and they click and it's and they realize how arbitrary some of this is like well you dislike 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 1,600 didn't make it through the 30 days probably a lot 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 have some sense of why they didn't it it seemed to be for one or two reasons one if they were just treating it like a peer detox like I just want to break before going back that was very hard to succeed use their brain was like this is painful we know we're going back to all this again why bother suffering like another couple weeks and then the other people who had trouble were those who really didn't take seriously the charge 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 derivation well it goes back to the philosophy yes you right yes if you can connect it to real values changes can be very sustainable uh-huh 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 last 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 X Y Z and so I've built the digital life that really boosts these things I care about it's much much easier to right 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 yeah so explain that because that was really cool yeah the Amish are the Amish are interesting if you want to understand why minimalism often works right like why we why we end up happier even though we are avoiding some things that might bring a 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 something like okay yeah you just didn't drive through that part of the country I see the buggies you see the buggies what is going on yeah so you think that for whatever reason that their religion must have told them that tech reached its peak and whatever 1790 and they're gonna stop 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 technologists I 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 he has an Amish beer doesn't he has an Amish boy and that's why he spent a lot of time honest yeah yeah it's it's purposeful but he talked 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 computer eyes you know $20,000 see routing machine right right out there yeah that seems it seems to not make sense yeah 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 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 if it you know 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 or a Jedi or whatever try it let's watch one guy go on guys like you know go nuts so nuts and then they'll watch it and so 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 there is it's not hurting the community and it seems convenient so we will use it and so this is why for example they can have generators like electricity doesn't bring into community apart but being plugged into the power grid that was worrisome to them because now you're kind of connected into the utilities you have to interact more with the outside world it's why they use tractors but the 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 what they found was that people would leave that will leave the village mm-hmm instead of visiting people on Sunday afternoon they would go dry places to do things are more interesting so like cars littering yeah Carson yeah most Amish communities have phones but it'll be in like a communal phone booth the when people had phones in their house they stopped visiting each other right so to drill it down into into their philosophy or their value based culture it's a prioritization of of community and that community connectivity is paramount it's paramount and so so they're they're betting that being intentional is going to be more important than convenience because obviously their decisions are incredibly inconvenient and yet the old owner Order Amish communities have survived sort of surprisingly they have survived I mean it's not like they're isolate on some somewhere right I mean it's surrounded by eastern seaboard civilization most young Amish girl in this room spring a year where they go out there so it's not like they don't know what's going on and eat in ninety percent of them come back yeah eighty ninety percent come back so they know what's going on and they know what they're missing out and yet these these communities survive and so to me the the interesting conclusion there is that intentionality is incredibly powerful right and so you can carry that over to your digital life and say yeah you might lose some convenience if you know 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 it's gonna swamp what you've lost in these minor inconvenience right but the key thing is having extreme clarity about what your philosophy and your values are because everything everything Orient's around that if you don't have that then you're not gonna have a clear direction about how to manage these things and that's the hard part and that's why I say thirty days and that's what you need the deep work to do that right yes all right you gotta be comfy for yeah because 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 you know Mary Kondo you can she does it in one episode right I have to add the 30 days why do I have to add to thirty days is because it actually takes a lot of time to figure out yeah what are the values yeah it takes time you meet that time you know a back to the diet context and there's people that do these nutritional protocols where they have a cheat day once a week and you know for me just knowing like my self-awareness is that that's not gonna work for me because if I could you know go go off the rails one day a week then that's gonna be two days a week and it's gonna be pretty much every day similarly in the technology space you know 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 that's based in values right as opposed to just you know I weigh less or something like this you know if it's just like oh I want to weigh less and so like a cheat day like on paper or shouldn't affect out or something like that but when you go to values that this I think is the right way to live right and so you have a protocol for how people can get clarity on 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 and 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 rhiness 30 days is not the final answer it's not going to be etched into stone you're allowed to keep changing this and evolving it but at least it's enough time to to get to something to have some thought behind it right and then in a very like pragmatic logical way you can evaluate each you know app that you're considering to downloading from the app store against that value-based system do you adjudicator that's going to bring enough value to you know buffer against whatever 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 artists really depend on Instagram because if you're a visual artist you have to do creative you know creative insight creative insight you have to have a lot of exposure to do other creative work that's the the fuel that fuels creativity which is why it used to be you know 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 are 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 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 crutch they're using this thing on their phone all the time and maybe it actually gonna take the time away from from doing the work and so like what a lot of the visual artists I talked to did is after deciding to use Instagram they said well what's the the how and win and almost always the answer was there's no reason for it to be in my phone that just serves the stock price of the company it's financed on my computer and I'll carefully cure who I follow like these ten artists are particularly influential and they often have some sort of schedule like I go on Sunday and I see like what they've been doing and it takes about 20 minutes yeah 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 is actually just procrastination from doing the actual thing like I've had days where I 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 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 yeah to deal with well that's women and there's that built-in like little dopamine rush or whatever that makes you feel like you're accomplishing something yeah but you're not actually doing anything yeah yeah well I mean that's that that's also definitely out there which is what I think having these rules about how you use things instead of just the the snow is actually usually pretty instructive because a lot of times you'll use the general idea that this technology could be useful to me uh-huh as the excuse that allows it to become this constant companion this thing that you're always using like for example roughly speaking of the people who reported back to me from the de-clutter 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 it 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 a hundred times a day yeah and so this was a really common thing among the minimalist who use social media is that they don't they don't have it on their phone and that alone gets rid of sort of like 99% of the of the cost yeah because the experience on a desktop or a laptop is is just inherently different yeah and they put the money when it came to the compulsive use they put the money in the mobile mhm 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 get a lot of eyeballs it was a little bit less useful for them to make right 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 but this yeah it basically turns off the internet it's impossible 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 there's a lot of people use it as like a training tool you use it for maybe a month at a time right can you essentially trying to lose the taste so where people use it very successfully I think is for train themselves out of the web surfing habit is that's one of these things where well it's just there right I'm on my computer got 40 tabs open yeah you have the browser later yeah you can't it's like social maybe you don't use Facebook right you can like not use an app at the web the web is always there and we build these web surfing habits where you go through the the cycle of the 20 sites you always look at us right 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 the freedom blocking and you've lost a 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 the 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 it's like a huge boon to your project yeah yeah have you noticed a difference between somebody who is you know living a life more as a manager of people versus somebody who is more creative type somebody who's creating content producing you know things that come out of deep work because Bryan Holaday talks about this a lot he wrote a blog post about the difference between managers and makers somebody who's a manager there in a generally in a corporate culture there's a lot of people involved in things like you know slack and email like and meetings that's their whole day is like moving pieces around the board and that's productive in the construct of what they do and how they kind of advance within their own world versus somebody's writing a book or you know people who really need to kind of engage with solitude in a fundamentally different way well I guess 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 this paper back in the early 90s when the personal computer was really becoming you know well used in the office place and and he had this effect he documented called the diminishment of intellectual specialization well what's happening is is that networked 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 you know creative worker someone who does high-level cognitive work there's doing tons of administrative and managerial type of activities all the time they're interacting with HR and this and that and on these committees and and and we've merged those two worlds and so I think one thing that we have to do is resep rate that much more clearly right now they're two merged everyone's just sort of in this general pool of we have inboxes and answer things but to I think the way that a lot of managing happening happens today is itself probably very ineffective and so a lot of managering today is the sort of hyperactive hive mind let's just keep this unstructured conversation going right and we're trying to talk here talk here talk there what's going on here and 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 also problematic we've gone down to this sort of least common denominator or Pro managing words let's just kind of keep everyone talking if I can reach you at any time you can reach me at any time we can have this ongoing unstructured conversation 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 yeah the wheels grind to a halt but something I've been arguing I'm working on new book about this is that that's not necessarily the only way to do this right we could be more structured I mean I think there's a lot of innovation that happen in understanding I call it a tension capital theory understanding the best way to sort of hire a bunch of minds and get value out of it we're we're in the early stages of this and and what we're doing now it's like the primitive factories in the early Industrial Age before we really figure it out how do you actually use industrial capital to build things efficiently we're in the early stages I think yeah ss 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 you were no email a lot of money yeah 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 five or six hundred thousand for a 10x programmer I don't have an email address right Oh Oh higher so o hire someone that you like a 22 year old amazonian by faraday cage yeah with their team right so they can collaborate I'll hire a 22 year old the the they have 19 screens open and do everything a half but yeah I have an article in the in the latest Chronicle of Higher Education where I'm basically making this claim about professors and I say this is crazy the they titled it is email making professor stupid they say that the whole point of this profession is to sort of think deeply and really well and and all we do is email and it's like but there's no reason for this university is not a really competitive business is very stable we can experiment we'll be okay I think higher education there's a point of this article higher education should take the lead and radically reforming our how we work so that professors essentially spend like most of their time actually right thinking and trying to teach the best classes and produce original research but now we all have to go on and Dave of asana silent meditation retreats to get that yeah okay but then we come back then we come back we self to answer the email free car right and go into the intranet the the enter our expense receipts and you know yeah I just don't think we have this we don't have this figured out yet and I think there's gonna 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 it's in software development because yes it's 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 our tasks actually track as opposed to just we're all in our inboxes are 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 2x more revenue this is going to be the stiffing right where everyone is gonna everyone I can see it I can see that happening I mean we 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 I'm 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 like oh look I mean he said his kitchen counter the way a lot of people do you know he could be living extravagantly but he's really not you know I got a glimpse of it and just the 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 composure to be able to manage everything that's coming at him every single day and I can't help but think that that will at some point that that methodology that philosophy that perspective will find its way downstream into the way that these companies are crafted from the ground up to create more efficient work systems that are oriented around getting the best out of people in the most holistic way I think you're right I mean really the the main issue is convenience but this is always the this is always the tail when you look at innovation and how we do commerce in different technological periods is usually to push back is against convenience right so the assembly line was an incredibly inconvenient way to run a factory it's a giant pain yeah you got to spend more money there's all these hard edges now like we don't get this just right this piece is gonna pile up at this piece and now we need more managers we have to put in all this new technology right it's like it's a it's a huge pain but it produce cars you know two necks 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 actually coordinated intend emails back right it's a it's a huge pain right after 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 is and so how do we overcome that it's like a chicken in 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 you know making the jump from the old way you build cars to the assembly line it sort of required a Henry Ford to say you know you know what the hell let's just do it because I said so and it could be a huge pain and I don't care right and so the next book is world without email yeah right and so what it what does that look like well I mean that's that's the basic idea is moving past this sort of generic hyperactive hivemind 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 the people out pretty fast when they have to do these second shifts at night and trying to catch up on all their email or this or that and so I'm still early in the the research for the book but basically I'm arguing that this bet we made that just making communication faster and more flexible was gonna 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 I'll look like but I think we're gonna 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 gonna see a lot of these type of properties a lot more of a separation I think from cognitive reduction 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 it's just a generic inbox it has a thousand emails and that your main work activity is just trying to turn through the Inbox right well I also think I can't help but think that that the maturation of AI is gonna play a huge role and how we navigate all of that as well well some of these these human cognitive skills can be you know offloaded - well that's super that's the in reims yeah I mean that's the end of them but it's actually known as the endgame there's a lot of money being invested right now in doing exactly this is can we essentially have AI play the role that like Leo McGarry played for you know president Bartlet in the West Wing like a chief of staff like that manages all the communication for you manages you know all the passing back and forth information it can just tell you like richly 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 been 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's 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 they'll just that's 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 gonna 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 only 12 at copywriters anymore six will do it because they're not spending their time doing email a day or I don't need this many lawyers this one you can get the same amount of work done 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 the creative class that feels like they're immune from AI because what they do directly can't be automated it's 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 gonna need as many of us anymore yeah that's something that evolve talks a lot about yeah well I mean I think we're that that that that dawn is coming yeah and things are gonna get messy and interesting yeah so either it's gonna be terrible like we're gonna 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 I mean we'll see but yeah it's gonna be disruptive so talk me through your own information and technology diet you know 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 doorstep such an old man I am an old man ha ha I know I'd be good hundred fifty years ago it'd be great it's right small town lawyer or something 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 yeah I'm not shooting boar off my back board you're taking long walks and to come apart yeah yeah yeah right it's like Ryan holiday without the boar 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 want it normally of 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 then and this maybe is unfair because it's not generally replicatable but I have this email address called interesting at Cal Newport calm because I have these great readers I've been blogging for over a decade I'm a huge blogging fan there's 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 these critters ship and incredibly smart and really has their finger on what's going on and so this address is say well 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 you know 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 or so that it's sort of like my own ad hoc social media yeah you've just created your own social network yeah except where 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 it we talk and we get together and they say should read this have you heard about this and and and so it's just old fast in social networking yeah and that seems to work I mainly don't web surf I don't entertain myself online very much I've no bookmarks when I work I am very scheduled so when I work I'm very intense like I'm doing the right now as intensely as possible and 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 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 I do get useful leads I do do some internetting to find articles often I really separate them it's like I'm 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 medias in fact on positive well-being because I'm writing this article right 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 you know I was reading them on the plane and so the processing I see which is something that in academia is very normal like so in academia if you're doing academic research especially in like 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 uh-huh and then there's this long period of sort of tangling with the articles and because it's it's so complicated usually to figure out math proofs yeah 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 then a completely separate activity is trying to make sense of it and what kind of phone do you have so I've 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 with while the 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 don't have a certain number of apps on there but just no social media apps yeah yeah so for example you had 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 fascinating I learned we learned a lot I learned about his daughter I learned about was so engrossing that he took some wrong turns right we missed a couple exercises he didn't seem to notice I notice because hey we got here huh yeah it's well I 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 jobs II envision 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 how do you think about and talk about how we should effectively parent our children around these devices I'm trying to figure it out so my oldest is six so it's like we're not you're not quite at that urgent right stage of relevance but I've been looking into a lot talking to a lot of parents who are to try to find out and a couple things I'm noticing is one there really does seem to be an issue especially with adolescents and oh it's huge huge massive and there's this weird kind of tit-for-tat thing going on in the research literature and 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 and 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 no confusion like yes it's not debatable yeah but it's tricky yeah you know I can't tell my 15 year old daughter that she can't use her phone and even to the extent that I want a police behavior around that it becomes very you know 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 in the neo-luddite camp like they don't they're really analog like they they're not interested I mean they have Instagram accounts they almost never post don't look at it yeah it's they don't you know if I text them it takes forever for them to text me like there does not yeah online and then I look at my two daughters completely different picture yeah well but that they're right in the sweet spot from like a timing perspective a cultural timing perspective we're sort of at the height of teenage especially teenage girls social media age girls I mean this is this is if their vernacular this is the vocabulary this is you know the a fifteen-year-old girl the most important thing in her life is her is her social yes life that's not gonna change and if you the phone is it the vortex of all of that yeah this is how they communicate yeah and so it's not a simple matter of like okay you know phone between this time and this time no I think so so 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 move towards maybe simpler phones I think that might change as well because we have we have two things happening right now we have the the health research that's saying the 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 mental mental well-being you mean mental well-being and the corresponding hospitalizations for self-harm and suicide attempts goes right up yeah with it but to I'm picking up on them 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 looking at the phone the teenagers are not happy about having to maintain their snapchat streaks or whatever it is it seems like work it's it's they know too that it's a problem and and so what I think Jonathan hight the psychologist Jonathan hight 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 smartphone before it's palatable for her what you need is like three people the cool people it's positive deviator right or it just it makes it a possibility like some people don't do it now that makes it a legitimate option then you don't have to do it your would it be the only one not to do it and so his take which I find optimistic is getting from everyone does this - there's three people who don't is not a huge gap but that's pretty much the gap you have to jump that gives cover - people say young people who are really unhappy about what's going on on here and so anyways that's what I'm hoping if 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 - the work I've done on this I'd be really reluctant to let them have a smartphone yeah it's deeply concerning yeah the trains already pulled out of the station and in our house you know and 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 that's I mean the 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 yeah yeah sort of unsavory I know man but you're optimistic because I'm sensing this groundswell I don't know yeah in GQ magazine I said that you know we were gonna look back in ten years at giving a and whatever a teenager a smartphone might be would give me a teenager in fact of cigarettes and that got me miss in trouble did it yeah I read that article was a very long article and it was pretty straight free point-blank straightforward yeah point yeah so so I know it's more complicated but I've decided the role I'm gonna 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 starting with Samuel Morse and Morse code and you know these 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 is 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 we have internet and people trying to figure out the right way to use the Internet we're gonna try a lot of things and the idea that you know five years from now we don't use snapchat anymore doesn't necessarily represent you know in into forward progress it could actually be completely consistent with a narrative of forward progress as part of progress in technology is to sort of evolution and experimentation to try to understand you know think about the first calm boom right in the late 90s it was about okay the internet should all be about e-commerce that's what the Internet is going to be it's everyone's gonna have a store and everyone can sell to everyone it's gonna unlock and it didn't work right it turned out that we only need one store Amazon and so this wasn't gonna fuel the economy and so we try it again like well maybe the Internet's all gonna be about social and like that's what's going on now it's not about the first dot-com crash was not about I guess and into the forward progress 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 really need to be doing this what could be better is blogging better than Facebook maybe fit you know these type of questions I think locally might seem like tech vs. 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 you know 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 you know explaining these things but it does go back to you has stoic philosophy in certain respects like what does it mean to live a meaningful life and 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 yeah just like we had in this 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 do we think about this question is all sorts of forces that keep bringing us back to this fundamental question right and and to kind of tie it to you know the book that preceded this deep work this idea that that the deep work is what gives our life meaning yeah 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 mm-hmm which was a more there's 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 you know 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 of satisfactions 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 I was talking about philosophers and we're really understanding you know the value it got a little bit head in the clouds when I was talking about the value the wheel right yeah the wheel right who understands the intrinsic properties of the wood and that's like no ESS on this system of values that's that's cited outside of himself I mean what makes what good or not good is not his own decision it's it's a part of it and then that in that you actually get this you know found that since a mean iam it can get pretty heady but all pursuit of mastery fast right 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 and and that will like drive your life forward with purpose yeah yeah and can and can help you make decisions about well I don't use this and I don't answer email or whatever it is and you can do that with complete confidence because you know another you don't need busyness for example they try to convince yourself that you're doing something meaningful because you're making the sushi and you know you know that's what's meaningful I mean in deep work I spent some time with a blacksmith that makes swords it's like what about if the question was what about this resonates like I have no interest in making swords like I'm not gonna live he has this open-air barn I'm you the Great Lakes where he sits in there his name's Rick fur 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 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 and I think that's a big reason why free solo was such a big deal this tell you what did you see his documentary I haven't seen it yet but I've written some about Alex yeah so alex is a master and and that documentary at its core was really about a master in pursuit of mastery you know in in the most fundamental traditional way and in a very tactile way in which the stakes could not be higher yeah and I really believe that the movie is gripping not just because he's hanging on by fingernail on this wall but because you're seeing somebody in real time pursue something with such pure you know intentionality and a 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 but 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 that's hard and that you find meaningful is like a huge source of satisfaction and that these other things that busyness things does 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 I ever I don't think he worries about it for know and I think yeah I think he would be you know 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'm so I've written that Chronicle Higher Education article is telling you about it opens on this sort of emeritus professor at Stanford who's right he's been writing since the 60s the sort of definitive series it's called the art of computer programming he basically invented all the big ideas or four algorithm theory but he got rid of email in the 90s he said I'd used it for 20 years and I think I've done enough and so he has this set up where he has this assistant he got weight so he'd been using it for tweet he'd been using the early internet I am using for 20 years when everybody else is first discovering anything over it he's over it in 1992 he'd use it for 20 years and so so he he says this is what I care about is this great quote he's like for some people their goal is to be on top of things for me I think my goal like wearing most sort of the world's 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 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 think I will get very mad I'm not gonna have you don't bother them to do that and so yeah sure he's missing out on opportunities and connections at this and that but like that's his his solo El Capitan is this book series and like I'm glad he's doing that yeah and world is better with him doing that than fielding email yeah or Neal Stephenson my other example the novelist write 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 you know I'm a sci-fi writer so I have I know you're my fans and you really want to interact with me 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 gonna readings gonna 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 so I love these examples and 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 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 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 gonna respond or not but I have this sort of I call it a cinder filter which is now a thing right 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 map because they have clarity they're like great I know I have clear expectations like I know I can teach Cal for these type of things I know some people are entitled to connect with you yeah but they don't people don't get as mad as you would think if it's clear if it's like you know no Neal Stephenson's like I I want to write books like I'm sorry I can't reach me and you're like ah that's frustrating 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 like well why didn't you get back to that's where that's where I'm at and it's created a friend of mine says rich you have you have you're in a constant state of freeform free-flowing overwhelm yeah you know it's like my persistence gauge that is exactly true and and I have a very haphazard relationship with how I manage like what's coming in like sometimes I'll respond and sometimes I don't yeah sometimes I stare at that email inbox and I'm just like I just can't just forget it man I feel like deleting the whole thing yeah 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 is so in non-fiction writing like there's a lot of people that no longer manage their own inboxes yeah and so I've been gathering some curious I've been I've been gathering stories a lot of people are doing that yeah I hire virtual assistants to do that yeah we're just real assistants I think you know it's not cheap yeah but but I've seen and I'm curious so now I've been interviewing people just for my own edification like what's 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 yeah but there is something inherently flawed about having to hire another human being to deal with a technology platform yeah on communication that doesn't seem efficient yeah your your computer first and right like hasn't that seemed 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 it's just going to have a begin flow and eventually someone needs to manage it but yeah I agree like fundamentally yeah if you have to if you have to hire I mean I wrote I wrote a piece about this long time ago this article right 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 like 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 have any I don't do email it so kind of like an easy answer to the same problem and they both ended up oh they're both doing fine they both were running sort of web-based brands like podcast plus blogs like write and writing the type of work that sort of we're talking about here yeah 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 twenty page no instruction man how to deal with it and you know what like they're both doing fine and probably the cheaper option was 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 mm-hmm I think there is no just like I want to hear from you here's my address I'm not on social media like there's really no way there's really no it's very hard to get in touch with me yeah normally yeah you can send me things which I appreciate like people send me links and stuff which I appreciate because I look at them but it's very clear like I'm not gonna answer uh-huh and then that's kind of it right like if I have a book launch I you know my publicist is available for you know you can contact my publicist and for speaking there's a speaking agent right 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 are no I guess if somebody if it's if you 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 I did you found out later like yeah so I got is cool thing well I did something for CBS for CBS this morning around this book because for this book there was like here's a public they could there's a publicist under stick 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 we should get him on the show he's like I didn't know how to get in touch with you right and so I was like whatever and then now when this came up like he had a way to do it so yeah that happened it requires some trust right and yeah and a healthy relationship with FOMO but that's see that's maximalism though so if we go back to the the minimalism axle ISM sort of dichotomy like maximalism is about not missing out on value right I'm gonna spend hours and hours and hours scrolling so I don't miss you so that there one that one thing yeah you know that's maximalism right because maximalism says if I 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 pond you know 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 they're you know for sure that like I do these articles and these are really and so I'm gonna put all my energy there and so minimalism would say what you get from 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 going to 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 yeah because I don't trust myself get rid of the temptations alright well let's let's round this out with with maybe some practical takeaways for for people so if somebody's listening to this and they're like okay I'm inspired I'm gonna I'm gonna pick up the book I'm gonna check it out like what are some things that I could do today though that might improve the quality of my existence like some simple things that yeah are easily implementable so if you're if you're contemplating making the shift of digital minimalism there's there 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 you no take that off your phone that alone is going to make a big difference to 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 you know 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 3 start aggressively reinvestigating the type of high quality analog leisure activity is that whenever or grandfather's in cressid do when they had downtime start introducing that back into your life just getting a taste again for these sort of higher startup costs 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 gonna 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 podcast yeah yeah you're doing for a long time yeah cool man I really enjoyed this yeah thank you thanks you are doing the deep work this is uh I really think that that this issue is is really the epidemic of our time you know I mean we have a lot of problems culturally right now but I think we're only gonna see the maturation you know the long-term impact of our relationship with these mobile devices and technology in general is going to continue to manifest in malignant ways so I really appreciate you being you know the sound of reason and and caution in the context of this conversation and I think we're gonna 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 if becomes a digital minimalist but that other people start thinking if not that then what right we need we need we need a Manhattan Project around this I think yeah I don't know if anything like that is going on like where's the Council of digital minimalist getting together it's a you know debate the future of technology but I certainly see wisdom in compiling just such a group of people yeah well good get on that I'm working on all right good yeah well Tristan Harris of course he's got he's got a non-profit 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 that's impossible to get to me through rich right you can hit me up and maybe I'll read it maybe I won't I I'm impacted by today so I'm really gonna start looking at ways that I can change my own behavior around these things yeah cool great thing right man digital minimalism deep work all the other books Cal Newport comm check them out thanks man yep peace [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 223,125

Rating: 4.9286871 out of 5

Keywords: addiction, Cal Newport, computer science, Deep Work, digital detox, Digital Minimalism, focus, habit, health, inspiration, minimalism, mindfullness, mindset, motivation, personal development, podcast, professor, Rich Roll, screen time, self-help, self-improvement, smartphone, social media, wellness, work ethic, anxiety, depression, tristan harris, andrew sullivan, marie kondo, bj fogg, jonathan haidt, ryan holiday, joshua becker, neurology, psychology

Id: 9L-Uoo4VrIk

Length: 116min 51sec (7011 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2019