The Art of Manliness - #131： What Ancient Philosophers Can Teach You About Using Your Smartphone With William Powers

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast we have a lot

00:00:19.760 of distractions in our lives today with all the technology that we have you sit down your

00:00:24.500 laptop at night and you think okay i'm just going to read this one article and then an hour later

00:00:29.440 you're like what have i've just wasted my life looking at nothing this is i can't believe i did

00:00:35.800 this and then you we get away from your laptop and there's the cell phone the smartphone with all the

00:00:40.660 the pings of emails and text messages and instagram and twitter and then we got periscope now i don't

00:00:46.760 even know what that is i i've seen a lot but apparently it's a thing now and it reaches a

00:00:51.520 point where you like you feel like you don't have any control over your life and it just it's

00:00:56.160 overwhelming we're like what can i do about this well our guest today makes the argument we should

00:01:00.280 look to the past particularly great thinkers of the past to find insights on how we can live a good

00:01:05.320 life in the age of technology my guest is william powers he's the author of the book hamlet's

00:01:11.100 blackberry and in it he makes the case that individuals like shakespeare thoreau they have

00:01:17.140 insights and wisdom that can help us manage technology in a way that we can be a part of

00:01:22.400 our life but not control our life so if you've been feeling a little frazzled by all the

00:01:26.320 technology in your life this episode is for you so without further ado william powers hamlet's blackberry

00:01:31.940 william powers welcome to the show thank you very much right great to be here all right so your book

00:01:45.220 is called hamlet's blackberry we'll get to the meaning of that title here in a bit but it's basically

00:01:51.360 about you're basically trying to create a philosophy for the good life in the digital age what inspired

00:01:59.000 you to start this project was there a moment that sparked you like i need to figure this out like

00:02:03.500 technology has just overrun my life and it's making me miserable was there a moment like that

00:02:07.960 there were there were basically two moments brett um the first moment was um i was invited to

00:02:16.260 take a break from my work as a journalist um and to go to harvard to be sort of a scholar in residence

00:02:23.240 at harvard at a nice academic center there and um they asked me what i wanted to do a project about

00:02:29.940 i just had to do a kind of a study and write an essay about what i learned and i immediately kind of

00:02:36.020 blurted out without even thinking about it um i i said i would like to do something about this

00:02:41.300 the death of paper that i keep reading about people keep saying that that books on paper and

00:02:47.060 everything hard copy is dying and something inside me kind of objected to that idea because i was

00:02:54.940 finding that hard copy stuff hard copy reading was had become a kind of oasis for me away from my

00:03:01.580 devices um so i spent a semester at harvard looking into the question of whether print on paper is dying

00:03:09.440 and um i concluded that obviously it's declining but i kind of predicted that um

00:03:18.240 digital reading will only really take off in a big way and conquer print when it does for us what

00:03:25.000 reading on paper has always done which is sort of center us and allow us to focus and be undistracted

00:03:31.040 in our thinking and it hasn't done that yet as you know digital devices are very good at distracting

00:03:36.580 and dividing our attention so i wrote i wrote that essay it had a lot of um technology history in

00:03:42.100 it including a story from shakespeare's hamlet so i called the essay hamlet's blackberry

00:03:46.040 and then um i started to think about whether it could be a book and the second thing that happened

00:03:52.440 was that i uh my family and i had moved to a small town on cape cod from busy washington dc

00:03:58.840 and my wife and i sort of thought that having moved from a busy place we were going to find

00:04:04.720 we had this nice calm centered life and that was one of our goals where we could focus on our family

00:04:10.200 time and so forth together and it didn't really happen um because of course we took with us from

00:04:15.920 dc the very thing that was making us busier than ever which was our digital devices and i remember

00:04:22.000 looking around me one day at my house and we were all sort of had our backs to each other staring into

00:04:26.580 our screens even though it was like friday night and nobody was working and we weren't even really

00:04:31.880 together and that was when i kind of decided i really have to write a book about this and try

00:04:36.740 and solve this problem of technology bringing us so much benefits but also taking so much away

00:04:42.280 and maybe devise a philosophy that would help us get out of that conundrum okay so you was talking

00:04:48.080 about yeah it's brought us a lot of benefits but some of the downsides you've highlighted in your book

00:04:52.420 and one of them is that it's brought us infinite knowledge to our fingertips right you can find out

00:04:58.160 anything about anything just go to wikipedia right but we've lost the ability to not only think deeply

00:05:04.220 but you say to feel deeply can you provide some examples of this loss of ability to think and feel

00:05:11.600 deeply yeah so um so on the thinking front that goes back to this question of you know are you really

00:05:19.540 reflecting on whatever it is you're doing and really sort of um giving it all of your attention i think

00:05:27.180 the best creativity comes from really kind of carving out a space where you can focus on that one task

00:05:33.260 that's important to you whether it's you know your work or the book that's in front of you or whatever

00:05:37.420 if you're constantly your mind is constantly wandering you're not you're not going to any depth it's like

00:05:43.760 being a water bug on the surface of a pond so that's the thinking side the feeling side um is really

00:05:50.140 about relationships you know i think being with people physically is not enough in terms of um you

00:05:58.200 know real togetherness and depth emotional connection and i found that you know we see this happening all

00:06:04.160 around us every day we're not doing that as much as we used to because these uh amazing little gizmos

00:06:10.240 have gotten in the way of it i mean that kind of raises the question why is that i mean if

00:06:13.960 if we get so much benefit from thinking deeply and feeling deeply and connecting with people on a very

00:06:20.920 intimate level how is it something like so frivolous can take us away from that well i would disagree

00:06:30.440 with you i don't think it is frivolous i mean i think that the the power that these devices have

00:06:37.480 to enrich our lives and to put us in touch with other people and ideas and images and you know

00:06:45.840 moving videos and all this stuff that comes at us is amazing the potential of it is fantastic

00:06:51.160 but our attention is limited and that's the problem it's we've kind of we've kind of oversaturated

00:06:58.880 that put the attention part of our lives to the point where it's just divided up into a million

00:07:04.480 little pieces every day and that's not taking us to that place that we're talking about which is the

00:07:09.700 ideal place to be of real presence real focus you can't get there if you're just dividing every

00:07:16.460 second up into a bunch of different pieces and and i can you know i wrote this book it's all about

00:07:21.020 getting out of that problem but i still find myself doing it years later because it's just hard to escape

00:07:26.760 yeah i mean it's interesting too so it's not only the technology that distracts us and splits us up into a

00:07:33.600 building different pieces but the technology also creates a sense of urgency within us and you talk

00:07:40.320 about how into our culture today busyness is sort of a badge of honor right when people ask you like

00:07:46.040 how are you doing oh busy really busy busy busy i mean that's right i do that all the time right um

00:07:51.140 but being busy doesn't really mean you're being effective right like you're not actually doing

00:07:57.520 something why are we so drawn to being busy and feeling like even though it makes us feel

00:08:03.640 miserable because everyone talks like i'm so busy i can't wait to go on vacation um right what's the

00:08:08.780 draw there well you know there's a lot of theories about this but the prevailing one that i find most

00:08:14.200 convincing is that it has to do with our amazing brains you know this uh capacity we have for kind of

00:08:21.880 higher level thinking and and a curiosity that the um biologist eo wilson calls the the excess capacity

00:08:30.460 of human beings we have obviously this x factor in our brains that no other creature has and our minds

00:08:36.980 are constantly searching for things to latch on to to think about to explore to do and that's in many

00:08:43.100 ways the best part of us that's why we have this incredible civilization and these beautiful cities and

00:08:47.940 all these things that we have came from our in a sense from our busyness but you know it's it's

00:08:53.980 always in tension with this other i think emotional and intellectual need we have for quiet time and space

00:09:00.760 and a little distance from the busy world because i think that's where we do a lot of our best thinking

00:09:07.140 and feeling as we discussed and technology all through history technology has kind of pushed against

00:09:15.260 that need for distance because think about what communications technologies have done gradually

00:09:20.020 over the last couple thousand years they've pulled us literally closer together not literally in the

00:09:25.400 sense of physically but they've linked us much more tightly together and um that's a challenge you know

00:09:33.100 that distance is harder to come by and it really is i think part an important part of the equation of

00:09:38.100 being a full human being having that distance okay yeah so like but to manage our our busyness we

00:09:45.160 come up with these productivity tools right you've got the calendaring tools you've got uh like

00:09:51.660 digital assistants that kind of configure look at your your email inbox it's kind of creepy i have

00:09:55.900 google now on my phone and it will like tell me like it knows when i'm about to leave on a flight and it

00:10:01.580 will say you need to leave for the airport right now if you want to get your flight on time right

00:10:05.860 without me having to do this it's kind of weird um but you make the case that these productivity

00:10:11.940 tools that are supposed to save us from our busyness actually can undermine our productivity how is that

00:10:18.340 well they can you know it depends on the tool and so i think the early tools and the way we use the

00:10:25.300 early digital tools like you know the beginnings of email the beginnings of websites they were all kind

00:10:31.220 of configured to maximize the incoming and no kind of concern for like our need to you know take things a

00:10:40.200 little bit at a time and to be patient or any of that it was like the more the better in the book i

00:10:44.960 call it digital maximalism and uh you know you just can't get too much and um that was a mistake and i

00:10:52.920 think at the time i wrote the book that hadn't fully dawned on civilization but it has since and

00:10:58.420 people have been working on that so now we have productivity tools that i think really do help us i'll

00:11:02.960 give you a few examples i mean you know how you kind of wonder whether you should make that decision

00:11:07.300 about some app you're using whether you should get the the higher level version you know pay for it

00:11:11.660 basically a monthly fee and i've got a couple that i gladly signed up for because they helped me so

00:11:16.840 much in terms of actually being less busy and there are two that are very popular but i love dropbox

00:11:22.140 and i love evernote because they have removed all this kind of filing anxiety and you know everything

00:11:30.380 is like crisply organized and i don't have to kind of wade through too much stuff to get to where i need to

00:11:36.100 get to in my files i'm a writer you know and i'm now working in the technology world as well so i

00:11:40.340 have a lot of information i need to save for all my projects and those help me hugely and i've noticed

00:11:46.140 that websites have gone the route i'm sure you've noticed you guys have actually i think done this

00:11:50.140 with your own website have gone the route of being a cleaner and crisper and less information coming

00:11:55.560 at you if you compare medium.com the blogging website to what blogging websites look like

00:12:01.520 eight years ago it's completely different animal we're trying to sort of unclutter unbusy our lives

00:12:07.140 and i think that's a great sign okay let's talk about one more problem before we start getting

00:12:11.760 into the solutions uh here and one i thought was really interesting is sort of this sort of a paradox

00:12:16.880 here so on the one hand technology um separates us right here for example your example uh with your

00:12:25.600 family where on a Friday night everyone had their face in a separate screen had their backs to each

00:12:30.040 other but at the same time uh it also makes us more attuned to other people's opinions

00:12:37.120 so like for example the sociologist david reisen reisman wrote the book the lonely crowd we've

00:12:44.340 talked about on our site over 50 years ago and he basically said that uh we're becoming an other

00:12:49.800 directed society right at one time people kind of looked into an eternal compass to navigate but now

00:12:55.740 they look to the opinions of others to to navigate i mean and you see that i guess with social media

00:13:02.800 right that's sort of what yeah how social media works yeah you put your opinion out there and you

00:13:09.920 want to get the likes to see if you have yeah the correct opinion i mean so what are what are the

00:13:15.800 downsides of that though i mean what do we lose by putting ourselves so much in the technology that it

00:13:22.520 we're so focused on other people's what other people have to say about our opinions

00:13:26.380 yeah so you know i love that book and i often have fantasized about what if david reisman could

00:13:32.900 be alive today and see you know where we've come because he thought the 1950s was that way

00:13:37.800 everybody being so other directed and of course that's our whole culture now you know and it's it's

00:13:44.620 sad because technology social networks the way they're set up they're kind of configured to play

00:13:50.520 to our insecurities you know none of us really feels like we've totally got our act together and

00:13:56.100 we've gotten to the place we need to get to in life and we have all these doubts every day that are

00:14:00.060 kind of gnawing at us and we go on digital and they just multiply because we see these people with

00:14:07.400 these perfect looking lives and we see people getting all these likes and having all these followers

00:14:11.800 we don't have and it's torture and yet there's something about it it's sort of like the busyness

00:14:16.920 we can't help ourselves and i think that's tragic you know i think it's you know if you read eastern

00:14:24.220 philosophy is especially good at this but unfortunately we've been moving for over a

00:14:29.020 decade now in the opposite direction and that's really one of the things i try to take on in the

00:14:32.980 book okay so it's kind of just sum up some of the the issues that technology have has brought into

00:14:38.820 our lives so there's i guess a sense of uh disconnect from others on a sense of depth but at the same

00:14:44.700 time uh we become very anxious about the opinions of others and what people think about us

00:14:49.260 right and then there's sort of the lack of uh depth and thinking and getting really into a topic and

00:14:55.680 just sort of skittering on the surface and then i guess another one you could say is just splitting

00:15:01.500 our attention into different areas where we feel rushed and really busy when maybe in fact we're not

00:15:07.900 as busy as we think we are but the technology makes us feel that way yeah and also i guess related to

00:15:14.480 all those things is just that missing kind of reflection time where i think we can go to this

00:15:20.580 creative place that's a little bit different from depth but related where we can have actually fresh

00:15:26.740 thoughts and make new connections that nobody else has made because we're away from all those voices

00:15:32.240 you know that's what facebook and twitter are basically is all these people telling us about their

00:15:37.140 ideas they just had how can you have your own if you're spending all day you know immersed in those

00:15:43.000 voices of others and so that that reflective time space apart is crucial so let's talk about to

00:15:48.860 develop your philosophy of the good life you uh went to the past and looked at some famous philosophers

00:15:55.760 and writers who have thought about the good life who are these seven historical philosophers that you

00:16:01.380 used as uses yeah i'll talk about each one briefly so and stop me if i'm taking too long so um

00:16:07.140 um i started with ancient greece and with plato and um one of his dialogues of socrates that he so

00:16:15.300 beautifully recorded and this is a story um that takes place at a time when the great technology

00:16:21.140 revolution was the advent of writing of the written word the alphabet was actually turning the world of

00:16:26.820 ancient greece upside down until that moment people had only communicated orally and suddenly letters

00:16:31.920 existed and people were learning to read and write so the philosopher taught socrates takes a walk um

00:16:37.900 is walking through athens and he runs into one of his students who proposes they go for a stroll

00:16:42.520 outside the walls of the city where they can have a little peace and quiet and a good conversation

00:16:46.660 and socrates actually objects and says well no i hate to leave the city this is where all the action is

00:16:52.620 and this young student says well no you know if we really effectively i'm not quoting him directly but

00:16:58.260 he says no you know let's take a walk and you'll see if we get out into nature you'll see our

00:17:01.980 conversation might go to an even better place so they take this walk they actually have one of the

00:17:07.040 greatest conversations in the history of philosophy talking about all kinds of things love and sex and

00:17:12.340 what does it mean to write with words versus speaking orally exactly that challenge they were facing at the

00:17:18.440 time and um two things happen socrates winds up being convinced that it really is a great idea to get a

00:17:25.800 little distance from your own busy life which in his case was that world of conversation in athens

00:17:30.720 and second he remains firm on his um in his opposition to writing he says don't embrace that

00:17:39.200 new technology it's going to ruin your mind he tells his student so stay away from the alphabet

00:17:43.500 and i found that story useful because it is a reminder that although technology can be causing us

00:17:49.840 all kinds of challenges like the ones you and i are talking about now we can't really see the

00:17:54.440 trajectory of it over the horizon completely where it's going to take us and in socrates case he was

00:17:59.280 one of the smartest men who ever lived and he couldn't see that writing would actually become

00:18:02.720 a wonderful tool for growing your mind and having creative thoughts if you use it well he was this

00:18:07.860 incredibly busy person in ancient rome which itself was a very busy place the capital of this huge

00:18:13.400 empire uh in addition to being a philosopher and playwright at one point he was basically running the

00:18:19.020 empire um for the boy emperor nero when he was still a boy um so seneca discovered that in order

00:18:27.380 to really be effective at everything he did his writing his thinking his politics he had to actually

00:18:32.980 carve out this space kind of apart from all of his activities similar to plato but in a different way

00:18:39.300 he did it purely as a mental exercise so he didn't take a walk out in the country to do this he actually

00:18:45.140 didn't have time to do this he would sit in a room and focus on like one he would write one letter to

00:18:51.500 one friend and focus only on that and don't let any other tasks get in the way think about that person

00:18:57.520 have them in his mind and really kind of use letter writing as an exercise of focus and he found it was

00:19:03.900 an incredibly useful way to get away from the urges you and i just talked about about you know what are

00:19:08.700 people saying about me what can i check now to keep busy what's the what's the thing happening now

00:19:13.840 that i have to be a part of he was able to basically quiet his mind with this simple inner exercise

00:19:18.760 which i find very inspiring the next philosopher is gutenberg who famously invented the printing press

00:19:26.920 in the middle of the 15th century and the gutenberg chapter i use i go to gutenberg not because he was

00:19:33.580 technically a philosopher because he wasn't he was a technologist he liked to build stuff like

00:19:37.800 technologist today but what he saw his one of his insights was that um in his lifetime up until the

00:19:46.200 invention of his printing press people had been reading books actually listening to books be read

00:19:52.440 in huge crowds because most people couldn't afford books they were made by hand they were very expensive

00:19:58.120 so they would go to churches and other places to experience books read aloud so reading was this kind

00:20:04.060 somewhat busy immersed in the crowd atmosphere he created the ability through the printing press to

00:20:10.540 have millions of copies of the same book that didn't cost that much to buy so that eventually people could

00:20:16.220 have a private book that they could even you know years later carry around in their pocket and having

00:20:21.160 that personal inward experience of depth that we get from reading a book silently and quietly and that i think

00:20:28.460 was a really really world-changing and underappreciated aspect of his invention here we can do this now

00:20:34.200 every day sit down with a book i read every morning at dawn i get up early and read a book

00:20:38.220 and i have gutenberg to thank for that and that's a kind of distance that serves me all through the day

00:20:43.960 the third story is the one of the title hamlet's blackberry my my philosopher in that case is shakespeare

00:20:50.520 who everybody's familiar with as a great playwright there's a moment in the play hamlet where um

00:20:56.320 hamlet meets the ghost of his father famous moment in the play and his father imparts this terrible

00:21:02.580 news that he was he wasn't killed by the bite of a serpent he was actually murdered by his brother

00:21:07.780 who's now the king hamlet's uncle this news is obviously incredibly disturbing to hamlet and he

00:21:14.960 doesn't quite know what to do and he actually talks about his mind being just crowded with all these

00:21:19.480 thoughts and you know he's just kind of in a tizzy basically and he suddenly says my tables my

00:21:26.100 tables and he takes out of his pocket this little tablet that was actually the great um sort of

00:21:32.880 personal technology innovation of shakespeare's time in the real world so not hamlet's world but

00:21:38.260 shakespeare's world and it was a little um as i said it was a tablet it just had one surface and it was

00:21:45.060 made from a kind of plaster like material and it had a stylus a little metal stylus you took the stylus and

00:21:51.100 you could take notes on the plaster like surface all day long to-do lists people's addresses you

00:21:56.740 wanted to remember blah blah blah but the beauty of it was at the end of the day with a swipe of your

00:22:02.200 finger you could wipe it clean for the next day so that you were starting with a blank slate the next

00:22:07.100 day now why does this matter this matters because shakespeare was living through the print revolution

00:22:13.560 that gutenberg had begun a century and a half later but it was really taking off now with newspapers and

00:22:19.380 books being published in incredible quantities so that people had this feeling of inability to stay

00:22:25.280 up with information it was impossible to keep up anymore they felt kind of overwhelmed by information

00:22:30.680 it was really one of the early cases of information overload the tables moved in the opposite direction

00:22:37.340 you could put information on your little device in your pocket and at the end of the day make it go

00:22:41.560 away the ideal of zero inbox that some of us have today shakespeare was aware of the use of that and

00:22:47.260 actually put of the usefulness of that and actually put it in the play hamlet my next philosopher is

00:22:53.740 ben franklin who i love um he never had negative goals like drink less wine instead he would say

00:23:02.800 something like um enjoy more sober hours during the day so that it always had sort of a positive spin

00:23:08.820 and therefore was appealing to him and i actually was inspired to when i read franklin for the book i was

00:23:14.220 so inspired i actually started a ritual like that myself where i set up my own positive goals including

00:23:19.260 technology goals and would check off every day how i had done and i should mention parenthetically that

00:23:25.880 um when i told my son who's 17 that i was doing this chat with you today brett he mentioned that

00:23:32.140 you guys have some kind of version of franklin's grid that you offer on your website yeah yeah and he

00:23:39.280 he has been using that that's fantastic great so you have a fan and in a 17 year old here in

00:23:44.580 massachusetts yeah and so that method you know that franklin it's not that he invented the idea of

00:23:49.000 having a list of goals but he took it to a very high level and i think it's great that people like

00:23:53.340 me and and your readers are still inspired by that today um the next philosopher is um henry david

00:24:00.700 thoreau who's famous for kind of running away from civilization for two years and building his little cabin

00:24:06.760 at walden pond here in massachusetts um supposedly thoreau was actually a technology hater uh but in

00:24:14.840 fact that's not really true first of all he was a writer so he was a fan of print technology second

00:24:20.020 his family owned a pencil making company which was a very powerful technology at that time and he

00:24:24.800 himself designed some really great pencils as a member of the company um but i talk about thoreau

00:24:31.540 because i think his experiment at walden is incredibly useful to us in thinking about how

00:24:37.700 we can actually configure our homes today that are so connected and so potentially busy all the time

00:24:44.500 because of our devices where we could if we think properly about our homes actually create spaces that

00:24:51.600 i call walden zones where we've put a little distance between ourselves and all that busyness just

00:24:56.820 the way thoreau did by moving out into the woods for a few years and getting some quiet time and i

00:25:02.320 sort of talk in the chapter about some specific ideas for example creating a particular room in your

00:25:07.800 house or apartment or even a part of a room that's no devices allowed so that we can achieve some of that

00:25:13.760 distance from our digital lives that i think is so crucial

00:25:16.680 is famous for uh coming up with a couple of phrases including um the global village and the medium is the

00:25:31.400 message uh less well known about mcclellan is that he had this kind of very proactive idea about

00:25:38.060 technology that we should all learn to view our technological lives as a kind of a thermostat that

00:25:43.960 we can regulate and that devices can actually go really really hot or really really cool

00:25:49.880 hot meaning they kind of fill our ideas with all this stuff all this information which can be good

00:25:55.300 in some cases but often bad and cool meaning you kind of have a more of a spacious feeling of dealing

00:26:01.640 with the device or the technology and it kind of gives you a little bit of a sense of being able to

00:26:06.200 participate in a calm or more focused way as you can imagine i favor the latter um so i use a couple

00:26:12.560 stories mcclellan told to talk about how we should all in some sense view ourselves as being in the

00:26:18.720 driver's seat of our digital lives and be able to regulate the heat or the coolness ourselves by just

00:26:24.860 being more thoughtful about how we use our devices so that's my seven philosophers and if you want to

00:26:29.780 dig into any of them or follow up on any of them just uh just let me know yeah well what i think is

00:26:35.080 interesting about all of them is that you're not saying like get rid of technology you're not like a

00:26:40.000 luddite i guess the the underlying theme is like be more thoughtful and intentional about your

00:26:44.720 technology yeah absolutely in fact you know one of the things that's happened to me since the book

00:26:50.220 came out is i've got i'm now working in the technology world i'm at the mit media lab actually

00:26:54.760 working on new technology ideas in in the area of social media and that happened through the book

00:26:59.580 because some of the folks in that world liked reading it and wanted to work with me and it kind of

00:27:05.120 underlines the point you just raised which is that i'm actually a big technology fan and even an early

00:27:10.240 adopter of technologies and i don't want to throw them out the window i think this revolution is

00:27:15.240 ultimately going to take us to a fantastic place but we are not even close to there yet and this is

00:27:21.100 one of the areas we really need to work on yeah i remember in uh when i was in college i took a

00:27:26.500 philosophy of science class and um the point one of the main points the professor made in that class was

00:27:32.740 that one of the problems with modern science is that we don't we no longer have time to develop

00:27:38.200 a philosophy towards the technology that we have right before we had the wheel and like we had a

00:27:44.260 long time to figure out how the wheel plays in our life we had writing we had like a long time to kind

00:27:49.400 of figure out and now the way that technology advances and like we're getting all this new social

00:27:53.980 media stuff like i guess there isn't a time to really pause and think about okay what how does this

00:27:58.420 how's this going to fit into our life and like what is it right how's it going to change things so

00:28:02.500 i guess yeah the goal is just the idea is just to be more thoughtful and think about how this

00:28:07.220 technology will affect us and what role it's going to play in our life yeah and at the risk of uh

00:28:13.720 seeming to tout my own workplace which i guess i'm about to do um we get technology ideas and work on them

00:28:20.040 in a kind of isolation from the commercial marketplace which makes it so hard to be thoughtful

00:28:26.180 because of the pressure to be profitable and to deliver for shareholders and so forth we kind of

00:28:31.040 have a sort of a a bit of a sandbox where we can play around with stuff see if it works test it with

00:28:37.740 you know our colleagues and with the public and then maybe at some point down the road if it feels

00:28:42.360 like it could be a really great potential for the public then turn it into a company and that's exactly

00:28:48.700 what we need more of i think is that kind of thinking about you know a philosophical approach to

00:28:53.340 technology like your course offered yeah i think it's interesting uh something i just learned about

00:28:57.820 the amish there's all this idea the amish are very anti-technology like they don't use anything which

00:29:02.300 is true like they don't use cars or you know cell phones or things like that but they're not

00:29:08.980 anti-technology per se they're just very picky about the technology they use um i guess the idea is

00:29:15.340 that they before they'll introduce a new piece of technology like they'll get together and like

00:29:19.200 talk about will this change our way of life um to a negative way and if it does then we'll shun

00:29:25.120 that but if it will benefit us uh we'll bring it in so i've been trying to like take more of an

00:29:29.840 amish approach to technology not that i'm going to get rid of my computers or laptops or instagram but

00:29:35.980 thinking more deeply about you know is this making my life better or is it making me not happy

00:29:43.900 yeah that's exactly what i do brett um i have the same approach i try to be really thoughtful about

00:29:50.080 every possible you know app platform device i use and kind of i don't literally think of it as the

00:29:57.700 amish approach i love that thought and in fact i have actually heard from some amish people since

00:30:01.900 the book came out um that it was kind of in sync with their point of view um yeah but um i think

00:30:08.620 they've got it you know i mean i think we all especially today we all need a dose of that i mean so

00:30:14.000 many of us are excited about technology but at the same time kind of drowning in it you know and and

00:30:20.140 we're it's it's sometimes i think it's making us less human rather than more and that's a problem

00:30:26.020 yeah so you mentioned one thing you can do is in your home sort of create uh waldens in your home

00:30:31.280 where there's like no devices allowed um another tip that you talk about in your book and you still

00:30:37.060 implement to this day and we've written about on the site is this idea of tech sabbaths um can you

00:30:42.520 explain what a tech sabbath is for those who aren't familiar with and how they can implement

00:30:45.800 it into their own life yes so i love these tech sabbaths we called ours we invented ours um i guess

00:30:52.440 it was 2006 so quite a long time ago when my son was um eight years old and uh we called it internet

00:31:00.580 sabbath because what it was all about was specifically the internet so it wasn't about technology per se

00:31:06.640 we didn't unplug our tv we didn't you know actually stop using our phones for voice and texting and so

00:31:13.420 forth but we did spend every weekend for five years completely off the internet so the the modem was

00:31:21.560 actually unplugged friday night in our house and not plugged in again till monday morning and that was

00:31:26.480 incredible unbelievable learning experience for all of us and it was amazing this other place that we

00:31:32.120 went to every weekend together it was very challenging in the beginning very hard to wean ourselves off

00:31:36.480 but once we got to into the habit of doing it and began to see the potential of that disconnected

00:31:42.640 time it was amazing we all have our own sort of smaller version of that now because we've kind of

00:31:48.320 gone off into the world and done various things that require um a little bit more than five days

00:31:53.640 online i do saturdays offline um my wife tries to do sundays offline and my son who's away at school now

00:32:01.160 does um does um does no video games at school no video gaming at all so we all do our kind of sabbath

00:32:08.480 equivalents and um i find that it allows the mind to it's like you know how when you use a muscle a lot

00:32:18.480 that muscle is always available to do tasks when you want to do it because you've been working on that

00:32:23.580 muscle it allows the mind to kind of always be able to switch into disconnected mode when you need it

00:32:29.300 even when you're not doing the sabbath so i find that if i keep my regular sabbath on saturdays

00:32:34.660 if i'm having a really crazy digital day on a wednesday i can still sort of step back and breathe

00:32:40.440 and go to that place because i was there fairly recently people who never go to that place who

00:32:46.980 never disconnect i think they have a much harder time well bill where can people learn more about

00:32:51.260 your work so my website is easy enough to remember williampowers.com and there's more on the book

00:32:57.460 there more about the book there it's still for sale in the bookstores and on all the digital bookstores

00:33:02.880 digital websites and um i uh i'm on twitter at hamlets bb at h-a-m-l-e-t-s-b-b and folks can email

00:33:12.760 me through my website or reach out to me on twitter if they if they want to comment on the book or have

00:33:17.600 any questions or whatever i'd love to hear from them awesome well william powers thank you so much

00:33:21.060 for your time it's been a pleasure thank you brett really enjoyed it our guest today was william

00:33:25.820 powers he's the author of the book hamlet's blackberry building a good life in the digital

00:33:29.360 age you can find that on amazon.com well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast

00:33:37.540 for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website at

00:33:40.880 artofmanliness.com and until next time this is brent mckay telling you to stay manly

00:33:47.600 so

00:33:49.280 you

00:34:17.600 You

The Art of Manliness - August 20, 2015

#131： What Ancient Philosophers Can Teach You About Using Your Smartphone With William Powers

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