The Art of Manliness - #479： Becoming a Digital Minimalist [RE-BROADCAST]

00:00:00.000 Hey guys, Brett here. We're taking a break the rest of the week. We got the Independence

00:00:03.040 Holiday here in the United States this Saturday. So we're taking a small, small vacation. So we're

00:00:07.540 rebroadcasting episode number 479, Becoming a Digital Minimalist with Cal Newport. Originally

00:00:12.560 published February 2019. It was our most downloaded episode in 2019. If you don't feel good about your

00:00:18.860 relationship with the technology, with social media, a lot of great insights. You're going to

00:00:22.280 enjoy this episode if you haven't heard it. If you already heard it, great reminders. I listened to

00:00:25.960 it again and found some stuff that I could work on. We'll be back Monday for the new episode for

00:00:29.860 those United States. Have a happy 4th of July. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition

00:00:48.600 of the Art of Manliness podcast. Practicing minimalism with your possessions has been a trend for the past

00:00:53.480 decade and it can be a worthy practice as long as you use it as a means to greater efficacy outside

00:00:57.740 your personal domain rather than just an end in itself. But there's arguably a minimalism practice

00:01:01.960 that's even more effective in achieving that greater efficacy, digital minimalism. My guest has

00:01:06.700 written the definitive guide to the philosophy and tactics behind digital minimalism. His name is Cal

00:01:10.900 Newport and this is his third visit to the AOM podcast. We've had him on the show previously to

00:01:15.020 discuss his books, So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work. Today, we discuss his latest book,

00:01:19.540 Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. We begin our conversation discussing

00:01:24.520 why digital tech feels so addicting, why Steve Jobs didn't originally intend for the iPhone to become

00:01:29.280 something we check all the time, and why the common tips for reducing your smartphone use don't work,

00:01:33.300 and why you need to implement more nuclear solutions instead. We then discuss the surprising

00:01:37.000 lessons the Amish can teach you about being intentional about technology, how cleaning up your

00:01:40.980 digital life is like decluttering your house, and why he recommends a 30-day tech fast to evaluate

00:01:45.960 what tech you want to let back into your life. Cal then makes an argument for why you should see

00:01:49.980 social media like training wheels for navigating the web, how to take those wheels off, and why

00:01:54.200 you should own your own domain address. We end our conversation exploring what you should do in the

00:01:58.340 free time you open up once your digital distractions are tamed, and the advanced techniques you can use

00:02:02.280 to take the practice of digital minimalism to the next level. I think you'll find this a

00:02:05.980 tremendously interesting and important show. After it's over, check out our show notes at

00:02:09.820 aom.is slash digital minimalism. Cal Newport, welcome back to the show.

00:02:26.860 Brett, always a pleasure to be on. So the last time we had you on was a few years ago to discuss your

00:02:32.040 book, Deep Work. And in that book, you made the case that the ability to do really hard,

00:02:38.260 deep thinking for long periods of time is a competitive advantage in today's world.

00:02:44.140 You got a new book out, Digital Minimalism, Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.

00:02:49.400 How is this book a continuation of your thinking in deep work?

00:02:53.500 Well, one way to think about deep work is that it was about some of the unexpected consequences of

00:02:59.320 technology in people's professional lives, right? So we introduced these new technologies into the

00:03:04.360 workplace, and it ended up severely diminishing people's ability to focus. And this had all sorts

00:03:09.680 of consequences, but also opened up interesting opportunities. So I released that book, and I was

00:03:14.540 out on the road talking about it. And one of the most common pieces of feedback I started getting

00:03:20.460 was people saying, okay, maybe we buy your premise about what technology is doing in our professional

00:03:26.560 lives, but what about our personal lives? And arguably, it seemed like this was an even more

00:03:32.120 urgent issue for a lot of people. That sometime, maybe the last two years or so, I really started

00:03:39.460 to notice, and they really started to notice a change. People had begun to shift from making

00:03:45.020 self-deprecating jokes about how often they check their phone to starting to become actually worried,

00:03:51.220 to actually thinking, you know, the digital things in my personal life are starting to

00:03:55.500 actually substantially degrade the quality of my life, and something has to change. And so I was

00:04:01.500 hearing this shift, this increased urgency, this increased concern from my readers. And so that

00:04:07.440 really turned my attention pretty quickly to, okay, what's going on here? How are these technologies

00:04:11.820 affecting people's personal lives? More importantly, what's really the right way to get out of a lot of

00:04:16.360 these issues? And that's where these ideas came from. So what were people saying that how technology

00:04:21.320 was detrimental to their personal life? Well, one of the things I noticed in these conversations is

00:04:27.120 that it was not about usefulness, right? I mean, if you take any one of these technologies that people

00:04:32.740 use in their personal life and look at it in isolation, it's not useless, right? There'll be

00:04:36.980 some value to it. There's some reason they use it. It's not like cigarette smoking or something where

00:04:41.420 they just say, there's no value to this. I just wish I wasn't doing it. The problem people were

00:04:46.140 having was the cumulative impact of all of these things combined. And they were finding that they

00:04:51.760 were using their devices and looking at screens more than they knew was useful, more than they

00:04:57.620 knew was healthy, often to the extent in which it was starting to significantly keep them away from

00:05:02.460 things that they knew was more valuable. And there was also this rising fear that they felt like

00:05:07.420 things like how they felt, what they believed, their emotions were being manipulated, that they were

00:05:13.700 starting to be manipulated in some weird sort of obscure algorithmic way into what they were

00:05:17.940 thinking about and how they felt and what they were believing. And so there was just this overall

00:05:22.060 sense of creeping lack of autonomy. I'm losing out on things that are more important. I'm starting

00:05:28.840 to get manipulated. This is shifting from, hey, isn't this fun or funny how often we look at our phones

00:05:33.820 to, uh-oh, something actually bad is going on here. Right. And I guess another issue that comes up too

00:05:39.500 is that one of the things that technology can get in the way of your personal life is actually

00:05:44.020 connecting with other people, like really connecting. Because I think you have a section

00:05:48.620 there about the book, like we've replaced connection with, or we've replaced conversation

00:05:53.560 with connection. And we think it's the same, but it's not. Yeah. This was actually an interesting

00:05:58.500 paradox you see in the research literature that if you spend time really trying to read a bunch of

00:06:03.880 papers about, let's say, social media and people's well-being, you start to see that there's

00:06:08.900 these two parallel tracks. So there'll be these papers out there that say social media use makes

00:06:15.040 people happier. Now I should point out almost every one of these papers has at least one Facebook

00:06:19.960 data scientist on the list of co-authors, but you know, you have those papers, but then you have

00:06:24.280 these other papers that are by very serious scientists, university scientists that are saying

00:06:28.920 using more social media is making people more lonely and depressed and unhappy. Right. So what's going

00:06:32.760 on? How can both of these things being true? And it turns out what seems to be happening

00:06:37.380 is it's not so much that the specific thing you do when you're using a social media app

00:06:43.940 makes you unhappy. It's that the usage of these apps is keeping you away from real world

00:06:51.640 communication. It's reducing the amount of time you spend doing old fashioned conversation,

00:06:55.860 talking to someone in person, spending time with someone, being on the phone with someone,

00:06:58.680 actually like hearing the subtle nuances of their voice, reading their body language,

00:07:02.400 actually making some sort of real sacrifice of your time to actually spend time with someone.

00:07:07.460 And this is a big problem. And so the reason why using more social media is making people feel more

00:07:12.480 lonely is that it's pushing out old fashioned interaction. And old fashioned interaction is

00:07:19.180 something that we crave and we need. And our brain more or less doesn't accept the digital equivalent

00:07:24.460 as a reasonable, comparable action. So we think that we're being very social because we're clicking

00:07:30.860 like a lot and leaving comments on people's social posts. Our brain, though, formed through hundreds of

00:07:36.500 thousands of years of social evolution, doesn't think that's socializing at all. So it just feels

00:07:40.780 lonely. And so that's how we get that paradox that you think you're being really social because you're

00:07:45.460 on your phone all the time, always swiping on things and tapping on things and hitting hearts and

00:07:49.520 clicking little thumbs up. But our brain doesn't see any of that as real socialization. So we end up

00:07:53.600 actually more lonely than before. So we how do how did we get here? I thought that was really

00:07:58.800 interesting. You how you talk about the history of how we got to this moment in 2018, where we're

00:08:04.340 communicating in memes, right? We we we show our connection with people with a thumbs up or, you know,

00:08:09.840 pressing a heart. You know, it's interesting because back into the 2000s, when the iPod came out,

00:08:15.800 there seemed there really wasn't an intention by Silicon Valley to create this new social ecosystem.

00:08:20.940 It sort of happened by happenstance in a lot of ways.

00:08:24.400 It's a lot more recent than many people think as well. So even when the iPhone came out,

00:08:28.580 this was not at all the intention. So I actually went back and talked to one of the original project

00:08:33.960 leads on the iPhone back when it was originally released to the public in 2007. And what he

00:08:39.680 emphasized is that Steve Jobs vision, like with lots of Steve Jobs's visions, was taking something

00:08:45.100 that people already really valued and saying, I can make the experience even better. And so the idea

00:08:51.620 behind the original iPhone was twofold. It's going to be a better iPod than we've ever had before.

00:08:58.600 And two, the phone features are going to be better than other phones, right? The way this engineer

00:09:03.800 said is Jobs said that this was supposed to be a phone that played songs, right? He just wanted to do

00:09:08.460 those two things better. And these were things that had long been established as things that people

00:09:11.680 like to do. People like to listen to music. People like to make phone calls. Jobs says,

00:09:16.140 I want to take these things that we love and make the experience better. And so if you actually go

00:09:20.460 back and look at the original keynote address where Jobs introduces the iPhone, it's not until about

00:09:25.660 30 minutes into it that he even starts really talking about the internet features or the

00:09:31.100 communication features. The first 30 minutes are really focused on the iPod features and the phone

00:09:35.960 features because that's what he had in mind. There was no app store when the iPhone was released.

00:09:40.680 This engineer confirmed to me that Steve Jobs was very worried about the idea that you would let

00:09:45.180 people's third-party apps run on the phone. He didn't want to sully the phone with third-party

00:09:49.580 apps. It was supposed to be a very, very good phone and a very, very good music player, right? So even as

00:09:54.560 late as 2007, this idea that we would be constantly checking a screen didn't exist. That wasn't on

00:10:01.600 anyone's radar screen. It wasn't really until the large social media giants figured out how to make

00:10:07.580 money from people looking at an iPod or iPhone screen that we really saw this drastic shift

00:10:13.040 towards the world we see today in which people are just constantly engaging with technology.

00:10:17.360 And as I imagine, Facebook was the first company that really figured that out.

00:10:21.360 Yeah. Facebook, they had an IPO pending. They weren't making a ton of money off of their browser-based

00:10:27.320 platform. And so they said, we have to get a lot more aggressive about trying to monetize our users.

00:10:33.700 And that's when they realized the shift to mobile would be the way to do it. Because people had

00:10:38.320 their mobile phones with them all the time, right? So they could get, in theory, a lot more

00:10:42.160 engagement, which they needed. Because if you're using it more, they get more data about you.

00:10:46.160 And if you're using it more, that's more time to show you ads, right? So the key was,

00:10:50.140 how can we get people to take Steve Jobs' beautiful phone and iPod out of their pocket 85 times a day

00:10:57.140 and click on our app and look at it? And they realized, okay, what we're going to have to do

00:11:01.920 is actually engineer in moderate behavioral addictions into our service. And that's where

00:11:06.460 you start to see these apps really take off with features that were created mainly to exploit

00:11:12.800 psychological vulnerabilities in its users, to try to get people to obsessively and compulsively

00:11:16.800 check this so that they could create the revenue numbers that originally Facebook needed

00:11:20.880 to show investors for its IPO to be a success.

00:11:23.340 And so it really was Facebook, which is why anyone who was an early user of Facebook

00:11:28.020 has this split experience where they have an old memory of Facebook being something they would

00:11:34.300 sometimes log onto on their computer and check on some things. And then they have this new memory of

00:11:39.060 them obsessively and compulsively using it. What happened in between there is that Facebook figured

00:11:44.740 out, okay, we can attention engineer this thing to be compulsive and we'll make a lot more money.

00:11:49.260 And then once they had that idea, everyone else sort of jumped on the bandwagon as well.

00:11:52.640 Well, so what are some of these tactics that Facebook pioneered and other apps use now to

00:11:57.020 keep people constantly checking their phone?

00:11:59.820 Well, they really were interested in sort of social related psychological vulnerabilities.

00:12:04.600 So, and a lot of this, by the way, comes from in part the research of the NYU professor, Adam Alter,

00:12:10.740 who's really looked into the psychological hooks, but also from Tristan Harris, who is a former

00:12:15.820 Google engineer who became a whistleblower and started writing about, hey, this is what we're doing.

00:12:20.120 This is what this company, you know, this is what's happening at these various attention

00:12:23.500 companies. And so what was revealed through the sort of this whistleblower and researchers

00:12:27.980 like Tristan and Adam is that hijacking the social apparatus in your brain is a good way

00:12:33.880 to get people to keep looking back. And so one thing they'll do, for example, is they introduced

00:12:39.360 a lot more social approval indicators into these apps. So a social approval indicator is some way

00:12:45.680 that someone else can indicate to you that they thought about you or were thinking about you.

00:12:50.120 Right. The original structure of social media didn't have a lot of this. It was more,

00:12:54.500 you would post things and then people could see it. So like, here's a baby picture and people could

00:12:59.160 see the baby picture. But when they added things like the like button, right, there's a reason for

00:13:04.000 that because now the like button meant that's a lot more social approval indicators. It's very easy

00:13:08.260 for people to indicate to you that they were thinking about you. And they added more and more of

00:13:12.400 these things, like tens of millions of dollars were invested, for example, to figure out how to

00:13:16.380 do the facial recognition required to do auto tagging on photos. So that when you take an Instagram

00:13:23.160 photo, it can say, hey, our algorithms looked at this photo and we think this person, the photo is,

00:13:28.060 you know, so-and-so. This is Brett. Do you want to tag him? Click a button to say yes.

00:13:31.800 Why did they spend so much money to solve that really, really hard computer science vision problem

00:13:35.880 is because it was another stream of social approval indicators, right? They're always looking for

00:13:40.040 ways that people can easily indicate that they're thinking about you. Because human psychology says,

00:13:46.180 if clicking on this app might reveal new social approval indicators, it's almost impossibly

00:13:52.900 irresistible to do so. That if I click on this app, I might see an indication that someone was thinking

00:13:58.240 about me. That's very, very hard to resist. And once they added those social approval indicators,

00:14:03.220 usage minutes of the app skyrocketed. Because now, instead of it being something that maybe you signed

00:14:07.700 on to once a day to see what was going on, you had a constant reason to keep checking.

00:14:13.180 Maybe there's a new indicator. Maybe there's a new indicator. And then you add on to that

00:14:16.760 intermittent reinforcement. So sometimes when you click, there is nothing. And sometimes there is,

00:14:21.560 right? Now you're becoming sort of almost impossible to avoid, right? Intermittent reinforcement

00:14:27.340 is something that Las Vegas casino gambling has taken a lot of advantage of in the design of their

00:14:31.600 games like slot machines. So you put those types of things together, which are all engineered,

00:14:36.480 right? This didn't exist in the original social media. It's not necessary for the social media

00:14:40.980 experience to be what it is. All of that makes clicking on these apps really, really difficult

00:14:46.680 to avoid. Yeah, we had Adam Alter on the podcast a while back ago. And one of the things, the tactics

00:14:51.440 he talked about that Instagram uses with that intermittent reinforcement is that sometimes when you

00:14:56.360 check, there's no likes, but they'll kind of build them up. So when you check again, you have

00:15:01.080 like 20 likes, right? And even though like someone was probably liking it already, you know, when you

00:15:06.180 check the first time, they don't show you that right away because, you know, getting seen that

00:15:10.520 it's 20 hearts, it's a lot more like, oh man, I want to check again the next time.

00:15:14.600 Yeah. And it's, it's important to emphasize that we think about liking is what you do on social media,

00:15:19.700 but it's really, really arbitrary. And it really was not in the original design of social media.

00:15:24.540 It was not there in web 2.0. I mean, this notion of liking things is entirely invented and spread

00:15:31.920 to make the app irresistible. And we're so used to it now, like, well, that's what you do on social

00:15:37.160 media. But actually, if you just step back and are objective, like, well, it's kind of weird,

00:15:40.940 like clicking on this thing, it just sends like a one bit and there's like a little counter

00:15:44.240 of like how many people click this thing. Like, why is that there? Like objectively speaking,

00:15:48.880 it's kind of weird, but it made these companies billions of dollars.

00:15:52.320 And the other thing it gives you, it gives these companies is information about you

00:15:56.100 that they can then sell more at more targeted ads at you.

00:15:59.280 Exactly. What are you clicking on? What do you not? What do you like? What do you don't like?

00:16:02.560 We can feed that all into machine learning algorithms, digest you to use Jaron Lanier's

00:16:07.000 term into essentially a gadget that can then be put into our ad making machinery.

00:16:11.920 And besides these other whistleblowers that you mentioned, like even Sean Parker, who was

00:16:15.540 the president of Facebook in the early days, even came out and said, yeah, we designed this thing

00:16:20.500 to keep you coming back again and again and again so we could make more money.

00:16:25.220 Yeah, there's a lot of this going on. I spoke on a panel recently with Roger McNamee, who was one of

00:16:31.700 the original mentors of Mark Zuckerberg, who brought Sheryl Sandberg on the Facebook. And he wrote an op-ed

00:16:38.220 for the Washington Post saying, I wish I hadn't mentored Mark Zuckerberg, even though the company

00:16:42.380 probably made him a lot of money. So there's a lot of this going on where people are having second

00:16:45.680 thoughts about what they've brought.

00:16:47.800 Yeah. And so as we can see, this could cause a lot of anxiety and angst in people because

00:16:52.400 you're constantly checking things for social approval. And if you don't get it, well, then

00:16:56.580 you feel terrible about yourself because someone didn't arbitrarily like something for whatever

00:17:01.120 reason. So it causes you to post another thing, hoping that someone will like that thing.

00:17:05.500 So it becomes sort of this weird arms race with yourself to get these digital status boosts.

00:17:11.140 Yeah. And it's playing with fire too, because the social aspects of our brain are incredibly

00:17:15.780 powerful. There's a massive amount of our neural processing goes towards social processing because

00:17:22.540 it's such a big part of our species survival is being able to cooperate and work together

00:17:26.980 in social groups. So our brain really, really cares about these things. So it's very dangerous

00:17:31.900 to start toying with it, right? I mean, our brain knows nothing about digital technology or social media.

00:17:37.020 So you bring these apps that are born out of incubators in Northern California by 20 year

00:17:42.900 olds and hooded sweatshirts or whatever, you bring these apps and you put them into your world and

00:17:46.960 they start manipulating and messing around with the social circuitry of your brain. It can cause a lot

00:17:51.340 of problems because that's a very sensitive and powerful portion of the brain. Just like when the

00:17:56.260 20th century, we were able to refine really pure chemicals. We figured out how to do the chemistry of

00:18:01.260 this, it created drugs that our brains couldn't handle because it was hijacking, you know, very

00:18:06.820 sensitive, powerful parts of our brains once we could have purified opioids or these types of things.

00:18:11.680 And so we're really playing with fire, right? You start messing around with something as fundamental

00:18:15.020 as our drive to be social. And you start messing around with that in a completely novel context,

00:18:20.720 like a digital screen and doing so for purposes of whatever manipulation, there could be a lot of

00:18:26.440 really big consequences. I mean, it's a really a dangerous thing to mess around with.

00:18:29.660 Yeah. One consequence, we had another guest a few years ago, a psychologist talking about

00:18:33.900 social status and things. And one of the research that came out that suggests that whenever you get

00:18:40.120 a status boost, like serotonin, I guess, increases whenever you feel a sense of status, like your parts

00:18:45.320 of your prefrontal cortex basically shut down, right? And so you think less, right? You think less

00:18:51.000 critically because you'd rather have the serotonin boost than like do the right thing. And so he suggested

00:18:57.380 that this might be why some people just post crazy stuff that they probably, they just took a step

00:19:02.380 back and think they wouldn't have posted it, but they did it because they knew it would give them

00:19:06.780 some sort of status boost. So they post some sort of outrageous thing that will get lots of engagement

00:19:10.960 and likes and comments and things like that.

00:19:13.020 Yeah. Well, I mean, you certainly see that on Twitter, for example, and I've interviewed a lot

00:19:16.500 of people, very active, sort of well-known, you know, blue check verified Twitter style users who

00:19:22.200 will tell the story that there's this, this weird drive towards extreme versions of whatever you

00:19:27.640 believe. And that's probably the underlying mechanism going on is that your serotonin system is being

00:19:33.620 hijacked by these sort of little visual retweet and, you know, heart counts. And you, I want more,

00:19:39.620 I want more, I want more. And you look up, you know, three days later and you're like, wow, this is

00:19:44.320 whatever. I'm, I'm completely, you know, trashing this person or saying like, I'm going to come after

00:19:49.600 your kids or have some really extreme version of my view or say like, if you don't agree with this,

00:19:53.240 you're Hitler or something. It pushes you so quickly to extreme places because again, these systems are

00:19:58.640 very, very powerful and you start messing around with them. You're going to have consequences.

00:20:03.400 And so this is why you're starting to see people take a step back and say,

00:20:06.220 I'm not liking how social media is affecting my personal life. I don't feel like a good person

00:20:11.220 when I'm on social media. Yeah. So you get those two things. One is I don't like the way it makes

00:20:15.980 me feel. I don't like the way I act. I don't like how it, how I express myself on it. And then you add

00:20:21.860 to that, just the more general thing is I don't like how much I'm using this. You know, I'm here

00:20:25.860 trying to give a bath to my kid and I can't help but look at my phone. And like the kid wants my

00:20:31.280 attention. You know that you, you know that it's much more important to be paying attention to your kid in

00:20:36.080 the moment. And yet you're still looking at the phone. Like, so these are the type of things that

00:20:39.940 I think have led people in the last couple of years to say, there's got to be a better way.

00:20:44.580 All right. So there's the problem. Let's talk about the solution for a lot of people who want

00:20:49.320 to concentrate more and be less distracted and have social media, have less of an influence on

00:20:53.440 their life. You argue that they typically resort to like modest hacks and tips to reduce their,

00:20:59.020 you know, the amount of time they spend on social media. What are some examples of those?

00:21:02.240 And then this, the follow-up question that is, why don't you think those are enough?

00:21:06.080 Yeah. This has certainly been the initial response to people recognizing that this is a problem

00:21:11.300 has been hacks and tips. So you've probably heard a lot of these, uh, like turn off notifications,

00:21:16.620 uh, you know, turn off the notification on the phone. You'll be a lot better or take a digital

00:21:20.780 Shabbat, you know, have a day each week in which you don't use your technology. That'll help. Or,

00:21:26.800 you know, try to, try to find, you know, something you do each day where you don't bring your phone

00:21:31.820 with you. So sort of assorted tips and tricks, these aren't working. It's not working. It's

00:21:37.500 completely underestimating sort of the scope of the problem, the appeal, the irresistibility of

00:21:43.720 what's in your pocket on this phone, the social pressures, the cultural pressures are so strong

00:21:48.200 that just a handful of these tips and tricks is, is not going to create the reform in what your

00:21:54.360 everyday life is like that you're looking for. And, you know, I think a really good analogy is

00:21:58.540 health and fitness. So, you know, we saw in the second half of the 20th century, a big rise of,

00:22:04.200 of, you know, the processed food industry in the West, especially in America, right? We had all

00:22:08.780 this processed food that was not healthy for us. And so of course we saw obesity went up,

00:22:12.660 diabetes went up, heart disease went up. There's a lot of negative health consequences.

00:22:16.560 And what we discovered is that simple common sense tips like, Hey, you should move more

00:22:21.340 or try to eat healthier. Didn't work, right? This wasn't taking people who were having huge

00:22:27.000 problems with like obesity or diabetes or something. And suddenly they'd be really healthy,

00:22:31.160 right? It was, it was too small given the, the powerful appeal of these foods and the cultural

00:22:36.080 pressure to go to fast food. And so what did end up working? Think about anyone, you know,

00:22:40.600 who's really healthy. Almost certainly they have some sort of strong, aggressive named philosophy,

00:22:48.560 you know, lifestyle philosophy that they live by. So maybe they're vegan or they're paleo or they're

00:22:54.200 like a CrossFit fanatic or whatever it is, but they have a really strong internally consistent

00:22:58.680 philosophy about how to live that's built on clear values and has its own internal logic.

00:23:03.500 And only that is really strong enough for them to resist all these urges. So almost certainly that's

00:23:07.420 what we need in the digital space is people have to treat this problem more seriously. And instead of

00:23:13.200 just tips and tricks have actually a strong philosophy for this is how I manage my digital life.

00:23:20.160 All right. So your philosophy is digital minimalism. So what is that philosophy?

00:23:25.160 So digital minimalism says that you should essentially wipe the slate clean of all these

00:23:29.660 different things that are pulling at your attention in your digital life. Wipe the slate clean,

00:23:35.220 ask what is really important to me? What are the things in my life that really matter? The things I

00:23:40.620 want to spend time on. And then for each of those say, okay, what's the best way to use technology

00:23:46.400 to support these things? And let the answer to that question be the technologies you let back

00:23:51.940 into your personal life. So you're essentially decluttering all of the junk out of your digital

00:23:57.540 life and starting from scratch and very intentionally and carefully putting back in a few digital behaviors

00:24:05.260 that give you huge wins, huge benefits. So it's very intentional and it's very selective. And so it's a

00:24:11.740 lifestyle that you know what technology you're using, why you're using it. You're almost certainly

00:24:15.200 going to be looking at screens much, much less than most of the people you know, all the while still

00:24:19.160 getting huge benefits from a lot of these new innovations. So let's dig into these three

00:24:22.680 principles a little bit more. So the first principle is clutter is costly. And I loved how you talked

00:24:27.820 about how Thoreau and his experiment at Walden Pond can kind of highlight or give us insights about the

00:24:35.360 cost of digital clutter. Can you talk about that a bit? Yeah, it's an important point because in any sort

00:24:40.560 of minimalist movement, the objection that people worry about is that the things they're saying no

00:24:46.320 to seem like they have some value. So maybe they're leaving value on the floor, right? It's very

00:24:52.580 worrisome. This idea that you just focused on a small number of really important things to the

00:24:57.000 exclusion of everything else, people get very worried about, well, what about all the little bits of

00:25:00.940 value? Wouldn't I be better off doing the important things and adding these other sources of value as

00:25:05.080 well? But the core idea behind why minimalism works is that actually the clutter itself of having too

00:25:10.820 many things in your life has such a big cost that you're better off not having all those small things.

00:25:16.260 And this was essentially what Thoreau was trying to explore when he went to Walden Pond. I mean,

00:25:22.420 I'm a big fan of Thoreau. I've been studying him for years. Walden is often incorrectly characterized

00:25:29.080 as a nature book. It's like an environmentalist book that it's about nature and the importance of nature.

00:25:34.120 It's actually mainly making a pretty aggressive and interesting economic argument, right? So what

00:25:40.420 Thoreau was trying to figure out is how much do I actually need to satisfy my basic needs of a human?

00:25:47.940 How much money do I need, right? That's why he went out to Walden and kept very careful tabulation of

00:25:53.200 exactly how much he spent on the nails he used to make his cabin, the food that he had to buy and

00:26:00.140 consume. He kept track of all of this. And then he figured out, okay, at my skill level and the going

00:26:05.780 labor rate, how much would I have to work to support these basic things? And he figured out it was about

00:26:10.980 one day a week, right? And so he was figuring out this baseline of, okay, it takes about one day a

00:26:16.880 week of labor to support my basic needs. And the reason he was out there observing nature was to

00:26:21.600 try to indicate that, hey, once your basic needs are met, you can actually have a pretty interesting

00:26:24.940 life as long as you're willing to, like he is, stare at ice for an hour and look at his different

00:26:29.640 properties. And then he makes this really big argument about where people get pushed awry when

00:26:36.360 thinking about bringing stuff into their life. Like, I want a nicer Venetian blinds. He talks about,

00:26:41.620 I want a nicer copper pot, the farmer that mortgages more land so they can make a little bit more money

00:26:46.140 to get a cart or something like this. He says they only think in terms of what's the value I'm going to

00:26:51.860 get from this new thing, but they don't think about what am I going to have to give up in terms of my

00:26:56.880 life in order to acquire this thing. And so his experiment was, okay, it only takes a day of my life

00:27:02.540 to meet my basic necessities. So everything else I'm giving up time, I don't have to give up. So what's

00:27:06.780 actually worth giving up time of my life for? And his basic calculation is that most of the stuff that

00:27:13.200 most of the farmers he knew around him in Concord, Massachusetts were toiling so hard to afford was not

00:27:19.340 worth the amount of their time and life that they had to sacrifice to get it. And his clever example

00:27:25.120 was getting a wagon for taking your produce to the market. And his calculus was, okay, taking the wagon

00:27:33.640 instead of walking to the market might save you an hour because it's faster. But if you actually do

00:27:40.160 the math, it's costing you about three or four hours of extra work a week to afford it. So actually,

00:27:44.760 you're way worse off, right? You've lost a lot more time trying to support this wagon than if you

00:27:49.160 didn't have it at all. And so the way that he thinks about things where you say, you can't just

00:27:53.840 think about what's the value I'm going to get from having this thing or using this thing, but you also

00:27:58.040 have to say, what's the price I'm paying in terms of my life force into exchange to get this thing.

00:28:04.540 You have to put both of those things into the equation. And that's what's happening with a lot of

00:28:08.500 these digital behaviors. Yeah, they all bring you some benefits, but they also are bringing you harm.

00:28:12.920 They're taking your time and attention away from other things that could be more valuable. They're

00:28:16.860 fragmenting your time and day so you get less satisfaction of other things. There is actually a

00:28:20.700 really big cost to this clutter that's hidden behind the sort of top line headlines about, isn't this

00:28:26.040 a nice little benefit you get from having this app? Right. So what this principle is, like, think about

00:28:30.320 the opportunity costs with your attention and your life force, if you can call it that. Yeah, he was sort of

00:28:34.920 the original person to really emphasize these opportunity costs really matter, don't ignore them.

00:28:38.780 And so going on to that, the second principle is, you know, understanding the importance of

00:28:43.460 diminishing returns, right? Like at a certain point, your social media use or whatever,

00:28:48.640 it has some benefit, but at a certain point you don't get any more. In fact, it starts going down.

00:28:53.140 Yeah. So this is another key point to minimalism, which is that you don't just ask the binary

00:28:59.500 question, you know, do I use this service or do I don't? You also ask the more specific question,

00:29:05.120 how do I use this service and why, right? So minimalists are always trying to optimize,

00:29:10.240 you know, how do I get the biggest ROI on the time required to use this thing? And a lot of

00:29:16.540 people in the digital space don't do this. They'll have some reason to use Facebook. Let's say there's

00:29:21.520 a community group that's important to them and this group organizes using a Facebook group.

00:29:26.860 And then they'll allow that justification to then be the reason that they're on their phone on

00:29:30.640 Facebook two hours a day, you know, because it was just a binary question of like, do you use

00:29:34.600 Facebook or not? But a minimalist says, no, no, no, you have to optimize. If you optimize how you use

00:29:39.800 these things, you get much, much bigger bang for your buck. And so the minimalist might say,

00:29:43.760 the only thing I want to do on Facebook is check on this Facebook group for this community

00:29:48.140 organization I care about. How am I going to do that? Wednesday and Sunday night on a desktop,

00:29:53.140 not on my phone. It takes 20 minutes. I have a big complicated password that's on a post-it.

00:29:57.880 So it kind of a bit of a pain to do. And now I'm getting most of the benefit that I need out

00:30:02.400 of Facebook and it has a minimal footprint on my life. So optimization of how you use the things you

00:30:07.320 choose to use is almost as important as just the binary decision of what's on your phone and what's

00:30:12.520 not. So that leads to principle three, which is to be intentional. And I love the example of the

00:30:18.000 Amish, how the Amish can teach us how to be intentional with our technology. Because oftentimes we

00:30:23.240 think the Amish are just like complete Luddites. They don't incorporate any technology, but that's not true.

00:30:27.880 Yeah. The Amish are an interesting case study. People do incorrectly think that they just froze

00:30:32.700 their technology, maybe in like the late 18th century or something like this. And it's not true.

00:30:36.800 I mean, the way the Amish actually function is that they have a really core principle,

00:30:41.200 which is the community matters above all else. The strength of their community matters above all

00:30:45.340 else. And so when new technologies come along, they go through a decision-making process.

00:30:50.260 Is this going to make our community stronger or is it going to make our community weaker? And if it's

00:30:55.280 going to make it stronger, then we can adopt it. And if it's not, we're not. And often the way

00:31:00.160 they'll do this is they'll test it. So they'll have essentially the Amish equivalent of an alpha

00:31:04.900 geek. Use it. Great. Here's a cell phone came along. Use a cell phone for a while. Let's watch it. Let's

00:31:09.340 see what happens. Here's a car. Great. Someone buy a car. Let's watch. Does this make things better or

00:31:14.500 worse in terms of the thing we really care about, which is community strength? And that's why if you study

00:31:19.940 actual old order Amish communities, you see all sorts of interesting technologies. You'll see diesel

00:31:25.660 engines and solar panels and really complicated fertilizer systems. You'll see disposable diapers

00:31:32.200 for sure. All this is really modern stuff, but you won't see phones in people's houses, automobiles,

00:31:38.080 or connection to the electric grid. Yep. So what's going on is they're evaluating what strengthens our

00:31:43.720 community and what weakens it, right? So disposable diapers are really great and they don't weaken the

00:31:48.880 community. So of course we're going to use those, but having a phone in the house, maybe then I'm not

00:31:53.160 going to go actually visit my neighbors. I could call you on the phone and it could weaken the community.

00:31:57.100 So maybe we don't want that. The automobile they're really worried about because then people can leave the

00:32:02.320 community and go other places and it really hurts the community cohesion. So they're really against

00:32:05.960 automobiles, but tractors, they're fine. And oftentimes they'll take the pneumatic wheels off the

00:32:11.220 tractors so that it's fine to drive through the fields when it'd be difficult to use as a car. So they do this

00:32:16.660 really complicated calculus. And so there's a lot of inconveniences to be Amish because they don't

00:32:23.940 use a lot of things that are convenient, like the electric grid or cars. But somewhat surprisingly,

00:32:29.260 if not bafflingly, this order has existed for 300 years. And it's not like they're in isolation in

00:32:35.280 North Korea somewhere where they don't know there's a better way. I mean, they're riding their buggies

00:32:39.260 next to McDonald's in Lancaster. They all spend at least a year living in the normal world during

00:32:44.380 Rum Springa, right? So it's not like they've been hidden from the real world, but this community has

00:32:48.960 persisted. And my argument is that this is in part because the positive power of being very intentional

00:32:56.380 about what you do in your life, so in their case, really trying to support their community,

00:33:01.060 can really far outweigh the conveniences you lose by making those intentional decisions.

00:33:07.540 So the Amish have introduced lots of inconveniences into their life by being wary

00:33:13.200 about a lot of modern technologies. But they persist in part because of the value they get

00:33:18.220 out of being really intentional about how they live their life. And so this is a big reason more

00:33:24.020 generally why minimalism is powerful, is when you're very intentional about what you want to do in your

00:33:29.700 life, and you focus your technology only on these small number of things, it's true that you're

00:33:34.920 probably missing out on a lot of little things that could be convenient. But my argument is that's

00:33:39.700 okay, because the positive return you're going to get by being so in control and intentional about

00:33:45.280 your life is going to far outweigh the inconvenience of not having whatever latest app might have been

00:33:51.140 useful in the moment. We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

00:33:58.960 And now back to the show. All right, so let's recap that. So basically, digital minimalism is

00:34:03.500 being intentional about your digital technology use, thinking about the opportunity costs that

00:34:08.880 come with having digital clutter, thinking about the return on investment you get from using these

00:34:13.040 things, and then setting some rules for yourself, and following those rules, and being happy even if

00:34:20.860 you miss out on some stuff because you don't use social media as much as other people.

00:34:26.080 Yeah, I've never had a social media account. And so I'm sure there's any number of little

00:34:30.700 things that you could list, like, well, you don't get this benefit, and you miss this benefit.

00:34:34.960 But as a true digital minimalist, I don't care about missing out on those little things,

00:34:39.480 because I'm much more interested investing more time in the things that I already know for sure

00:34:45.300 are really important to me. That if you want to look at the net happiness and satisfaction you have

00:34:50.340 in your life, investing in the things that you already know give you huge returns is almost always

00:34:57.100 going to be the better strategy than instead dissipating that energy around a lot of things

00:35:01.800 that give you small returns, you know, the big return things dominate. And so I mean, I would say

00:35:06.240 the quick summary on how you operationalize these digital minimalist ideas is you really want to think

00:35:11.880 about it like you're decluttering a house, you clear all of the stuff out of your digital personal

00:35:17.720 life. So we're talking about your personal life work is a different thing. You clear all the optional

00:35:21.740 technology out of your personal life. And you start from scratch and say, Okay, if you want to make it

00:35:26.660 back onto my phone or onto my computer or onto the regular rotation of things that I check on my web

00:35:31.320 browser, you've got to make a really strong case, there has to be a really strong case that you're very

00:35:37.000 important for something I really value. And when you do this decluttering process, you are almost

00:35:42.360 certainly going to end up with much, much less things in your digital life. And you're almost certainly

00:35:48.700 going to actually be getting more value out of the technology in your life than before. So it's

00:35:53.020 this interesting paradox, you'll be looking at screens much, much less, but you'll be getting

00:35:56.980 much more value out of the time you do spend with your devices.

00:36:00.560 So let's talk about that declutter. So brass tack advice, one thing you talk about in the book is you

00:36:04.440 start off with a 30 day tech break. And you basically just as you said, clear all the stuff off your

00:36:09.420 phone. What do you think the 30 days like staying away from it before you start reintroducing does to

00:36:14.620 make this process, I don't know, more seamless or more, it just work, make it work better?

00:36:20.560 Well, you need two things that the 30 days give you. The first is a detoxing process. In my

00:36:25.440 experience, and again, I've run about 1600 people plus through this process so far, it takes about

00:36:30.260 one to two weeks just for your mind to detoxify enough that it doesn't have this strong craving

00:36:36.380 for especially the more engineered addictive services you spend time with. So you want your mind to

00:36:41.540 actually get a detox experience. And then you have a couple more weeks to actually spend time

00:36:46.220 exploring and rediscovering what it is that you really value. And so this is worth serious thought,

00:36:52.860 this sort of rediscovery of, okay, when I'm not just looking at my phone and my tablet, you know,

00:36:57.080 all evening, what do I really do like to do? What really is important? And so I really encourage

00:37:01.980 people to take this 30 days, not just as a detox process, but also a period of discovery to return to

00:37:08.020 the type of analog activities to sort of to use a terminology that's relevant to your audience to

00:37:13.180 the type of traditionally manly activities that people used to spend their leisure time with and

00:37:17.640 rediscover and re-experience what's valuable, what you really like, what really gives you

00:37:23.360 satisfaction. So that when it then comes time to do the reintroduction, you know what matters.

00:37:28.160 And so you know, okay, this doesn't matter, this doesn't matter. Oh, I can use this tool in a way

00:37:32.100 that's really going to make a difference. So you need some time to actually rediscover what it's like

00:37:36.860 to live a real meaningful life. And one of the things I've noticed when I've taken, you know,

00:37:40.480 extended breaks from social media is that when I do come back to it, I realize I just don't like

00:37:45.720 this. Like, because I think when you're like doing it all the time, you think like, okay,

00:37:49.220 it's just a habit and you, it's something you do, but then you take a break and you come back and

00:37:53.020 you're like, boy, this is really dumb. Yeah. And you just go away from it again.

00:37:56.420 Yeah. There's a lot of arbitrariness that, that you kind of miss out on when you're using all the

00:38:00.180 time. You're like, oh, this is just what people do. Right. And then you step away from it and you

00:38:03.360 turn around and you're right. And it looks really weird. And this is a common experience

00:38:06.740 with digital minimalists is because they look at their screen so much less than most people,

00:38:10.960 everyone around them thinks they're weird, but then the digital minimalists always have this

00:38:14.840 matrix type moment where they look around and are like, wait a second, what other people are doing

00:38:19.140 is incredibly weird. Right. I mean, I'm not the weird one that I'm sitting here reading a book.

00:38:22.820 I think the weird one is that, you know, everyone around me is looking at this little thing and

00:38:26.820 tapping at it with their finger. You know, the digital minimalists are not the weird ones. I think

00:38:31.280 it's the rest of us, the rest of the culture that is, that's kind of gone into the, the,

00:38:35.660 the unusual territory with their behavior. So you take the 30 day break. How do you go

00:38:41.220 about reintroducing the, the service digital services so that you don't go back into your

00:38:45.600 old ways? A good way to think about it is don't even use the term break. Think of it as a decluttering,

00:38:51.260 right? Like if you really want to clean out your house, the way you think about it is not,

00:38:54.800 all right, I'm going to take everything, all this junk out of my house. And then after 30 days,

00:38:58.260 I'll put it all back in, right? Like you're not taking a break from your junk. You're getting out of

00:39:01.540 your house. And then after those 30 days, when you find it, Oh, I'm really missing, you know,

00:39:06.500 whatever my potato peeler, like, let me go get that out of storage and bring that back into my

00:39:10.340 kitchen. It's sort of the same thing with a digital declutter. So you're take, you're decluttering

00:39:14.440 all the stuff out of your life. And then you can sort of step back and see what do I really miss?

00:39:19.500 Like, where am I finding, Hey, not having this thing in my life is really having a big negative

00:39:23.900 consequence. It's keeping me from something that's really important or diminishing the benefit I'm getting

00:39:29.280 from something that's really important. And as you discover these, these real needs for the things

00:39:34.040 you've taken away, then you can reintroduce that particular thing back. But when you do the key

00:39:39.020 advice is don't just bring it back, put some rules in place. All right, here is how and why I'm going

00:39:44.140 to use this thing. And so it's just like the classic minimalist house decluttering trick. You know,

00:39:48.420 you pack up the whole house and then you only bring back the things that you realize you need. And when

00:39:52.900 most people do that, they find that, you know, 90% of their possessions, they actually didn't need.

00:39:57.140 And that should be the same experience you have when you do this with your digital life as well.

00:40:01.560 So let's get to those rules. So like, what kind of, what are some examples of rules that you apply

00:40:05.440 whenever you bring, you know, a digital service back into your life?

00:40:09.300 Well, you should think about when and how I'm going to use it and for what purpose,

00:40:13.140 right? So, you know, on what occasions or on what timing am I going to use this? And when I use it,

00:40:18.440 what am I going to do with it? And let me be clear about what's the underlying reason.

00:40:21.600 So a lot of digital minimalists that I've worked with have particular needs to use particular

00:40:28.080 social media platforms. And almost always when they apply these rules, they're not using it on

00:40:33.320 their phone. They almost always determined that it's much better to have it on their computer.

00:40:37.020 If it's on their phone, they're going to use it for other reasons. And they usually have a schedule

00:40:40.440 on which they're going to use it. Another thing you see when people do these, you know,

00:40:44.600 when and how and why type rules is it changes their behavior. So there's, I've met several artists,

00:40:50.520 for example, who get important professional creative inspiration from Instagram, right?

00:40:56.780 That, that at the moment, I guess, in the art community, it's a place that a lot of people

00:41:01.140 share works in progress or things they're working on. And creative inspiration is very important

00:41:05.180 if you're an artist. And so a lot of artists that become digital minimalists, for example,

00:41:09.620 will say, okay, that's important to me, right? Creating art and being inspired is important.

00:41:14.080 And this is a source of inspiration that technology has brought into the life that wouldn't be here

00:41:18.520 otherwise. But they realized that maybe the way they were using Instagram before is that in addition

00:41:23.340 to these artists, they were following lots of people and commenting and they were looking at it,

00:41:27.240 you know, 90 minutes a day. And so they might, when they're looking at the sort of the when and how,

00:41:32.080 they might say, okay, I'm going to be very restrictive about who I follow, right? So that's

00:41:35.920 a common how rule that I'm going to reduce who I follow down to like the 10 artists who are most

00:41:40.420 inspiring me at the moment. And then the win rule might be every evening, you know, after dinner,

00:41:45.320 that's when I look at this for 20 minutes. And so it can mean different things, but basically when I

00:41:49.620 use it, how I use it and reiterating the reason why you're using it, that's the key when you realize

00:41:56.400 you want to add one of these things back. One of the rules that you talk about that could seem like

00:42:01.460 crazy for a lot of people, because you're just disrupting the way that social media is supposed

00:42:05.140 to like works today is people should stop liking things on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. I recommend you

00:42:10.960 don't click like, and you don't leave comments. And it does seem kind of disruptive. But what's

00:42:15.880 going on here is it goes back to what we talked about earlier in the interview, which is this notion

00:42:20.360 that researchers are finding that that type of digital interaction really does not satisfy our human

00:42:27.240 drive for sociality. One bit indicators like, hey, someone click like or pure text indicators, like

00:42:33.920 someone says, hey, great, or congratulations, or I'm rooting for you, whatever. These don't activate

00:42:38.700 most of the social areas of our brain that are expecting instead a very rich analog stream of,

00:42:44.500 you know, voice tone and modulation and body language, the type of things that we expect from

00:42:49.680 social interactions. So we do not get a lot of social satisfaction out of these sort of lightweight

00:42:54.860 social connection type things. And so one of my strategies I advise to digital minimalist is

00:43:01.540 consider changing your mindset. So that you say, from a social perspective, the primary purpose of

00:43:09.820 things like social media or text messaging is logistical. It is here to help support an old

00:43:17.120 fashioned analog social life, right? So text messaging is very valuable because it can help me

00:43:21.900 when I'm trying to meet my friend, you know, hey, no, I'm over at this bar, not that bar or something.

00:43:26.040 And it's, it's helping facilitate an old fashioned analog social interaction. Social media in this

00:43:31.940 context is maybe useful because I can find out that, hey, this person I knew for a long time is

00:43:35.880 going to be in town. And now I can, I can set up a get together with this person. I would have known

00:43:40.100 they're going to be in town if I didn't see them on social media, but now I do. But seeing these tools

00:43:44.700 is logistical. It's the support my analog old fashioned interactions. And it's not a substitute for

00:43:51.160 those interactions is probably the healthier way to look at it. So once you stop counting

00:43:56.100 social media and text interactions as real interactions, you'll realize like, oh, I'm not

00:44:00.620 really that social. When's the last time I talked to someone? When's the last time I was on the phone?

00:44:03.760 When's the last time that I was getting coffee with someone? And you'll feel that urge to actually get

00:44:07.200 out there and do the things that really satisfy our human drive for sociality. So when I say don't

00:44:10.840 click like, what I mean is change your perspective. You know, these digital connection tools,

00:44:16.180 think about them as logistical things that makes it easier for you to do the same type of old fashioned

00:44:20.680 face-to-face or voice interaction that for centuries has been at the core of our drive for human

00:44:27.200 interaction. But how do you explain that to like friends and family? Because that's the weird thing

00:44:31.120 about social media. There's like this weird etiquette that's developed. Like, well, if I like your stuff,

00:44:35.560 you got to like my stuff. And if you don't like it, then that signals some sort of, you know,

00:44:39.880 rift in our relationship, right? Yeah. You know, you just tell them, I don't use social media much

00:44:44.520 anymore. Right. I mean, that's like, if you think about it, you usually know some people who are like

00:44:49.340 that, there's probably a couple of Cal Newports in your life who aren't on social media or, you know,

00:44:54.160 they are, but they really haven't used it in a while. And you basically, you step away from that

00:45:00.120 particular attention marketplace. It's a little bit more difficult with text messaging. This is what

00:45:05.560 I found. This is the feedback I've been getting. When people really expect you to respond to text

00:45:09.300 messages, it can be a little bit harder, but basically you essentially teach people like, I often

00:45:13.200 don't have my phone with me. So, you know, I'm not always able to respond right away. And people just

00:45:17.960 learn and they adjust and then they're usually more or less okay with it. And, you know, sometimes

00:45:23.900 people get frustrated. The biggest thing you lose when you step away from thinking about social media

00:45:29.200 as actually counting as social interaction is that you are going to lose probably some weak tie social

00:45:35.640 friendships that were maintained exclusively through social media interaction. But I think that's

00:45:40.440 fine. Actually, as human beings, this idea that we need to maintain like well above the Dunbar number

00:45:46.140 of sort of weak tie social interactions with people we barely know or knew a long time ago,

00:45:51.120 there's no actual evidence that that's important for us thriving as humans or feeling socially

00:45:55.660 connected or valued. So yes, you will lose those when you step away from social media as an actual means

00:46:01.360 to socialize with people. But I don't think there's any actual loss to the strength of your social life

00:46:07.720 or your happiness by doing so.

00:46:09.060 Gotcha. And the other upside to like stop liking things on the internet, like social media companies

00:46:15.800 know less about you is another benefit. And also, you had an article about this not too long ago about

00:46:21.060 how social media sort of encourages just like really crappy stuff on the internet because it's all based

00:46:26.200 on vanity metrics and not really on quality. So maybe if you stop liking crappy stuff because everyone

00:46:32.960 else is liking it, you will start getting better stuff on the internet.

00:46:35.460 Yeah, I definitely think that's true. And more generally, I mean, I think there's a not to get

00:46:40.360 technical, but there's an important distinction to make here that I've been writing about quite a bit

00:46:44.100 recently, which is there's a difference between the social internet and social media, right? So the

00:46:50.520 social internet is just the idea that you can use the internet to connect with people, express yourself

00:46:54.840 and discover interesting information. This is a incredibly sort of powerful paradigm shifting

00:47:02.140 innovation that we got, along with consumer access to the internet in the 1990s, and in particular, the rise

00:47:08.200 of the World Wide Web and the associated protocols, among other things, right? So the idea of the internet

00:47:13.260 as a force for these type of things is very, very powerful. And I'm a huge booster of it. The thing that I'm

00:47:19.560 less a fan of is this notion that we need to consolidate the social internet behind the walled gardens of

00:47:27.580 these massive private companies. And that's really where the problems start to happen. When you have

00:47:32.820 massive companies like Facebook say, look, you guys are too, you're too dumb to enjoy the social

00:47:38.700 internet. It's too complicated for you. We'll make an easier to use version of it, right? And we've got

00:47:43.420 to get everyone to sign on to our easier to use version of the internet, but we'll give you like a

00:47:47.960 really clean interface. And, and you don't really have to go discover things. We'll just kind of show you

00:47:52.160 things. We'll, we'll watch you and see what you like. And you can just sit there, you know, like

00:47:55.700 the, the people on the spaceship and that Pixar movie, WALL-E, just sit there and we'll just kind

00:47:59.500 of feed you things that, that, that'll make you happy and you'll like it and don't worry about it.

00:48:03.080 And, and the internet's too difficult for you to actually go out there and engage with. And,

00:48:06.220 and so this movement of let's take the social internet, which is wild and decentralized and

00:48:11.280 wonderful and disruptive and something I love, and let's, let's consolidate it, you know,

00:48:16.460 into a small number of private companies. That's where all the problems are happening. Like almost everything

00:48:20.420 that people are upset about with social media today is because we thought that the social internet has

00:48:25.220 to exist, you know, on the private servers of two or three companies. And, and so I like the social

00:48:30.540 internet. I don't like social media. I think if you leave the, the walled garden of social media and go

00:48:37.160 back out to the wild web, you can find interesting things. You can connect to interesting people. You can

00:48:42.340 express yourself in interesting ways and you can do it in a way that's just so much healthier because you

00:48:47.580 don't have these sort of algorithmic forces trying to push you into weird extremes or to pacify you

00:48:53.140 or to get you upset or to get you mollified or whatever's going on, you know, that that's necessary

00:48:57.820 to get revenue up at these private companies. When you go back out to the wild social internet,

00:49:01.760 it's such a better experience. And so this is why I've been a blogger for a long time.

00:49:05.980 I think the blogosphere, though weirder and harder to navigate is for example, a, a much better

00:49:12.320 repository of expression and information than say Facebook or Twitter is. And so this is definitely

00:49:18.320 a movement I've been making is that, that Facebook wants us to think that it's fundamental. I think

00:49:24.160 it's more like what AOL was in the 1990s, right? It was like the worldwide web with training wheels

00:49:29.280 for people who didn't know how web browsers work. I think Facebook is just the social internet with

00:49:33.940 training wheels, you know, for, for people who, who don't want to actually take the time to go out

00:49:39.140 there and explore, you know, actual websites and different, you know, protocols and more peer to

00:49:43.660 peer type stuff. And so I'm hope I want to make that distinction clear because I don't want it to

00:49:48.480 seem like it's, I'm, I'm curmudgeonly on these technologies. I just don't like the idea of

00:49:52.300 consolidating all this stuff into these big companies that really is the source of most of

00:49:56.320 the problems. So maybe a digital minimalist rule would be delete your Facebook page, get a blog with

00:50:02.800 your own name, you know, domain name and start posting stuff there. Yeah. You know, there's this

00:50:07.360 exciting movement out there. It's called the indie web movement. And that's basically what it's saying.

00:50:12.420 It's like, you need to own your own domain, have your own domain. You know, it's a server that you're

00:50:16.960 renting from a local hosting company. You own it, you own all the content. And actually what, what

00:50:21.360 we're seeing in the indie web movement, which I think is kind of exciting is that they're saying,

00:50:25.560 you know, the way that the social internet should work is that everyone has their own domain.

00:50:29.660 They have their own information. And then what people can offer, smaller companies can offer

00:50:34.400 like social front ends where you can point your feed towards one of these companies. And then

00:50:39.300 when you log into their interface, they can make it easier for you to find people and follow people

00:50:43.180 or whatever. But the actual content is on people's individual servers on their own blogs. They own

00:50:48.180 it. They can point it towards however many of these services they want. This idea that everyone has to be

00:50:53.140 in the same service and that service has to own all of their things and own all their data.

00:50:56.880 It's just not necessary for there to be a vibrant social web.

00:51:00.980 So let's go back to another tactic that you'll, you'll have to implement as you

00:51:05.880 do this declutter. As you said earlier, uh, once you get rid of all this stuff on your phone,

00:51:12.080 you're going to realize you have a lot more free time on your hand. And that's,

00:51:15.520 that's a catch 22 because the reason why people go to their phones is because they're bored

00:51:20.100 and they have a lot of free time on their hands. So what can people start doing to figure out

00:51:25.360 like what to do with their new found freedom or new free time now that they're not checking their

00:51:29.760 phone all the time? This is a really important point and something that really became clear,

00:51:35.040 especially as I worked with people who are going through this, this transition into minimalism,

00:51:39.560 which is this notion that we have, we have a human drive, uh, among other things for, uh, quality

00:51:46.960 leisure, you know, things that we do just for the sake of doing them. I go all the way back to

00:51:53.340 Aristotle and the Nicomedean ethics, where he, he talks about this as, as far back as then,

00:51:57.740 he really talks about the importance of sort of activity that's pursued just for the activity

00:52:01.740 sake, just for its intrinsic qualities. And we have this drive, right? I mean, you write a lot

00:52:06.440 about this on art of manliness. You see these, there's a reason why these sort of old manly

00:52:11.200 hobbies of woodworking and being an expert at this and that there's a reason that resonates so much

00:52:16.000 is because it's quality activity. You're mastering a skill for the sake of being good at something.

00:52:21.180 We want that. We hunger for that. And if we don't have that in our life, we tend to feel a void,

00:52:25.620 right? There's, there's a large void. One of the problems with this sort of very recent modern state

00:52:32.080 of persistent digital distraction is that we can be distracted enough that you can paper over that

00:52:38.280 void just enough that it's tolerable. Right. And so you're like, okay, I can, I can avoid having to

00:52:44.520 actually, you know, develop real sort of manly quality skills and pursuits and hobbies in my life.

00:52:49.420 If I can just look at, look at my phone and my tablet enough, I can kind of tolerate not having

00:52:54.700 that thing that I really crave. And so the issue, as you point out, is that when you then rip the

00:52:59.680 bandaid off, so let's say you do the 30 day digital declutter, it can be really uncomfortable

00:53:05.160 and disconcerting because now you have to confront that void in your life of what do you do in your

00:53:10.760 time outside of work. And if you haven't taken the time to actually develop quality, high quality

00:53:16.840 leisure pursuits, you're, you're going to feel bad and you're going to be adrift and you're going to

00:53:21.640 be sort of itchy and wanting to look at things. And so I often, you know, advise people, if you're

00:53:27.120 really, really into screens, you might want to take the time to develop these sort of old fashioned

00:53:32.860 analog, high quality leisure pursuits before you even attempt a digital declutter. So that when you

00:53:38.860 do rip these things out of your life, you have something waiting to fill that void. Because I was

00:53:43.920 surprised to the extent by which this was disconcerting to people when they tried to step away

00:53:49.220 from their technology, they didn't realize how much they were missing in their life by not actually

00:53:54.500 having high quality leisure. And they were so thrilled to discover how much meaning it gave

00:54:00.660 them once they actually put in the time to reintroduce it. Yeah. One other thing I've noticed

00:54:04.060 too, is that when you use screens a lot, like you, you often like you forget how to develop that high

00:54:10.380 quality leisure, right? It's like, like, that's a skill that, you know, you, you develop, so it takes

00:54:15.340 practice. And then when you stop using it, you're like, well, how do I get, how do I get started?

00:54:19.180 What do I do? Because you haven't exercised that skill in maybe years. Yeah. And that's why I get

00:54:24.820 really instrumental in the book. It's like, okay, let me give you some like actual tactics. I mean,

00:54:29.140 this is something that our grandfathers would think is crazy that we would even talk about this. Like,

00:54:32.800 what do you mean you need tactics for how to, you know, have high quality leisure? Like what do you,

00:54:37.640 what else would you do with your time if you weren't, you know, building a canoe in your

00:54:41.140 woodshed or, or, or what have you, or, or running a big community organization, the road, you know,

00:54:45.200 the rotary club or whatever. And so, but yeah, we have to, we have to go back to tactics. So in the

00:54:49.600 book, I get down to some basic things. I, I give out a plan about, okay, use YouTube how-to videos

00:54:57.140 and systematically work up the complexity of things that you're fixing with your hands. I mean,

00:55:03.120 it sounds almost trite, but it's a huge mind shift, right? Just this notion of, of going from my

00:55:09.740 hands are basically used to manipulate digital screens to my hands manipulated something in

00:55:14.560 the physical world. It didn't work. And now it does. And your brain, it's like fireworks go off

00:55:19.220 once you do that. They're like, yes, this is what we're supposed to be doing. Our, you know,

00:55:22.600 we're supposed to be confronting the world physically and changing the world in ways that's

00:55:27.120 positive. We're supposed to be, you know, holding the piece of wood and feeling the grain. We're

00:55:31.740 supposed to be, you know, seeing the metal bend. We're supposed to be confronting the world.

00:55:36.320 Our brains get really confused by like, all I'm looking at is glowing LEDs all day.

00:55:39.740 Like this is not what I'm used to from our evolutionary history. I also talk in the book

00:55:44.080 about building leisure plans. And maybe this is just sort of hyper Cal Newport Tonian productivity

00:55:50.020 stuff here, but you know, some people need this. Like these are some leisure activities that I'm

00:55:55.320 working on. This is what I'm working on each week. This is what I'm working on each day. Like

00:55:58.740 systematically building yourself a schedule of doing high quality analog leisure and building up what

00:56:04.860 you're comfortable with. I mean, all of this is so important. It sounds, you know, like optional,

00:56:10.400 superfluous, like, well, you know, whatever hobbies, but you need this, right? Especially

00:56:15.440 if you're going to go minimalist on your digital life, you need to go much more intentional on your

00:56:20.860 analog life that replaces it. And it can be pretty hard.

00:56:24.000 Right. That system. That's why we developed the strenuous life last year on the art of manliness,

00:56:28.080 just like providing a structure for people. It's like, well, I don't know what to do. It's like,

00:56:31.340 well, do these things and they get going and it sort of greases the wheels and they start,

00:56:35.760 you know, they find a new hobby and they get delved deeper into that. And that's been really

00:56:38.680 cool to see. Yeah. And I'm not surprised that it's been popular. I mean, I think what's happening

00:56:43.460 in the digital world is actually making the appeal of the analog world so much stronger again,

00:56:48.660 in a way that would be completely mystifying to our grandfathers. Just the idea that you would do

00:56:52.760 anything else with your leisure time of these types of activities would make no sense. You would

00:56:56.220 have been doing it in every spare moment since you were four years old, but you know, for our

00:57:00.660 generation or younger, it can be completely novel. And like, that's why I think the strenuous life

00:57:04.500 is a great, that program is great. Right. It's not about, is it really important that you learn

00:57:09.600 to do this particular thing? It's no, no, no. It's the fact that you're out there doing analog things

00:57:14.240 just for the sake of doing them, just for the sake of mastery, just for the sake of adventure.

00:57:19.040 And it's so important. And I, and I think that's also, I mean, you would know better, but

00:57:22.940 it explains, I think a lot of the growing Renaissance in some of these sort of virtuous

00:57:27.860 manliness movements, like you're a part of, or, you know, why characters like Ron Swanson

00:57:31.860 resonate so strongly with people, even though he was supposed to be, you know, a comic character

00:57:36.900 is because we miss these things and we feel it. Right. We know that, I don't know, just swiping at

00:57:44.560 this tablet, this doesn't feel right. Right. My shoulders are hunched over, you know, and I'm sort

00:57:49.700 of in the back of the cafe and I'm swiping on this and clicking on emojis. And something about that

00:57:55.220 just doesn't feel like this is what, you know, you know, I'm a grown man and this is what I'm

00:57:58.760 supposed to be doing with my time. It just doesn't feel right. You know, we know there's something

00:58:02.640 wrong here. And when we get back to using our hands, engaging in our community, spending real

00:58:09.720 quality time with our family, you know, being an active dad for your kids, like all of this type

00:58:14.580 of stuff that resonates, we know in our gut is the right thing to do. We feel it. And I think we're

00:58:20.080 feeling it stronger at the same time that the sort of attention economy conglomerates are trying to

00:58:25.260 distract us from it as hard as possible. I love that. So let's talk about like last

00:58:28.840 minute, like last thing, what are some like next level, like advanced level tactics in implementing

00:58:33.960 digital minimalism? So far we've talked about, okay, you get rid of everything and you slowly

00:58:37.540 introduce things that you're actually going to use. You set rules for how you're going to use those

00:58:41.120 things. But let's say someone's like, man, I just, I'm tired of it. Like what can they do to

00:58:45.220 like take this to the next level? So the most hardcore digital minimalists, one of the things

00:58:50.420 you'll see is they don't use smartphones. And that's actually a lot more common than you would

00:58:54.000 think. I would, you know, there's a, I just read a article in the Guardian. So this, this came out

00:58:59.900 around the new year. So it was like on the second or third of January and the reporters, she's a

00:59:03.540 literary critic and she read, she read the book and she's like, that's it. I'm done with my smartphone.

00:59:08.940 And she writes about how, you know, switching over to what they call feature phones, but basically old

00:59:13.640 fashion phones, you know, with buttons and you can't touch the screen, how it's really

00:59:17.540 improved her life. Right. And, and she's, she's bored more and just present more and, and doesn't

00:59:23.280 feel that crushing weight. So that's something you see a lot of like people will go away from

00:59:26.540 their smartphones. You also see people being pretty aggressive about taking their computers

00:59:31.240 and transforming them back into more like single tasking machines. So they'll use internet blocking

00:59:37.340 software like Freedom very aggressively. Right. So, okay. I can't access any, I can't access the

00:59:43.380 web, for example, during this five hour period, or there's only like a two hour period at night

00:59:47.440 where I can, I can even see social media. Like they really, really hamper down, really tamp down

00:59:52.800 like when they have access to things. A lot of digital minimalists like me just leave social

00:59:57.180 media altogether. They like the social internet. Maybe they have a blog or maybe they say, I don't

01:00:00.900 care. I'm, I, I have good friends that I see every week. I call my family on the phone. I'm a part

01:00:05.020 of a community group. I don't need a, you know, a computer screen to be social. So definitely the

01:00:09.200 more extreme digital minimalists, you see that. And finally you see like much more aggressive

01:00:13.560 engagement in analog activity. So, so minimalists, once they get away from these things that are

01:00:18.920 void, you know, papering over that void I talk about, the extreme digital minimalists tend to

01:00:23.380 become much more extreme in their analog activity. And, and so you get sort of Mr. Money mustache

01:00:28.880 style. Like I'm out there, you know, renovating a building in my town or learning how to weld and,

01:00:35.200 and building a rack for my truck, like this type of stuff, like really like a lot of time

01:00:39.620 doing really highly skilled analog type activities. And so like, these are what the black belt

01:00:45.220 minimalist, that's the type of things you'll see. No smartphone, really severely locked down

01:00:49.120 computers, no social media, really big, almost old fashioned analog presence in their life.

01:00:55.260 Yeah. And then it's funny, the market's responding to this. So, you know, like I, you know,

01:00:58.540 the strenuous life, you mentioned us, you've been Mr. Money mustache. There's all these analog

01:01:02.600 things you need, like communities, like in-person stuff you can do now, but even like the devices,

01:01:07.000 I just, there's this new phone, the Light Phone 2. Yep. I don't know if, have you seen,

01:01:10.920 yeah, it's, it's, it's amazing. It's like, it's a phone. You can listen to music, you can text

01:01:15.380 and do directions, but that's about it. Like there's no social stuff, which I think is genius.

01:01:21.940 Yeah. And there's also phone tethering too. So the original Light Phone before the Light Phone 2,

01:01:26.880 the original idea there, I write about a bit in the book is you have your normal smartphone,

01:01:31.180 but then you have this like second, really simple phone. That's like the size of two credit cards

01:01:34.640 and people can call you and that's about it. And so what you can do is basically put your phone

01:01:39.560 into a mode where it all transfers to the Light Phone. And then you can go out and say,

01:01:43.420 I have the Light Phone with me. So if there's an emergency, you know, my wife can still reach me

01:01:47.640 or whatever. I can call, you know, the police or something if my car is stolen. But I don't have

01:01:51.780 any of the social stuff, but you still have your real phone. And what's happening is like,

01:01:55.080 things are getting forwarded to the Light Phone. So you don't have to keep two separate numbers.

01:01:58.360 And so like, that's another thing that you see out there is a sort of tethering or just in general,

01:02:04.120 this notion, you know, I really get into this in this book, this idea that like you have to have

01:02:08.740 your phone with you is all the time is really recent and really unnecessary. And, you know,

01:02:14.680 I do this a lot and this is a growing movement among people where they really change their

01:02:17.720 relationship with their phone. And they think like, there's sometimes I need it for specific

01:02:21.640 purposes, but it's not by default, right? It's not wallet keys, phone. It's like wallet keys

01:02:26.000 and sometimes phone. And so they'll, they'll spend much more time without a phone at all.

01:02:30.600 And so you definitely see that as well. Yeah. So the market is responding for sure.

01:02:34.900 Well, Cal, it's been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book?

01:02:38.280 So you can find the book anywhere books are sold. Also my website, calnewport.com.

01:02:43.620 I've been blogging there, a diehard blogger for over a decade. So if you're just curious,

01:02:48.640 maybe dipping your toe in these type of ideas, you can also probably spend a little bit of time

01:02:54.100 there as well. And you can subscribe to them via RSS feed, which I do.

01:02:58.160 Which is awesome. Or yeah, or old fashioned emails. Yeah. And as I like to say, since I have

01:03:01.900 no social media presence, if you have any complaints about the books or any diatribes

01:03:06.820 you want to give or insults to me, I just highly recommend that you share those, but you do so on

01:03:10.740 social media. There you go. Well, Cal, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

01:03:14.980 Great. Thank you, Brett.

01:03:16.200 My guest name is Cal Newport. He's the author of the book, Digital Minimalism. It's available on

01:03:19.800 amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out his website, calnewport.com. And while you're

01:03:23.900 there, subscribe to his blog. It's one of my favorite blogs, been following it for years.

01:03:27.080 Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash digital minimalism. We find links to resources

01:03:31.580 where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the

01:03:47.000 AOM podcast. If you want to check out the strenuous life, Cal and I talked about it during

01:03:50.420 the podcast, check out our strenuouslife.co. You can see what it's all about, what we're

01:03:54.540 trying to do with it, what happens when you sign up. And while you're there, make sure you get your

01:03:58.060 email on our waiting list for our next enrollment, which will be around the end of March, 1st of

01:04:02.220 April. So strenuouslife.co, check it out. And if you haven't done so already, I'd really

01:04:05.860 appreciate if you give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher. It helps us out a lot. And if you've

01:04:09.240 done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member

01:04:12.460 who would think we'd get something out of it. As always, thank you for your continued support. And until next time,

01:04:16.120 this is Brett McKay encouraging you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've

01:04:20.080 learned into action.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#479： Becoming a Digital Minimalist [RE-BROADCAST]

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