Interview: Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize podcast. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Cal Newport about his newest book, Digital Minimalism, subtitled Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. If you follow along, you know that I am a huge fan of Cal and his work. We started by featuring so Good They Can't Ignore youe. Then we moved on to Deep Work and then I interviewed Cal around then two, three years ago and wound up spending time chatting over the last couple years. Cal was one of the few people who made it through my hermit bubble and it's been just a joy to have his support as I wrap my brain around what we want to do and dive deeper into his work. We also featured, I Should say how to Become a Straight A Student. And when he told me about Digital Minimalism, I just got fired up. To me, this is such an important topic to figure out how to use technology wisely. And Cal in this book articulates a strategy to engage in technology that I find extraordinarily compelling. I believe this book will help spark and I hope this book will help spark a movement. And Cal, I'm excited to have you here today. I'm also excited to have you as our very first guest professor, if you will, creating Digital Minimalism 101 with us. We're going to be sharing that with the book launch as well. So thanks for being to you, man. Thanks for taking the time to be here today, Brian.

It's always a pleasure to talk with you and I love the irony that me, Mr. Focus, Mr. Anti Technology, was one of the rare people to knock you out of focus and get you using technology. So ironies abound in that particular aspect of our relationship.

Well, here's what's funny is that the if you look at my calendar, what you would see, particularly in that time, is deep work. And I literally set it for every day and I blocked out the calendar time I was busy so that nothing could be scheduled. So you made it in along with my coach, Phil Stutz. And again, I appreciate you and why I'm such a big fan of your work is it's impacted my life deeply. So, you know, Deep Work we've talked about so much and I think that why Digital minimalism is so powerful is it provides the most powerful approach with which to deal with the biggest distraction to Deep work, which is obviously our technology. So let's step back. Digital minimalism, I always like to chat about titles. Tell us why your book is called Digital Minimalism.

Well, that's actually the name of the philosophy that I think is the right response to this growing sense of unease that so many people now have about the role that technology is playing in their life, especially in their personal lives. So one of the things I observed is that tips weren't getting it done. Everyone was out there writing and reading the same article about turning off notifications or doing the digital Shabbat on Saturdays. Tips weren't getting it done. Good intentions weren't getting it done. Everyone make the same here's resolution. Less screen time, more time not looking at my phone. And none of this was working, so we needed something stronger. I took inspiration in part from the world of health and fitness, where when I looked around and said, okay, who are the healthiest people I know? The fittest people I know, almost always, they had a philosophy, something they believed in, something that was based on their value, something that helped them make consistent decisions about how to move and how to eat. Maybe they were primal or maybe they were vegan or whatever. I realized what we need in the world of tech. We need a philosophy, a philosophy of technology use. Something you can get on board with, something you can believe in. And the philosophy that I follow and a lot of other people do as well, and the topic of the book is called Digital Minimalism.

Perfect. Which brings us into an opportunity to define it. So let's just define it, then we'll step back and talk about our lopsided arms race.

So the basic idea of Digital Minimalism is that you should essentially start from scratch with the technology in your personal life, clear out all the clutter, like all those random apps that you downloaded 10 years ago or whatever services you just kind of got in the random habit of using. You clear out all the clutter, and then you rebuild from scratch, very carefully and very intentionally what you actually want in there, what tools should actually be in your life. And you only let in the things that actually give you huge roi, that take the things that you really value and give them a significant boost. You focus on those small number of tools that give you huge wins. And then in classic minimalist fashion, you're happy missing out on the rest of the.

That's awesome. We can juxtapose the minimalist, obviously, with the maximalist, who, if it's out there and it's useful, which is a word you use a lot as an inappropriate standard for adoption, right? Yeah, Then I'm going to use it.

I mean, it's a Very American idea, this maximalism idea, which is okay, if there's some possible value something could give me, if I'm not using it, it's like you're stealing that value from me. So we have this mindset of, like, wait a second, there could be some convenience or some value I might get if I download this app. Well, I don't want someone to take that away from me. That's mine. Right? So I better sign up for this. I better download this. But we can go back as far as Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle. We can go up to Thoreau and into modern thinkers like Wendell Berry. And everyone had the same point. Maximalism doesn't work. It's a road to ruin. You have to focus on the small number of things that give you real value and be willing to ignore the rest. Once you head down the road of maximalism, whether it's your digital life or the clutter in your house, once you go down the route of maximalism, almost inevitably you're going to end up in a much worse place. Less is more. This idea is not new. And so it shouldn't be surprising that it turns out to work in our digital life as well as it's worked in all these other aspects of our life throughout history.

Yeah, that's awesome. And again, you make the point so well throughout the book. So let's step back and let's talk about the need. I think we all have an implicit understanding that something's up, but you make the case for why we should be thinking about this in a very compelling manner. Can you give us kind of the high level, and then we'll drive in? You know, I want to talk about the soul, et cetera, but can you just step back and just kind of paint the picture of what's going on?

Well, at the high level, the way that I began to understand this issue that people were ambiguously feeling but were having a hard time articulating it, is that the issue that people began to have was really not about usefulness. So this question of, whether, hey, is Facebook useful or useless, or is Instagram useful or useless, that's not really the. The issue. It's not that the thing that people were doing when they're looking at their screen was in itself terrible or in itself was making them feel bad. The problem seemed to be autonomy. That what people were beginning to feel is like they were losing their autonomy. Right. Their humanity was being a little bit diminished. And what I mean by this is that they were looking at their screens more than they knew was useful. They're looking at them more than they knew was healthy. They were looking at these screens to the detriment of things that they already knew were much more valuable. They were beginning to feel manipulated, like their emotions were being manipulated by algorithms. What they believed in, even how they were acting, was somehow being affected by these forces that they didn't understand. And so this all added up to not an issue of usefulness, but really of autonomy, that I am using all of this stuff way, way more than I ever intended, and it's beginning to diminish the quality of my life.

Yep. And you make the case so strongly that this is a lopsided fight. Talk to us about that, and then we're going to get to our chariot here.

Yeah. Well, there's a couple reasons. Two main ones, I would say, right, why this is happening. Why are we looking at these screens more than we know is useful. One of it is because that's the idea. That's the design of these services. I mean, think back to what Facebook used to mean seven or eight years ago. Like when you first signed up in college or something like this. Facebook was a relatively static experience. You posted information about yourself, like your relationship status, your favorite movies, your favorite books. You occasionally would update it, like, hey, I went on vacation. Here's some photos. It was something that you would maybe check in once or twice a week to see. Maybe a friend changed an update or you want to explore the social network a little bit. But it was pretty static. Like, the information didn't change that much. It was fun, but not a major impact in people's lives. Now look at Facebook today. The average Facebook user is on there 50 minutes a day on average. And that's just an average. There's a lot of users who use it a lot more. We've gone from checking it once or twice a week to compulsively hitting that little blue F on the phone 40, 50, 60 times a day. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on? How did that change happen? That was entirely engineered. Essentially, what they figured out at Facebook around the time that they were thinking about their ipo, around the time that the initial investor said, hey, where's our 100x return? We want that 100x return. That means you need big IPO. Big IPO means you need to really scale up these revenue numbers. This is when they completely changed the experience of Facebook and they added a lot of what I call social approval indicators. So, like the like button or auto tagging of photos. These type of things changed the experience. So that now when you clicked on that app, there was this steady stream of little indicators that people were thinking about you. And now you had a reason to tap on it again, because there could be some more likes that built up or some more little comments or some tags people had done of their photos. And sometimes when you clicked, you would see that, and sometimes when you click, there'd be none. So this was rewards about you that were intermittently delivered, which is a psychological recipe for compulsive use. And they knew that, so they completely transformed the experience. And every other social media platform followed suit from this relatively static. Let me post information about myself. You can come read it when you want. Through this very personalized experience of a steady stream of social approval indicators coming at you all day long, which got people into this mode of I have to check this thing again and again and again, frying their dopamine systems, completely playing with the sociality aspects and the sociality centers of their brain. No one asked for that. Adding the like button did not help an issue that users had. It didn't solve a problem that users had. All of this was about, how do we get engagement minutes up so revenue goes up, so the IPO will succeed and the investors will get their return. And so this is a big part of why people feel like they're losing their autonomy, is they signed up for these services for one reason. And then without requesting this, the entire experience was transformed into something else to benefit a very small number of people. So the fact that these are being engineered and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to make these things really hard to turn away from, I mean, that's really a big reason why people are suddenly looking up and saying, why am I using this so much more than I ever intended?

Yep, love it. Which perfectly leads us to Bill Maher and Plato and. And our soul and that charioteer and the choice we're making, the autonomy to choose, meaning vis a vis usefulness. Right?

Yeah. I mean, there was a quip that Bill Maher had this funny quip where he said it was a monologue about how addictive these services were. And the monologue featured clips from Tristan Harris, who's essentially a whistleblower. He used to work for Google. Before that, he trained in BJ Fogg's Pervasive Technology Lab at Stanford. So he learned how to use technology to affect people's behavior in the way that you want to. So he was sort of an expert on this, and he essentially turned state's witness at some point and was like, this is terrible. What's going on? He now runs a nonprofit dedicated to helping people get away from some of this more compulsive use and make technology better. And so at the end of this monologue where Bill Maher was talking about Tristan Harris in this 60 Minute interview that he did, he said, this is like Big Tobacco. This reminds me of the Big Tobacco whistleblowers. But whereas Big Tobacco just wanted your lungs, the app store once, your soul. And he was joking, but there's actually something pretty serious underneath there. Because if we go back and use, for example, Plato's conception of our soul, where you have the chariot driver who's trying to control two different horses, you had the noble steed, which represented our noble instinctual impulses to act with character and virtue and to live well, to do good things, to embrace what Aristotle would later call eudaimonia. And then we have the ignoble steed, which is our baser instincts. And it's a fight. This is the soul is this battle between these two things to try to keep the chariot going in the right direction. When you have these two impulses, it's mediating those two impulses is what the Greeks understood to be what it meant, the challenge of our soul. And so one way to think about what some of these tech companies are doing is by secretly essentially engineering these products that we signed up for for innocent reasons, so that they could supercharge our baser instincts, get us to compulsively use them, to get outraged, to get upset, to not spend time on the things we know are more valuable. It's like they're giving a extra power boost to the ignoble steed. And because of that, it is a real impact on the soul. It's catching our proverbial or metaphorical chariot driver off guard. We didn't see it coming. We looked up and the chariots being wrenched way over in this other direction. We're way off the road. We're thinking, when did the ignoble steed get that strong? And it's really that observation, that thing that we're noticing that's leading people to say, what's going on? What's happening with these screens? Don't talk to me about usefulness or why you get some value out of this or that. There's a deeper problem going on. We're talking about the very direction of our soul. If we really get down to the base level of what the issues are here.

Yeah, it's so Powerful. And then that actually is a perfect segue into the practices. So in the book, Cal kind of establishes, as he does, does throughout his books, kind of the intellectual framework of why we should be even thinking about this. And then the practical. Okay, so we agree that there's something to think about here. This is what we can do about it. We move from that intellectual framing to the practice. We have that digital declutter period for 30 days, which you make a great distinction on it not being a detox per se, but a true declutter. So starting from scratch, and then we move into the four practices I want to talk about briefly. But can you give us kind of the distinction between the declutter and the detox?

Yeah, I mean, the notion of a digital detox is popular, but it's something I've never really understood. I mean, the way that a digital detox is usually pitched is take a break from this technology that's causing you all these problems and then when you're done, go back to all the technologies, which, I mean, I'm not a substance abuse expert, for example, but I think this is not the normal way that people deploy detoxes. Right. Typically when you're doing a detox, it's the first step towards building a new life in which the original thing that caused a problem is no longer there. You would never tell someone who had a drug problem, I got this great plan. You're going to take two weeks, you're not going to use the drug for two weeks. And then after the two weeks, you can go back to using it again, problem solved. That doesn't work. And so that never made sense. So declutter, which is what I recommend is you actually are clearing all this stuff out of your life. Not temporarily, you're clearing it out, it's gone. Now you can add things back, but when you add things back, you do so really, really intentionally. You say, okay, I'm adding this back for a reason. It's to support this particular value. And I have rules around how I'm going to use it. A declutter is different than a detox. A declutter is. You're getting rid of most of the junk for good. A digital detox is just a break, which I think has limited long term usefulness.

Yep, perfect and brilliant. And that leads us to the first practice of four, spending time alone. But before we talk about the details of the actual practice, can you talk to us about the profound research on Igen that you unpack? I found that to be one of the most impactful, powerful sections in the book. That was just super sobering for me.

And the sad truth about this research is as this research has developed since I've been working on the book, it's only getting worse. The signal in the noise is getting stronger and the signal is pretty alarming. And essentially what, what we're finding, and this started with research. Gene Twinge was the demographer who really led the way with this research. But others are now getting involved in finding things similar. Essentially what they found is that the first generation to grow up with iPhones, starting at their young teenage years were having these unprecedented spikes in mental health issues. Things change between generations. But the graph of how much mental health issues changed between my generation of millennials and Gen Z was something like she had never seen before. She's an expert on demographic changes between generations. As I detail, it's easy to find effects, it's easy to come up with stories for them, but doesn't necessarily mean the story is right. So Janine Twinge and a lot of other researchers said, let's try other explanations for this. It's not necessarily social media and smartphones. I detail a little bit how they looked at explanation after explanation. It's economic anxiety. It has something to do with parenting. They looked at all these different explanations, but the timing fit for any of them. These other explanations, either they came well before the spike in mental health issues occurred, or they came after. But none of them fit in the same way that smartphone use did. So more recently after the book came out, there was this period where the pushback was, well, okay, we're seeing mental health increases because self reporting's up. Our culture in general, in that generation in general maybe is just more comfortable talking about mental health. And that's what we're seeing. You don't have to worry about it. That turned out not to be true either. Because the way you get past self reporting, and this is the sobering part, is you look at hospital records. So you look at hospitalizations for self harm and suicide attempts. Those went up just as, just as strongly at just the same rates. Right. So that it's not a self reporting issue. And so basically what we're finding is that smartphones with social media are having immense effects on young people's brains, especially young women. This effect is incredibly pronounced for young women. And it's not just they're a little bit less happy or a little bit less sad. It's hospitalizations for self harm and suicide rates are jumping up in ways we've never Seen before. I call it the canary in the coal mine, because of course, young people use this technology way more than anyone else. So you're going to see the effect that these things cause being amplified. You're going to see the signal really strong if you look at young people. And the signal is incredibly strong there. And so I think this is actually a public health issue. I mean, if we put aside, you and I, these phones might make us more anxious, might take us away from things we care. But when we look at young people, it's about their physical health. And so I wouldn't be surprised. My conjecture is three or four years from now, our culture is going to shift. And the idea that you would give a 13 year old a smartphone is going to be like the idea that you would give a 13 year old a pack of Marlboros. It's just something that we're going to culturally say that's crazy. And so that's the only silver lining to that data is that it's becoming so unfortunately strong and distressing that it's going to almost inevitably shift major, major cultural changes.

Well, and this is one of the many reasons why I'm such a huge advocate of this work, in this book in particular. It's time. And that's only going to happen if people who are listening to this, particularly those of us with kids and just all of us with a social conscience, actually do something about it. And you make the point many times, this is a battle. It's only worth fighting. We must fight it. You know, and I think it's easy to ignore. What you just said is impossible to ignore. I mean, those are real data that kind of quantifies in a very visceral level that implicit rise in anxiety that you mentioned that we all kind of feel as adults. But yeah, I'm excited to make that true. And even 13 year olds, it seems like even kids younger than that are just plugged in and longer chat there. That I will leave for the moment. Let's come back to the practice to deal with that you share the stories and the data around the effects on Igen within the first practice of spending time alone. Can you talk to us about the importance of that?

Right. And so to put this all into context, that declutter we talked about before is like the first step type thing. Let's clear things out, let's try to build up a new digital life. Then these practices we're diving into now, I like to think about them as this is the masterclass stuff. This is how you now take this newly formed minimalist life and actually make it sustainable, make it work, focus on the right things, figure out what's important in that context. The first idea is spending time alone. This is something I didn't know a lot about until I started doing research, which is the crucial importance of solitude. Now, the issue was, I think the reason I didn't know much about this is that I had the wrong definition of solitude in mind. When I'm thinking solitude, I'm thinking physical isolation. If you're going to be in solitude, it's got to be the cabin, it's got to be on top of the mountain. There can't be anyone within 20 miles or something like this. But that turns out to be a not very useful definition of solitude, at least not from the perspective of psychological health. The definition that makes more sense is one that comes from this great book called Lead Yourself first by Mike Irwin and Ray Kethledge. I want to give them credit. They said the right definition of solitude is freedom from input from other minds. If your mind is processing something that came out of someone else's mind, so you're listening to something, you're reading something, you're looking at something on a screen, you're not in a state of solitude. On the other hand, if your mind is just alone with its own thoughts, you are. So you can be in a crowded subway car, but if you're just alone with your own thoughts and not reacting to things created by other minds, you're in a state of solitude. On the other hand, you can be in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, but if you're looking at your phone, you're not in a state of solitude. So what I found in the research literature as well as I would say basically just historical writing. I mean, I started with Blaise Pascal and I moved through Benjamin Franklin to Thoreau to Virginia Woolf to Wendell Berry, even Mr. Rogers. Fred Rogers wrote about this. I'm not sure if that quote made into the book, but I mean, everyone talks about, you need this type of solitude in your life. That is crucial. It turns out there's a couple of reasons why. One, it's probably best to think of your brain just for the purposes of understanding solitude as like a computer. So it needs to take an input, sure, but then it also needs to process the input if it's going to do something useful with it. And that processing takes a lot of time. And your brain can either be processing, like thinking about things and trying to draw insights from it, or it can be reacting to inputs as they come in, but it can't be doing both. So if you're constantly just looking at things and listening to things and talking to people, all you're doing is taking an input, which is fine. But if you don't also spend a lot of time just thinking, making sense of that input, letting your mind wander over it and think about it and try to place it into different structures and schemas that already exist in your cognitive space, if you're not doing that, you're not going to extract the value from it. So you have to have this time alone with your thoughts. You also need this time alone with your thoughts if you're going to have any sort of self improvement, any sort of insight about yourself if you want to develop as a human being. This type of reflection requires just you thinking, what's going on with my life? What's working? What's not working? What resonates? Why does that resonate? Why is this other thing not resonate? There's no way to get to this type of self insight without just lots of time with no other inputs, just thinking. Now, it used to be that there was no issue with solitude because you couldn't avoid it. You were just going to have to have at many times during your normal day, you're out there in the field or you're waiting in line at the bank, you were just going to be alone with your thoughts. We got plenty of solitude. But ubiquitous wireless Internet access, plus smartphones made it possible for the first time in human history that if you want, you can banish every single moment of solitude from your day. And this, I think has been a disastrous experiment. It's terrible for us because it takes you away from all of those positives that I talked about. And as we see in Igen, it creates new psychological problems as well. So you lose positive, you create new negatives. It's not the way that we're meant to live. And so I've become this huge proponent of solitude that you should just be spending lots of time most days just with yourself, not with a phone, not with something in your ear, just with yourself, just thinking again.

Amen. Brilliant. So many things we can talk about there. One my wife likes to remind me that my wife got me Lead Yourself first. And I believe I sent it to you to read. And so for you to have that. And then Michael Irwin is our second professor, so he's going to teach Lead Yourself First 101. And I think he sent me a note after you guys connected last week or whatever it was.

Yeah, we had dinner. Yes.

Yeah. How thrilled he was to connect. And so it's fun for me to step back and to see your work. Digital Minimalism 101. Lead yourself First 101 as just the cornerstones to everything we're trying to help people do with optimize. And you extend their definition of solitude, which to restate it, as you restate in the book, it's a subjective state in which your mind is free from input from other minds. And you say what we all suffered from to a great degree is solitude deprivation, a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your thoughts and free from input from other minds. And again, most people think that that's just not a big deal. You turn on, of course, you turn on the music when you're in the car. And of course you're listening to a podcast when you're on your workout. And of course you're doing this, and of course you're doing that. But you get to the end of the day and you literally spent no time alone with your thoughts. And again, I've been talking about this for quite a while, but finding those pockets of time is so essential. And again, you make the case so well for it. I want to hear from you a couple of the practical things you do. I'll share a couple of things I do, and I'd love to hear what you do to do this for me. I literally. And again, I am willingly extreme, but I want to find as many pockets of this as possible. When I'm deep in learning or input mode, I'm deep in that. But otherwise I want to oscillate off. So I never, literally never have any music on in the car or any talk whatever on the car or any podcast. It's silence. I go to my trail. It's silence. There's time for me to not only digest the inputs, but to have an original thought or two. God willing. Right. So those are a couple of my practices. What do you do to actually create this solitude that you found to be helpful?

Well, I'm a big walker. You know, everyone, every big thinker, it seems in history, once you start looking into it, was a big fan of walking. Now, it used to mean that walking was guaranteed solitude because you were away from inputs in the age of smartphones. Not necessarily. So I just add the caveat. I walk without a phone. I'm sort of weird in my town because I have routes and people wonder like, well, why do I keep seeing? Or the loss of My wife. Why do I keep seeing your husband walk by? I've seen him walk by my house three times today. Like, where's he going? Is he lost? Because I guess people don't do it anymore, right? You walk to places, but no one just walks. But I love it. I have my little pedometer, my 3D sport little piece of plastic pedometer that can do nothing but report on an LED screen. This is how long you've been moving and here's how many miles you've walked. And I put in my pocket, I like those numbers to go big and I don't bring the phone. And. And you listen to things and you see things and you think, I love it. And so I'm a big proponent and I probably spend too much time in the book doing an ode to walking, but I think there's a reason why it keeps coming up in the lives of people who have interesting thoughts or do courageous things.

Yep. And then your point was this was just a fact of life until very recently. And then you bring it back to Igen and they spend basically zero time in true solitude and enter these disastrous psychological effects. Fantastic. Okay, thank you for so coherently sharing that. The, I think, is it the second practice that is don't click like. Yeah, okay. So in this one I actually didn't cover this in the note. You talk about it in the class, of course, and go off on in the book. It's one of the most powerful sections. Your research on Turkel's research on true conversation versus like kind of quasi connection was really, really powerful. Talk to us about that briefly if you can.

Right, so what we know now from the research is that if you're interacting with someone digitally, so in text or I guess clicking on a thumb or clicking on a heart next to a picture, that's not negative. And in fact there might be like a little positive boost if you leave a small comment, especially if you know the person well. But what we also know from the research is that that small little positive boost is really, really small compared to the massive boost you get for actually doing real world interaction. So if you actually have a real world conversation with someone, you can hear their voice and go back and forth and it's analog, or you're sitting with them in person, you can see their body language change and you do what Douglas Rushkoff calls limbic consonants, which is where you start to actually mirror some of the traits of how they're sitting or how they're talking this back and forth. Our mind love evolved to do that, huge sections of our brain are sitting there to do just this type of real world conversation. And we love it and our brain needs it to be happy. And so it's much, much better. The issue that we're having with social media is not that using social media itself makes you lonely. It's that people who use social media feel like, okay, I've done my socializing, I'm good. And so they don't do the real world conversation. And the real world conversation is so much more powerful that when you take that out of your life and just replace it with this much, much less positive digital, your net happiness falls. And this is why we see study after study now actually finding this weird correlation that you use more social media, you feel more lonely. And that's why it's not that the social media itself is bad, it's that it's taking you away from things that are much, much better.

That is all brilliant. Again, I'm going to quote you. You say that to replace this rich flow of social interaction you just described with a single bit of clicking like is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. And again, in the book, you go off on the underlying neurology going on there, etc. You say, to say it's like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement. The better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule. I just love that point. On the fact that our brains need that interactivity and that like button gives us that false sense of having met that need while falling incredibly short.

Yeah, no, I mean, that's absolutely right. The more you look at the research, the more you see our brains are social computers. They have to, they crave it. They need to be in the real world interacting with people. And there's no way to replace that. You get rid of that. Bad things happen.

Reclaiming leisure is our third practice. We have creating solitude. Then we have don't click like. And then the third practice is reclaiming leisure. You talk about the importance of active versus passive leisure. Can you give us the quick overview of that?

Active leisure is where you actually have to expend some energy and apply something that's skilled, something that you've learned to do. Where passive leisure is just consuming information. So you're passively getting benefit just because of the content itself. It's funny or interesting or active. You're doing something easy way to describe it.

Give us an example of how you've done that. You share a few in the book.

Yeah, well, I mean the Key thing I found when I was looking into this is that active leisure is great. I mean, we are a species that assumes that we're going to go out and interact with the world and make it do things that we want it to do. We're going to pick up the rocks and we're going to figure out through skill how to hit them together and create the flint knife. We're going to know how to skin the mastodon that we just killed. I mean, we're used to interacting with the world with our hands, manipulating it, applying skills and creating things from this interaction that match our intentions. And so our brain is really keyed up for this. And so when you have skilled activities, which could be anything from. It could be something like knitting, it could be like the ultimate Frisbee. Playing ultimate Frisbee, for example, in some sort of league sports or a skill. It could be playing cards, it could be woodworking, painting. You might be into sort of DIY maker type projects, playing an instrument, like whatever it is. But doing something with skill in the real world is something that really gives us great pleasure and something that people that have leisure time have almost always done. And so one of the insidious types of negative impacts of the modern sort of addictive digital stream is that it very subtly pushes that all out of your life. It's like, don't go all the way upstairs and get out the guitar to go out to the woodshed. And you have to. How boring, right? You're going to have to pick the wood and work at it with the sandpaper. Just look at this screen. I've been studying you. I have 19,000 data points on your interest and demographic preferences. I can show you something. I can guarantee you that I'm going to show you something that's going to make you a little bit happier, a little outraged. It's going to be kind of interesting. And then you can just swipe a little bit and it'll be another thing. Isn't that better? People have made this Faustian bargain, like, great, I don't have to bother with the active leisure. But they're learning the hard way, as I think we all are, that when you just fill your time with the passive stuff, it doesn't give you the same thing. And you're not happy and you're anxious and you feel this sort of hole in your life that you're kind of papering over with frantic swiping and tapping. And that's an issue. And so to get around that, you have to go back and Draw from the wisdom of Aristotle, who wrote about this in the Nicomedean Ethics, that activities done just for the sake of their own quality is crucial. If you're going to live a flourishing life in a world in which hard things are going to happen, things under your control are going to happen, bad things are going to happen, you know, stuff that's really unlucky, stuff that's really unfair, all this bad stuff is going to happen. But you have things you do that are quality, and you do them just for the sake of the quality. You can still find a sort of peace and sort of an appreciation and still sort of joy. So he knew all the way back then, we need high quality active leisure. And so the way that the algorithmically optimized digital stream has subtly pushed this out of people's lives is something that, again, I didn't really realize until I got into this topic in the book is a big deal.

Yeah, again, so powerful. I'll throw Spartan races into the category of active leisure you talk about. CrossFit as well is a great way to not only be engaged in the physical world, but even with your body and in community with others and to swap that passive leisure out for the active. I'm going to share another one of your quotes because it's so good. You say erecting barriers against the existential is not new. Before YouTube, we had and still have mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions. But the advanced technologies of the 21st century Attention economy are particularly effective at this task. And again, an antidote among the many practices include reclaiming leisure, which leads us to our final practice, which is to join the attention resistance movement. Tell us about that.

Right, so one of the things that I found when I began working with a lot of digital minimalists to understand, okay, tell me about your carefully optimized technology life is that it's not just about the binary question of do I use this or do I not use this? It's not do I use Instagram or do I not use Instagram? Minimalists always have a two step process when introducing a technology into their personal life. One is do I use it? If the answer is yes. Two is how do I use it? What is going to be my approach? To use this so that I can take this cost benefit ratio and I can subvert the technology company's attempts to push that in their advantage and instead really bias it towards me so I'm getting tons of benefits without that many costs. I almost think of these people and the high tech hacks they do to push this ratio and their advantage as their members of the so called attention resistance. So, for example, let's use Instagram. When I think about Instagram, so I'm a minimalist. So when I think about Instagram, you know, I asked a standard minimalist question, is this the best way to use technology to help something that I really care about? For me, the answer is no. I mean, in my small list of things that are really important to me, there's none of them for which Instagram is really the best way to use technology to support it. But when I was doing research for the book, I met several artists, visual artists, who had a very different answer to that question. It turns out if you're a visual artist, what I learned is that it's very important that you expose yourself constantly to creative input. You have to see work from other artists. You have to feed the mill of your mind with lots of examples of really interesting creative things because it all gets mashed up and that's where your new creativity comes from. And Instagram is a great place to do this if you're a visual artist, because a lot of artists post their works in progress. So they answered yes, but the better minimalist among them then did the next step and said, okay, but how am I going to use Instagram? I want to support this value of feeding the creative engine. So how do I do that in a way that keeps the cost benefit ratio really pushed in my advantage? So these artists would do things, for example, like call their follower list. Who do they follow? They go down to maybe 10 artists that they really respect and that's it, because they're using it for a very focused purpose. Second, they would say, there's no reason for this to be on my phone. If it's on my phone, the tech company wins. I'm going to pull it out when I'm bored. It's going to keep me away from doing things that are more important. So they say, I'm just going to access it on my computer. Then they might use a tool like freedom to restrict when they can access it. So, like, I only need to look at this twice a week. These artists only post so often. So it's going to be Sunday and it's going to be Wednesday, and I've configured my computer with a high tech tool so that I can't even have the option of seeing it otherwise. Now you're really seeing minimalism in action, because here's someone who's deploying a tool that could conceivably take up massive amounts of your cognitive surplus and keep you away from things you really care about. And they don't have to worry about it. They're looking at this thing for 15 minutes twice a week and they're getting 99% of the benefits out of it for what they care about. That's the attention resistance. It's saying, you cannot control what I pay attention to. You can't control my time. I'm going to slip past your attempts to snare me and I'm going to use your free product for exactly my advantage. I'm going to win. You're not going to win in this case. We're blowing up the proverbial bridge at the end of the Bridge over the River Kwai. This is my commando attack. There's tons of examples of this. People who use very sort of special rules, strict rules and high tech tools that when they do deploy technologies for a thing they really care about, they do it in this very special focused way that gets them what they need and that gets them out of there before they can get in trouble again.

Brilliant. Amen. We have our fourth practice. Such a great example of it. And I think that uniqueness and that we're all going to discover our own kind of idiosyncratic way to use technology is something that you do a great job of helping us unpack throughout the book. Where can people so people find you? What? CalNewport.com is still the best place.

Yeah, CalNewport.com's great. I'm a big blogger fan. I'm a blogger nerd and I've been doing it there for over a decade. You're not going to find me on social media because I've never had an account. But I am at my own website on my own server. No one owns the data except me and no one is using my rides to try to raise the stock price or whatever. It's old fashioned, but there's a server somewhere and my software runs on it and it's mine. And I have a sort of inordinate amount of pride in that. But that's the blogger nerd in me talking. But calnewport.com, you can see over a decade worth of my ideas on this and also find out about these books I've been working on.

That's great. I just got a flashback to our first chat. I ended that one with, okay, where can people find you? And you said, well, I never had a social platform at the time or social profile and of course get the book Digital Minimalism subtitle again. Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. We've got the note on it as part of the Optimize program. We've got the 101 class. I couldn't be more excited about 10 big ideas from Cal and a spartan studio with the workbook and the poster and all that good stuff. And then Cal is also going to be joining us for the Coach program, which is exhilarating. And then on your site too, do you still have the special offer where when people buy the book, they can get access to some special stuff? And if so, is there an easy way to point them there or should they just go to your site and then kind of go from there?

Yeah, just go right to calnewport.com, right to my blog and there's a post on there. It might no longer be the last post, but a recent post is on there where I tell you exactly how to do it. If you buy the book in advance, you can go to this form, throw in the invoice number and you get a bunch of stuff you get to see. I filmed the video where I go inside my productivity systems. You get a detailed guide to how to do this digital declutter right away if you do two or more copies. So one for you and one for a friend. You also get access to this private book club I'm doing where just the members get together, they can ask questions and I answer them with private video feeds. So, yeah, a lot of good stuff. If you like these ideas and you're thinking about buying the book, you might as well do it now because you get something for doing it.

Okay, fantastic. So that's important. So then we're recording this for everyone on Thursday afternoon. Your book comes out on Tuesday, so they need to buy the book by Tuesday, the advanced kind of copy, in order to get all those special things. So we'll put this up as fast as we can, but that's how I understand it. That's correct.

Yeah, that's right.

Okay, perfect. Calnewport.com Go get the book. You're going to absolutely love it. I rarely say a book is a must read. I think this is a must read. I think it's going to be impactful for you, for your family, for your young kids, your teenagers, if you have it, iGen, etc. And again, honored to be able to support your work. Al. Well done.

Thanks, Brian. I enjoyed it. As always.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of.

Optymyze with Brian Johnson.

To find out more. Go to Optimize Me Foreign. This is Brian with some super exciting news. Optimize is now absolutely free. All 600 philosopher's notes, the 50101 masterclasses, thousand optimize ones free. So what do you want to optimize today? Your productivity? Habits?

Sleep?

Mental toughness? We've got 33 categories here, each of which comes with its own Optimal Living 101 Masterclass and a collection of Philosopher's notes to help you go to your next level with more wisdom in less Time. We've had tens of thousands of people from nearly every country in the world sign up for our premium membership offering, which we have now made. Did I mention absolutely free? Come join us. Optimize Me More Wisdom in Less Time. Let's optimize every aspect of your life so we can go out and change the world one person at a time together. Starting with you and me today.