PNTV: Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport (#395)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less Time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Digital Minimalism. I'd hold up the book here, but it's still packed. We got to unpack it. After the move from Southern California to Austin. Sitting here in my barn studio, feeling good. And this is one of my favorite.

Books I've read over the last couple.

Of years since I've seen you here. Cal Newport. If you have yet to discover him and his work, you're missing out. We've covered a bunch of his books. So good they can't ignore you is where we started. Then I interviewed him, asked him, where.

Can I find you on social media.

So I can point our community to you? He said, I'm hard to find. I'm not on social media. And in fact I'm writing my next book on the subject. It's called Deep Work. So that's amazing. Please send it to me. Got it. Read it the next day, shared it. Amazing book, so good they can't ignore you. Deep Work. Then I went back and read another one of his books called how to Be a Straight A Student. I think it was called Fantastic Book on the Science of Learning and kind of his the Art and Science of Learning as applied to Doing well in School. Then this book came out. Obviously loved it. And in between so Good They Can't Ignore youe and Deep Work, Cal and I started connecting and I'm a hermit. I don't have anything in my calendar other than my coach and a few calls here and there with various individuals in the team. But Cal and I connected consistently and I just. He's just a good, good, good human being. And I know that if you know Cal, you know this to be true. Check him out his all these books, check out the notes, etc. Check out his website. He's got a new podcast which I don't do podcasts, but I've heard is amazing. Our team loves it, et cetera. Cal actually worked with us to create a class on this. Digital Minimalism 101. The first class we produced with a friend of mine, a luminary. You can check that out at Optimize Me. It's part of the overall core membership. Again, two week free trial, et cetera, at Optimize Me. And Cal was the very first person I invited and we had as a luminary a guest faculty in our Optimized coach program. He Tal, Ben Shahar, Mark Devine, I.

Think were the first three we had in the Coach program.

Optimize Me Coach. We now have dozens of amazing world class teachers coaching our coaches, sharing their most practical tools and Cal of course is one of the favorites. So Digital Minimalism subtitled Choosing a Focused Life in a noisy world. 6 page PDF as always, 20 minute MP3 get it on the app as well, et cetera. Digital minimalism. Cal tells us we need to create a new philosophy which will be our second idea here. But first we need to realize that our souls are at stake here. He steps back and says, look, the attention economy is a multi, multi trillion dollar economy that has one thing in mind, which is to hack your attention. You think Facebook or Instagram or YouTube even is a product. That's not how they see it. They see you as the product. Your attention is what they're trying to get into. And again, a lot of technology adds incredible value to our lives and we'll talk about how to use it wisely. We're not saying get rid of the technology, but you want to be mindful about the fact that most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and big businesses and others who run around in the attention economy don't have your best interests in mind and your soul literally is at stake. Cal references Some various resources 60 Minutes did an episode called Brain Hacking featuring Tristan Harris. If you and your family haven't watched that yet, check it out. The basic idea there is a la Tristan Harris, a former Silicon Valley programmer, executive, et cetera, who basically is blowing a whistle on it and saying, guys, we need digital ethics. Technology is amazing, but let's do it right. Let's do it the right way. And he says it's an unfair fight. When you have you with your ancient prefrontal cortex trying to navigate the world, you got to know that behind every screen you look at, there are a thousand programmers trying to hack your brain stem, get you to do your most impulsive, addictive stuff. So you get in that infinite scroll and stay there. Why? Because that's how they make their money. Hacking your attention again. Ultimately technology is neutral, but we need to be smart enough to know that's the case. So your soul is at stake here. Again, Cal compares Socrates and the charioteer who's controlling the horses. We could call them the daimon, the best within us and the Demon. And again, technologists don't have your best interest in mind. We talk about this, generally speaking, I should say in Adam Alters irresistible. You know, the executives and CEOs of these huge companies don't Even let their own kids use the products they make from Steve Jobs. Hey, what do your kids think of your iPad? They don't use it. He said, we have limit their access to technology. So pay attention. Your soul's at stake. And then Cal says, look, we got to create a new philosophy. Again, this does not mean that we throw away technology, but we want to be mindful. We don't want to be maximalists using every single new app that comes out just because it's a shiny new app. We want to actually cultivate a philosophy because we're up against something pretty challenging. And just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's a wise thing to do. In fact, as Mark Twain would say, anytime I find myself on on the side of the majority, I pause and reflect. And Krishnamurti come back to him all the time. It is no measure of your health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So just because everyone else is blowing up their minds all day, every day doesn't mean that you need to join that group. In fact, Cal provides some very compelling.

Reasons why we don't want to do that.

So digital minimalism as a philosophy, not a detox. Oh, I'm going to take X days off and oh, I feel great and then go back to my old habits. He says, no, no, you got to step back, create an actual philosophy, know what you're dealing with, then create a coherent philosophy. Here's the philosophy in a nutshell. He says. A philosophy of technology use. Digital minimalism is this a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else. That is a digital minimalist. Again, it's not zero, it's just. And we'll talk about this as we talk about the attention resistance. Actually, I'll go there right now. You need to know what your eudaimonic goals are. What is your. And I'm drawing a lot of targets lately. That is a target. What is your wildly important target?

Right?

What's so wildly important to you? The four disciplines of execution guys call it a wildly important goal. We call it a wildly important target. Reminding ourselves we're teleological. We're goal oriented individuals. So what's wildly important for you? I encourage you to consider high fiving your inner soul as your ultimate goal. Your summum bonum. As Aristotle said, to be a eudaimon, a good soul. That's my ultimate goal. And it makes my Decisions a lot easier as it relates to technology and everything else. I want to express the best version of myself more and more consistently. And then I have some very clear, wildly important targets I want to create creatively and impact wise there as the four disciplines. No, I think it's David Brooks might say, soul achingly compelling. Like if you don't create this in your life, you feel a level of pain. We want a wildly deep yes to.

Something that matters to us.

Then you structure your life such that everything you do is aligned with that goal. Boom. As my coach, Phyl Stud says, everything should be moving in that line. Anything out here is a distraction. Boom. Focus. And then you have a clear sense of, well, how should you use technology? I'm sitting here using technology and I can share with you in miraculous ways. I use paper Dropbox paper to create my plus ones. I use messages to communicate with a.

Few different people on our team.

I don't do slack, I don't do email. I rarely use my smartphone except for videos that I'm creating in the morning these days. Very deliberate and mindful use of technology allows us to amplify and accelerate our path toward actualization. And again, the point here is that you can't rely on companies to do that for you. You need to do it and you need to be a leader in your own life in order to achieve that. So maximalist versus minimalist, which leads us to solitude deprivation. So this is what do we got here? We have four practices. So Cal always in an MIT. I didn't mention he's got a PhD from MIT. He's a professor at Georgetown in computer science. His mind is like just beautiful. It just works in a really coherent, logical, grounded fashion. So of course he walks us through logically, what the problem is, what we can do about it, and then the practical applications. He has four practices, right? Let's see what they are. Check out the handy dandy philosopher's note here. We're going to talk about two of them. The first practice is spend time alone, which is our solitude deprivation. Then his second one is don't click. Like he talks about deep social connection that we need to have in our lives that we don't get by clicking, like on a Facebook or Instagram post. And then he tells us to reclaim leave seizure, which we're going to talk about, which is our third practice. And the fourth practice is the attention resistance joining it. So anyway, solitude deprivation. Cal shares some shocking and disheartening stats as it relates to the Igen. So the first generation that's grown up with iPads, iPhones, that sort of thing. The level of anxiety and depression in this generation is unprecedented. The self harm, the suicide rates are unprecedented. And they're highly correlated to the adoption of iPhone usage, et cetera. So we need to be really, really mindful about how we're using this technology. And one of the things that happens when we're always plugged in is that we're never alone. We're never really connected, and then we're never alone. We never have time to process all of our interactions to really get clear on who we are, what we want in our lives. And he references Mike Irwin who wrote Lead Yourself first. Mike Irwin happens to be another guy who taught a class with us called lead yourself first 101. And I actually connected Mike and Cal to one another. But Mike talks about the importance of solitude and you need to create it. If you want to lead yourself, you have to create solitude. Then Cal talks about solitude deprivation and he actually creates that phrase. He defines it as a state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your thoughts and free from the input of other minds. And that comes with a very, very big cost. And there's an underlying level of what I call enervated anxiety that exists in our society. When you're constantly plugged in, you're just burning yourself. We're burning ourselves out when we do that, and myself included when I allow too many inputs to come in, which is why I'm constantly reminding myself and optimizing my own philosophy of digital usage. So solitude deprivation is real. We want to create more solitude in our lives by reducing inputs, finding deep pockets of time where we can think, we can connect with our family, we can go on a walk, on a trail or whatever. Leave your technology behind and allow your mind to settle down and recognize the fact this is a brand new set of inputs. As we've discussed in different contexts, we're exposed to more stimuli in one day today than our ancestors even 500 years ago, let alone in the jungle when we were wild 500 years ago, in one day were exposed to more stimuli than they were exposed to the old school guys in their lifetime. We are bombarded with by stimuli. We got to learn to control it and create some solitude. And then another practice, the third practice is what he calls active leisure. Active leisure. Most people are engaged in passive leisure. So we go to our technology for everything, our work and our quote, leisure. But it isn't really restorative when you're sitting there consuming more information Passively, you're leaving a lot of your soul's potential on the table. Leisure in an active sense is a really, really important thing, which helps us, as we like to say, oscillate. Right? So you want to be on when you're on and you're focused and you're giving life everything you got. And then you want to be off, you want to recover, you want to make waves, is what some of the great teachers talk about. Tony Schwartz, Jim Lohr and the powerful engagement. They say it's not that you work too hard, it's not that you don't recover enough and that you need to train your recovery. So good recovery is not going from one work thing to another work thing or to email or to videos or to movies. That's not a good recovery per se. We want to find ways to be active in our leisure and then we can move from. And if you don't, then you're just going to be like this. You're not going to be a flat line and burned out because you're never totally on, but you're also never totally off. It'd actually be a little bit lower, more like that. We like to think of it like this, and I've shared this recently in these PNTVs. But you can be constantly enervating yourself, which is a minus one, or you can be energizing yourself, which is a plus one. So, for example, I can check out more tech news, which is an old bad habit of mine that's easy to slip back into, or I can say, you know what, I'm going to take that 15 minutes and I'm going to have active leisure and I'm going to go on a walk on our trail here around our property, or I'm going to meditate for an extra 11 minutes, or I'm going to hang out with the kids or do something restorative for 11 minutes. That's a huge gain. And it's not just one point, it's two units. But then I like to say it's actually a plus three, because you're the kind of person that can move from minus 1 to plus 1. Active leisure is a way to do that. Cal also talks about it in the context of using technology. Mindfully, he uses the example of using YouTube to do something in the physical world. So he needed to fix a fan motor in his bathroom or somewhere in his house. Right. Went on YouTube. Fantastic use of technology as a digital minimalist. Let me watch this five minute video. Perfect. I'm actively doing what I need to do. I'm using technology mindfully. I thought of that when we arrived in our property, right? And the first thing I did was carve out a half a mile trail around the property, kind of the perimeter, then weaving in and out, right? So I got a weed whacker. I've been to Home Depot more times in the last two and a half months than I had in my entire life by a factor of 10. Never used a weed whacker before. Mowed the lawn as a kid. I never got upgraded. Promoted to the weed whacker duties, so. So I needed to learn how to string a weed whacker. Restring it. YouTube. Perfect. Literally, this guy taught me that and this guy taught me perfect. Thanks, guys. Technology on, technology off. Boom. And as Cal says, in deep work, you don't want to take a sabbatical from technology to do some deep living. You want to take a sabbatical from deep living to go into technology. It's a huge difference. Live deeply, then go to the shallow end of technology when you need to, then come back to living deeply. Big, big distinction. Active leisure is a part of that process. Then finally, we've got the Attention Resistance. Join the Attention Resistance. There's a growing group of people that are realizing that the way that we use technology right now is not sustainable, it is not healthy. And we got to create a new code of ethics. We need to create individual philosophies that work for us. Again, that's more than a detox. This is an overall lifestyle philosophy of this is how I'm going to mindfully, consciously, deliberately use my technology. Check out the Philosopher's Note. Check out the Digital Minimalism 101 class. And of course, get the book. I did a class as well called conquering Digital Addiction 101, where I share my best ideas. But this is a big, big, important subject we want to get right as we optimize our energy, our work, and our love and give our soul something exciting to go for and then use technology mindfully. We'll finish this off revisiting. Cal, Define digital minimalism for us one more time, will you, Cal? Thank you. Digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology. I get that wrong every time. A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else. What's one thing you know you could do after absorbing this to optimize your technology use? Get on that and make today another awesome Day.

See ya.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Bry.

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