Quitting Social Media: How To Declutter Life & Discover Your True Self Again

00:00:00.000 | So today I want to talk about a quiet revolt against social media that seems to be circulating

00:00:05.800 | mainly among artists.

00:00:08.600 | It's being documented and broadcast on YouTube.

00:00:11.040 | What I'm going to do is I'll get into the theory behind this revolt.

00:00:14.920 | I'm going to argue why it might be more sustainable than you might at first imagine and then help

00:00:21.300 | you understand if you should be joining this revolt as well, even if you're not specifically

00:00:25.880 | an artist.

00:00:26.880 | But let's start by trying to understand what's going on.

00:00:29.600 | I want to look at some videos.

00:00:30.600 | I'm going to load these on the screen.

00:00:32.200 | I'll turn off the audio and have the closed captioning on, but I'll load some videos that

00:00:36.960 | are emblematic of this ongoing revolt.

00:00:39.960 | So I'm putting a video on here now.

00:00:41.520 | This is from Damon Dominique, which is really like a travel video channel.

00:00:47.560 | But this video seems to be one of the sparks for the current revolt.

00:00:53.120 | I do got to say first, by the way, Damon has beautiful aesthetics on his video.

00:00:59.480 | I don't know if you see this, Jesse, but it's a very expensive camera and he has a, I would

00:01:05.040 | say like a vintage Vogue sort of visual aesthetic happening with the light, the color balance

00:01:11.920 | or whatever.

00:01:12.920 | Anyway, it's very nice looking channel.

00:01:13.920 | Let me put on his closed captioning because what he's talking about, what this video is

00:01:17.560 | called is "Why am I not posting anymore?"

00:01:21.680 | And basically he is arguing he is tired of having to post on social media.

00:01:27.740 | He's tired of trying to get his content viral on social media.

00:01:32.960 | I appreciate the giant glass of wine he's pouring right now.

00:01:36.520 | This is a gag where he's kind of emphasizing his frustration with what's going on in social

00:01:41.000 | media.

00:01:42.000 | And he catalogs, it's an hour long video.

00:01:44.300 | He catalogs all these frustrations with the interaction of his content, which is very

00:01:48.480 | artistic as you can tell by how it looks, and the demands of social media.

00:01:53.740 | This seemed to inspire a lot of other people, more specifically artists to post their own

00:01:58.960 | videos.

00:01:59.960 | Let me post another one here.

00:02:00.960 | All right, here's one that one of the listeners sent me.

00:02:05.260 | This is hi.imded_art channel.

00:02:10.860 | This is a smaller channel.

00:02:11.860 | It's an artist who does really cool artwork.

00:02:14.020 | And this video is called "Deleting Social Media and Making a Website."

00:02:19.440 | The artist here, who does videos of her art, which I really appreciate, is basically saying

00:02:26.380 | in this video, "I'm done with social media.

00:02:29.580 | I'm creating a website.

00:02:30.580 | And I can put my art on my website, and I'm going to control it, and I don't want to post

00:02:34.020 | things anymore and have to see how many likes they get or what have you.

00:02:38.860 | I'm done."

00:02:39.860 | Right.

00:02:40.860 | So let's see.

00:02:41.860 | I'll read a little bit of what she's saying here.

00:02:45.140 | It's a good presentation worth listening to.

00:02:47.500 | Let's see.

00:02:48.500 | All right.

00:02:49.500 | I don't know how to fast forward.

00:02:51.500 | I got to go out of full screen here.

00:02:54.380 | I want to read a little bit of what she's saying here.

00:02:56.940 | She has some interesting things, she says.

00:02:58.540 | There we go.

00:02:59.540 | All right.

00:03:00.540 | I'm going to expand that.

00:03:03.540 | Man, you can tell I use a lot of social media, Jesse.

00:03:06.700 | I don't even know how to use videos.

00:03:08.620 | You notice when people unfollow, people unsubscribe, and you see that, like it's so noticeable,

00:03:14.220 | and it hurts.

00:03:15.220 | It does hurt.

00:03:16.220 | But at the same time, I'm like, "I would rather you know if I'm not for you, I'm not for you."

00:03:21.320 | So if you choose to unsubscribe or unfollow, it's like, "Well, I'm sad to see you go.

00:03:26.980 | Maybe I'll catch you on the flip side."

00:03:28.540 | Feeling like you can never keep up, and an addictive quality, of course, that is just

00:03:32.940 | social media in general.

00:03:34.480 | So she's going on about you just get really caught up in how many followers, and you really

00:03:38.660 | notice when numbers go up and down, et cetera.

00:03:42.540 | Very good sort of honest video.

00:03:43.780 | Here's another one I want to load up.

00:03:45.760 | This is another artist.

00:03:46.760 | This is LRNDulyOneWord.

00:03:47.760 | That's the name of the channel.

00:03:50.220 | This website is, "I deleted all social media and made a website."

00:03:56.020 | All right.

00:03:57.020 | So in this video, this artist is explaining why.

00:04:00.780 | So she left social media.

00:04:03.080 | She has these outlines.

00:04:04.520 | She also was tired of the demands of social media, and she built a website.

00:04:08.880 | And that's where she's putting her art now.

00:04:10.660 | All right.

00:04:12.180 | There's a lot more videos like this happening on the internet right now of people declaring,

00:04:17.140 | especially artists, "I'm leaving social media, and I'm just going to put stuff on a website

00:04:21.660 | that I control."

00:04:23.440 | So what are their reasons?

00:04:24.440 | Well, I mean, I actually went through and watched these videos so I could summarize

00:04:28.720 | like the main reasons given by these artists, and let me give you the three main categories.

00:04:35.120 | Number one, they're leaving because social media is controlling and reducing the possibilities

00:04:41.300 | and quality of their art.

00:04:43.720 | They talk about the limited format.

00:04:46.160 | "Oh, if I'm posting on Instagram, then my art now has to somehow fit into the physical

00:04:50.600 | format that's appropriate for Instagram."

00:04:53.180 | They talk about the algorithm that you are posting for rewards sameness and not uniqueness.

00:05:01.640 | This is a big point that Damon in particular has, is that social media used to reward people

00:05:06.900 | for doing something different.

00:05:08.340 | Now it really forces conformity, otherwise the algorithm will ignore you.

00:05:12.460 | It focuses on what's already working.

00:05:15.560 | Another big reason is these artists are saying social media is making them unhappy.

00:05:20.780 | They have to use it all the time.

00:05:22.420 | They don't like being addicted.

00:05:23.620 | They also don't like feeling as if they're trying to get other people addicted as well,

00:05:28.100 | that they're playing this game of trying to make their stuff as compelling as possible

00:05:31.540 | so people can't look away.

00:05:34.600 | The third reason they give is it seems to deny the reasons why they became artists in

00:05:41.260 | the first place.

00:05:43.360 | So I think in particular, the LR and Julie video had a really good take on this, where

00:05:49.980 | she was saying, "Look, we didn't get into art for social validation.

00:05:53.980 | That's not why artists become artists, is to have social validation.

00:05:57.360 | They do it to create something new, to take raw materials and produce, on the other hand,

00:06:01.340 | something that's beautiful or engaging.

00:06:03.340 | Art, the production of art, is what they got into art for, but having to integrate their

00:06:09.340 | art in social media meant that their focus became more on social validation, trying to

00:06:14.700 | build or appease crowds of people.

00:06:18.220 | So that's why they're leaving social media.

00:06:20.620 | So here's the key question I want to ask about this revolt.

00:06:24.380 | Is it narrow?

00:06:26.340 | Is what these artists doing essentially self-sacrifice?

00:06:29.780 | They're going to destroy their career because they're not on social media, but they're doing

00:06:35.220 | so to make a broader point, and maybe that's important.

00:06:38.140 | Or is this different engagement with the internet, to be a creative and to be engaging the internet

00:06:44.620 | without social media, is this actually sustainable?

00:06:48.180 | In fact, could this actually be better?

00:06:53.220 | Those are the questions I want to explore here.

00:06:55.980 | Not surprisingly, I'm going to make an argument for the second, but to do that, let's get

00:06:59.620 | a little bit theoretical.

00:07:00.620 | All right.

00:07:01.620 | So what do we have when we think about the internet?

00:07:04.040 | At the base, all we have is a standard set of protocols and a standard scheme for addressing.

00:07:10.540 | This was the big innovation of the internet.

00:07:13.180 | Whatever computer network you have and whatever computers you have on it, if you use the same

00:07:18.180 | protocols and you use the standard way of referring to yourself, the standard addressing

00:07:23.180 | scheme, you can plug into the internet and anyone can talk to you and you can talk to

00:07:27.020 | anyone else.

00:07:28.820 | So anyone could connect to this network of networks and any two machines connected to

00:07:33.660 | this network of networks could talk back and forth with each other because we all agree

00:07:37.220 | to speak a common language, a common protocol.

00:07:39.580 | We all agree to refer to ourselves with a common naming scheme.

00:07:44.380 | So the fundamental problem of the internet from the very beginning is how do people find

00:07:47.620 | other people or things to talk to?

00:07:48.980 | How do you find what machine to talk to?

00:07:50.380 | How do you find what information you want to get?

00:07:52.560 | When you have this growing collection of networks and networks, anyone can connect to it.

00:07:56.440 | How do you figure out what to do?

00:07:59.840 | It is a hard problem.

00:08:02.400 | My younger audience probably doesn't remember this, but I remember this in the nineties

00:08:05.720 | when the web, which is a part of the internet, but when the web became a big thing, they

00:08:10.560 | would publish internet yellow pages.

00:08:13.160 | Do you remember these Jesse?

00:08:16.040 | Kind of.

00:08:17.040 | Actual yellow pages, a paper book that looked like the yellow pages and you would like flip

00:08:20.240 | through to a topic and there would be like list of URLs, like here's a website, there's

00:08:25.400 | a website.

00:08:26.400 | That's actually a early Yahoo.

00:08:28.900 | Yahoo used to be when it started in the nineties, just a hierarchical list of websites by topic.

00:08:35.000 | Well, business, entertainment business under this, movie companies, and then here's a list

00:08:40.720 | of like websites and movie companies.

00:08:43.240 | Google really solved the problem of finding specific information.

00:08:46.040 | It said, okay, we have a better way of actually, if I want to find out about this thing, it

00:08:51.000 | does a really good job of finding where on the internet are there authoritative sources

00:08:54.760 | on this particular thing.

00:08:55.920 | You're interested in.

00:08:56.920 | So that was, that kind of solved that original problem, but we still had the problem of what

00:09:01.120 | we could call serendipitous discovery and serendipitous exposure.

00:09:05.040 | This ability to say, I'm not looking for something in particular, I'm not looking for the website

00:09:10.400 | for Warner brothers.

00:09:11.520 | I want to find something that I didn't know I was looking for.

00:09:15.360 | I want new ideas, new art, interesting people, new perspectives.

00:09:20.240 | This is the bigger promise of the internet is not just that it's a more convenient way

00:09:25.220 | for companies to be accessible online, but that you can have this serendipitous discovery

00:09:30.000 | and the flip side, how do you service the creatives so they can produce stuff?

00:09:36.120 | And even if people don't know them directly, people can find them.

00:09:40.620 | So as creatives can find audiences and audiences can find creative input.

00:09:44.880 | That became the second fundamental challenge of the internet, especially once we had the

00:09:50.880 | web 2.0 revolution.

00:09:53.540 | This was happening roughly like 2004, 2005 is when this picked up where it became really

00:09:58.760 | easy to put stuff on the internet.

00:10:00.320 | Hey there, I want to take a quick moment to tell you about my new book, slow productivity,

00:10:06.640 | the lost art of accomplishment without burnout.

00:10:11.160 | If you like the type of things I talk about on this channel, you're really going to like

00:10:15.160 | this book.

00:10:16.540 | It distills all of my ideas into a clear philosophy combined with step-by-step instructions for

00:10:22.920 | putting it into action.

00:10:25.080 | So to find out more about the book, check out calnewport.com/slow, everything you need,

00:10:31.940 | you can find there.

00:10:32.940 | All right.

00:10:33.940 | Thanks.

00:10:34.940 | Let's get back to it.

00:10:35.940 | Like the 1990s, if you wanted to put something on the internet, you had to get a server,

00:10:38.720 | you had to hand code a website in HTML, it was kind of difficult.

00:10:42.880 | By 2004, 2005, there was web-based software like blog software, for example, that made

00:10:48.800 | it easy to post information.

00:10:50.940 | You could have an easy interface and like type and drag in photos and the software would

00:10:55.520 | automatically produce a nice looking webpage for you.

00:10:58.280 | That was the web 2.0 revolution.

00:10:59.640 | So now really like anyone could post stuff, it was much easier.

00:11:03.520 | The barrier to entry was lower.

00:11:05.080 | And we had this question of serendipitous creative discovery, how is that going to happen?

00:11:10.280 | All right.

00:11:11.280 | The model that came to dominate is what we can call the algorithmic model.

00:11:15.320 | I'll draw this on the screen here.

00:11:17.160 | I'm putting a lot of dots on the screen.

00:11:20.640 | These are people creating stuff, their own individual stuff.

00:11:26.660 | So in the algorithm model, we have a single platform.

00:11:32.660 | So I'll draw a big gray box here.

00:11:34.940 | And inside this platform is going to be algorithms.

00:11:40.140 | So I'll put a bunch of little binary symbols here.

00:11:45.820 | Right.

00:11:47.240 | They have algorithms.

00:11:51.200 | Everyone is going to aim the stuff they're creating at the central platform.

00:11:58.700 | So we're all aiming what we're creating at the central platform that's running lots of

00:12:04.120 | algorithms.

00:12:05.120 | And then on this other side, we'll have a single, this will be us, this will represent

00:12:11.840 | us.

00:12:12.840 | I can put a dot for someone who's just trying to consume some information.

00:12:14.960 | So I'll put that over here.

00:12:17.400 | And the platform, it's going to decide like, okay, here's what, here's something cool for

00:12:24.440 | you to see.

00:12:25.440 | I'll make a stream of things for you to see.

00:12:28.200 | All right.

00:12:29.200 | So this is the algorithmic model I've drawn.

00:12:31.280 | Lots of creators.

00:12:32.760 | Everything goes into a box.

00:12:34.520 | That box then looks at it and decides for you, yeah, here's stuff you might like.

00:12:40.560 | And it chooses stuff that you might like.

00:12:42.160 | All right.

00:12:43.160 | So that's basically what it is today.

00:12:44.880 | If you're using TikTok or using Instagram or you're using Twitter slash X, this is how

00:12:51.040 | your content, how you're finding serendipitously.

00:12:54.380 | So content you didn't know existed, how you're finding stuff you didn't know existed that

00:12:58.800 | might be interesting to you.

00:12:59.960 | And if you're a creative, so you're over here on the other side, you're just throwing your

00:13:04.120 | stuff in here, hoping that your stuff is assigned to people, right?

00:13:08.640 | And this is what's creating the problems that the artists are talking about is now your

00:13:12.800 | art becomes about satisfying this gray box.

00:13:16.440 | Try and do whatever you can do to get it to select yours, to show to other people.

00:13:20.240 | And this of course has a real constricting effect.

00:13:22.920 | There are advantages to this model though.

00:13:24.360 | The reason why this model is so popular is there's real advantages.

00:13:28.220 | First of all, is it simplicity.

00:13:30.680 | If I'm a consumer, it's really easy.

00:13:32.240 | I have a stream on an app on my phone that's being populated by an algorithm.

00:13:36.400 | If I want to serendipitously encounter information, I press an icon on my phone and there we go.

00:13:40.960 | And it's just, I'm just being shown stuff that's been selected for me.

00:13:44.360 | That might be interesting for the creators who are feeding this algorithm.

00:13:49.520 | There's a sort of lottery ticket excitement to it.

00:13:52.920 | You never know your thing, right?

00:13:55.120 | And I'll, I'll highlight something over here.

00:13:57.680 | Your thing might be really favored and you have a way if you could reach thousands of

00:14:02.640 | people all at once, like there's that lottery ticket excitement of virality.

00:14:06.480 | If you just never know you could be like one right choice of topic and look and timing

00:14:12.920 | away from being seen by, by, by an amount of people that would have in a traditional

00:14:17.020 | world require like a whole career of building up your success.

00:14:21.860 | There's also a huge aspect of attention manipulation here that affects creators.

00:14:28.160 | We don't talk about that that much anymore, but I talk about it in my 2016 book, deep

00:14:33.000 | work.

00:14:34.840 | One of the ways that when these algorithmic platforms took off, one of the ways that they

00:14:39.360 | convince people to move their creative activities over to these platforms is they collectivized

00:14:45.800 | attention.

00:14:46.800 | And what I mean by that is that in a pre algorithmic platform web 2.0 world, one of the big problems

00:14:52.680 | if you were creating content is that it was very hard to get people to find the look at

00:14:57.840 | what you, what you produced, right?

00:15:01.040 | It's hard.

00:15:02.660 | And so you would, you would write a blog or post some photos on your Flickr account or

00:15:07.000 | on your Tumblr.

00:15:08.000 | They're like, no one would show up, right?

00:15:10.720 | And this is, you know, uh, this is hard.

00:15:12.480 | You're like, I, I look, I want people to show up.

00:15:15.380 | What these original platforms like Facebook offered is we'll make it seem like people

00:15:19.100 | are showing up.

00:15:20.740 | It collectivizes attention.

00:15:22.560 | These platforms make it easy for you to have something like a couple thousand of, I'm putting

00:15:26.480 | an air quotes here, followers.

00:15:28.940 | Now in reality, these are castles made in sand.

00:15:31.060 | This is not a couple thousand people who are waiting for what you're going to produce next.

00:15:34.160 | I mean, most of them are not seeing, really aren't seeing what you're producing anyways.

00:15:37.840 | The follow was a button.

00:15:38.960 | They clicked at some point and forgot about it and the algorithms aren't even serving

00:15:42.600 | your content to them.

00:15:43.880 | But for you, the creator, you get this simulacrum of like, I'm in an arena, there's a few thousand

00:15:48.240 | people.

00:15:49.240 | They really care what I'm doing.

00:15:50.520 | That feels really good.

00:15:52.080 | And that was really powerful for content creators.

00:15:55.000 | This idea of we're going to give you a sense that you have an audience and not like a dozen

00:15:59.720 | people, but like hundreds or a couple thousand people.

00:16:02.480 | And this was very powerful.

00:16:04.080 | So it was playing on the psychological needs.

00:16:06.560 | Again, it's not really a couple thousand people who are watching what you're doing, but they

00:16:11.880 | could give you that sense.

00:16:13.160 | And that really attracted a lot of people, not even creatives, just everyday people who

00:16:17.520 | messed around with a GeoCities website or a Tumblr.

00:16:21.080 | They all moved over to Facebook because Facebook had this model where you will comment on what

00:16:26.360 | your friends are doing.

00:16:27.360 | You will comment on what you were doing, whether or not it's good or interesting.

00:16:31.200 | This is going to happen.

00:16:32.640 | And you get the sense of like, people care about what I'm doing, which is incredibly,

00:16:35.880 | incredibly powerful.

00:16:36.880 | So the algorithm model has some real attractions.

00:16:40.640 | So what happens when you quit this?

00:16:42.520 | Well, we get to what we can call the distributed trust model.

00:16:47.240 | So now what I'm drawing is a bunch of these blue creator dots again, but now there's no

00:16:52.640 | gray box that everyone is connecting into what you what you get in the distributed trust

00:16:59.600 | model where now where are people producing and let me let me just label this like they're

00:17:04.480 | producing.

00:17:05.480 | These are ugly dots, by the way, Jesse.

00:17:09.540 | So now we could think of like email newsletters, podcasts, websites, all independent content,

00:17:21.840 | stuff that's not going into a centralized platform that everyone's on, but everyone's

00:17:25.200 | kind of posting their own things.

00:17:27.640 | And it's all universally accessible over the Internet, but it's not being curated by algorithms.

00:17:32.480 | And what we get in this world is these like individual links of trust.

00:17:38.080 | Right.

00:17:39.080 | And a lot of times they're kind of we see these little cliques of people that all know

00:17:43.840 | each other and they all talk to each other.

00:17:46.560 | So think about these orange lines.

00:17:47.880 | I'm drawing these orange lines are think of these as like connections, like people that

00:17:54.640 | know each other.

00:17:55.640 | It's an actual human trust relationship.

00:17:57.880 | I'm a person.

00:17:58.880 | You're a person.

00:17:59.880 | We have some sort of connection.

00:18:00.880 | We communicate with each other and you get this web of these connections.

00:18:04.160 | And as you can see on here, if you're if you're watching this online, there's clusters like

00:18:09.440 | a bunch of people that know each other.

00:18:12.680 | Over here is a bunch of people that know each other.

00:18:15.040 | And so like they all know each other and then you have these like longer distance links

00:18:17.760 | connecting them.

00:18:18.760 | It's like standard human social networking happening on the Internet.

00:18:23.840 | Though, how does information move through here?

00:18:26.680 | It moves over these links.

00:18:28.880 | It moves over these links.

00:18:29.880 | So I'm going to let's trace a particular piece of information, you know, maybe someone over

00:18:35.560 | here produces something.

00:18:38.320 | And they send it to like their nearby people.

00:18:41.000 | They have like interest.

00:18:42.000 | They like it.

00:18:43.000 | It spreads to this local group.

00:18:45.240 | Now it's going to maybe make its way out of here because this person has some connection

00:18:48.840 | to that person.

00:18:49.840 | It kind of makes its way out of there and maybe makes its way into infecting another

00:18:53.040 | clique and the information begins to spread.

00:18:57.560 | Now, it's not all epidemic viral spread.

00:19:01.080 | Some of this stuff just goes, you know, a little distance like over here.

00:19:04.560 | Hey, it kind of spreads in here, makes its way out and stops and some stuff goes farther

00:19:09.200 | and some stuff has a more sort of serendipitous path where it just kind of makes its way,

00:19:15.160 | you know, off random links and gets to a pretty far distance in the graph.

00:19:18.360 | But the information is being spread on individual trust-based links between people that have

00:19:23.040 | some sort of established relation, be it digital or physical.

00:19:28.040 | This turns out to be an actually very good way of curating serendipitously interesting

00:19:31.920 | information.

00:19:33.880 | In fact, the curation decisions that end up being made here implicitly tend to be much

00:19:39.080 | more interesting and higher quality than what you would get with a centralized algorithm.

00:19:44.080 | Because now the main incentive is if I'm going to send you something, I really care about

00:19:47.760 | what I'm sending you.

00:19:49.280 | I'm not going to send you nonsense.

00:19:51.400 | I'm not going to send you something that's not interesting.

00:19:53.680 | I'm not going to send you something where the person is clearly unhinged or it's really

00:19:57.520 | hateful, most likely, you know, unless one of these clusters is like a cluster of Nazis

00:20:02.120 | or something like that.

00:20:03.880 | It works out to be really good curation.

00:20:06.800 | And so when something makes its way through this network and me as a receiver receives

00:20:11.040 | it, it's interesting stuff I'm receiving.

00:20:14.880 | It's carefully curated stuff, like a really original idea that looks like nothing else

00:20:18.360 | but has a spark of something interesting.

00:20:20.040 | It's going to spread probably pretty well.

00:20:22.120 | And I'm not going to get all these things, but I'm going to get an interesting mix of

00:20:24.720 | these things.

00:20:25.720 | And maybe I'm primarily getting things that are local in this graph from places that aren't

00:20:30.720 | too far away.

00:20:32.120 | But that's OK.

00:20:33.120 | I'm getting an interesting mix of things.

00:20:34.120 | And then occasionally long distance things make it into this region of the network graph.

00:20:37.320 | And then that spreads to me as well.

00:20:38.920 | From the point of view of any individual receiver here, you're going to end up getting a really

00:20:44.000 | interesting serendipitous mix of information that's going to be much more original and

00:20:48.320 | diverse and I would say creative than what you're going to get when we trust TikTok's

00:20:52.440 | algorithms or Instagram's algorithm to decide for us.

00:20:56.480 | It's also we're going to have community standards can implicitly be enforced.

00:21:00.800 | So instead of trying to figure out, for example, what are the rules for this billion person

00:21:05.500 | social network about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable, what you get in a distributed

00:21:09.840 | trust model is like, well, over here we have shared standards implicitly because we know

00:21:13.600 | each other and we have similar interests.

00:21:17.260 | So when stuff comes in here that we don't like, we don't like that tone, we think that

00:21:22.880 | is over the top or conspiratorial, whatever it is, it's just not going to spread in our

00:21:27.800 | group.

00:21:28.800 | And so you're getting implicitly these regionalized community standard type spread.

00:21:34.840 | Anyways, it's a really interesting way to have serendipitous information spread.

00:21:39.120 | It's a really interesting way if you're a creator to have your information spread.

00:21:43.800 | Now there's one more twist here.

00:21:44.800 | So if you're a creator, your information is spreading somewhat serendipitously through

00:21:49.320 | these networks because of individual trust connections.

00:21:52.480 | But what happens is, is as your information, it's like, let's look at this, this orange

00:21:56.600 | if you're watching this like orange path here.

00:21:59.960 | As this creator's information sort of begins to spread, you begin to attract new direct

00:22:07.120 | connections.

00:22:08.580 | So now more and more of these people might say, oh, well, I kind of want to connect with

00:22:13.160 | you.

00:22:14.160 | I like this too.

00:22:15.160 | I want to connect with you as well.

00:22:16.480 | I like this too.

00:22:17.480 | I want to connect with this as well.

00:22:18.840 | And you begin to build around you this cluster of this clique, this cluster of shared connections

00:22:23.800 | of people that you can more directly communicate your information to.

00:22:29.120 | This is really the standard of the original vision for the internet.

00:22:33.320 | It's a vision of these distributed connections.

00:22:35.520 | We're all speaking the same language.

00:22:37.600 | The curation decisions are human.

00:22:40.160 | Do I want me to send you or two people something?

00:22:44.200 | Did I like this thing that came to me?

00:22:45.640 | I did.

00:22:46.640 | I'm now going to connect directly to this person.

00:22:48.240 | I'm going to subscribe to their letter or listen to their podcast or their RSS feed

00:22:52.520 | or go to their website.

00:22:54.400 | And you can, as a receiver of information, receive a lot of interesting stuff.

00:22:59.280 | And as a producer of information, begin to grow as your content and art warrants it,

00:23:05.000 | a sort of larger sort of clique.

00:23:07.320 | It's a really good system.

00:23:09.040 | And it solves a lot of the problems that we get when we instead use this system of like,

00:23:12.720 | let the gray box handle everything.

00:23:14.780 | Everyone will talk to the gray box and we'll just sort of have a thousand people in Northern

00:23:19.680 | California to sit there tweaking it and try to make everyone happy.

00:23:24.020 | So when these artists are leaving social media to create their own websites, they're leaving

00:23:28.400 | the algorithm model of information spread and discovery to go to the distributed trust

00:23:32.040 | model of information spread and discovery.

00:23:35.840 | And I think that's not a bad model.

00:23:38.900 | The biggest problem with it is it's slow, right?

00:23:43.960 | I mean, you can build your true fans as a creator, but you got to produce good stuff.

00:23:49.840 | It has to like make its way on a regular basis through this network and attract people one

00:23:54.000 | at a time.

00:23:55.240 | It's slow.

00:23:57.240 | There's no attention manipulation.

00:23:59.840 | So if you're not really producing something original or interesting that people really

00:24:03.520 | like, there is no pretending like there's a thousand people who care what you're doing.

00:24:07.000 | Like TikTok can do for you.

00:24:09.000 | You just won't succeed.

00:24:10.000 | So there's this sort of threshold for success.

00:24:14.040 | So it could be frustrating.

00:24:15.640 | Like I want people to think I'm interesting, but what I'm doing is not and do have to deal

00:24:19.080 | with that.

00:24:20.600 | And even as a consumer of information, it's more work.

00:24:23.840 | You kind of have to like follow things and keep up with things and check out different

00:24:27.240 | websites and you have email newsletters that come in that you read and sometimes you don't.

00:24:31.640 | There's different podcasts and you have to discover a podcast and then you have to go

00:24:34.840 | try it and listen to some episodes.

00:24:36.600 | I mean, it's a lot more work than just having a continuous stream that you just hit a button

00:24:41.480 | and there's stuff there that's really interesting.

00:24:43.940 | This way of consuming content is not good for in the moment distraction.

00:24:47.880 | You're trying to hide from something difficult in your life.

00:24:50.200 | TikTok is there to hold your hand.

00:24:51.840 | We can right away distract you whenever you need it.

00:24:54.340 | This distributed trust model, no, it's harder.

00:24:57.320 | Like you have to wait for the email newsletter, the new podcast to come out or for someone

00:25:01.000 | to update their website.

00:25:02.000 | It doesn't offer you a solution to the problem of numb me right now, but I think you get

00:25:07.400 | better information.

00:25:08.400 | I think it's more interesting.

00:25:09.720 | I think it's more human.

00:25:10.720 | I think it solves a lot of problems of the algorithmic model.

00:25:13.000 | And if you're an artist, I think it's just more true to art.

00:25:17.420 | So should other people do this as well?

00:25:18.880 | I think it's completely on the table.

00:25:23.000 | All it takes is stop using social media, but lean into the internet as a really cool place

00:25:29.180 | and lean into it by independently produce things.

00:25:33.960 | Newsletters will talk about other newsletters.

00:25:35.220 | Check those out.

00:25:36.220 | Podcasts will talk about other podcasts.

00:25:37.960 | Check out those other podcasts, websites.

00:25:40.420 | The sounds old fashioned have a folder of bookmarks.

00:25:44.320 | I like this artist website.

00:25:46.120 | Like I, one of the things I do, like I used to do in 2006 is like, go check out what these

00:25:50.960 | artists are up to.

00:25:52.040 | Have an RSS reader if they're syndicating their content, embrace the friction, embrace

00:26:00.020 | the quirky weirdness of, I'm not just getting these really polished streams.

00:26:04.780 | I think it's a, it's a cool version of the internet, but the key thing is for these artists,

00:26:08.540 | it is a version of the internet that is compatible with being a working artist.

00:26:12.820 | I would even wager that you have a better chance of making a full-time middle-class

00:26:17.020 | creative living as an artist in the distributed trust model than you do in the algorithmic

00:26:22.500 | model.

00:26:23.500 | The algorithmic model gives you more hope, but again, these are castles in the sand.

00:26:28.620 | All these followers that you're trying to pursue aren't really doing much for you other

00:26:32.780 | than making you feel better.

00:26:34.260 | Whereas the carefully built distributed trust model, true fans, they'll join the subscription.

00:26:40.020 | They'll buy the artwork.

00:26:41.020 | They'll come to see you in person.

00:26:42.820 | You only need so many of those to actually make a living.

00:26:46.020 | So I'm a big believer in distributed trust model.

00:26:48.260 | And I think these artists who are revolting against social media, aren't just making a

00:26:51.600 | sacrifice to prove a point.

00:26:53.260 | They're discovering a better way to be a creative in an online world.

00:26:57.200 | I like the castles in the sand metaphor.

00:26:59.620 | Yeah, we don't, it's interesting.

00:27:02.820 | That was when I first started talking about social media, that attention manipulation

00:27:07.860 | was the number one point because they weren't really, they had not yet fully invested in

00:27:14.540 | the engagement strategy, right?

00:27:17.140 | So like early Facebook, when I first started writing about this, they were just trying

00:27:20.940 | to get as many users as possible.

00:27:22.620 | They did not care about active user minutes, like trying to make it addictive.

00:27:27.240 | They wanted to make it something that you wanted to join and they didn't really care

00:27:30.780 | how much you used it after you joined it.

00:27:32.380 | So the really, the big push of Facebook in 2004, 2005, 2006 was people are paying attention

00:27:38.440 | to you.

00:27:39.440 | It was entirely attention manipulation.

00:27:41.260 | Then once they went to their mobile strategy in the 2010s, then the game changed and it

00:27:44.900 | was, okay, we also need people to look at this all the time.

00:27:47.580 | And so the focus became on how do we keep you on the app once you're on the app?

00:27:51.140 | And it became a little bit less for the average user, became a little bit less about, I want

00:27:56.520 | to be seen and more about, I want to be numbed.

00:27:59.180 | And that's what we talk about most now.

00:28:01.460 | When we critique social media, we talk most about the engineered addiction, but we shouldn't

00:28:05.580 | forget, especially when thinking about creatives, that this like original attraction was no

00:28:11.100 | one's coming to your blogger.com blog.

00:28:14.620 | But if you come over to Facebook, people will comment on your wall.

00:28:18.900 | And that was really, really compelling.

00:28:20.780 | And I think that's how they, they got people to leave the quirky, interesting old school

00:28:27.460 | distributed trust web and come into these walled gardens.

00:28:30.700 | That's how they got them to do it.

00:28:31.900 | That was what they were dangling.

00:28:33.820 | And I think that that point's often forgotten, but artists know it well because man, it feels

00:28:37.900 | good.

00:28:38.900 | If you create things for a living to make it seem like there's a lot of people who are

00:28:43.380 | caring about what you create.

00:28:44.820 | And it's just weird, collectivized attention and algorithmic manipulation and they're subscribed.

00:28:50.260 | What does that mean?

00:28:51.260 | Who are these followers?

00:28:52.260 | Do they ever actually see what you're doing?

00:28:53.700 | Like who knows why they hit that button at some point and they haven't thought about

00:28:56.700 | you since.

00:28:57.700 | It's a weird game that's being played on there.

00:28:59.700 | Interesting as well, because these creatives probably have some sort of validation through

00:29:04.820 | their friend group on Facebook that they're like, Hey, I saw you do X, Y, Z yesterday

00:29:10.220 | on Facebook.

00:29:11.220 | Yeah.

00:29:12.220 | So then they're like, Oh, people must be honest.

00:29:14.180 | So I must have those a thousand fans or whatever.

00:29:16.300 | Yeah.

00:29:17.300 | Yeah.

00:29:18.300 | You get the, you get the signals that keep you hooked.

00:29:19.500 | Hey, I really, a comments do the same thing.

00:29:22.020 | Hey, this is great.

00:29:23.020 | I really love that.

00:29:24.340 | Yeah.

00:29:25.340 | But I love the way they're talking about it.

00:29:27.180 | This is a Jaron Lanier point, but I'm glad it's being picked up now by these artists.

00:29:31.500 | The, the impact on your art of the medium.

00:29:35.300 | That was another really cool point about this is like when you're designing for Instagram,

00:29:38.900 | part of it is just a format of Instagram really constrains what your art is.

00:29:42.900 | And then you have that second order effect of you're trying to create art that Instagram

00:29:46.220 | will like, you're trying to please the algorithm.

00:29:49.180 | Art can't survive in that world.

00:29:50.740 | It would be the equivalent if we, I guess we kind of did have this in the early Renaissance.

00:29:55.300 | I think about like there was a small number of great patrons and the artists, if you wanted

00:30:01.020 | to succeed, if you're in Florence in the 1500s, you needed one of these great patrons to support

00:30:06.100 | you.

00:30:07.100 | So those patrons you're, all you were doing was trying to design what they were going

00:30:09.580 | to like.

00:30:10.580 | I mean like the Medici's taste completely shaped high Renaissance art because they were

00:30:14.940 | funding Michelangelo.

00:30:16.100 | They were put, they were, and you were creating this art, you know, for them.

00:30:19.820 | Right.

00:30:20.820 | Um, and then think about what happens.

00:30:21.820 | You go to like the, the first half of the 20th century where you have the, the, the

00:30:26.780 | New York city modernism scene.

00:30:29.340 | And what you got instead was these networks of independent galleries and people began

00:30:34.660 | to produce really experimental, interesting things.

00:30:38.340 | They were, weren't serving like a small number of patrons or like, okay, we need to paint

00:30:43.100 | whatever the, the epic art is of the day.

00:30:45.620 | And, and, and, you know, this is where you start to get the interesting things.

00:30:48.940 | It's where you get the, the Pollux and the de Kooning's and you begin to get the, the

00:30:53.260 | abstract expressionism reaches its full, um, flourishing, right.

00:30:58.060 | When you, when you get this, uh, things are more distributed and you're pretty small groups

00:31:02.300 | of people producing for an independent production, like small galleries and people are hearing

00:31:06.900 | about stuff through other people.

00:31:08.500 | And that's where all the excitement happens.

00:31:10.980 | That's when the innovation happens.

00:31:14.640 | So we'll see.

00:31:15.640 | I saw recently that Jonathan Haidt was on Rogan as well.

00:31:18.300 | I have to check that out.

00:31:19.780 | Yeah.

00:31:20.780 | Yeah.

00:31:21.780 | John, do I know, uh, one up to our number two debut on New York times bestseller.

00:31:27.380 | You got number one.

00:31:28.420 | What's his book?

00:31:29.540 | The Anxious Generation.

00:31:30.540 | Oh, he's probably on the, on his book.

00:31:32.980 | Yeah.

00:31:33.980 | Yeah.

00:31:34.980 | So there's this new book out.

00:31:35.980 | Yeah.

00:31:36.980 | So, I mean, we talked about John all the time on the show, but his book that lays out what

00:31:38.100 | he's been talking about for the last six years, the research on teenagers and social media

00:31:42.740 | and phones, his book with all that research just came out and it's cool.

00:31:47.380 | It's like really, um, really crushing it because it's, it's one of those things where everyone's

00:31:51.660 | like, yeah, we're there.

00:31:53.660 | Just give us the, give us the numbers.

00:31:55.940 | So I think that's, um, he's killing it and good for him.

00:31:59.940 | It's been, there's a cool man also being attacked.

00:32:04.380 | I mean, it's hard to be number one in anything.

00:32:07.020 | There's like a really interesting, if you want to hear an interesting height interview,

00:32:10.940 | he went on Tyler Cowen's podcast, right?

00:32:13.540 | Marginal revolution and Tyler who I've met, and I really liked Tyler as well.

00:32:17.860 | Brilliant guy.

00:32:18.860 | Economist at George Mason.

00:32:19.980 | Um, he's very, he's very pro technology.

00:32:22.540 | Also very pro, uh, like there's different ways of thinking about technology.

00:32:26.660 | My philosophy is different than his.

00:32:27.940 | His is very much like we will adapt to new technologies.

00:32:32.260 | It's, it's, uh, it's, it could be, um, disruptive when they emerge, but we adapt to them.

00:32:38.500 | And ultimately over time, we can't deny that like technological innovation pushes forward

00:32:43.060 | the human story, um, and like really positive ways.

00:32:46.020 | So you have to just deal with the, the tumult in the small scale.

00:32:50.720 | And so he had hide on and it's really contentious interview.

00:32:54.000 | It's interesting.

00:32:55.000 | Now after the fact, here's what I love about it.

00:32:56.000 | After the fact, both Tyler and John were like, yeah, this got kind of contentious, but that's

00:32:59.300 | a great, like we respect each other.

00:33:02.100 | And it was like a heated discussion.

00:33:03.500 | It's not gotcha.

00:33:04.500 | It's not like someone hating the other person.

00:33:06.460 | This is what heated debate should be like.

00:33:07.900 | So that was kind of cool.

00:33:08.900 | I haven't listened to it yet, but like they, uh, I guess Cowen's much more of like a libertarian

00:33:13.440 | on these issues and really pushing hide.

00:33:15.820 | And, and then there's like, anyways, I've heard it's really interesting and contentious

00:33:18.860 | and a mop, but a model of what like a contentious conversation should be like when it's done

00:33:22.740 | in good faith and with respect for each other.

00:33:24.980 | Um, yeah.

00:33:25.980 | So we should check that out.

00:33:26.980 | I would say we should have John on, but he's just like in the stratosphere right now.

00:33:30.980 | He doesn't need to be coming on our show.

00:33:33.180 | He's a, he's on like every major show, which I love because God, his message is needed.

00:33:39.500 | All right.

00:33:41.500 | We got questions coming up, but let's, uh, first hear from a sponsor.

00:33:45.860 | So I want to talk about our friends at Maui Newey venison.

00:33:50.420 | So that's Maui M-A-U-I Newey N-U-I.

00:33:55.580 | It's a mission based food company.

00:33:58.100 | That's bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door.

00:34:03.020 | I love this meat.

00:34:04.760 | We had the jerky and we had the steaks, which we grilled.

00:34:08.380 | Both were fantastic.

00:34:09.380 | My kids loved the steaks, which they don't always do.

00:34:11.780 | So that's a good sign.

00:34:12.780 | Um, but here's the thing about this company.

00:34:14.740 | What is this meat?

00:34:15.740 | Where did it come from?

00:34:16.740 | Here's their, their big idea.

00:34:18.700 | There's an invasive deer species in Maui, the Island of Maui in Hawaii.

00:34:23.340 | That's eating all the vegetation.

00:34:25.420 | So they have to call these herds and Maui Newey his whole idea was instead of just wasting

00:34:31.540 | all of these deer, just calling them off.

00:34:34.700 | We should harvest the meat because it's incredibly nutritious because they're eating a Hawaiian

00:34:38.500 | salad bar all day, very nutritious meat.

00:34:41.600 | And so they figured out how they could harvest the meat from the invasive species.

00:34:46.180 | They have to call anyways and make it available as super nutritious meat for consumers to

00:34:52.820 | actually eat.

00:34:53.820 | So it's a hundred percent wild harvested red meat.

00:34:55.380 | The only U S company that has wild harvested red meat, you can wild harvest fish.

00:35:00.220 | It's the only company that's wild harvesting red meat.

00:35:04.280 | So this is their invasive access to your population.

00:35:05.980 | It tastes fantastic.

00:35:07.160 | It's very nutritious and it's ecologically sound.

00:35:10.300 | It's a, it's a species they have to cut back on anyways.

00:35:14.260 | And so Maui Newey venison is definitely a favorite now in the Newport household.

00:35:19.500 | So the good news is you can get 20% off your first order.

00:35:25.180 | If you go to Maui Newey venison.com/deep questions, so that's M A U I N U I venison.com/deepquestions

00:35:36.700 | or use the discount code deep questions at checkout that's Maui Newey venison, the healthiest

00:35:41.820 | red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door.

00:35:46.360 | Also want to talk about our friends at element L M N T.

00:35:52.020 | So this is a what do you call it?

00:35:54.220 | A drink mix, like a powder you add to water that adds to the water, the electrolytes,

00:36:01.660 | including sodium that you need, especially if you've been sweating a lot or otherwise

00:36:06.220 | have been exerting yourself.

00:36:08.760 | It's created by the former research biochemist, Rob Wolf and keto gains founder, Louis Villacenor.

00:36:15.740 | It has enough sodium, potassium and magnesium to move the needle that gets you feeling to

00:36:19.780 | performing your best.

00:36:20.780 | But what I like about it is zero sugar, zero artificial colors, no dodgy ingredients.

00:36:26.860 | I use it after I exercise.

00:36:27.860 | If I've been sweating a lot, I'll put a little bit of element into my water to get back some

00:36:31.780 | of the electrolytes and not just the water.

00:36:34.540 | If I've been lecturing all day or giving talks all day, I also lose a lot of liquids.

00:36:39.580 | I'll put a little element in my water.

00:36:41.980 | I like having that hit of salt and other things in it.

00:36:45.620 | And I liked it.

00:36:46.620 | There's nothing bad.

00:36:47.620 | There's no sugar.

00:36:48.620 | It's not the sweet.

00:36:49.660 | I can just throw it in there.

00:36:50.660 | It tastes great.

00:36:51.660 | I know I'm not drinking.

00:36:52.660 | Um, no, I'm not drinking stuff.

00:36:54.660 | That's not good for me.

00:36:55.660 | You have a lot of different flavors like citrus salt, which I really like, or raspberry salt.

00:37:00.440 | You also have spicy flavors like mango chili or chocolate salt, which here's a key.

00:37:05.540 | If you had a late night, mix that into your coffee the next morning.

00:37:09.860 | That actually goes really well with the coffee.

00:37:11.480 | Um, so anyways, I am a big fan of element.

00:37:15.360 | So I'm going to say, suggest you go to drink element.com/deep.

00:37:20.960 | So that's drink element.com/deep, uh, to get a sample pack with any purchase.

00:37:29.580 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:37:33.500 | Sounds good.

00:37:34.500 | Before I read the first question, I think you got to tell the audience about how you're

00:37:36.380 | wearing a new shirt.

00:37:37.940 | I'm trying a different shirt.

00:37:38.940 | Yeah.

00:37:39.940 | It's similar to my old shirt, but not quite the same.

00:37:42.780 | I don't even recognize who you are anymore.

00:37:45.300 | I don't know if it's going to perform as well, uh, but I'm, I'm, I'm sampling different options

00:37:50.660 | I have for shirts.

00:37:51.660 | I mean, it does feel weird.

00:37:53.320 | It's like driving your car left-handed or something.

00:37:56.500 | We'll see.

00:37:57.500 | But I'm sure it's been distracting.

00:37:58.500 | Everyone who's watching it.

00:37:59.500 | Yeah.

00:38:00.500 | Yeah.

00:38:01.500 | Like that's a different shade of blue.

00:38:02.500 | All right.

00:38:03.500 | Our first question is from mate boots.

00:38:05.700 | I'm a student and devoted myself to deep work and digital minimalism.

00:38:09.500 | Thanks to this, I've become more aware and I'm doing much better in school.

00:38:12.500 | However, yesterday I was sick and it absolutely interrupted my core of a deep life.

00:38:16.140 | I was on my screen all day.

00:38:18.460 | Reflection made me think that my life was simply a routine loop of habits related to

00:38:22.380 | the same goals every day.

00:38:24.140 | For example, learn to constantly develop, read a book to become smarter and wiser.

00:38:28.260 | Is this extreme routine good?

00:38:30.580 | Um, look, it's, it's not only fine, but it is good to have regular routines or rituals

00:38:36.620 | that emphasize the stuff that you find important because that signals to yourself that I find

00:38:41.660 | these things important.

00:38:42.660 | So of course we've talked about that.

00:38:43.660 | I like reading on a regular basis.

00:38:45.180 | It signals to your mind that you take the slow consumption of big ideas seriously, right?

00:38:50.840 | So routines to emphasize what's important is important.

00:38:54.100 | However, I think what you're seeing here is that you probably have these turned up.

00:38:59.100 | The dial of their intensity and frequency is probably turned up too much.

00:39:02.940 | This is easy to do, especially if you have a lot of discretionary time, like you're a

00:39:05.940 | student and you really have a lot of autonomy in your time.

00:39:10.100 | It is easy for you to begin to really just fill your day almost entirely with these highly

00:39:14.500 | structured activities.

00:39:16.220 | Then it becomes counterproductive.

00:39:18.740 | So you want regular, uh, we call them daily discipline sometimes on the show.

00:39:22.340 | Those are fine, but they shouldn't be all consuming of your day.

00:39:27.700 | Something you do on a semi-regular basis, the signal something is important to you,

00:39:32.140 | but your day should not become a sort of monastic ritual of this service followed by this discipline

00:39:38.860 | followed by that service that I think not only is non-sustainable, but sort of misses

00:39:43.060 | the point of life in the first place.

00:39:45.400 | Your day should be varied and exciting, suffused with gratitude and adventure, and they won't

00:39:50.560 | be that after all routine.

00:39:52.440 | Also, you should have more of these sick days.

00:39:55.680 | I'm doing a lot of air quotes today, Jesse, but I'm doing air quotes again.

00:39:57.960 | You should have more of these sick days, even when you're not sick, days where you're not

00:40:02.120 | doing a normal routine.

00:40:03.600 | I'm going on a long hike and then I'm watching a movie and then I'm like hanging out with

00:40:07.000 | friends.

00:40:08.000 | Right?

00:40:09.000 | So you want, you want, you want the daily disciplines routines to be regular and important

00:40:13.840 | to you, but not everything you're doing.

00:40:15.200 | And you can walk away with them for a while and be fine, and then come back to them and

00:40:17.920 | you can take days off and you want that sort of variety.

00:40:20.560 | So it's not like you're doing something bad here.

00:40:22.320 | I think you just, again, have that dial of intensity and frequency on these daily disciplines

00:40:26.720 | probably just turned up a little bit.

00:40:28.660 | So turn it down a little bit and go throw a little bit more variety into your life and

00:40:32.600 | I think you'll be fine.

00:40:33.600 | All right, who do we got next?

00:40:36.080 | Next question's from Ed.

00:40:37.720 | In your books, you talk a lot about quitting social media.

00:40:40.160 | I don't have Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok, but I do use LinkedIn.

00:40:43.640 | However, this platform has become very toxic and I find the whole promotion aspect untasty.

00:40:49.680 | I'm considering quitting LinkedIn, but I'm unsure of its implications.

00:40:54.680 | My work does not really rely on it.

00:40:56.260 | What should I do?

00:40:57.260 | You can go ahead and quit it.

00:40:59.600 | You know, this is classic digital minimalism.

00:41:03.040 | Tools have to earn their way into your limited time and attention.

00:41:06.760 | They use Thoreau terms because Thoreau is a real inspiration for digital minimalism.

00:41:11.140 | Before you're willing to allocate some of your limited life force to a particular activity,

00:41:18.000 | it has to earn it.

00:41:19.200 | So it sounds like LinkedIn is not earning it for you.

00:41:21.600 | Now if it is, like, oh, there's something that happens on LinkedIn that I find to be

00:41:24.480 | really important, then you can reconsider, is there a way to isolate that and get rid

00:41:30.400 | of the other aspects of this or is it worth taking that hit or is there another way to

00:41:33.880 | get a similar value?

00:41:34.960 | You can go down that whole process of figuring out, like, what value am I getting here?

00:41:39.680 | But if you don't have obvious value, it's not your job to figure out how these tools

00:41:45.640 | can be useful to you.

00:41:47.840 | It's the tool's job to convince you that they're unmissable, right?

00:41:52.320 | And this is something I used to write a lot more about because there's a period, especially

00:41:55.960 | during the height of tech exuberance, when the attitude of the tech companies was this

00:42:01.520 | could be important.

00:42:03.360 | You don't want to miss on something important, so please go use this and figure out how this

00:42:06.960 | might be important.

00:42:07.960 | And so people would just sign up for these things and use these things because it's like,

00:42:11.200 | I don't know, it could be important as if it was their job to figure out why LinkedIn

00:42:16.760 | was important.

00:42:17.760 | It was their job to buy the first Apple Watch and figure out what am I going to do with

00:42:20.600 | this?

00:42:21.600 | You don't need to be a beta tester, Ed.

00:42:23.440 | If you don't have the definitive value from LinkedIn, just walk away.

00:42:26.760 | Hey, if it's a problem, if you discover something you're missing, it will become apparent and

00:42:31.640 | then you can make another decision.

00:42:33.000 | But I say it's completely fine to walk away from something that's not obviously earning

00:42:36.120 | its keep.

00:42:37.120 | I don't really know what happens on LinkedIn these days.

00:42:40.280 | I never go on LinkedIn.

00:42:41.360 | I mean, it was when I first started talking about social media, LinkedIn was very much

00:42:45.760 | just business networks.

00:42:50.360 | You would just kind of declare, I know this person and here's my job title.

00:42:55.480 | And the main use of LinkedIn when it first started, Reid Hoffman actually blurbed so

00:43:00.840 | good they can't ignore you back in 2012.

00:43:03.780 | Back then, the main use of LinkedIn was two degree of connection contacts.

00:43:09.440 | So like I want to talk to someone who works at Google because I'm thinking about trying

00:43:13.000 | to work at Google.

00:43:14.240 | I don't know anyone who works at Google.

00:43:16.160 | But if I look at the people that the people I know know, probably someone in that much

00:43:20.560 | larger group works at Google.

00:43:22.960 | And that's a connection that could make sense because the person who works at Google is

00:43:26.720 | hearing from someone they know and I know that person as well.

00:43:31.120 | And so that's a connection that actually makes sense.

00:43:33.880 | There's trust.

00:43:34.880 | It's a full train of trust.

00:43:35.920 | That was the main use of LinkedIn.

00:43:37.280 | Nowadays, I think you post a lot of stuff.

00:43:40.040 | I know they have a big ad network as well because I hear their ads on Ferris.

00:43:43.520 | Yeah.

00:43:44.520 | So they advertise job listings, help you find people to hire.

00:43:48.600 | For the individuals, I think you more promote yourself.

00:43:51.800 | It's not just I want to be on here.

00:43:53.760 | It's I got to post things like sort of a blog medium type setup, I think.

00:43:58.720 | I got to post things and people share it and so I think there's more sort of social networking

00:44:02.840 | going on as well.

00:44:03.840 | All right.

00:44:04.840 | Who do we got next?

00:44:06.400 | Next question is from Julius.

00:44:08.120 | I've been able to wean off social media and replace those old habits with reading books,

00:44:12.320 | listening to audio books and watching films.

00:44:14.920 | Where do I fit in online articles?

00:44:16.960 | You always mention your articles published in the New Yorker.

00:44:19.280 | I want to save those to my pocket app, but that would just add to my growing to be read

00:44:22.920 | list.

00:44:24.200 | So with articles, I mean, I typically recommend you have some times when you read articles

00:44:29.080 | and it could be just regular, you know, a Sunday morning to go to a coffee shop, a Friday

00:44:34.540 | happy hour afternoon of the week, a lunch hour on Wednesday, or it could be more if

00:44:38.560 | your schedule is more flexible, a little more serendipitous, like what do I want to do today?

00:44:41.760 | I want to have a article reading block, but have a ritual around it.

00:44:45.960 | I go to this place to like read articles.

00:44:47.960 | I like to go to the park and sit there and read articles, right?

00:44:50.560 | Have some rituals around like when you do article reading.

00:44:53.920 | Have a place you gather articles.

00:44:54.920 | So some people use things like the pocket app, the grab articles they see throughout

00:44:58.720 | the week, and they can read it in a nice interface, like on a tablet.

00:45:02.900 | Other people like to print things, you know, okay, I want to bring them with me somewhere.

00:45:06.320 | I don't care how you do it.

00:45:08.280 | During your regular article reading period, just like read the ones that seem interesting.

00:45:12.840 | You know, that's it.

00:45:13.840 | And like, yeah, you're not going to read all the articles that are interesting.

00:45:15.880 | You'll read some interesting articles, and that's the goal.

00:45:18.520 | And maybe it's just, I do it once a week and I read three articles, or maybe I really,

00:45:21.920 | you know, I do this three or four times a week and I get through a lot of articles.

00:45:24.480 | It doesn't really matter.

00:45:25.840 | The activity of value here is just encountering interesting ideas from interesting people.

00:45:32.020 | And doing that is interesting.

00:45:34.060 | Do not have a completist mindset about this.

00:45:37.000 | I have to read every interesting article.

00:45:38.800 | There's no prize you get for reading every interesting article.

00:45:40.800 | And by the way, you're not.

00:45:42.640 | You think you are, but there's a hundred other publications of cool things.

00:45:45.460 | So your goal is not to somehow win at every interesting article I read.

00:45:49.840 | It was the experience of communing with a mind that has thought a lot about something

00:45:54.520 | and given an interesting thought.

00:45:56.000 | That's going to be good for me.

00:45:57.560 | It's like eating a good meal or doing exercise.

00:45:59.840 | I want to do that on a regular basis, but I don't have to eat all the good meals and

00:46:03.720 | I don't have to do all the exercises.

00:46:05.560 | So I would just lower that.

00:46:06.920 | I mean, the only caveat I would give there is my articles you absolutely have to read.

00:46:13.320 | That is just a given.

00:46:15.920 | Bad things will befall you if you don't.

00:46:18.300 | But beyond my articles, just reading some interesting stuff each week is a win.

00:46:23.820 | What I do with like New Yorker hard copy is if it gets too stacked, I just recycle and

00:46:30.000 | then just start fresh.

00:46:31.000 | I always try to read one article right away when the hard copy New Yorker comes.

00:46:35.440 | And then if I have more time, I'll read more.

00:46:37.560 | Yeah.

00:46:38.560 | All right.

00:46:39.560 | But it's weird for me.

00:46:40.560 | I don't really write for the same mediums.

00:46:43.020 | Reading becomes different.

00:46:44.020 | It's like I have a hard time reading nonfiction books that are similar to my nonfiction books

00:46:48.680 | because it's sort of close to home.

00:46:50.480 | And so like we have we have sort of weirder habits sometimes.

00:46:54.120 | Like if you're if you're a magazine writer, you might not read a lot of other magazine

00:46:57.600 | articles.

00:46:58.600 | It's kind of interesting.

00:46:59.600 | All right.

00:47:00.600 | Who do we got next?

00:47:01.600 | We got our slow productivity.

00:47:03.200 | Oh, slow productivity corner.

00:47:04.880 | Let's get some theme music, Jesse.

00:47:10.320 | So as long time listeners know, we try to have one question per week that is inspired

00:47:16.840 | by or related to my new book, Slow Productivity.

00:47:20.600 | If you have not yet read Slow Productivity, but you do listen to this podcast, that's

00:47:24.480 | a problem.

00:47:25.480 | It's like the handbook for the digital knowledge work category that we tackle so much on here.

00:47:29.920 | So check that out.

00:47:30.920 | Slow Productivity.

00:47:32.160 | Find out more at kellennewport.com/slow.

00:47:33.160 | All right.

00:47:34.160 | What's our question?

00:47:35.160 | Jesse?

00:47:36.160 | This question is from Matt.

00:47:37.160 | He actually emailed me over the weekend.

00:47:38.160 | So I had to include it because I was curious myself.

00:47:40.120 | I just sat down in my garden on Eastern Saturday weekend to read Slow Productivity and hardback.

00:47:46.400 | I noticed the following the size perfect size for a hardback, not so big that it's hard

00:47:51.160 | to hold up the weight.

00:47:52.680 | Again, glorious.

00:47:53.680 | The paper choice, such a nice weight and color.

00:47:56.560 | The font love it.

00:47:57.560 | I'm not sure what it is, but I'm going to try to work it out.

00:48:00.840 | The page size by this, I mean, the margins on the page, again, I like it a lot.

00:48:05.720 | Were all these factors deliberate?

00:48:07.400 | Well, Matt, little known fact, I hand bind every copy of Slow Productivity.

00:48:14.400 | I sit outside under a tree and I sit and I knit, whatever you do, I bind with thread

00:48:21.960 | every page.

00:48:22.960 | Now, it's not quite true.

00:48:24.800 | So a lot of that is deliberate, Matt.

00:48:27.520 | I will say the thing that I really went back and forth a lot with the publisher was the

00:48:32.720 | interior design, the font, and how the interior design looks, because I had a very specific

00:48:38.520 | idea there.

00:48:39.520 | This whole book has a lot of very specific aesthetic choices.

00:48:42.840 | I think that the first design they put together was what I would call like the standard sort

00:48:48.440 | of business space idea book design, similar maybe to like A World Without Email.

00:48:52.560 | And it was much more of a sans-serif adjacent font, a more modern look, a more sleek kind

00:48:59.520 | of digital type look.

00:49:01.280 | This was kind of like a standard look that a lot of these types of books went.

00:49:05.000 | I said, no, no, no, this has to be old fashioned.

00:49:07.280 | We're tapping into like this timeless attraction to slow production of things that matter.

00:49:12.560 | I'm drawing from the stories of traditional knowledge workers.

00:49:16.000 | I want this book to be more old fashioned.

00:49:18.920 | We iterated and found that font, which you can find the name for.

00:49:21.520 | It's in either the front or back of the book, you'll find the name of the font in there.

00:49:25.960 | I fought for that font and the looks, this more old fashioned look.

00:49:29.920 | And they were really, once they realized what I was going for, I sent them a bunch of existing

00:49:35.200 | books.

00:49:36.200 | Like see what they did with their font and layout.

00:49:37.200 | This is what I'm looking for.

00:49:38.200 | And then they got it right away.

00:49:39.600 | And I really loved the way that design looked.

00:49:41.920 | In terms of like the size and the weight, I also specifically made this book a certain

00:49:47.440 | length that lends itself to a little bit of a smaller trim size, a little bit of more

00:49:51.920 | portability.

00:49:52.920 | I didn't want, sometimes I write tomes, you know, big thick books, not super thick books,

00:49:57.720 | like a world without email.

00:49:58.720 | Like I cover a lot of ground.

00:49:59.720 | That's a pretty thick book.

00:50:01.480 | I wanted this to be more talismensic, is that a word?

00:50:05.680 | That's not how you say that.

00:50:06.680 | How do you say that, Jesse?

00:50:08.200 | I have no idea.

00:50:09.200 | The vocabulary is so robust.

00:50:10.200 | Talismen.

00:50:11.200 | Sorry, talismen.

00:50:12.200 | And then adding like a talisman, talismensic, I'm going to say.

00:50:20.760 | Like a talisman.

00:50:21.760 | Like this object is capturing this new philosophy that I want to return to and like rethink

00:50:26.140 | what I mean by productivity.

00:50:27.140 | And so the size also mattered.

00:50:30.160 | I was the one who really pushed the cover.

00:50:32.080 | I said this cover needs to be rich and artistic.

00:50:36.680 | It needs to capture a mood more than it needs to capture specific information about the

00:50:40.600 | book because there's a big psychological element to slow productivity.

00:50:44.780 | So I'm glad you appreciated it, Matt, because all aspects of the aesthetics of this book

00:50:48.520 | I really cared a lot about and I took some big swings on.

00:50:52.000 | You know, I did some things that were different than the sort of standard book in this space

00:50:55.600 | for my prior books.

00:50:56.600 | I'm glad you appreciated that.

00:50:58.320 | Talismensic.

00:51:00.000 | There is a real word there.

00:51:01.000 | I'm just not getting it right.

00:51:02.000 | All right.

00:51:03.000 | What else have we got?

00:51:04.000 | All right.

00:51:05.000 | We've got some questions from John.

00:51:06.700 | When I come back from a declutter, I can't find a good solution to my reading inbox.

00:51:11.020 | Even after the most careful filters I employ, I still get over 50 high quality think pieces

00:51:16.900 | pushed to me every week.

00:51:18.240 | Right.

00:51:19.240 | So again, so this is great.

00:51:20.240 | So now we can go back and reapply our advice from before.

00:51:24.020 | Collect everything interesting in a place that's easy to get to.

00:51:27.280 | Have regular rituals and time set aside for reading think pieces.

00:51:31.480 | Fit what you can in there.

00:51:33.460 | Be happy with that.

00:51:35.820 | Unless like your job is to stay on top of the cultural zeitgeist about a particular

00:51:40.760 | issue, you just want the benefit is from the interaction and grappling with the smart article,

00:51:47.380 | not from the collection of specific types of information.

00:51:50.260 | So just like to reiterate that advice, I mean, I love the idea.

00:51:53.260 | Let's elaborate this.

00:51:54.260 | I love the idea of reading rituals.

00:51:57.100 | Certain place, certain day, certain times you go to read.

00:52:00.140 | Like I used to tell college students who are like seniors over 21 that my whole like Hefeweizen,

00:52:05.060 | Heidegger with Hefeweizen philosophy is like you need a, you need like a friendly pub style

00:52:09.980 | bar that you can bring your Heidegger, like the stuff that's sort of ambitious that you're

00:52:15.300 | reading and you can sit there and read and it doesn't feel like work.

00:52:18.340 | Or this could be a spot in the woods as well.

00:52:20.580 | It could be like you want interesting places you go to read and think and encounter really

00:52:24.700 | big ideas.

00:52:25.820 | I used to do a lot of reading when I was at MIT during the summer and the spring on the

00:52:30.180 | banks of the Charles, I would like to would read on the running path or on one of the

00:52:34.820 | docks that was out there in the river, especially when like the first sunlight of the spring

00:52:38.700 | season would come.

00:52:39.700 | I have a lot of good memories of that, like location, location really matters.

00:52:44.540 | And so like reading wrapped around location wrapped around with non instrumentality, meaning

00:52:49.000 | you're reading just for the sake of encountering ideas, not because you're trying, you need

00:52:52.500 | it for your work or it's research for something else.

00:52:56.740 | It's really, there's few human pleasures that are greater.

00:52:58.620 | So like have a reading ritual, regularly spend time with contemporary articles, variety of

00:53:06.260 | them.

00:53:07.700 | But the goal, the goal is going to be to fulfill that ritual, not to somehow capture everything.

00:53:13.380 | And again, the big exception here is my articles.

00:53:15.200 | You have to read and share those at the tombs in Georgetown at the tombs.

00:53:18.940 | That'd be a great place because cell phones.

00:53:20.820 | So the tombs is a bar near Georgetown university.

00:53:23.820 | It's a basement bar, college bar, cell phones don't work down there, or at least some providers

00:53:28.260 | don't work down there.

00:53:29.260 | So you go down to the tombs, bring your book and like, you're not going to be distracted.

00:53:33.900 | You can't even look at your phone.

00:53:35.700 | I like the tombs.

00:53:36.700 | I was there last week.

00:53:37.700 | Yeah.

00:53:38.700 | Yeah.

00:53:39.700 | I haven't been in a while.

00:53:40.700 | We had a game at Georgetown university.

00:53:41.700 | So we all went there afterwards and we won in overtime.

00:53:43.940 | So it was exciting.

00:53:44.940 | This was lacrosse.

00:53:45.940 | Yeah.

00:53:46.940 | Yeah.

00:53:47.940 | And then someone, a reader reached out.

00:53:48.940 | Someone reached out.

00:53:49.940 | Oh no.

00:53:50.940 | Someone else.

00:53:51.940 | It wasn't a reader, but I was talking to someone recently.

00:53:52.940 | He's friends with the new coach over there.

00:53:54.620 | Oh, okay.

00:53:55.620 | So he's going to say hi to the coach.

00:53:57.780 | Yeah.

00:53:58.780 | The tombs is cool.

00:53:59.780 | It's a rowing.

00:54:00.780 | It has a rowing theme.

00:54:01.780 | Yeah.

00:54:02.780 | Love that place.

00:54:03.780 | It's a Dartmouth or down there.

00:54:04.780 | Yeah.

00:54:05.780 | The tombs is cool.

00:54:06.780 | All right.

00:54:07.780 | Do we have a call?

00:54:08.780 | We do.

00:54:09.780 | All right.

00:54:10.780 | Let's see what we got.

00:54:11.780 | Hi, Kyle.

00:54:12.780 | I'm Giacomo, a product designer from Italy.

00:54:14.100 | Thank you for Slow Productivity and for the positive change that it has brought to my

00:54:20.020 | personal and professional life.

00:54:23.260 | I have a question for you, and it's related to the principle of obsessing over quality.

00:54:32.020 | So the way I implement Slow Productivity is truly through the lens of quality, because

00:54:38.680 | as you say, obsessing over quality is the glue that brings all the different parts of

00:54:44.560 | this framework together.

00:54:46.700 | Now the question is, do you think that this is the best way, or maybe there are other

00:54:52.660 | ways that we can find the object that we should focus on?

00:54:59.140 | Obsess over its quality is enough to ask yourself, what it is that only I bring to this organization?

00:55:07.480 | And then obsess over its quality.

00:55:10.820 | Thank you so much for your work, and I'm really glad that you mentioned slow food in your

00:55:16.860 | book.

00:55:17.860 | I really hope that, who knows, maybe they're going to reach out to you.

00:55:22.580 | As an Italian, I must say that I'm proud that you included it.

00:55:28.660 | Thank you so much again, and have a great one.

00:55:32.480 | All right.

00:55:33.480 | Well, Giacomo, thank you for that question.

00:55:34.480 | Coincidentally, I should say, I was just right before we recorded, was talking with my Italian

00:55:40.920 | publisher.

00:55:41.920 | So we're going to have an Italian version of Slow Productivity is coming out in June.

00:55:47.200 | So look out for that.

00:55:48.200 | He was actually telling me my books do well over there.

00:55:49.840 | Deep Work does well over there.

00:55:51.640 | Digital Minimalism does well in Italy.

00:55:53.760 | They more recently published So Good They Can't Ignore You, and they were a little bit

00:55:56.680 | worried because I wrote that 12 years ago, and that's doing well over there as well.

00:56:01.640 | So I guess I'm connecting with the Italians, Jesse, I think.

00:56:04.440 | That's good.

00:56:05.440 | Yeah.

00:56:06.440 | So June, I think, 11th or something like that, an Italian translated version of Slow Productivity

00:56:10.680 | will come out.

00:56:11.680 | All right.

00:56:12.680 | So it's a good question.

00:56:13.720 | I might actually draw a little bit in answering this question for people who are watching

00:56:17.200 | instead of just listening.

00:56:18.680 | So what Giacomo was asking about is how do I figure out what craft I'm pursuing in my

00:56:24.200 | job, right?

00:56:25.200 | Because again, it's this key idea in Slow Productivity is that when you turn your attention

00:56:29.100 | from activity and towards quality, producing something really well, all the other ideas

00:56:33.240 | become much more natural.

00:56:35.560 | So you want to care about your craft.

00:56:37.720 | He was suggesting, should I just say, what can I do that no one else can do?

00:56:40.600 | I don't actually think that's necessarily going to be the most accurate way to do this.

00:56:43.600 | So let me draw a picture here.

00:56:45.720 | The Venn diagram, I'm going to draw two circles with an overlap.

00:56:48.000 | So we're going to do a Venn diagram here.

00:56:51.360 | All right.

00:56:53.560 | And we are going to look at this intersection in the middle here.

00:56:58.040 | So how would I label these two circles that we're looking at the intersection in the middle

00:57:02.200 | of?

00:57:03.200 | How would I label them?

00:57:04.200 | I'm going to label what I can do.

00:57:09.160 | What I can do is going to be the first circle.

00:57:12.520 | Notice I'm leaving off that no one else can.

00:57:15.600 | Then over here, produces clear value.

00:57:21.920 | So for your organization or for your company, whatever you do, this red circle are the things

00:57:26.880 | that clearly produce value.

00:57:29.560 | So it's like, these are what ultimately get us new business, it's what the products that

00:57:34.400 | are paid for, it's the strategy that we bring to clients.

00:57:37.240 | This intersection is what you should care about.

00:57:39.040 | The things you can do, where it intersects with the things that produce clear value.

00:57:43.480 | And there might be multiple things in here.

00:57:45.520 | And there might be multiple people that correspond to any of the things in here, that's fine.

00:57:50.600 | And what you do is you find something in this intersection.

00:57:53.200 | All right, here's something I know how to do, preferably something that requires some

00:57:57.120 | sort of specialized training.

00:57:59.560 | Let me get a big dot.

00:58:02.680 | This is messy.

00:58:03.680 | Here, I'll put blue around the two.

00:58:04.680 | Jesse, I'm getting abstract here.

00:58:06.400 | All right, whatever.

00:58:07.400 | Here's something I can do.

00:58:09.640 | It's skilled.

00:58:10.640 | It produces value.

00:58:11.640 | They might have many options, choose one of those.

00:58:14.560 | And then you run with it.

00:58:15.560 | I'm going to get better and better and better at this thing.

00:58:19.040 | So the choice of what, it's not trivial to choose what you're going to get good at.

00:58:22.440 | It's not trivial, but it's also not impossibly hard.

00:58:25.440 | It shouldn't be too fraught.

00:58:27.600 | There's some things I do that actually are non-trivial.

00:58:30.040 | And some of these things also, I can tell matter in what I do for a living.

00:58:34.280 | Let me choose one of those and really focus on getting better and better at that.

00:58:38.220 | So that's how you figure that out, Giacomo.

00:58:40.400 | And just to walk through the logic here, again, once you start really focusing on craft, busyness

00:58:48.640 | becomes more and more unnatural to you.

00:58:51.120 | And it motivates you to go through the other principles of slow productivity to commit

00:58:56.040 | to those more strongly.

00:58:57.680 | I want to be working on fewer things.

00:59:00.040 | I want to have more of a natural pace.

00:59:01.280 | I want to take longer on the stuff that matters because you're trying to get better at what

00:59:04.040 | you're doing.

00:59:05.040 | All that becomes natural.

00:59:06.040 | And then as you get better at what you're doing, you gain more control and leverage

00:59:08.480 | over your job.

00:59:09.480 | And then you're able to make even bigger demands about how many things you work on or the pace

00:59:12.760 | that you work on.

00:59:13.760 | And it becomes a flywheel, a flywheel of slowness and quality.

00:59:17.500 | So don't look for this perfect thing only you can do, but just find something you can

00:59:22.240 | do that's valuable.

00:59:23.240 | Even if other people can do it, your goal is to do it better than them.

00:59:26.440 | I'm going to get better at it than they are.

00:59:27.760 | I'm going to focus on craft.

00:59:29.680 | So that's a good question.

00:59:30.680 | That was, Giacomo, a good chance to qualify that.

00:59:34.000 | All right.

00:59:35.120 | I think we have a case study here as well.

00:59:38.160 | So let's see.

00:59:39.160 | We got a case study.

00:59:40.160 | This is where people send in their stories of putting some of the ideas we talk about

00:59:42.640 | here into action.

00:59:44.920 | This case study, actually, we don't have a name on this one, but we'll just call it anonymous.

00:59:51.700 | I read Digital Minimalism and started applying its lessons.

00:59:55.660 | Since then, I have drastically increased how much I read, drastically increased how much

01:00:00.620 | I exercise, incrementally increased how much I sleep, significantly increased the amount

01:00:06.140 | of movies and video games I have actively and consciously consumed in contrast to passive

01:00:11.580 | or regretful consumption.

01:00:14.420 | My case study is one of very slow and steady progress.

01:00:17.960 | Here are some stats I compiled with my nerd spreadsheets comparing 2022 to 2023.

01:00:24.460 | I doubled the amount of hours I read books, paper or ebook, while listening to the same

01:00:28.420 | amount of audiobooks.

01:00:29.760 | I did 2.5 times the amount of strength training exercises and three times the amount of cardio

01:00:34.820 | workouts.

01:00:35.900 | I increased the average sleep per night by about 20 to 30 minutes.

01:00:39.580 | I increased the amount of video game hours put in by 30% and hours of shows and movies

01:00:44.120 | watched by 80%.

01:00:46.360 | There are also some fuzzy or subjective improvements, but still worth noticing.

01:00:51.280 | Subjective improvement in mood, maybe 10 to 25%, increased attention span as measured

01:00:55.100 | by being able to read for more than an hour in a single sitting, which was unheard of

01:00:59.660 | for me two years ago.

01:01:01.980 | Now I can do that.

01:01:03.580 | Increased attention to kids due to lack of phone usage when spending time with them.

01:01:07.500 | I used the phone foyer method.

01:01:10.260 | And mood and attention span improvements.

01:01:12.660 | Reading time seems to be reduced, vaguely remember 4-5 hours daily previously, that's

01:01:17.200 | down to 1-2 hours, and that's mainly maps, podcasts, reading time trackers, and leaving

01:01:22.860 | my screen on after making a call or text.

01:01:25.040 | I forget to charge my phone overnight and it is never a problem.

01:01:28.200 | I have saved a few hundred dollars because I no longer feel any need to replace the phone

01:01:31.120 | I've had for 3+ years.

01:01:34.400 | I like the quantitativeness there.

01:01:36.480 | Most people don't like to track things so closely, and I think that's fine, that's a

01:01:39.280 | personality decision.

01:01:41.320 | But I appreciate us being able to benefit from seeing the quantitative benefits of getting

01:01:46.100 | more intentional about your relationship with technology.

01:01:49.420 | There's a lot of cool things in here, let me highlight a couple things.

01:01:53.380 | The phone usage.

01:01:54.580 | Phone foyer method is massive.

01:01:55.980 | I put my phone in the same place in my house when I'm home.

01:01:58.660 | If I need my phone, I go to that place to look something up or to make a call or to

01:02:02.260 | receive or send text messages, and then I leave the phone there and go back to what

01:02:05.140 | I'm doing.

01:02:06.740 | That makes a big difference.

01:02:07.740 | The phone is no longer a constant companion, it becomes instead an oracle.

01:02:11.500 | Something you consult usefully as needed, not something that's always with you.

01:02:17.060 | I also like this idea of attention span returning.

01:02:20.500 | Like when you start to read on a regular basis, you get more comfortable reading.

01:02:23.900 | And reading is a good proxy for basically any sustained concentration demanding activity.

01:02:30.500 | The anonymous writer here says two years ago or more, the idea that he could read for a

01:02:35.900 | single hour and just do nothing but read for an hour was unheard of, and now he does it

01:02:40.300 | regularly.

01:02:43.020 | More time spent with kids, big deal.

01:02:45.140 | More time spent exercising.

01:02:47.500 | When you get more intentional about your time and your technology, it really opens up a

01:02:51.220 | lot of things.

01:02:53.220 | So we hear about all these things this person was doing that they weren't doing before.

01:02:57.060 | And probably if we talked to this person before, they would just say, "How would I ever have

01:03:01.140 | time to read?

01:03:02.140 | How would I ever have time to exercise?"

01:03:03.300 | And it turns out like, oh, you had more time than you thought, but the technology was stealing

01:03:07.660 | and monetizing it.

01:03:09.060 | So these moments that you could have spent making your life and your family's life better

01:03:14.540 | was instead being spent implicitly toiling in the salt mines of these attention economy

01:03:20.100 | companies, looking at their content to make them more money.

01:03:22.180 | So you sort of regained that.

01:03:23.180 | So anyway, this is a cool case study.

01:03:25.620 | He says this is digital minimalism in action.

01:03:27.260 | Yeah, it is digital minimalism, but it's like the whole program here in action.

01:03:30.900 | So that was cool to see.

01:03:31.900 | All right, so we have a final segment coming up, but first, Jesse, let's hear from another

01:03:37.060 | sponsor.

01:03:38.060 | I want to talk about our friends at Shopify, right?

01:03:43.760 | Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business

01:03:52.300 | from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage, all the way

01:03:57.300 | to the did we just hit a million order stage.

01:03:59.780 | Shopify is here to help you grow.

01:04:01.540 | They have an all in one e-commerce platform.

01:04:04.980 | You could be selling things in a store.

01:04:07.920 | They have the point of sale systems that make that easy.

01:04:11.320 | You can be selling things online.

01:04:13.340 | Best e-commerce setup makes it easy for you to sell things online, gives the users this

01:04:17.360 | like fantastic checkout shopping cart experience.

01:04:20.820 | If you're selling things, Shopify is who you should be using.

01:04:26.820 | It is definitely what Jesse and I will use when we, and I don't say if, I say when we

01:04:31.480 | launch our long rumored deep questions store with confusing t-shirt slogans, Shopify is

01:04:39.300 | absolutely what we're going to use to rack up our, and I want to be conservative here,

01:04:44.620 | Jesse, but I'm talking like tens of orders that we'll probably get.

01:04:50.260 | But here's the thing, as we go from tens of orders to a million orders, Shopify can be

01:04:54.420 | there for you, whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing,

01:05:00.380 | however you cha-ching.

01:05:02.460 | So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep.

01:05:08.120 | Just be sure you type that all lowercase.

01:05:10.940 | Go to shopify.com/deep now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in, that's shopify.com/deep.

01:05:17.260 | I also want to talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor.

01:05:23.180 | I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder for many years.

01:05:27.200 | He used to be the fitness advice guy for my study hacks blog, and I've kept in touch with

01:05:33.660 | him ever since.

01:05:34.660 | MyBodyTutor is a brilliant company because it solves a real problem in a smart way.

01:05:38.780 | It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness,

01:05:43.380 | which is consistency.

01:05:44.380 | It's not too hard to figure out what you should be doing with your diet and exercise.

01:05:49.140 | It's hard to keep doing it.

01:05:50.460 | It's hard to adapt that when the situation temporarily changes, like you're traveling

01:05:54.660 | or it's the holidays.

01:05:56.260 | MyBodyTutor solves this by giving you an online coach, a coach that's dedicated to you.

01:06:01.740 | They help you make your plan for nutrition.

01:06:03.900 | They help you make your plan for fitness, and you check in every day.

01:06:09.140 | Here's how it went.

01:06:10.300 | If you have a question, they give you feedback.

01:06:11.460 | If you need encouragement, they give you encouragement.

01:06:13.580 | You need to modify your plan for whatever, business travel, they help you do that exactly

01:06:17.300 | for you.

01:06:18.300 | You get all the power of having a trainer that's working straight with you without the

01:06:22.340 | expense of having to have someone come to your actual house.

01:06:25.580 | Because it's done online, it becomes a lot more affordable.

01:06:30.020 | If you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving Deep Questions listeners $50 off

01:06:33.460 | their first month.

01:06:34.740 | All you have to do is mention the Deep Questions podcast when you join.

01:06:39.540 | Go to MyBodyTutor, that's T-U-T-O-R dot com, and mention Deep Questions when you sign up

01:06:44.180 | and you'll get $50 off your first month.

01:06:46.900 | All right, let's do our final segment.

01:06:51.380 | There's a thing we used to do, long-time listeners know it, called Deep or Crazy, where I would

01:06:56.060 | talk about some sort of scheme I had, some sort of dubious thing I've invested money

01:07:01.380 | in and Jesse would be our arbiter to determine was this decision a bid for living a deeper

01:07:09.100 | life or is it crazy.

01:07:10.660 | You remember this game, Jesse.

01:07:11.660 | We've been doing this one for a little while.

01:07:15.380 | I have three things that get maybe increasingly outlandish, either decisions I've made or

01:07:21.680 | I'm thinking about making.

01:07:24.620 | Number one, I have tricked out the studio here at the Deep Work HQ with a really nice

01:07:31.980 | teleprompter system.

01:07:34.140 | I'm actually looking right now into a teleprompter.

01:07:36.500 | I can see my own face reflected up on the screen, so I'm looking at my own eyes, but

01:07:40.180 | actually I'm staring down the barrel of the camera.

01:07:42.980 | When I'm doing interviews, remote interviews, I can have the interviewer's face right in

01:07:49.380 | front of me, so I could be making direct eye contact but staring down the barrel.

01:07:53.540 | This is an Elgato teleprompter.

01:07:56.020 | I just set it up, so I thought this would be good because I spend a lot of time in here.

01:08:00.340 | This is where maybe it gets a little bit more outlandish, Jesse.

01:08:03.140 | I also was thinking, "Hey, when I just do normal Zoom calls for work with my publishing

01:08:09.620 | team with faculty meetings at Georgetown, it's a waste not to use this nice studio I

01:08:16.340 | have."

01:08:17.340 | And so I also bought a pretty good Rode condenser shotgun microphone that I can put off camera

01:08:27.180 | aimed at me, so now I can do a Zoom meeting.

01:08:30.620 | I can be looking down the barrel of Zoom, but really be looking into my pretty nice

01:08:33.420 | Sony a6400 and have no mics because when you're on a Zoom meeting for work, you don't want

01:08:38.620 | to have a broadcast mic and headphones on.

01:08:41.800 | So I'll be completely mic-free, but well-lit with three-point lighting, looking down the

01:08:46.420 | barrel, really good audio, but with an off-camera microphone.

01:08:49.660 | All right, so the question, this upgrade of the studio, Jesse, deep or crazy?

01:08:59.900 | Very deep.

01:09:00.900 | All right.

01:09:01.900 | The only thing you have to figure out is the shirt you're going to wear for these new things.

01:09:06.220 | I'm thinking no shirt, is that you put a pull-up bar, get a pump going, and then just do every

01:09:13.180 | meeting like they do in the Marvel movies where they're holding a really hard-

01:09:17.700 | The new Roadhouse with Conor McGregor?

01:09:19.500 | Yeah.

01:09:20.500 | And they're always holding a flex because they want to look good.

01:09:23.260 | That's going to be my flex is in a very sort of unsettling way, just sort of be shirtless

01:09:29.900 | in Zoom meetings.

01:09:31.540 | All right.

01:09:32.940 | Second thing, I'm upgrading the makerspace part.

01:09:36.980 | So the DeepWork HQ has a studio, it has a makerspace/production office, and then has

01:09:43.300 | like a conference room.

01:09:44.860 | And so I'm upgrading the makerspace because I have a lot of making I want to do and I

01:09:50.660 | want to clean it up and get stuff stored better, and me and my sons are working on various

01:09:55.100 | things.

01:09:56.100 | I want to make the makerspace more usable, I'm going to put up a pegboard and get a lot

01:09:59.980 | of stuff off the desk and-

01:10:01.220 | Just get it organized.

01:10:02.660 | Get organized because I'm learning CAD design because I want to be able to build sort of

01:10:08.100 | custom 3D print components and cases for the microelectronics I'm building, et cetera.

01:10:12.220 | So I'm excited about that.

01:10:14.500 | I felt compelled as part of doing this to really upgrade the computer system in there.

01:10:19.940 | And all this stuff arrived, by the way, Jesse, I haven't brought it over yet.

01:10:24.180 | But we have a nice external monitor in there, I bought another one.

01:10:27.860 | And I got the dual Jarvis Herman Miller sort of monitor, free-floating dual monitor stands.

01:10:34.180 | You'll be able to position those two monitors like however you want them.

01:10:38.540 | And then I invested in like a pretty good mid-range Mac computer, a Mac Studio, which

01:10:44.260 | is like a step above an iMac or a Mac Mini, but a step below the Mac Pro.

01:10:49.260 | It's a pretty powerful computer, it's got a good amount of RAM.

01:10:52.300 | It's got a big multi-core GPU in there.

01:10:57.060 | It's something you would use for like pretty serious 3D design or video editing.

01:10:59.860 | So I'm telling myself, well, Jesse, you do some video editing in there.

01:11:03.620 | So this, you're going to have dual screens and like a beast of a computer for video processing

01:11:07.420 | that can like really, it can do 4K, even 8K, like whatever you need to do.

01:11:12.580 | And I do 3D design and my son does 3D design.

01:11:14.940 | And so we're like, yeah, we can do rendering and we can do slices for our 3D printer and

01:11:18.220 | everything's going to be really fast.

01:11:20.960 | It's probably like 5X more powerful than it needs to be.

01:11:23.980 | But I just like the idea of my maker lab of just, this was like my gift to myself for

01:11:28.100 | the book launch of just having like a beastly computer system set up in there.

01:11:32.540 | 100% deep.

01:11:33.540 | Because also you got to consider back in the day when you remember you had the noise that

01:11:39.540 | was bothering you and you were thinking about moving studios to maybe a potentially more

01:11:42.580 | expensive studio.

01:11:44.180 | And now, I mean, we stayed and you're probably, you know, got a decent deal.

01:11:47.780 | So you're saving, you know, funds on that as well.

01:11:49.500 | You're right.

01:11:50.500 | We could have been spending a lot more money.

01:11:51.500 | Yeah.

01:11:52.500 | Yeah.

01:11:53.500 | I don't know how we got rid of that hump.

01:11:54.500 | Oh, I fixed it eventually by just like changing certain, turning down certain gains and turning

01:11:58.420 | up other gains.

01:12:00.220 | I solved that problem with a time honored of like turn offs.

01:12:04.260 | But yeah, you're definitely, you're definitely allowed to like beef up the maker computer

01:12:07.340 | room now.

01:12:08.340 | Yeah.

01:12:09.340 | I want to like be like writing my program and doing like my CAD designs and like the

01:12:11.340 | big monitor and like dragging things over and put into the 3D printer and I have my

01:12:14.940 | desk where I'm doing whatever.

01:12:16.540 | And okay, I like big computers too.

01:12:19.300 | I just hang some of those pictures up there.

01:12:21.420 | Gonna hang some pictures.

01:12:22.420 | I'm buying a cool, I have a cool piece of artwork I'm buying for in there as well.

01:12:25.780 | That's awesome.

01:12:26.780 | Yeah.

01:12:27.780 | So everything is going to be covered in there.

01:12:28.780 | It's going to be a cool space.

01:12:29.780 | All right.

01:12:30.780 | So we've got two deeps.

01:12:31.780 | The final thing is in the maker lab and this, I mean, I think this one is just like from

01:12:36.340 | a professional perspective, probably very necessary.

01:12:38.540 | I want to move the fridge.

01:12:39.540 | We'll move that somewhere else.

01:12:40.540 | We've got plenty of room for the fridge and I want to replace that with a street fighter

01:12:44.460 | video game cabinet.

01:12:46.260 | Crazy, crazy.

01:12:48.860 | Oh, that one might be crazy.

01:12:52.900 | I might do that though.

01:12:54.580 | I like the idea.

01:12:55.580 | I mean, I was looking at these video game cabinets and I didn't want a game that is

01:13:01.820 | of the style of like you try to play as long as you can, like a standard video game.

01:13:05.660 | I wanted something like if I was here, I'm here with like my sons, like you're like,

01:13:08.900 | okay, we got to like clear our head for five minutes or two minutes.

01:13:11.020 | You can like jump on and play one fight and then like that's done and then you can get

01:13:14.260 | back to whatever else you're doing.

01:13:16.140 | And I remember street fighter very well from my childhood.

01:13:19.020 | So I'm eyeing a street fighter video game cabinet, not vintage, not vintage.

01:13:25.980 | I went down the track of vintage.

01:13:28.340 | Vintage is hard.

01:13:30.220 | They break.

01:13:31.220 | They're big.

01:13:32.220 | They're going to be hard to get up here.

01:13:34.300 | Are you talking like an arcade thing?

01:13:36.980 | Yeah.

01:13:37.980 | Yeah.

01:13:38.980 | Like you stand at it with the like, yeah, the controllers.

01:13:41.980 | Um, so I looked in the vintage, what I really wanted was pre microprocessor electronics,

01:13:47.220 | like the original pong and breakouts.

01:13:49.220 | That's like impossible to find.

01:13:50.540 | Um, I did find a really good company in the DC area that could refurbish like an actual

01:13:54.860 | like vintage cabinet, but I worry about them being too big to get up here and it might

01:13:59.140 | take up like more space than we think.

01:14:00.660 | And because the stairs are narrow and it's for the audience, it's a mini fridge.

01:14:04.460 | Yeah.

01:14:05.460 | So it's, yeah, right, right, right, right.

01:14:06.460 | It's not like we're moving a huge fridge.

01:14:07.860 | Yeah.

01:14:08.860 | We're replacing, like, it's not a big space.

01:14:09.860 | We're putting this in.

01:14:10.860 | Um, so I worried about that and they break easily and then you have to have like the

01:14:13.660 | team come out or whatever.

01:14:14.820 | So there, there's a compromise is there, there are a couple of companies that just, they,

01:14:18.060 | they build these things new, um, and they come, you, you, they come in pieces and you

01:14:22.980 | reconstruct them.

01:14:23.980 | It's not vintage electronics.

01:14:24.980 | It's actually like a nice new screen and just running off of a, uh, emulator.

01:14:29.300 | Um, so, but it's a smaller footprint.

01:14:31.700 | Uh, it's like it would fit in there without thinking, and it was still solved the problem.

01:14:35.260 | Um, it was still solved the problem of like, I liked the idea in there just like having

01:14:39.460 | something like from my childhood that you could go over there for five minutes and like

01:14:43.620 | clear your head and then get back to like whatever you're working on.

01:14:45.940 | So I'm writing at my major monitors, like working on a project, whatever.

01:14:49.620 | You can just like roll over there and like do a couple of fights and then like get back

01:14:53.940 | to what you're doing.

01:14:54.940 | That's so good.

01:14:55.940 | All right.

01:14:56.940 | So we've got two deeps in a crazy, I'm going to do all three of them, I think.

01:15:00.820 | Yeah.

01:15:01.820 | Great.

01:15:02.820 | All right.

01:15:03.820 | All right.

01:15:04.820 | Well, we haven't done that in a while, but I'm glad to have a chance to do it.

01:15:05.820 | Um, I guess it's all the time we have.

01:15:08.380 | So we'll be back next week.

01:15:09.380 | Uh, the episode again, if all goes well, we'll be releasing the episode that we're going

01:15:12.580 | to tape on Thursday at people's book.

01:15:16.460 | Maybe we'll delay when we release that, but I kind of want to release that as the next

01:15:19.540 | week's episode.

01:15:20.540 | So it's timely.

01:15:21.540 | So we can talk about stuff that happens.

01:15:22.540 | That'll be fun.

01:15:23.540 | So we'll have a lot of like in-person questions.

01:15:25.300 | So stay tuned.

01:15:26.300 | You'll like that episode next week.

01:15:27.300 | Um, and whether we see you then, or you encounter us at our next episode, uh, stay deep.

01:15:33.100 | Hey, so if you like today's discussion about social media technology and the deep life,

01:15:38.260 | you might also like the discussion from episode two 93, where we got into how technology could

01:15:44.860 | help us do administrative tasks in particular, what will be required for AI to clean your

01:15:50.660 | inbox.

01:15:51.660 | That was a really fun discussion.

01:15:52.660 | I think you might like it.

01:15:53.660 | Check it out.

01:15:54.660 | For a large group of people, a big part of our audience, perhaps the even more pressing

01:15:58.660 | question about AI is the following.

01:16:01.600 | When will it be able to empty my email inbox on my behalf?

Quitting Social Media: How To Declutter Life & Discover Your True Self Again | Cal Newport

Chapters