Ep. 396: Can I Learn To Love My Phone Again?

Remember how much we loved our iPhones when they first came out? Can we get back to that relationship with these devices? In this episode, Cal explores five pieces of advice for transforming your current phone back to something that’s less distracting, more useful, and fun once again – a goal he calls “2007 mode.” Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia DEEP DIVE: Can I learn to love my phone again? [3:31] INBOX: A new study on brain fry [30:29] Use of phones in The Pitt [38:58] 17th Century scholar dealing with overload [42:05] WHAT CAL IS UP TO: What I’m trying [43:57] What Cal read [48:45] What Cal watched [49:44] Movies: Secret Agent Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4youtube.com/watch?v=mJ4lsi2RtaIyoutube.com/watch?v=ENUO7dbZ-TYyoutube.com/watch?v=7jVb1lLniEwyoutube.com/watch?v=aC0JKAN5xVIhbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fryinstagram.com/reel/DUxCG_BDvWX/?igsh=a3pyZXNlNTZvdDVp Thanks to our Sponsors: butcherbox.com/deepvanta.com/deepquestions1password.com/deepshopify.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Cal Newport?

  Do you remember when the iPhone was first introduced? It was an exciting moment. Like, I want to play you a clip here from Steve Jobs keynote address at the 2007 Macworld, where he first introduced this device. And I want you to listen to the enthusiasm of the assembled crowd.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.

• 1:07Cal Newport?

  Wow, those were the days. And then when we finally got our hands on those devices for the first time, they were everything we had hoped they would be. They were slick and easy to use, and they were super useful, and they were fun. But then, of course, over the years that followed, our relationship with the phones began to sour. Now, a big part of this is the attention economy platforms that realized there was money to be made in making us look at these screens longer and longer, so they built their contrived addictive apps. And soon, we felt obsessed with our phones. But also, it was just clutter. Over the years, we've added more and more different types of apps and services, some

• 1:51Cal Newport?

  useful, some that we've forgotten, some that have become habits, and some we wish we could get rid of. And now, just the whole screen, when we turn on that device... Is a multi-colored, garish, distracting pile of exhaustion. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to the way we looked at our phones in 2007? Well, here's the thing, I think we can. In recent years, there's been a lot of interest in both the app space and the sort of strategy space and figuring out how to transform the, the, the actual setup of your phone so that it is much simpler and more fun, like the phones used to be when we first got them. And to do this without having to give up major functionality that still makes smartphones

• 2:36Cal Newport?

  useful. I call this effort putting your phone into 2007 mode, and it's what I want to talk about today. So I have five big ideas I want to share, five practical ideas for transforming your existing phone into 2007 mode. The first four come from very popular videos online and the fifth idea will be my own. Collectively, these present a possibility for a much healthier and more enjoyable relationship with your device. And let's be honest, we could all use that in our current moment. All right, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music.

• 3:31Cal Newport?

  All right, so let's get into it with my first piece of advice for putting your phone into 2007 mode. This is probably the most drastic of the advice I'm going to suggest, so I want to start with it so we can really set the tone right. The idea here is to completely transform the visual interface you use to interact with your apps. In particular, I want to talk about moving away from screens filled with brightly colored application icons to instead a monochromatic screen where your apps are listed in text. So you'll actually just see, for example, on a dark gray background in light gray text,

• 4:10Cal Newport?

  messages, the word messages, maps, the word maps, weather, the word weather, and so on. This type of interface was really first popularized by a feature phone known as the Light Phone, which used an e-ink display like you would have on a Kindle that really could only do monochromatic displays.

• 4:28Cal Newport?

  But people really enjoyed that. And so there's been a sort of renaissance in apps developed that you can run on a standard smartphone, like an iOS phone or an Android phone to make your interface look like that Light Phone interface. Two of the more popular ones are Blank Spaces and Dumb Phone, but there are others. All right. So how do you technically, like, what are the technical steps to doing something like this? Going from all of these icons to just a black and white screen with text on it? What I want to do here is play a little bit of a clip from a longer video about how to do this. This is from a channel called Nicknology, the very popular video that I'm going to play this clip from is viewed something like half a million times. My goal here in playing a clip from this is just to

• 5:09Cal Newport?

  give you a sense of the type of steps involved in these transformations. Obviously, watch the video for the full set of instructions. All right, let's hear this, Jesse.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Actual Light Phone. Head to the App Store and download the Dumb Phone app. It looks like this. First thing you're going to want to do when you open the app is set up which apps you want on your home screen. I chose Phone, Messages, Notes, Spotify, Google Maps, and Settings. These are the most basic things I use on a very regular basis, and none of them lead to distraction. As you can see, I already have mine set up, but if you hit this little button in the bottom right, you'll be able to select which apps you feel are best for you. You can also reorder them to your liking. Once you've completed that, you're now ready to add the Dumb Phone widget to your home screen. You're going to want to start with a completely blank canvas. Long press to activate Wiggle Mode, then remove all four apps from your dock. Next, swipe over to an empty page, then select Edit

• 5:59Speaker 02

  at the top left, then Add Widget. Navigate down until you see Dumb Phone. You can also search for it by typing DP. Add the first widget to your home screen.

• 6:07Cal Newport?

  All right, so I'll cut it off there, but that should give you an idea of what's going on. Just like quickly summarize, and I'll say if you're listening, this might be a case where you want to jump over to the video so you can see that on the screen. But just to quickly summarize, when you go to that Wiggle Mode where you can take individual apps off and on different screens, you can take the apps off of the dock on the bottom, and now on every screen, there'll be no apps on the bottom. And then what they did is they navigated to a blank screen. You know how you can scroll through different screens? And they added a widget from the Dumb Phone app. And then that widget is what you can configure in the Dumb Phone app to say, what apps do I want? And what do I want to call them? The final thing, this is the thing that threw me, which I didn't understand when I was watching this video, but now I do, when I watch it a little bit more closely. How do you make that your new home screen?

• 6:52Cal Newport?

  Just this blank screen with this one widget on it that's displaying the dumb phone app. There's a mode I didn't recognize, a setting screen where it shows all of the different screens. You can side scroll through on your phone and you can uncheck ones you don't want to see. They don't disappear. You can recheck them again and get them back. But if you uncheck them, they're no longer displayed. So you can just uncheck everything except for the screen that has the dumb phone widget. And so now, when you turn on your phone, you just see this blank screen with the widget on. There's a lot of other tips in that video. You want to set your background, the match it. There's a spacer widget you can add to keep it centered. But that's basically what goes into it. You download an app, you set up what apps you want on your simple screen.

• 7:33Cal Newport?

  You say what names you want, and then you do some settings on your phone to make that the only screen you see is one that has that widget centered. All right, so if you do that, you already are, I would say 70% of the way or 60% maybe towards 2007 mode. But now we got to start refining this setup even more, which brings us to our second tip. The next tip comes from a name that's familiar to my listeners, Writer Carroll, inventor of the bullet journal method of analog life organization. He has a, what I thought in a video that he posted on his site, a clever idea for how to go take the next step. Once you've moved to text-based descriptions of apps,

• 8:15Cal Newport?

  he had an idea for moving to the next step to get even closer to 2007 mode. Let's, let's hear it in his own words and then we'll, we'll talk about it a little bit more. Jesse, let's hear what Writer had to say.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  So here's what I did. I changed all app names to verbs, actions that support who I want to be, like write, connect, move, learn, plan. The shift is subtle but powerful. I'm not reacting to brands or my life. I'm exercising my agency, one intentional action at a time.

• 8:48Cal Newport?

  So this is a powerful idea. He's saying as long as you're going to have text-based descriptions of your app, be careful about what text-based descriptions you use. Describe the aspirational outcome you want from using that app. Use that to describe the app instead of its name. So I want to walk through, he mentioned them briefly, but let me walk through specifically the examples he gave in this clip right there. So he began with the following five apps listed text in his sort of minimalist phone setup. He had a writing app called IA Writer, the messages app, Apple Notes, Instagram, and Calendar. Those were apps he uses a lot, and he had those descriptions. Here's what he changed

• 9:29Cal Newport?

  each of those descriptions to, to make it more value outcome oriented. He changed IA Writer to write, so it's just described as write, the action write. He changed messages to the word connect. So, you know, it's not the messages app, it's I click there if I want to connect to other people. And he changed Instagram to learn, Calendar to plan, etc. So the bigger idea here is the way you see your apps described will change the way that you think of them. And if you really focus in on the value enhancing action of the app and its description, you now see this device as delivering you value enhancing actions

• 10:12Cal Newport?

  as opposed to just this sort of mechanistic, consumeristic, transactional relationship with other commercial activities. I don't know what you would rename TikTok in this scheme though, Jesse. What is the action you're trying to, I think I would just put on my phone, give up. And that's, when I click give up, that means I want to just scroll through TikTok. All right, let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

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• 11:10Cal Newport?

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• 11:55Cal Newport?

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• 12:37Cal Newport?

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• 13:09Cal Newport?

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• 13:54Cal Newport?

  All right, so let's check in what we have so far. We're two tips into going into 2007 mode. One, and most importantly, we've now changed our phone to a monochromatic's display that just lists apps as text. Two, we've carefully named those app descriptions to focus on the value that we hope to enhance when we use it. All right, now let's keep going with our third piece of advice. And this has to do with the app experience themselves. So everything so far is about the interface through which you access apps. But once I click on that app, now I'm back into whatever world that app developer wants me to be in. So I can label Instagram, for example, with whatever aspirational name I want.

• 14:37Cal Newport?

  But when I click on it, I'm in Mark Zuckerberg's world. And all of the things they've optimized to get me mindlessly scrolling through algorithmically curated content, or whatever they're doing, is still waiting for me in the app. So my third piece of advice is identify the most addictive apps, the apps that tend to keep you on phone longer than you want to be and make you unhappy. Identify what those are, and let's re-engineer the apps themselves so that the experience is more useful, functional, and minimalist. So how do we do this? Well, there's some interesting tools out there that can make a big difference. In particular, there's a whole group of apps now, which you might not have heard of, that work as follows.

• 15:20Cal Newport?

  If you access social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, there's a bunch of different websites that they're compatible with. If you access them through your browser...

• 15:31Cal Newport?

  There are now apps that can get in there and manipulate what the experience looks like. Because we can manipulate, I can't, I can't change what the Instagram app looks like, but I can have an app that goes in and changes what the Instagram webpage looks like. It can take things off or add things back to it. Let me play a clip here to explain this a little bit better. This is from the Ray Sue's channel, very popular video, had 2.4 million views. I want to play a little bit of a clip here where he talks about using one of these app experience modification apps. Let's hear this and then we'll, we'll check in on it.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  And it's solemn there. I recommend the app called Social Focus, which costs $3.99 on iOS and it's free on Android. But with this app, it gives you some basic modifications for every social media site, like YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn, I think. Where you can remove the algorithmic feed, you can remove like recommended content. And they make it more functional and less addicting. For YouTube specifically, the same developer has another app called Untrap for YouTube, which I've also bought, but it allows you to do stuff like remove the thumbnail or remove recommended videos from the sidebar. Like this is what my YouTube looks like on my phone. It's just a list where I'm unlikely to fall into a binging rabbit hole.

• 16:48Cal Newport?

  All right, so let's summarize what's happening here. Instead of actually keeping individual apps for social media or YouTube or related sort of potentially addictive apps, instead of keeping those apps on your phone, you will now access them through your browser on your phone. Step two, you will use the type of apps that were mentioned in that Ray Sue video. And there's a hundred of these and you can find a lot of videos of these online as well, that will then modify to your exact specifications, what you want the experience to be of using those apps. This is advice that keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. This is the type of advice that when, whatever the head of, I don't know who his name is, but the head of ByteDance, when he turns around his Skull of Thrones,

• 17:27Cal Newport?

  the check in on how TikTok is doing and how many young kids they've ensnared into addictive cycles, absolutely fears, because it strips away the addiction while keeping whatever like small sliver of usefulness you still find in those apps. And their whole point is the small sliver of usefulness is supposed to be the lure that gets you to bite the hook, which allows them to pull you out of the lake. But you get rid of the hook. Then people are getting value without having to use it all the time. They have no reason to use them all the time. They become useful. The phone becomes like we used to have in 2007. So I love this idea. There's no social apps on your phone anymore. And if you still, I don't want to have the debate with you now about using social media or not. We've talked about this a lot on the show.

• 18:11Cal Newport?

  I'll put that aside for now. But whatever you are using through the browser modified so you take back control of that experience. I think that's a very powerful idea. All right, let's move on to our fourth idea. Our fourth tip comes from Mayen, Mayen Bialik. So we are mispronouncing her name, Jesse. But to you and I, that is people our age, we obviously know her as Blossom. Remember Blossom? The TV show? You were like born in a CrossFit gym and don't know like what's going on in the world. It was like a very popular show in like the mid 90s. What you were doing in the 90s.

• 18:49Speaker 06

  I remember the wonder years from like the 80s.

• 18:51Cal Newport?

  Okay. We're the same age, man. You should remember Blossom. Joey, her brother Joey, you don't remember this?

• 18:57Speaker 06

  I kind of remember that.

• 18:58Cal Newport?

  Six or seven? She had a friend that had a number for a name.

• 19:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:03Cal Newport?

  Right? I think her name was like six or something.

• 19:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 19:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah. All right. Anyways, I think slightly younger viewers know her as Amy from The Big Bang Theory. She's been around forever. Anyways, she's been doing a bunch of videos about lots of stuff. But she did a lot of videos about technology and her struggle to beat her phone addiction. And in one of these videos, she hinted at an idea that I want, I'm going to play this clip and I'm going to run with her idea and develop it to be even more severe. So let's start with the clip and then we'll run with what she's suggesting.

• 19:32Speaker 07

  Number two, I have an incredibly annoying, damaging habit that I have adopted of scrolling through the news anytime there's a lull in anything, anytime of day or night, no matter where I am. I have no clue why I started doing this. I'll be just walking like from my car in a parking lot to a doctor's office and I'm like scrolling through news. I end up looking at all these headlines and they're terrible. It's almost always like death and tragedy or forgive me, like celebrity gossip that I do not need to be filling my head with. This habit is really hard to break. I'm hoping that just by having an awareness of it, it will encourage me to stop doing it, but I might need to take that news app just off my phone. It's

• 20:13Cal Newport?

  All right. So she gets to the right answer only at the very end. At first she's like, maybe I should like moderate my online news consumption. This is kind of a problem. I wonder if I should really just take the app off my phone, the apps I'm using to get news. That is actually the correct answer. Now, this is an important tip that's often missed because it hits people like me. People like me who don't use social media, or maybe if you do, you're using the advice from my last tip and now it's moderated, it's in a browser, it's in an experience where the addictive elements are stripped off. You don't really have a problem with it, but you still find yourself coming back to your phone all the time because news has borrowed a lot of ideas that the attention engineers innovated, and it can

• 20:54Cal Newport?

  be just as sticky. And now you're like, I'm still on my phone. Instead of doom scrolling TikTok, I'm doom scrolling New York Times headlines. And this could be just as affecting. Jesse, I've had to put up with this a lot recently because, you know, I'm doing this new, these new Thursday episodes, the AI reality check episodes, which requires me to read a lot of AI news so that I can sort of help people feel better about it. And man, there are so many, it goes in waves of topics, but like some, they'll decide, they being like the collective media. Oh, here's some like really negative topic about AI we all need to cover. And then every article is just like pounding this, trying to one up each other in like the worst way. And so like what might start with, AI might affect your

• 21:36Cal Newport?

  job. It kind of like builds up until you get to articles that are, you know, talking about, how do you use your dystopian trash can fire to properly cook your dog so you don't starve? Like, it's just dark. It puts me in a bad mood and I know a lot of its BS. I'm an expert in the topic. So don't let news become the hidden addict or and the right way to do it is don't read news using apps on your phone. Have an alternative way of consuming news. It can involve your phone, but not an app that can constantly refresh, not something that if you check it when you get out of the car, it's going to be different when you get back to the car. You want more static, high quality and self-contained descriptions

• 22:18Cal Newport?

  of the news. So this could be like daily news podcasts. This could be email daily news roundups. That's what I would do. Do not use the news apps because they are just following. I mean, we see this, by the way, like the New York Times figured this out is that they worried about losing. Readers to X. So now what they'll do, if there's any breaking news event is they'll put article after article after article, they'll put live updates. They found a way to make sure that there's an abundance of information piling up for you to keep reading through so that you can have that same scroll experience you have where it used to be five years ago or 10 years ago. If something happened, here is an article that explains it. And that's it, right? For that day, that's your news about it. Now it's they pile, pile,

• 23:02Cal Newport?

  pile. Here's it from six different angles and live updates so that you can keep coming back to it. You have a sense of urgency. So I think news apps is something that is a hidden addiction trap on phones. So follow Blossom's suggestion here and take those apps off of your phone. All right, we're going to get to our fifth tip. I wanted to offer one myself, and I wanted to offer one that I hadn't actually explained before. It's sort of like one of my standard pieces of advice. All right. So what is my addition to this collection of advice for putting your phone back into 2007 mode? All right. I have this idea of seeking functional substitutes for, in particular, the social platforms

• 23:47Cal Newport?

  that are engaging you, overly engaging you on your phone. So we talked about before changing the icons of the social platforms. We talked about before using a browser-based technology in which you can control the experience of what you're seeing on your social apps. Here is my addition to this. Find functional substitutes for those platforms, meaning you ask the following question about the platforms you use. What psychological, emotional, or practical role do these platforms currently play in my life? Like, why is it that I'm going to TikTok? Why is it that I'm going to X? Is it to stave off boredom?

• 24:30Cal Newport?

  Do I go here to try to get hits of inspiration? Is this a numbing thing when I'm stressed out or anxious? I go here because it's just going to like numb me and I don't have to use my mind? Figure out the specific problems these are solving in your life, and then say, what is a positive functional substitute for each of those roles they play? If I use this app to stave off boredom, What's another way to save off boredom that I think is going to be more positive? If this is something I'm using to numb myself when I'm anxious, what's a more positive activity that I can do to save off anxiety? And what I would do is find, you know, add to your interface on the phone,

• 25:11Cal Newport?

  like descriptions of those goals, save off boredom, you know, reduce anxiety or what have you. But now have these links go to these more positive substitutes. So when you pick up that phone, you see the thing you really want to do listed right there. You know, calm anxiety. And now, instead of like going to TikTok, it's going to go to something that you find to be more productive. It's going to bring you to a, you know, a podcast page of a sort of soothing podcast, or it's going to take you to a meditation app, or it's going to take you to your workout app to remind you of like, oh, I should go do some exercise. So I think having functional substitutes for social media really helps you decouple from these things that are pulling back to your phone again and again, even when you don't want to be. All right, so there we go.

• 25:56Cal Newport?

  We had five ways to transform your smartphone into something that's much less distracting and much more useful. So let me go through what we had here. Number one was going to this sort of extreme minimalist interface, which I think is the crux to all of this. Number two was giving better names for the apps on your phone once you're in that interface. Number three was re-engineering the most addictive apps by running them through your browser and using browser modification tools. Number four was don't use phone apps. Use self-contained static forms of news that are updated, say like once a day or so, so that you get rid of that hidden addictive trigger. And number five, find functional substitutes for social media and then put pointers on your phone that take you to those functional substitutes.

• 26:39Cal Newport?

  So your phone is helping you in healthy ways and not in unhealthy ways. So look, there's a lot of other good ideas out there. This is a little big discussion online. So if you go look at any of those videos that we, we pulled clips from today and you watch them and you're tired, you'll see a lot of other suggestions. You'll see a lot of people are talking about this out here. You can customize this as you see fit. But the key thing here is you can take back control of your phone. You can transform it back to something that supports your life. You can regain a little bit of that excitement that we felt back in 2007. And I think now is the time to do it.

• 27:15Speaker 06

  Is your phone set up like that?

• 27:17Cal Newport?

  I'm going to do the minimalist interface.

• 27:19Speaker 06

  You are?

• 27:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't use social media. I don't, I don't have as much of a problem, but I like the idea of the minimalist interface and I, and I think I'm going to use the Ryder Carroll descriptions as well. I don't need to re-engineer the addictive apps. I really don't use that many of those, but I think that's, you know, a good one. I guess I don't use news apps. I do use the New York Times app, so I'll have to think about that. And for the last one, I might do that, right? So I don't use social media necessarily, but I think it'd be nice to have things like, you know, relieve boredom, anxiety, like have some links on my phone that take me to a healthy way to do that. So then my phone, like it'll just change my relationship to the phone. It'd be a source of solutions,

• 28:04Cal Newport?

  you know, for problems.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  If you're going to a ballgame and you need like the ticket Stubmaster app, how would you do that? You just go to the other page?

• 28:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I go to the other page.

• 28:12Speaker 06

  And it shows up all your?

• 28:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can have, I was watching these videos. So like what people, there's a couple of things you can do. There's two options. Some people just have their, their home screen now is minimalist. It's black and white with just the things listed and it's like the main things they use. And then if you go to some other pages, they'll have folders of other apps that like they don't really have as much of a problem with. Other people build up page after page of minimalist descriptions. So they have like their main things on the first page listed in text. And then the second page might be like sports stuff, like the ballpark app and like MLB app listed just in text. And then another page might be entertainment stuff, you know, listed in text. So some people make everything text, others like just make their main page and like the, just the first thing they see when they turn it on, just text.

• 28:57Cal Newport?

  But you can, in the app, you can set up lots of different widgets with different apps and descriptions. And then you're just adding the widget, the pages on your phone and that page is just showing that widget. And the widget just shows the text. And so after a while, you can, so you can kind of do either way.

• 29:11Speaker 06

  How long do you think it takes to set up realistically?

• 29:14Cal Newport?

  I watched that video, like six minutes.

• 29:19Speaker 06

  For non-tech people too?

• 29:20Cal Newport?

  Well, it depends how many pages, but like to set up one page.

• 29:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:24Cal Newport?

  You download this app and then you go in and configure the widget. And then you go to wiggle mode, clear out your doc. Then you navigate over to an empty page. You add the widget, you change the background. You add a spacer widget if you want to like, keep the text centered, which people care about. And then you uncheck the other pages you don't want to see anymore from the page selection page. And then you're good. So I don't know, I think 10 minutes or less, you can have at least like some of these pages up and running. And then you can just like customize it as, as like you see fit.

• 29:52Speaker 06

  Cool.

• 29:53Cal Newport?

  But I think that's a cool way to do it. A lot of people are like, look, I like the idea of the light phone, but I need the ballpark app. I need the bus tracking app that I use to see where my kids' bus is. Also, I don't want to pay 600, I get this phone already pretty cheaply. I don't want to pay $600 for a light phone, but I love that interface. So it's like, kind of cool that you can get that interface now on your existing. Some of these also come with like, uh, social media control. I don't quite understand how this works, but they were, they were saying in these videos that some of these minimalist interface apps will, uh, come with, you know, built in features. If you want to look at social media or something, it'll say, hey, you have to take five seconds first and take a breath and all that type of stuff. And I don't know as much about that, but anyways, I think it's a cool space.

• 30:37Cal Newport?

  All right, you've heard from me. Now we want to hear from you. So let's open up our inbox. All right, and a quick reminder, uh, if you have a question for me or want to share a case study, or perhaps just want to try to get me going on a rant, you can send that over to [email protected]. All right, let's get into it. Jesse, what message are we going to look at first here?

• 30:59Speaker 06

  We have a note here from Alexander about a new study on brain fry.

• 31:04Cal Newport?

  All right, let's see here. Alexander said, hi Cal, big fan of your work. Have you seen this article on AI usage leading to brain fry? By this, they mean some kind of decision fatigue stemming from the increased workload workers can accomplish using AI. I have seen this study. It came out in the Harvard Business Review. I think it has some interesting points in there. Actually, I'm going to talk about a little bit here. Now, look, I know I have this sort of separate Thursday episode where I talk about the AI reality check. But I'm going to talk about this here because I think the results of this study are not just about AI, but they're pointing to a phenomenon.

• 31:46Cal Newport?

  That is relevant for knowledge work in general. All right, so the study is titled, "When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry." It's a collection of authors led by Julie Bedard. It's a, some are from Boston Consulting Group and some are from University of California, Riverside. I'm just going to read a few quotes from this and then I'm going to help you interpret how this is relevant even beyond AI. All right, so early in the article, the authors say, "In recent weeks, online AI users have described increased cognitive load, saturated attention and mental fatigue in social media posts. Engineer Francesco Bonacci, founder of QIa AI, wrote a popular X post titled 'Vibe Coding Paralysis:

• 32:29Cal Newport?

  When Infinite Productivity Breaks Your Brain,' in which he lamented, 'I end each day exhausted, not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six work trees open, four half-written features, two quick fixes that spawned rabbit holes and a growing sense that I'm losing the plot entirely.'"

• 32:45Cal Newport?

  As the article goes on to say, "As a research group that studies emergent workforce and AI trends, these signals caught our attention." "To understand what's going on," again, I'm reading from the article here, "we conducted a study of 1,488 full-time US-based workers at large companies across industries, roles and levels. We asked them about patterns and quantity of AI use, work experiences and cognition and emotions. We found that the phenomenon described in these posts, cognitive exhaustion from intensive oversight of AI agents, is both real and significant. We call it AI brain fry." Now that rhymes, that's nice. "which we define as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity."

• 33:29Cal Newport?

  As an aside, Jesse, this is my number one research rule. If you're coining a term in a research paper, you better make that thing rhyme. That's the key. Rhyming. They went on to say, "We found that the most mentally taxing form of AI engagement was oversight, or the extent to which AI tools require workers direct monitoring. There's some nuance here, however. We found when AI is used to replace routine or repetitive tasks, burnout scores, but not mental fatigue scores are lower." All right, so how do we make sense of these observations? And what does it tell us not just about AI, but knowledge work in general? Well, based on my sort of extensive writing about attention and distraction and knowledge work in the digital age, it seems clear to me that almost certainly a big factor of

• 34:14Cal Newport?

  these observed results is the cognitive cost of context switching. Switching your attention from one target of attention to another is an expensive operation. And when you do it really quickly, you're now forcing your mind in the complex cognitive scenarios before you have been able to fully load up the relevant context. And that creates a sense of mental fatigue and confusion and difficulty actually doing the work. So if we're looking at AI, what would be the type of AI efforts that would make this the worst? And that would be reviewing or doing oversight of efforts by multiple different AI agents, right?

• 34:58Cal Newport?

  So the way that we see AI agents being used most often right now, which tends to be in computer programming circles, they're doing complicated work, the production of code, that you then, or spec writing, or specifying architecture documents, that have to be reviewed by you, the engineer in charge. And that's really hard. And it's in a very specific cognitive context. So when you have to switch between agents quickly, you're switching between, "Oh, I have to review the work that this agent just did," which is a very hard mentally demanding task, that review. And then I jump over to this agent and try to review its work, but that's a completely different cognitive context.

• 35:37Cal Newport?

  This is really difficult for the brain to do. It takes context switching and it pushes it to an extreme. And no wonder it's calling brain fry. But the bigger message here is that we all have to worry about this. I mean, I wrote about the negative cost of context switching back in my 2021 book, A World Without Email, that this is a, one of the key issues that we face in knowledge work is that we have many different ways that we force people to have to switch their context rapidly. And it really exhausts us. So AI, this sort of agent overview approach to AI, which I have a lot of thoughts about because I think it's overblown now, we're going to rein it back in, but I'll talk about that more in the Thursday episodes, is really pushing this context switching issue to the

• 36:20Cal Newport?

  extreme because overseeing a bunch of employees that are working very fast, all on separate projects, and you're trying to switch back and forth, three minutes here, one minute here, four minutes there, is almost an impossible task to ask. And of course, people are burning out. And so there's something we need to do about it there. But more generally, just remember, context switching is productivity poison and something we worry about. All right, I want to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors.

• 36:46Speaker 04

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• 37:16Cal Newport?

  Now, here's a mistake that a lot of small business owners like myself often make. We think because we're not big, we will be ignored by bad actors. Unfortunately, when it comes to digital attacks, this is not true. Cyber criminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. The solution, you need OnePassword. OnePassword provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit: weak passwords. It's a simple turnkey solution that can be rolled out in hours, whether you have a dedicated IT staff or not. And here's the thing, OnePassword is designed to meet small teams where they are, but it's

• 37:59Cal Newport?

  also built to grow along with your company. One particular, one feature I particularly like is their Enterprise Password Manager that will proactively examine your employees' existing passwords to discover which ones are most vulnerable. So take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at onepassword.com/deep. That's the number one, thewordpassword.com/deep, and start securing every login. I just want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast, but here's what I learned: don't reinvent the wheel.

• 38:44Cal Newport?

  Trust industry leaders where you can. And this is where Shopify enters the scene. If you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from big names like Allbirds and Motel to new brands just getting started. Now, if you want to sell online, they can help you get started with your own design studio that has hundreds of ready-to-use templates so that you can have a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. If you need help spreading the word, Shopify can help you here as well by their tools, which let you easily create email and social media campaigns to get to your customers, wherever they happen to be, scrolling or strolling.

• 39:28Cal Newport?

  If we ever start selling products related to this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use: Shopify. So it's time to turn those what-ifs into the Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. That's Shopify.com/deep. All right, let's get back to the show.

• 39:56Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, what other messages do we have?

• 39:58Speaker 06

  We have a message from Karen about the use of phones on the set of The Pit.

• 40:03Cal Newport?

  Oh, I like this one, right? Because we talked about The Pit, the HBO show The Pit, starring Noah Wiley, a couple of weeks ago, and we had Sarah Hart Unger on the show because she's a doctor. And I was like, you have to explain to me all of these different ranks of doctors, intern, resident, whatever. So we're thinking about The Pit. So I guess that's why Karen sent this in. So here's what she said in more detail. My first time writing in, came across the below Instagram reel with Noah Wiley on the on this alternative the cast and crew developed for themselves during long hours on set where they don't have access to their phones. All right, let's let's hear a little bit of this clip here, Jesse.

• 40:50Speaker 08

  Michael Robbie Rubenovich on the pit. One of the cool things that we have here, because nobody's allowed to have their cellphone on set, is we have a lending library where everybody can come, background, foreground crew, and check out a book. It's been growing over the last two seasons. And I'm willing to wager that we've got one of the better red casters and crew in Hollywood today.

• 41:09Cal Newport?

  That's cool. So they're not allowed to have phones on the set of The Pit. Now, I don't know if that is a rule they put in place because they thought it'd be like good for people's mental health, or if it's a rule they put in place because of security, they don't want people like recording what's going on. But that's pretty cool. They have a lending library for the cast members to go and get books. Something I found out about The Pit, when I was reading about them a couple of weeks ago, Jesse, which makes this lending library even more relevant, is the fact that the episode takes place, I mean, the seasons each take place, I don't know if you've seen the show, they take place over one day, right? So each episode is another hour. It takes them about seven months to

• 41:49Cal Newport?

  film a season. So for seven months, you're filming one day in the life of this hospital. Well, what that means is, the people in the waiting room, because they keep going out to the waiting room, those extras have to be sitting there in the waiting room for seven months, right? Because the same people need to be there every time you come out. And what I heard, this was, I believe this was an interview, I was listening to an interview with Wells, is it David Wells, the showrunner who also was the showrunner for The West Wing? Anyways, I was listening, his last name is Wells. I was listening to him being interviewed on the Ringer podcast, The Town with Matt Belmi. And he was talking about this, that

• 42:32Cal Newport?

  they have these really structured days for the extras to make this sort of palatable, right? Because you have to just sit there all day, day after day, and they have like very specific breaks. But he said they're always reading. So they all get these books and they sit there and they read, waiting for like, oh, we need to do some filming now. And they put down the books and like film their scene of one of the doctors walking through the waiting room. And then they try to read again. So it's kind of cool. It's like a environment there where everyone is just, everyone's just reading. So the pit, there we go. All right, let's see. What else do we have here?

• 43:05Speaker 06

  A listener named Adam sent a note in response to your email newsletter from last week about the 17th century scholar dealing with information overload. He said, so essentially, this is just the experience of being human. Any amount of data can overload if we let it?

• 43:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, yes. I guess that's pretty much true, right? Is that our experience of being human is there's specific types of information we're used to taking in, usually information through all of our senses, hearing, sight, smell, touch, so that we can understand what's happening in the physical world around us. The modern turn, sort of like the turn that changed the entire human experience on what like the whole human experience is now built on in the post-Paleolithic age was also now using those brains to process information in a way we never would have done on the savannas, you know, 250,000 years ago. This is, I mean, this is like a theme of a lot of my thinking and writing about thinking. This is like a perilous balancing act. It is difficult to use the human brain

• 44:05Cal Newport?

  to do abstract reasoning about abstract or symbolic information.

• 44:10Cal Newport?

  And so, yeah, we get overloaded really easily. So we have to think about it. We have to practice thinking. We have to contain thinking. We have to have plans for how we're going to think, what information we're going to encounter, how we're going to encounter, how we're going to make sense of it, what we're going to keep away. We really have to care about that. And when we don't, just like when we don't care about our body and we throw all this modern food into the world and we get really unhealthy, if we don't care about our mind, we easily get into trouble. So this is the way I think about the, the modern human experience is it's a intricate balancing act to get a brain that's really not meant for abstract processing of symbolic information to do that all the time in a very productive way and sustainable way. So I think that is, I think that's a good point. All right.

• 44:51Cal Newport?

  Before we wrap up this episode, let's quickly check in what I've been up to.

• 44:58Cal Newport?

  All right. So there's a couple of things here. I'm trying something new from a tools perspective. So sort of inspired by Sarah Hart Unger coming on the show to talk about planners a couple of weeks ago. I bought a Hobenachi notebook, not a Hobenachi cousin, which is the planner she used because obviously I'm a big fan of my time block planner, which does, I mean, I designed it. So it does exactly what I need, but for the purposes of a single purpose notebook, which I've talked about on the show before, where I have a small portable notebook that I'll use for like one problem I'm working on as a place to keep coming back to working through thoughts, adding thoughts. I can capture inspiration from a wider net of my daily schedule and I can do more sort of analog hard thinking away from a computer screen.

• 45:42Cal Newport?

  I find single purpose notebooks to be really useful. So I'm testing out using a small size Hobenachi, I think it's called the Techno grid paper Hobenachi notebook of sort of this size, the, I don't know what you call that, five inches by four or three and a half or whatever. And I'm working on a sort of academic paper about, oh, it's complicated, but a complicated paper. And I'm seeing if this, this notebook format's a really nice notebook that has nice pages, very thin, lays flat and interesting ways with this binding. Trying it out. Maybe this will be the, the new notebook I use for my single purpose notebooks. Right now I use field notes primarily, but I'm giving this a try. It was like 15 bucks, which I think is like a good sweet spot for like, oh, I gotta

• 46:26Cal Newport?

  take seriously whatever project I'm working on, but also not like irresponsible. On the nonsense meter, and by nonsense, I mean brutally important. I have an important update to what I'm doing now, some new things I bought for my Halloween display technology. I am moving on, the last two years I worked on building my own custom light and sound controllers, basically from scratch. I would start with a microcontroller that I would custom program and solder the circuits myself for it to interact with programmable lights and sound systems, because I thought that was like a fun challenge. Now I'm ready to move on to using higher end hardware and more advanced open source

• 47:10Cal Newport?

  software for doing things like show control and prop control. So I think this will be the new fun challenge for what to do, and it's gonna be more reliable, and it's gonna open up many more opportunities and reduce the chances that I shock myself by building my own relay board. So I am now moving over to running the open source FPP Falcon controller software on a Raspberry Pi as my main scheduler. So I bought a Raspberry Pi, this then hooks into an Ethernet network switch, and then you can network into it other device circuit boards that the controller can talk to. So I bought a custom circuit board for doing my programmable LED controls, so I'm getting rid of my custom built circuit, and that can actually network onto the same network.

• 47:55Cal Newport?

  I'm gonna get a relay controller and a motor actuator, motor controller board. And in theory now, I can now have much finer control, much more powerful and reliable control of much more elaborate types of situations. So I am, this is like kind of my spring project, is to learn all that technology, so I can start thinking about the Halloween head. This is like the stuff that's important, let's be honest.

• 48:18Speaker 06

  That's great.

• 48:19Cal Newport?

  So I'm working on that. Recent interviews, I did, there's a couple of things, a couple, if you want some more Cal. I did an interview with Chris Williamson on his Modern Wisdom podcast, came out last week. I think it was really good, so it's worth listening. We get into weeds and a lot of like work and distraction type of stuff.

• 48:35Speaker 06

  I listened to most of it so far.

• 48:36Cal Newport?

  Pretty good, right?

• 48:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, you've been on our show a bunch.

• 48:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I know, Chris, we go back. Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  He was talking about his days of being a, working in a nightclub?

• 48:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, like trying to like, having to add up the money at the end of the day. Yeah, he's an interesting guy. Good interviewer, I always like going on his show. Also, this is probably worth watching, it's been viewed a lot, like well over a million times just a couple of weeks. You know, Hank Green, the YouTuber, did a YouTube video about AI and what worries him. There's like a 20 minute video on that. And then the next 30 minutes is he had me on the show to talk about the video that he had just aired, and we talk AI. And he's got a huge audience, I've got a lot of notes about that interview. I think it was a really good discussion, so check out my appearance on Hank Green's interview, and also check out the AI reality check that I'm doing on Thursdays, maybe

• 49:26Cal Newport?

  not every Thursday, but that's where I'm moving my sort of project of just trying to be realistic about AI, but also lower the anxiety around it. The first one came out last week. Let's see, when this comes out, two will have been out already. So the first two would be out, in theory, there'll probably be a new one coming out on Thursday, so check that out. All right, reading and watching, not to open up the curtain too much, but we don't always record on the same day, and so we're actually recording this pretty soon after our last episode. It's been like four days or whatever, so I've started three new books since the last episode. I did not finish any of those three new books in the four days that passed between the last episode and today. In the latest New Yorker issue, though, I did read Jill Lepore's article about the

• 50:11Cal Newport?

  bicentennial, and it was pretty interesting, you know, about what happened, the history of the celebrations, and what happened in particular in 76. And it's like a, kind of like a straight history piece, you pulled from a lot of sources, and it's, so I enjoyed it, I thought it was worth reading.

• 50:28Speaker 06

  Are the three books you started all hard copy?

• 50:31Cal Newport?

  No, um, like one is Kindle, two are hard copy.

• 50:34Speaker 06

  That's what I'm at, yeah.

• 50:35Cal Newport?

  Yeah, one's Kindle and into a hard copy. But the two hard copy ones came later. They're kind of taking over my attention. I'll see if I get back to the Kindle one, which I sort of impulsively downloaded. In terms of things I'm watching, I'm not quite done with it because it takes my wife and I multiple nights to watch movies, just the reality of like kids in sleep. But as part of our efforts to watch the Oscar nominated movies for 2026, Best Picture, we're almost done with The Secret Agent. It's actually, it's a Brazilian film that people really love. It's a fascinating movie so far. I'm not done yet, but I'll just like drop a couple ideas here to see if this inspires you to watch it or not.

• 51:16Cal Newport?

  It takes place in the 1970s, like 1977 Brazil, and it's the photography, cinematography is very much in that style. So they film it and there's a sort of somewhat desaturated, the color palettes is like very 1970s. It's filmed on old glass anthropomorphic lenses like the, so that, which is like very much like a thing you would see with like the new Hollywood directors in the 1970s. So you get a more cinematic aspect ratio, but you get a lot of these horizontal flares, which you would get. That's just an artifact of these particular types of Panasonic lenses that when you point them at a light, you get horizontal flares of light across. So it's sort of this cool, like physical 70s style.

• 52:01Cal Newport?

  The actors are all like fantastic, naturalistic, character actor, style actors, really real type of people. They're all fantastic. The only thing, here's what I'm going to say, it's a different style of movie than we make in America now. And the way you know it's a different style of movie is that it's 90 minutes into the movie. Things are just happening, but you don't really know, like who is this person? What's their relationship to this person? Is this person is on the run? Why? They don't tell you. You just kind of are seeing these things and it's really not till 90 minutes through the movie that you even really begin to sort of realize like, oh, I think I see what's going on. This is what this person is doing and how it relates to these people and now

• 52:42Cal Newport?

  I'm starting to see what's going on here. It's in no rush. It's laying out threads of realities on not too many spoilers, but multiple timelines and starts to sort of take its time weaving them together. It's more of an experience than like a super by the book plot bullet point unfolding. In America, we don't do these things, especially on Netflix now because we don't trust people's attention span. So, you know, on Netflix, we would have, I don't know, like a title card that would just explain it or have a narrator come in and just be like, you know, and the character realized and then just sort of explain who everyone is and everything that's going on, put titles up on the screen. I don't know. Have like arrows follow to like remind you who people are. Just every

• 53:26Cal Newport?

  once in a while, just cut to like a YouTube style influencers like, all right, let's hold here. Let me explain to you what just happened. So it's nice to see a, a, a much more intentional, sort of slower, novelistic, naturalistic type of screen writing and movie making, but I haven't seen the ending yet. So maybe it goes weird. So I can't, I can't give it my full endorsement yet, but we're going to finish it tonight. So I'm excited about that. We're almost there, Jesse. We're almost, I got yelled at, by the way, my friend of mine who heard me say that like, well, my wife saw Hamnet and I saw Frankenstein and we're kind of running out of time. So we're going to count that on both of our list. And he wrote and was like, no, you have to see Hamnet. It's a great movie. You can't skip it. So

• 54:03Speaker 06

  I started watching Frankenstein. I don't think I could finish it.

• 54:05Cal Newport?

  I saw it in the theater. I wanted to see it at 35 millimeter. It was cooler in the theater, I think.

• 54:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:11Cal Newport?

  I like Yelena del Toro, but I, yeah, I thought the screenplay could be better in that one. Some crazy visual stuff in there for sure.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:23Cal Newport?

  And as, as he does. That's pretty good. It's not going to win best picture though. So we're getting closer. We still have to see sentimental values and God, what else am I missing? Oh, Begonia, which I like that director.

• 54:40Cal Newport?

  I like that director. I like Emma Stone. I'm looking forward to it. My wife is not looking forward to it, but we gotta see Begonia. I think Atlantean's a good director. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, let's stay deep.