Ep 383: Why Is Everyone Talking About “Against the Machine”? (w/ Tyler Austin Harper)

Earlier this fall, the activist, novelist, and essayist Paul Kingsnorth published an anti-technology polemic called “Against the Machine.” To say it hit a nerve is an understatement. In the months that followed, Kingsnorth has been everywhere; profiled, among places, in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and The Atlantic. In today’s episode, I want to find out why Kingsnorth’s take on technology is resonating so strongly. To help me answer this question, I’m joined by the journalist and scholar Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote a great review of Kingsnorth’s book for The Atlantic. We dive deep into Kingsnorth’s ideas and explore what they teach us about our current moment more generally. 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 INTERVIEW: Why Is Everyone Talking About “Against the Machine”? (w/ Tyler Austin Harper) [0:00] Is the simple awareness of a notification as harmful as full context switching? [1:15:49] Is there an “ideal ratio” for consuming information across different mediums? [1:17:12] How can I effectively implement your shutdown routine and not keep checking emails? [1:20:21] How can I manage my social media obligations with my marketing job? [1:23:52] CASE STUDY: Reframing a career to utilize career capital [1:26:07] CALL: Dealing with conflicting views about digital minimalism in a relationship [1:30:21] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?theatlantic.com/books/2025/11/paul-kingsnorth-against-the-machine/684848/ Thanks to our Sponsors: This show is sponsored by Better Help:betterhelp.com/deepquestionsshopify.com/deepmybodytutor.comexpressvpn.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.

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  At some point last year, I received an advanced reader copy of a book titled Against the Machine. It was written by Paul Kingsnorth, a former environmental activist, turned novelist, turned poet, turned essayist. And the first thing that caught my attention about this was actually the cover. It's really cool. It features what looks like a primeval green forest, but as if it's being displayed through an old analog computer monitor that's starting to distort it. It also had a sort of Stranger Things-style 1980s font. So it was a really cool-looking cover. It's like, you know what? I'm gonna read this book. And I did. And you know what? I was captivated. It was about technology, but it was also about culture, and it was also about politics and the environment. Kingsnorth talks about techno-capitalism and

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  how it's choking civilization and destroying the earth. It's not a politically careful book. It skews jargon. It doesn't align with pre-existing tribes. It embraces its own hypocrisy and lobs its share of rhetorical bombs. It reminded me less of the sort of hand-wringing anti-technology op-eds that we see today, and more like those sort of confident, full-throated polemics of past voices like Louis Mumford, or Jacques Ellul, or Neil Postman. It wasn't short, exactly the type of book that someone like me was going to enjoy. But then, earlier this fall, the book actually came out. And when it was finally published, it turns out that Kingsnorth

• 1:23Cal Newport?

  hit a much bigger nerve than I would have expected. He was basically everywhere. The New York Times ran a long profile of Kingsnorth. It opened with a description of the author spending his 50th birthday in a cave in County Clare, Ireland, as a storm drove, quote, "great nails of rain," quote, "into the ground." Kingsnorth, and the reporter tells the article, tells the reporter, "I want to know what's real." And the reporter went on to call the book "a searing indictment of a society hooked on technological innovation." Soon after, Kingsnorth was profiled in my own home publication, The New Yorker. The author, who also named Cal, called the book "part Summa, part broadside, part testament."

• 2:06Cal Newport?

  And then there was a recent review in The Atlantic, which called Against the Machine, quote, "one of the most insightful works on culture, technology, and the environment published in some time," end quote. So what's going on here? Why is this particular book about technology making such an impact? And what can we learn as people who are struggling to cultivate deep lives and distract the world? What can we learn or take away from this book? These are the questions that fascinated me after I saw Kings North was everywhere. These are the questions that I want to answer today. I'm going to have some help. I'm bringing on the show to help me get into who Kings North is and why his book hit. The journalist Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote that big review of Against the Machine

• 2:50Cal Newport?

  that I cited before from The Atlantic. Harper is a great writer. I really like his writing and he's someone who used to actually teach Kings North when he was a professor. So he really knows what's going on here. So I'm going to bring on Tyler. He's going to help me make sense of why this book was so big. And then I will go to my virtual chalkboard and we'll figure out together the big ideas and what you should take away from this book to make your own life better. So without much further ado, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, why is everyone talking about Against the Machine?

• 3:46Cal Newport?

  All right, Tyler, thanks for joining me here to help me figure out what's going on with Paul Kings North. I'll be honest, when I first saw this book and I got an early copy of it and I read it, I was like, whoa, this is cool. I kind of recognized the name, but I didn't really know what was going on. You, you've crossed paths with him. You used to assign Kings North to your students when you were a college professor. Who is he? Like, what do we need to know about this guy?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, Paul Kingsnorth is a former green radical, a former radical environmentalist, who, after being very active in sort of the fringes of the environmental movement for many years, became disenchanted with it over the course of the 90s and ultimately wrote this semi-famous essay called Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, which is also the title of a very good book of essays he put out. And he came to feel like, you know, at its origins, the environmental movement was this movement that was very anti-technology, that was very pro-limit, that had this sense that we need to take a kind of ascetic posture and restrain ourselves in the face of this consumer society that's always saying more, more, more. And he felt like over the course of the 80s and 90s,

• 4:52Speaker 01

  environmentalism shifted toward this movement that was much more centered on sustainability. And he saw sustainability as just this idea that we can keep living the way we live now, except we'll make it sustainable through technology, right? So no longer asking you to ride your bike rather than drive, but we'll just, we'll make the cars green, right? And he saw this as a kind of betrayal of the environmental movement. So when I was a college professor, I, my PhD is in literature, but I taught in an environmental studies department. I signed Kingsnorth because I think, you know, most young people who are interested in the environment think about sustainability as like the end-all, be-all, right? And it was very challenging for them to read this guy who was trying to call attention to the ways in which sustainability is kind of a corporatized model of environmentalism that

• 5:35Speaker 01

  we've been all sold over the last, last few decades.

• 5:38Cal Newport?

  Oh, interesting. So he was around before that. I mean, I always think of sustainability, I mean, you were the environmental studies professor, so tell me if I'm wrong, but this emerges once you have the sort of co-option of the environmental movement by political parties. And it's like, oh, okay, this is no longer the monkey wrench gang against the governor of, you know, whatever. It's like, yeah, we're the Al Gore, we're green. And they had to make it palatable. Okay. So he was from this old school. I mean, I read somewhere, maybe it was even in your review, like, he was from the old, like, chain yourself to the... Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  To the trees.

• 6:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, interesting. Okay, so he gets disillusioned. He writes these manifestos and again, tell me this was in the 2000s, like the, tell me the timeline.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist comes out late aughts or maybe around 2011. I think the book is around that.

• 6:28Cal Newport?

  Oh, interesting. And then, so he makes a radical move, right? This is when he's like, I'm, I'm gonna disappear. I'm gonna go to a farm. I mean, he becomes a Wiccan for a while. Like, what happens to, what happens to Kings North once he kind of gets fed up with the environmental movement?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, he seems like a guy who was kind of on a sort of spiritual quest. I think the early version of the environmental movement where he's chaining himself to trees and so on and so forth, gave him a real sense of purpose is my sense, right? And that as, as that movement became corporatized, he went looking for meaning and purpose elsewhere. You know, at a certain point, I think he became a Wiccan. He, you know, moved to, you know, the countryside. Eventually, more recently, he's converted to Orthodox Christianity. But clearly, he's a guy who's been on a kind of a quest for, for meaning in a society that he feels like is, is sort of like hedonistic and over determined by, you know, the constant intrusion of technology into our lives.

• 7:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and you've read a lot of his work. So my understanding is he's, he's a smart guy. Like, he, he wrote a novel in some sort of-

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Trilogy of novels, actually.

• 7:27Cal Newport?

  In like an old form of English or something like this? He's a poet, like, he's written like really good essays. Like, clearly, he's got a mind that's going at high horsepower.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:36Cal Newport?

  Which is probably driving, driving some of the frustration. Okay, so he sort of disappears at some point. So when does he emerge as like a Substack? That's kind of his thing now, right? Like, that's how he reemerged in our current culture is through Substack?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he, he did write some novels. He wrote another work of nonfiction at some point in the, in the teens or maybe early 2000s. And he did start substacking in the, in the early 2000s, I believe, is when he launches his Substack. Around the time of COVID, I think, or maybe, maybe a bit before. And he started writing, the, the Substack's called Abbey of Misrule. And he started writing about what he, he calls the machine or machine civilization. So this idea, and he's indebted to a bunch of other sort of critics of technology of who've, you know, sort of referred to society as- But his basic kind of insight is that, you know, our society is increasingly organized around using technology to remake not just nature, but human nature, right? And I think that's where we see the connection to some of his earlier work.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Like his earlier work was really focused on the way that the environmental movement went from being a kind of degrowth Luddite movement to being a pro tech movement, right? We're going to use sustainable green technology to solve the climate crisis and all these problems. And his central insight is like, actually, that move is just all across culture. Like, our entire civilization has become organized against the idea of limits. And that just comes to see technology as a way to remake nature, but also human nature in service of, in the service of our whims and desires.

• 9:01Cal Newport?

  Right, so he's, okay, so he's, he's kind of disillusioned from the environmental movement. He's got this view of like, why are we giving up on a sort of more aesthetic, sort of anti-growth type of mindset? Covid comes, he's online, he's writing Substacks, and he's like, I'm gonna take an even bigger swing here. This critique of the environmental movement is a critique of culture. So I guess that's what he's working out on his Substack in the pandemic. Which, there's some irony here, because I have to imagine, because it was, you know, he's on a farm during Covid, that a lot of what he's reacting to is what he's probably encountering online. So it's almost like he's, he's reacting to like a digitized, sort of bastardized version of the world.

• 9:43Cal Newport?

  Okay, so he's writing, he's writing these essays, and then he pulls it together into this book. Is it right to think of this book as, I mean, are these actual adapted essays from the Substack? Or is this inspired by, by?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:55Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  A lot of it's from the Substack. Yeah, there are parts of it that are definitely new, there are parts of it that are pulled from the Substack, but it's sort of his magnum opus. It's the Substack plus some new stuff pulled into a kind of cohesive package.

• 10:06Cal Newport?

  And his Substack's popular, it looks like. Like, he was hitting a nerve. Okay, did you know, were you following this or aware of this before you did this review for The Atlantic?

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been following his work for many years because I think he is one of the more interesting, unusual and challenging sort of environmental writers at the moment. I mean, he calls himself a recovering environmentalist, but I mean, I think it's a bit tongue in cheek. I mean, he is a guy who is deeply committed to the natural world and against the sort of constant human intrusion into the natural world. So, you know, to say he's no longer an environmentalist, I think is to say he's abandoned a certain style of mainstream environmentalism. But yeah, I've been following for, I mean, you know, 10 years or more following his work because he is, he is, I think, a really interesting idiosyncratic. I don't agree with everything he has to say, but he is, you know, persistently thoughtful.

• 10:52Cal Newport?

  I have to say, this is just a brief aside, you know, I'm not an environmental thinker, but it feels like something right up his alley. It's something that's caught my attention about 21st century environmentalism is that it somehow has negotiated itself into a position where the right way to be an environmentalist is for upper middle-class people to take on consumer debt. Like, that's an amazing, it's an amazing transformation. It's like, yeah, take on this loan to buy this car that's like way more than you would normally pay for a car, to finance like solar panels, that you have this complicated formula where with the right rebates in 17 years, I'll be making back whatever. But basically, somehow the solution for saving the planet is upper middle-class people to pay interest to banks.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, shocking.

• 11:31Cal Newport?

  Shockingly, yeah, it's not spend less. It's, you know, work out on a spread. This is upper middle-class technocrats like me, it's our favorite thing to do. We worked out on a spreadsheet that by year nine, with this tax credit, we're going to make back or whatever.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. Just consult this chart.

• 11:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah, exactly. All right. Okay. So then this book comes out. Before we get into the reaction, I have some theories about it. I want to get a little bit more into the book. So you mentioned, you know, he uses this phrase, "the machine." And, you know, this is, he's drawing from a long tradition here. Doesn't Lewis Mumford actually use literally the word "the machine" in his?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the machine, the mega machine, exactly. So he's drawing on Mumford and a whole host of people.

• 12:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah, for a little, it's technique. Kevin Kelly, the technium. Let me give you, all right, I'm going to give you my take. I'm going to give you my short summary of what I think this sort of intellectual move is, and then I want you to tell me like why this is not quite right or like the way you see it. So what I see like the technical, because you know, I love the big polemics, 20th century tech polemics, right? I just think it's, it's just muscular writing. It's like, let's just go for it, right? Like, they don't care. They're just, they're just swinging. Lewis Mumford. I love this story. If you read like the the author's notes to Technics and Civilization, he's like how he wrote that book. This is such a different time for the internet. He's like, well, I went to Europe for like two years so that I could. There's all of these museums

• 12:50Cal Newport?

  of industry in small towns like all throughout Germany where they were like, here is our tractor, whatever. And he's like, so I just spent like two years going from museum to museum, constructing from scratch a history of technology. And then I came back and wrote my book like that's, you know, that's not today. Now, now it's like I had a tweet that did well and I'm going to riff on it. But anyways, okay, so here's my theory, right? Is that that those those writers are in the tradition of this like a Yuval Harari idea, but they're in this tradition of like, look, there are human civilization is defined by commitment to various abstractions is what allows like, you know, Neolithic, post Neolithic civilization to exist. You have like governments and God and human rights and, you know, liberalism or whatever. These are like ideals that are

• 13:34Cal Newport?

  abstract. You can organize activity around. And that you get in sort of a post Marxist world, a lot of these technological critics having this idea of like, you know what, like Marx was pointing out about economic systems, you can have these abstractions that arise that are kind of ruling us or that we live by that we didn't really choose, or maybe they're a little bit more emergent, or it's not, we don't even really have a name for it. We should name it and be careful about it. And maybe we need to reject some of these. And this is where we got this line of critique that was all about identifying these sort of emergent abstractions around technology and culture that that, hey, let's recognize these may is not what we want. And so you have the machine or you have, you know, the technique or whatever it is. And that this is the tradition that Kings North is going back to like, yeah, that's, that's the right way to talk about it. I think it's different than the way we've been writing about this recently, which we can get to.

• 14:19Cal Newport?

  But is that, am I over from a literature perspective, professor perspective, am I oversimplifying there? What am I missing there about like this intellectual tradition this belongs to?

• 14:28Speaker 01

  No, I think that's entirely correct. I think he's in the sort of Jacques Ellul, Mumford, Martin Heidegger sort of tradition of criticisms of technology. You know, that's, that seems spot on to me. I think that's the very self consciously, that's the intellectual lineage he situates himself within.

• 14:43Cal Newport?

  Okay. And so then you say really the right way to understand the machine and his push against a machine. You say it's really an argument about limits. What do you mean by that in your review?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he's really trying to say that most of human civilization now is organized around a rejection of limits, which is another way of saying that most of the arguments we have right now are arguments about the place of nature in human life, right? So whether that is something like gender issues, right? That is what seems like a superficial culture war is actually an argument about like, okay, what role should nature play in human life? How much deference should we pay to nature? Is nature something to be overcome or is it something to be sort of like worked within? And he, like I said, he comes at this, this, this version or of thinking about the machine out of his prior sense of like the failings of the environmental movement, which went

• 15:34Speaker 01

  from being a pro-limit to sort of like an anti-limit movement centered around how do we find a way to keep our current level of material comforts sustainable, right? And, and we can do that by wind farms. We can do that by nuclear power. We can do that by increasing intrusions into the natural world. In one of his early books, he has this great phrase where he's like, you know, it used to be the case, you know, that clear cutting, you know, mountain tops was bad. Now we clear cut mountain tops to put solar panels up in the name of the environment, you know? And his basic insight is that maneuver is all across culture now. And most of the arguments we are having are about whether we should or should not be limited by our, our human nature.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  I mean, for Kings North, you know, what a human is, is a creature that is born with a sexed body and a brain capable of seeking wisdom and then eventually it dies, right? Like, that's what we are fundamentally. And he sees a lot of modern life and particularly technology as oriented around making those fundamental facts about our, our sexed bodies or about our intelligence seeking nature or even death negotiable, right? I mean, you only have to look at all the Silicon Valley startups centered around longevity treatments for, you know, life extension to sort of see what he's on about. So that's kind of his, his central insight that he's working with is we have organized society entirely around a rejection of limits as our kind of ultimate good.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  In the world of expense management, SAP Concur is here to help. From cost control slipping to travel chaos. SAP Concur has an integrated travel and expense solution to help you overcome problems like overburdened teams, decisions looming. When travel, expense, and AP are connected with a single AI-supported solution, SAP Concur keeps you ahead of problems. Visit concur.com to learn more.

• 17:26Cal Newport?

  All right, we're going to take a quick break from my conversation to hear briefly from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. The holidays are in full swing, which means so are the Grinches out there who are trying to steal data about your internet activity. Fortunately, there's a simple and easy way to protect this sensitive information by using ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN is an app that reroutes 100% of your online activity through secure encrypted servers, preventing your internet service provider or other online snoopers from learning which sites and services you're using. And trust me, there are plenty of shady characters out there who want that information so they can sell it to data brokers or use it to help hack you.

• 18:08Cal Newport?

  If you want to keep your activity away from the types of people who will end up on Santa's naughty list, then you need the VPN that is rated number one by the experts at The Verge and CNET, ExpressVPN. Now, here's the great part, ExpressVPN has multiple plans available, so you can find one that fits exactly what you're looking for, including a basic plan that starts as low as just $3.49 a month. That's less than 12 cents a day. Protect your online data for cheap, so you can spend your money on gifts and eggnog. If you want to get ExpressVPN at its lowest price ever, plus four extra months of service, go to expressvpn.com/deep. That's a price as low as $3.49 a month, plus four extra months of service by going to expressvpn.com/deep.

• 18:57Cal Newport?

  This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are a time of traditions. Some of them are new, like signing out the, the find the ultimate, you know, hot chocolate recipe with your kids. And then some might be old, like cooking your great aunt's sweet potato pie, but they're all important. This holiday season, consider incorporating therapy into your traditions as a way to help ensure that you take the much needed time for yourself during what could be a joyful time of the year, but also one that is hectic and sometimes lonely. And if you're considering therapy, consider BetterHelp. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally.

• 19:38Cal Newport?

  And it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Now, something I like about BetterHelp is that they do the initial matching work for you. You just fill out a short questionnaire based on BetterHelp's more than 12 years of experience, and they will connect you with a therapist who is a good fit. This allows you to focus on your therapy goals and not the headache of finding a practitioner. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com/deepquestions. That's better H E L P dot com slash deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's get back to my conversation with Tyler.

• 20:25Cal Newport?

  So even though his general intellectual approach is similar to some of these past books, this feels what's new about his details that, you know, if you read like The Mega Machine and Mumford, I guess there's really more an argument about like political power. It's like the way the pharaohs organized the entire culture around the production of the, the pyramids, right? Or a lull falls more, I guess, I mean, everyone's read that book, but it's also kind of hard to fully make sense of it. But like, I mean, not as hard as Heidegger, but I guess like a lull, you know, when we talk about technique, it's more about, oh, this obsession with like process and efficiency. Yeah, but it's sort of more of, it's very French is like, well, that's, that's, you know, this is not, this is not a culture. This is the wrong culture, whatever, but it's not really about limits, right?

• 21:10Cal Newport?

  It's about the, don't like the wrong people, you know, are in charge, the wrong people are taking, you know, advantage. So this, I guess this is where the environmental strain. If I understand this right, is making King's North's argument more unique because that he's coming at it from a degrowth perspective, which is very different than some of the other, the other 20th century thinkers. Okay. Okay. So interesting. So he writes this book. It's, yeah. And this is, by the way, why, like, part of what's fascinating about, if you read this book, is that like his, his politics are incoherent in like a 21st century.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 21:45Cal Newport?

  Context. They're very coherent in terms of what you just said. But as you mentioned, if you're, if you're like, we need limits to return to like what we are as a core as humanity, you're going to have things in there that the right will really dislike, like anti-capitalism, you know, like, look, we, economic growth is no good. We need to like push back on that. Really strong sort of aesthetic environmental messages, which you're not going to like if you're on the right. But if you're on the left, you're really not going to like him saying like a lot of gender experimentation is like, that's the same as like unlimited economic growth, right? Like, it's just.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  Transhumanism.

• 22:19Cal Newport?

  It's transhumanism.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Basically, it's just transhumanism.

• 22:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that we throw that in there. And that he's, you know, there's, there's sort of like a nationalist strain in there. Like, we need to sort of return to, you know, our, what, we're a part of a particular place and we're like connected to that place. He's anti-mass immigration. It's, so he's, because if you're thinking about things through limits, just like everyone goes everywhere and it's this global cosmopolitan community, you're like, that doesn't make sense. Those politics are incoherent on like a modern scale. So how is that? I mean, I thought you handled it really well in your piece. You're basically like, yes, let's not get in the weeds there. Like, what matters is like, what is the polit, what is the, the framework he has that like maybe leads that seeming incoherence? Let's stick with the main argument.

• 23:03Cal Newport?

  I think other coverage had a little bit harder time with it. So how did that affect what's going on when this thing, when this book landed?

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think people view the politics of the book as incoherent. I actually would make the inverse case, that the politics of the book are very coherent, and that the politics that dominate particularly American society are extraordinarily incoherent, right? I mean, the point I always make is that, and no, other people before me, I mean, Michael Lind has made this point, but like, the Republican Party historically, like, pre-Trump, is very anti-limit on the economy and very pro-limit on culture. The left has been very anti-limit on culture and very pro-limit on the economy, right? And so you have this like schizophrenic mismatching on each side of like, a pro-limit disposition on the economy or culture, married with an anti-limit disposition on the other hand,

• 23:53Speaker 01

  right? And Kingsnorth is like, just anti-limit across the board, right? Like, because the left and right are often like libertarian about culture, economics, but anti-libertarian about the other term, you know? And he's just like, sort of like anti-libertarian across the board. We need to draw limits, we need to have limits to our economy, we need to have like, you know, work within a national context and culture and a nation-state, we need to be opposed to the constant intrusion into both, you know, human nature, viewing our bodies in the natural world alike as things to be engineered and optimized, right? So I think his politics are actually remarkably coherent, and I think it's only the, the basically ideological disorder of, you know, American politics in particular, that make him confusing, you know?

• 24:34Cal Newport?

  I think you see that confusion in some of the reviews, I think. Like, people are just literally confused. Like, I'm not quite sure what to do here. Like, I like this, but this doesn't make sense. Wait, is he a bad guy? But maybe, but maybe he's not. Maybe I need to condescend, you know? My, my home publication, The New Yorker, tends to do that. That's, that tends to be our MO sometimes, is like, oh, I'm gonna have to kind of condescend to this about this person, because like, he, let me, I'll just point out the ways that like, he is incoherent or hypocritical, and then I'm the cool guy. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. So, but what is his, all right, so the book comes out, I want to get to a second, and why it picked up so much coverage, but- Sticking with what he's saying, in the end, what is he pushing towards? Like, what is the program beyond a descriptive program?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I think what is provocative about Against the Machine in particular, and you see this going back in his other work, but in particular, really acutely in Against the Machine, is that there is no program. He is saying really clearly, he's a bit of a fatalist, I think, in a certain way. I think this is partly probably informed by his Christianity, where it's sort of like a leave to Caesar what a Caesar's kind of thing. But he really does think probably not a whole lot we can do to sort of like, at a macro level, resist the pace of technology. If you just like, look at the course of human history, it is just like a relentless, you know, march forward of this, this machine. And so the task at hand is to figure out like, where to draw your limits. And that's kind of where he sort of ends is like, you know, you're, you might not agree with everything I say here

• 26:03Speaker 01

  about transgenderism, or about transhumanism, or about like X, Y, or Z. But like, the question you need to ask yourself is like, where are my personal limits? Where am I going to say, no, like, this intrusion of technology into my life is too much? Maybe it's, I'm going to get rid of my smartphone, or I'm not going to let my kids have screens. Maybe if you live in a city, and this is where I think he's like a really, there's a way in which he has this romantic streak, but at the same time, he's, he's kind of pragmatic. He's like, look, the limits you can draw if you are a, you know, professional class guy with a laptop job in a city, the limits you're going to be able to draw are, are different than maybe what I can draw on my subsistence farm. Maybe you need your smartphone to work. Maybe that's not the limit to draw. But he is really trying to say like, we probably can't stop the progress of this thing,

• 26:46Speaker 01

  but we can create these pockets of resistance in our own personal lives, where we are trying to carve out some space for sort of a, you know, fundamentally, human modes of living that aren't just drenched with, with the sort of, you know, march of technology. So I think it's a really anti-program book, you know?

• 27:02Cal Newport?

  So, and in his life is supposed to be, let's just give an example of that to an extreme.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:07Cal Newport?

  If you're gonna get fitness advice, you kinda want the guy who's in incredible shape, even though you're like, look, I can't, I'm not gonna look like the Peloton instructor, because they do this professionally, but I really want someone who looks like the Peloton instructor, you know, giving me the advice, and that maybe I'm going to exercise more.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:27Cal Newport?

  If not, so let's, I'll make sure I have all of his limits right. So he lives in Ireland, Galway County somewhere. He's on a farm, they grow their own food.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Kids are homeschooled.

• 27:38Cal Newport?

  Homeschool kids, no smartphones. He secretly makes his living, not secretly, but substack, I assume.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Ironically.

• 27:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah, but he kind of leans into that a little bit, or like, he doesn't avoid it. He's like, yeah, I'm on here, I don't know, it's all terrible. I mean, he's not like running from it, he's not trying to justify it. Then they, and he's orthodox, he used to be Wiccan, he likes to be outside, so nature's really important. He spends a lot of time outside, and is, now he's orthodox Christian, so he's sort of, which is a more, you know, that along with Catholicism are the two real sort of ritualistic Christian denominations. So it's really like heavy on ritual denomination, where, so he's trying to connect to whatever, the transcendent, and finds like deeper, more mystical, spiritual meanings in his life. That's basically, okay.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:30Cal Newport?

  And that's the big, that's the life of limits. Yeah, and he's like pro-Ireland and anti, it's curmudgeonly in some ways, and like anarchic in another. It's, an anarchic curmudgeon is sort of like an interesting type in the world of ideas. Like, on the one hand, it's like, it's very anarchic, on the other hand, he's like, you know, kids these days, and with their like pronouns and open borders, and like, it's like, he's all over, it's interesting, you know, he is.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah, he's all.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  You know, the thing I think is important, though, is he is, and the reason I think I find him especially compelling, is that even when he talks about a fraught cultural issue, like gender reassignment surgery, he is. And perhaps it's that his thinking has taken a kind of sort of more religious bent, but he is kind of compassion forward where he's like, look, I'm not interested in scapegoating people who have questions about their gender identity. They are not causing the problems in, you know, in Western society, regardless of whatever the conservatives say. But like, I want us to think about like, what does it mean to actually think of sex as something open to technological negotiation, right? That's a huge shift in how we think about what a human being is born with a sex body, right? And so his approach on a lot of even these issues where he is curmudgeonly is very much like, you know, this is actually

• 29:41Speaker 01

  a huge shift in how we've historically done things. And like, what is the price of that? And what comes along with it, you know? And I do think part of what makes it harder to dismiss him, and I think why he's got more of a, particularly with this last book, more of a mainstream reception, is that he does kind of, even as he has some conservative positions, I think he really eschews a kind of like politics of cruelty, you know?

• 30:01Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's part of what makes him, I think, compelling, you know?

• 30:04Cal Newport?

  Right. He's not, he's not a political polemicist. So what, why did this book? I mean, am I correct? My impression was it was everywhere in a way that like any author would dream. All the mainstream publications and not just reviews, like The Times is not just a review, but like a long profile, a long profile in the magazine, you know, in The New Yorker. You wrote a big splashy review for The Atlantic. He's on stage with, you know, big names, et cetera. I'm seeing him pop up. He's on Ross Duhut's podcast. He's everywhere, right? Okay. So assuming I'm correct, this book was everywhere. Why was it everywhere?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  You know, I think, I think something I've been really finding compelling, fascinating lately. I'm not an especially religious person. I was raised Presbyterian, but you know, I'm not, I don't go to church any, every week or anything like that.

• 30:52Cal Newport?

  As was I, sir. As was I. I know Presbyterianism, we connect on that predestination, but they don't talk about it.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I mean, I think one of the reasons it's landed so much is to me, I've been really frustrated with a lot of the critiques, particularly of AI. And I think it's worth noting, so much of this book is about like the coming of AI and the way that's just another turn of the screw. And this sort of like anti-humanist halt of technology. I think one of the reasons it's landed so well in the mainstream is that, you know, he really has an account of AI as a kind of, and tech as, as a crisis of human meaning. Right. I think when the left in particular tends to focus on an issue like AI or big tech, right? They're like, this is bad for the environment. This exploits laborers, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 31:36Cal Newport?

  And the people, the owners are bad. The people who own the companies are bad. Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  And for what it's worth, all of those critiques I agree with, but I think it still doesn't attend to the fact that like, this stuff isn't just bad because it's exploits the environment and it exploits labor. And it's their oligarchy companies run by billionaires. It's also bad because this technology is like a real threat to like human purpose, human relationships, you know, human meaning. And I think it's, it's not a coincidence that some of the better critiques of AI that are, that are attendant to that, that element of human meaning, right? Have been from some sort of like religiously infected, inflected thinkers. And I think that's why this has, has hit so hard is that that's what Kingsnorth is focused on. Yes, he, he abhors, you know, he is a kind of, you know, an interesting sort of conservative.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  He totally abhors sort of the, the, you know, corporations and the oligarchy class and so on and so forth. But like for him, the fundamental fact of the matter is that this is, the world we live in is increasingly nihilistic. And it's nihilistic because of the way we've allowed technology to shape it, you know? And I think that speaks to something that people feel very deeply, but that hasn't been as articulated as well by, by some other folks.

• 32:43Cal Newport?

  That's fascinating. All right. So let me run with that for a second. Because I think you're, you're on to explain something that makes a lot of sense to me and it's helping with some confusions. I mean, so obviously I know the world of, of like tech criticism, tech writing well, because it's the world in which I've also existed for many years. And, you know, it, it seems like in the sort of post- Smartphone age, we just think about like the last 10 years of tech criticism. There's really two major lenses that it falls into. I think there's like a political lens, which is basically I'm aligned with a particular type of like political or tribal identity, or I'm sort of seeing the technology through that lens. So the things that we already pre care about, how does it fall against those things? And this is where you get like the critiques you're talking about is like, well, I'm going to see AI through the lens of environmental

• 33:26Cal Newport?

  issues, which I care about. I'll think about it through like, you know, capitalism and like capitalism issues. I'll think about the people involved, like who are these leaders? Are they like, you know, this is, are they sufficiently on our team or not that team? Are they, are they friends of the wrong side, etc. like that. The other lens that is very popular is the psychological lens, right? I think this is the, the, the direction that really like Nicholas Carr kicked off at the beginning of the 21st century, where like you're jumping from a world of Neil Postman, which is very much like cultural critique to a world of like, let's look at what the brain science says about the internet. And that, that kicked off like a new engagement. And, you know, like John Height would be probably like the, the leader of this movement right now, but like really thinking about, we're looking at the data about what this does to your brain. So it's a very sort of professionalized,

• 34:10Cal Newport?

  medicalized, like look at the technology. And those seem to be the two, the two major frames. And I kind of agree with you. They both, they're both really lacking for people, right? They're kind of, they're kind of messy. The political frame is no good because it's just confused because, you know, both sides have their issues with technology. Both sides really use the technology. You get a lot of incoherence. I think especially with things like social media, where the political frame makes you, if you're a tech journalist, you're kind of already addicted to these tools. You use them all the time. It's a critique of yourself to say like, let's not use this. Does you really want the focus to be like Elon Musk is bad? And not also, why are we using a global conversation platform? Like, maybe that's a bad way for humans to interact. It's like, it's about the people involved.

• 34:52Cal Newport?

  It's about the, what's on the platforms. It's, this has always been my, my fight since I, even since my book, Digital Minimalism, which is like, the people writing about technology think the real problem is like, what's on the platforms, where the people who are upset by technology think the real problem is the platform's existence and like, how much they're using it. And then psychological is fine, but it's like, it's sterile. And I think it'd be very successful, but at the same time, it is kind of like dry and sterile. And it's sort of, everything is just reduced to, we want these lines on graphs to, of mental health to be better, or something like that. So, Kings North is coming in and say, well, what about like the humanist approach? Like just what it means to be a thriving human being and that we want them to be in there. That feels pretty novel.

• 35:35Cal Newport?

  I mean, I'm thinking this through, I mean, that, that, that feels, that feels pretty novel. Even in like the classic big, I mean, I guess the big polemical tech, anti-tech books of the 20th century, were like, this is bad for humanity to be like obsessed with technique. But it's not like their goal was necessarily this like richer vision of flourishing as a human. It was just like, this is not a reasonable way to live or it's serving like the capitalists, but no one else. All right, that's interesting. So you think the AI, now, do you think it's true that the AI moment? Here's my theory then on the fly, the AI moment is more open to this type of humanist turn. Because the last big moment, which was the social media moment, was too confused culturally. That it was, the problem was this technology was also supposed to be for a while, like the savior of culture

• 36:17Cal Newport?

  and like the tool for, you know, overturning dictatorships and new activism and expression. And like it would, it was like coded with all these other things and it was really confusing. And then the lead, then Mark Zuckerberg wasn't mean enough to Trump. And now like, well, maybe these technologies are bad, but, but are, but, or maybe they're just doing them wrong. We need our own versions. Like, I think social media really should have been that moment, but it was too, it was too confusing culturally. But AI, like who's really on? I mean, some reporters are excited about it, but like, it's not, no one is looking at this and saying, I don't know, it's coded differently. It feels like it's coming out of nowhere. The use cases are murky and everyone is like, ugh, like not ugh, but like, err, like a little bit uneasy, kind of shrugging their shoulders.

• 36:58Cal Newport?

  So, I don't know, it's just a case, let me throw this back to you. I'm just, I'm just rambling here. AI, this is this turn, we're ready for a mirror humanist approach. Like what's going on?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, so I think it's important to think about, because I think this relates to the return of the humanistic question that you're, you're breaking up, right? I think it's important to think about, like, what is the basic financial model of social media? Versus like, what is the basic financial model and set of presuppositions that underline AI? The basic model of social media, right, is that we're going to convince you that you need an algorithmic layer to mediate your human relationships, right? Facebook, you need this algorithm. In between you and your friends, right? It's going to help optimize your friendships, keep you in touch. I mean, I think you see this even more acutely with Tinder and like dating websites, right? Like, uh, which have totally remade human courtship such that people don't even feel like they can date outside of the apps, right? We need this algorithmic intermediary that is going to help me make human connections, right?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  That's the whole business model. And so much of social media and so much of like tech in general in the, you know, 2000s, 2010s is about like, okay, where are some places where we can insert? Like, what are some industries? What are some, um, dynamics where we can insert an algorithmic intermediary between people, right? I mean, Uber, it's the same thing. You don't hail your own cab anymore. You have this algorithmic intermediary. What is novel about AI, right? The chain for social media, if you think about it like a chain, is human, uh, algorithm, human, right? Um, what AI is aspiring to do very clearly, right? Like what it's actually aspiring to do as opposed to what the companies say, right? Like Sam Altman will say, we're going to get this digital paradise of milk and honey, and it's going to remake our economy, and we're all going to have universal basic income,

• 38:36Speaker 01

  and the robots are going to do all the work and blah, blah, blah. But if you actually look at like the use cases that are taking off right now, they are all predicated on, uh, creating algorithmic substitutes for human relationships. So no longer human algorithm, human, just you and the algorithm and no human on the other side. You see this with, uh, the, the rise of AI therapists, right? Therapy is very expensive, uh, but if you don't have good insurance, why don't you try chatbot therapist, right? The rise of AI companions, AI sex bots, AI romantic companions. It's the same thing, right? Why go through the process of Tinder and trying to find another human being when you can just have this relationship directly with the algorithm? I mean, same thing with even senior citizen care, right?

• 39:19Speaker 01

  There are now these companies that are trying to like do senior care with, oh, seniors are lonely. Maybe their family lives across the country. Uh, actually, talking with a chatbot can really help alleviate some of that loneliness. So I think, um, one of the reasons there's been such a humanistic backlash to AI is I think Under the social media model, there was still this sense that like, oh, they're trying to foster human connection and this algorithm is helping optimize that. And now that pretense, and that was always a lie, but that pretense is now totally gone. And I think a lot of people can see what the game is now where they're like, oh, okay. So like there are all these people who have like AI boyfriends now that I see what's going on here, you know? And so I think that's part of it.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I just think AI is touching these fundamental parts of human life in a way that social media did, but in a more oblique way. And that was harder to interpret and read and where it was possible to at least initially read more charitably, you know? And that's just not possible here, I think for a lot of people at least.

• 40:17Cal Newport?

  Right. So because you're interacting directly with the algorithm, it's not, it's not a hidden substrate. It's, I'm just talking, and the thing I'm talking to is using fluent language. So it's just directly attempting to be human like. Yeah, okay. I mean, I buy, I do buy that, right? But it's, it's kind of, AI is an interesting case because, I mean, I buy that, that it has these flashy, flashily worrisome use cases like the AI boyfriends, like the companions for old people. I also don't think these use cases are going to end up being major economic sectors because like ultimately like what it's really selling for most people right now, and it's a problem for the AI companies is distraction, right? Like this is interesting, right?

• 40:58Cal Newport?

  But the problem is the short form video algorithmic curation companies have really, really gotten good at distraction. Like, I mean, a conversation is interesting, even with like a, you know, a sex bot is yeah, purely interesting, but man, Tik Tok has really refined that art of like capturing your attention in a way that like the predictions keep paying off with values and your short term motivation systems, like this is what we want to do. I mean, it's just so much more, it's just so much more pure. But, okay, so, but you think the humanistic impulse, whether AI in that form survives like a major thing, the humanistic impulse that AI creates, can that carry over to these other technologies, which to my mind are right now have been doing so much more high impact damage, you know, the culture?

• 41:42Cal Newport?

  Does it carry over like a King's Northian type of program? Or is that like humanist response is like, no, just, I don't want something to, don't uncanny valley me. I don't, I just don't want the thing that talks like a human or looks like a human. And maybe we need to like reject chatbots that we like are friends with, but everything else like that's just here. Or can the humanistic impulse spread?

• 42:03Speaker 01

  I think there's a real gap or lag time right now between where the American public is at in terms of their patience for Silicon Valley and tech and where the political class is at. You know, obviously, this is all anecdotal, but I write a lot about tech. I talk to a lot of people about tech. And everyday people are so furious at the constant intrusion of screens into their lives, and especially people with kids into their kids' lives. And there are so many people around the country who are white-hot mad at this just constant creep of more and more and more technology, right? I mean, you can see it in the takeoff of anti-tech K through 12 schools all around the country, right? And so, you know, in the recent election, I voted, of course, at the polling station.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  There were all these people outside with like, you know, booths or whatever. And by far, the line, the longest line at any of these booths was this woman who worked for an anti-tech, anti-screen, K through 12 organization, just handing out information packets. And people were like, a long line, just waiting to get information from this woman, you know? So I think there's a real gap between where the public is and where the political class is. I think, you know, I don't like to subscribe to the great man theory of history, but in a certain way, I do think we are waiting for a major American political candidate, whether it's a presidential candidate or someone with a large political platform, taking a strong anti-tech stance. I think, you know, the voter base is absolutely, is absolutely there for that. I think a lot of people are sick and tired of it.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  People don't believe the lies coming out of Silicon Valley anymore about, you know, like, you know, improving the human, you know, our lives. No one believes that. And so I think that's the big problem I see. It's not that, I actually think people are pretty impatient with all of it. That doesn't mean they've given up the technology. They feel addicted, right? They, they, we are not very successful at putting our phones down or getting off Twitter or whatever it is. But they want someone to come along and say, "I'm going to regulate those people, so it's not going to be so easy for us all to be addicted."

• 43:56Cal Newport?

  What does that program, political program, look like?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a really good question. You know, I mean, I think in particular, they have to regulate the availability of these apps for kids, right? I think they should 100% be focused on getting technology out of the classroom, which is, you know, destroying learning for all parties involved and making the jobs of teachers harder, right? I think they should ban, you know, dark patterns and algorithms like these, these features of platforms that are designed to be habit forming or addictive. I mean, one of the least discussed, but most crucial parts to me is like the video game industry, which is literally just run like the gambling industry and they have all of these tricks. Oh, if you don't log in every 24 hours, you're going to lose half your cows. That should be illegal, right? Like these

• 44:41Speaker 01

  ways of just trapping people in these dark patterns in the attention economy, like those are all problems susceptible to regulation. And I mean, to take it back to Kingsnorth, this is one place where I actually do, I think he's too fatalistic because some of these problems are actually problems that politicians could solve if they weren't so interested in getting money from Silicon Valley, right? Like there are some issues here that can be fixed with legislation. And so, yeah, I just think we haven't, we haven't gotten a political class yet who's, who's willing to mobilize. But I think the grassroots support for that's there.

• 45:12Cal Newport?

  What do you feel about Section 230 reform done in such a way that it basically becomes like economically unfeasible to have a company that makes its revenue off of millions of users contributing free content that it algorithmically curates? I've become fascinated by this. I think there's, I'm going to have on an expert to help me understand why this is hard. And maybe this is from a market perspective, not the right thing to do, to basically just turn off an industry because, but I don't know, what have you heard? These, these type of options where you basically said, look, like you're liable, I would hit AI too, like you're liable for the things that are produced from your apps, the content that you're produce. I don't care where it comes from. Like you're just liable. So you can be a newspaper, no problem, but you can't, you can't make a living off of 100 million users and we'll just sort of sort their content and show it to people.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's I think that's totally reasonable. I mean, I tend to be very heavy handed with this kind of thing. I think, you know, there's a way in which I think one of the things that the state should do is save people from themselves, you know, I think there is a libertarian ethos that even non libertarians often apply to to technology, where they're like, well, if an adult wants to be on Twitter, or if an adult wants to play video games, that's their free will that they're exercising. It's like, OK, but like, what if the thing in question is designed to curb your free will and make you keep returning again and again and again and again? Or what if it is designed to take your your the political views you start with and then radicalize them and ratchet it up and ratchet it up and ratchet it up and ratchet it up, right? Then we're out of a territory where it's

• 46:39Speaker 01

  just a question of like, free will and you're freely choosing to engage something. So yeah, I really think we need to be much more heavy handed about technology. And I think we need to think about, I think we need to recognize, look, if you whether or not you want to see, you think addiction is the right terminology for our relationship to technology. It's the one that gets thrown around a lot. I know some people who specialize in addiction who think, well, it's not quite right, right? Because you don't die from a smartphone withdrawal in the way that you die from heroin.

• 47:07Cal Newport?

  They talk about the blood brain barrier and whatever. But then, but I've gone down this road. But if you call it a moderate behavioral addiction, then like the psychologists are OK with it.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So whatever you want to call it, I'm totally agnostic on that. But like, I think, you know, we need to, we need to be more heavy handed about saving people from these these dark patterns, these sort of addiction economies.

• 47:26Cal Newport?

  So we need a King's Northian mindset to do that, because it requires this idea to say, human flourishing matters.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I think, I think something related here is that a huge frustration I have is that when you take an anti tech attitude in that way, the rejoinder often is, but look at the last 100 years of human development, there are less people starving than any time in history. The GDP is up around the world, there's less poverty than any time in history, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of which is true. I mean, you can quibble with the details on the margins, but that picture is basically true. That has nothing to do with Facebook. That has nothing to do, you know what I mean? But there is this constant bundling of like, all technology into that story of the alleviation of suffering over the 20th and 21st century, such that anytime you critique something that has nothing to do with that project of human improvement. It's like, well, you're taking this anti tech stance, but look at all these other good things technology has given us.

• 48:17Cal Newport?

  I don't, yeah, there's a logical fallacy there. I get I get all the time. It could go either way. But like, one way I often get it is like, We can often find for past technologies overreaction that we later thought. But it's a huge logical fallacy to go from the existence of those cases to the universal of

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:36Cal Newport?

  all negative reaction, the technologies is an overreaction. Like, well, that's just like a clear philosophical blunder. I mean, you put that reducto ad absurdum, no technology could ever be bad. Like, clearly, there has to be some technologies that are bad. You can't leap from, I got this, this was on, God, everyone's doing digital minimalism. I wrote about this, and he wrote me about it. It was on Brian Koppelman's podcast, which I like. But he was not really feeling my book at the time. And he was like, isn't this like phone, social media stuff? This is just like kids in the 50s and their parents being like, rock and roll music is bad for them, or something like that.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Moral panic.

• 49:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, moral panic. Yeah. But the problem about moral panics is the very fact that you have to add that modifier to it indicates there's other types of panics that aren't. Right? Because there's, so there must exist, then, if we have to differentiate out certain types of panics. Yeah, then there are plenty of issues. Like, people will be like, hey, we had these same complaints about TV. And to which the answer was like, yeah, like, all those complaints were true. Like, it was a big deal by the, by the-

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Have you considered things are getting worse? They're like, you know, they're always like, this, we had a panic about this thing in the 80s. It's like, that was bad. And it's worse now. Like, the fact that this other panic, like, what if it was right? And things are just on the decline?

• 49:48Cal Newport?

  Yeah. TikTok is just worse TV. Like, no one was ever happy about, yeah, okay, I like it. Okay. So we're kind of on the same, now, now I'm really sort of, I'm grooving with Kings North. I mean, I grooved with that when I read it. And I like that major publications are covering him. You know, and I've talked about my past with this before. This is a change. But there was a time where major publications were like openly antagonistic of me because of stances that today you would consider to be like, oh, that's like a fair, like, just being saying, social media is a problem. That was a real problem as recently as like, 2016. You know, like, I got really scolded by the New York Times for-

• 50:28Speaker 01

  That's crazy.

• 50:28Cal Newport?

  writing an op ed about that, be like, social media is not as important as you think for kids. And they, they commissioned a response op ed two weeks later. That just went through my op ed, quote, my quote, to say why it was wrong. Like, there was such a blowback back then, like, this is not our sort of like liberal technocratic, like, whatever, requires us to, this is on our good list, or whatever. And then it just, like, flipped like that, you know? There's like this interesting change because, you know.

• 50:50Cal Newport?

  So I think it's really good news then, that like, The Atlantic writes a big review, The New York Times writes a big profile, The New Yorker writes a big profile, that people are more open to this sort of humanistic critique. And I, I think the key thing you're saying is, for Kingsnorth's impact to be pronounced, the key is stripping away the fatalism.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Cal Newport?

  Bringing his core of humanism, stripping away the fatalism. Like, are we really consigned to having to look at short form video? Or chat with, you know, chat with a companion? You know, do we have to? I mean, that was in your piece. I don't remember if that was you quoting Kingsnorth, or if that was you saying it.

• 51:29Cal Newport?

  But you gave all these examples, right? Will you watch television shows written by language models? Will you let machines craft your emails and college essays or obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled girlfriend? Will you let AI in your life know that data centers are metastasizing and parched deserts are drying to cool them? I guess, was this Kingsnorth you're quoting here?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:47Cal Newport?

  That's you. Okay.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:48Cal Newport?

  So these are like the key questions.

• 51:51Cal Newport?

  And, but you can actually answer? No.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I, I think that's why I find his fatalism frustrating. Because, you know, there's actually things we can do about a lot of these problems. Maybe not all of them, right? I mean, certainly not overnight. But it's not as though they're totally intractable, you know? And I think he is somebody who is motivated by, like, the sweep of human history is like, militates in favor of the inertia of what he would call the machine.

• 52:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  That this, this human intrusion into technology, into human life is just going to grow and grow and grow and grow. And that's a perfectly reasonable point of view. But I do think it undersells the, the degree to which, like, some of these problems are actually things we could get a handle on. Right? Like, and we're seeing this right now with schools, banning smartphones. Like, it's working.

• 52:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Right? Like, it's, it's like actually working. It's improving social cohesion. It's improving face-to-face contact. It's making kids more curious. Kids are going to the Libraries when they weren't previously using the libraries, right? Like we have examples of this, this working. And so, yeah, I don't think we should be so fatalistic.

• 52:53Cal Newport?

  Right. So there's a difference here between like the industrial revolution. Like, I mean, it seems like when it comes to these sort of like technological transformations and whether we can push back or not, there are certain transformationals which are like these, I guess the term would be general technologies or general use technologies. The industrial revolution was a new substrate on which the economy ran and it was a substrate that could produce 100x more, whatever. I'm making up that number, but you know what I mean? Like 100x more economic activity than before and that it spreads out. But what's happening with technologies that we're worried about is not really a general use technology. Internet's a general use technology. If you turn off the internet, that could be a problem, but really like TikTok and Facebook and Sora and even ChatGPT, like none of these are right now general use technologies. They're actually like very siloed and they,

• 53:37Cal Newport?

  something I wrote, which I quote a lot because I was like, this is the most important thing I've written about technology that no one's read was I did a New Yorker piece a few years ago where I said, this is a really big deal. Like 2023, that the other social media companies are following TikTok's model because in the short term, they're worried about user migration and they're switching away from things that are connected to sociality and connecting the people you know, or the people that you chose to follow. And they're switching to purely algorithmically curated video as being their main thing they offer, which now they have done, right? We now know, Derek Thompson talked about recently that from the FTC filings with Meta from the summer, they now say like 7% of Instagram activity involves people who you know who they are, right? So like they made this transition. And my thing I wrote back then, when this was first starting to happen, it's like, this is really

• 54:18Cal Newport?

  the beginning of the end for those massive monopoly platforms, because once you really have become just a your distraction source, you're playing the game of just pure distraction, you're precarious. Like there's nothing fundamental about you. You can be swapped in for something else. Someone else can come along. This is more interesting. You can be regulated out of existence. Like you're no longer trying to make a case that you offer something really important and you no longer have a lock-in advantage like Facebook used to have where your friends were on this platform and nowhere else. So no one could ever build a competitive Facebook, but if Facebook is just showing you stuff that algorithms have selected, well, it doesn't matter what platform I'm on. It doesn't, I mean, there is no user mode. And so like a lot of these companies we're worried about, they're very precarious. They're very precarious right now, both culturally and like economically. They're not a substrate on which growth is, you know, built.

• 55:03Cal Newport?

  They're not core to like how the culture functions. It's, it's, you know, television, just in a more portable form that's more useful. And that's something that we're, we're willing to do without and to really change our relationship to. So yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  It's also bad.

• 55:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Like a lot, like, like in terms of quality, not just like it's bad for us, but it's often just slop. You know, and I think that's part of the thing here too, is like, you know, a lot of this is just garbage. You know, and I think people don't have a sense like, I think there was a time when people believed that Facebook had a use case. Right. Where it's like, oh, it's improving my life in a way and it's keeping me in contact with XYZ. Or like Instagram, I get to see photos of my friends' kids. And I think that like, since that there's some like inbuilt purpose to these things and my needs are being served. That is totally gone and like, people just know that like, oh, I'm returning this thing because I'm addicted to it. Not because it's like giving me anything back, you know? And I think even recently there was this, so I agree, that makes them more precarious. Right. Because like, I think people know they're not getting anything back out of this, you know?

• 56:00Cal Newport?

  And I think people care about quality, right? Like, I think we've seen this, you know, again and again, like as soon as like cable television and premium television made the golden age of television possible. It did really, really well, even though we were coming out of a period where like early cable television, greatly increased the number of options and greatly increased like the, the slop that was available. Right. We began to get just like really low end reality shows and it's just a lot of like following people with cameras. It just did, you know, whatever, the fixed fish tanks or whatever. But as soon as premium television model became a thing, like it was just huge. People like, I would rather watch better shows. Movies have survived all of these things. They, you know, I was just reading a book about the history of 20th century Fox, for example.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 56:41Cal Newport?

  TV, movies were struggling in the 50s because television was gaining a foothold. And, you know, okay, hey, this is, this, people are saying this is getting better and maybe we don't need to go to the movies as much. How did they regain their economic footing? Is it like they switched to Cinemascope? They switched to a 70 millimeter prints. They switched to much higher quality film stock, more spectacular type of movies. They just made the product. Better where it used to, you know, it was in a smaller frame and it was more just like where else you can see visual entertainment. They just made it better and people like, oh, I want to see better things. And like the industry became really successful after that as people were saying, I'm happy to see really good things, even though the television's at home. So yeah, people care about quality. All right. So that makes me optimistic. All right. So then,

• 57:26Cal Newport?

  what would you recommend that if someone is thinking about reading this book? How should they approach it? Like someone in my audience who's like, ah, yeah, I'm also kind of about technology right now. But I don't know who Jaco Lowell is and the Red Mumford. And I don't know this political stuff sounds weird. Like, how should they approach Paul Kingsnorth to get the most out of it?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I would say the first thing I would do is I would read that short essay. You can find it online. I think on Orion Magazine, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, because I think that gives you like, and I think that's something where it's less contentious. And I think people there's like, that's a good way into sort of like his basic disposition, his way of thinking about sort of problems around modernity. It's very thought provoking. So I would start there. It's short. And then in terms of approaching against the machine, you know, I mean, I would, I think the main point he's trying to get at, and it's a beautifully written book. And I actually don't think it's, you know, he cites, you know, Charles Taylor and, you know, all sorts of, you know, academics and so on and so forth, and Heidegger and so on. But it's certainly not impenetrable by any means. I mean, I think that's why Substack's popular. He's a very good writer

• 58:26Speaker 01

  and it's very readable. But, you know, I think the takeaway is that what he's really trying to say is that what we think of as culture wars are wars about nature, right? Like, all of these debates we're having over social media and algorithmic polarization, or gender, or immigration, are actually debates about like, what does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be a person in it rooted in a place? Right? And so I think if you go in with that disposition and that like, I don't need to agree with his like, particular take on every one of these issues, but that he's trying to push me to think about like, okay, what are my personal limits? And have I really thought about actually the stakes that come along with changing our conception of what it is to be a human in this way? Right? And I think, you know, reading him as a provocateur,

• 59:09Speaker 01

  and I don't mean that to intellectually cheapen what he's doing. I think he's very sophisticated. But I think he's really trying to There's a way in which, I hate the self-help genre, but there's a way in which like deeply buried in Against the Machine is a kind of self-help book that is asking, like, what are your personal limits? What do you care about? Where are you willing to draw the lines? Where are you able to draw the lines in your own personal life, right? And so, you know, you're going to disagree with things as you, as you get through the book, but I think I'm going in with that frame of mind that this book is about, you know, forcing me to look more squarely at like, what areas of my life have I accepted the intrusion of technology? Am I comfortable with that intrusion? And if I want to put up some limits, what, what limits look realistic for me? And I think

• 59:52Speaker 01

  that's the central question he's asking. It's an important one. I think we can all relate to.

• 59:55Cal Newport?

  He's shaking things up and saying, hey, if you don't have strong limits about stuff, forget what they are, but if you don't have strong limits that are like intended for your life to be flourishing the way you think, then like you're really not living life all out.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think there's another message in there too around, I think, our fetishization of, of happiness. You know, I saw the other day, Taylor Lorenz, some of her, the journalist, some are things I like, some, some less so, but she was complaining about an article, I believe, about work from home. And she's like, well, if you look at data, like studies suggest people who work from home are happier than people who don't, right? And I work from home, so I'm not going to get up on some soapbox about working from home, right? But because I work from home, I definitely have less friends and I, you know, than I would if I was in an office and I definitely have less social interactions on a day-to-day basis. But the argument was like, well, people who work from home are happier. And like setting aside how good people are, are at judging their own personal happiness, right? I think one of the things that Kingsnor is trying to say is like, are we just happiness maximizing

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  flesh bags? Like, is a human just like a happiness maximizing, suffering minimizing device? Or is there more to human life, right? I mean, the people in a brave new world eating soma by the fistful would certainly score very high on their happiness surveys, right? But part of Adi Huxley's point was that there's more to life than just like the, the endless and infinite pursuit of happiness, you know? And so I think that's another thing he's trying to get us to think about. It's like, if you put up some of these limits, they might be uncomfortable and unpleasant, and maybe they won't increase your happiness, whatever exactly that means. But I think they, you know, they might put you more fully in touch with what it is to be a person, you know? And that seems, you know, happiness isn't the same thing as well-being. And I think that's one of the core messages of the, of the book in a way, you know?

• 1:01:33Cal Newport?

  Well, then I think it's fitting, like the, the way to end this conversation is that we were talking about it before the camera, we turned on the cameras, but, you know, one of the key limits in Kingsnor's life is that he's sort of He's out of the sort of economic growth cycle. He's living on a simple farm. They kind of survive off of his Substack. He spends a lot of time outside. And because of this book, he had the sort of enter like the highly online jet traveling, sort of come to America, do a tour, be everywhere. The thing that we sort of fetishize is like the machine would say, this is what you should be doing. And it literally broke down his body and he gave up on the tour and said, I'm going back to Ireland and I'm not, you're not going to hear from me again until January. And so like, there we go. That's Paul King's north bean,

• 1:02:13Cal Newport?

  Paul King's art. That's the example in action. Like, yeah, it's not, if there's not a sacrifice, it's not a limit. He's like, I'm not going to do the second half of my book tour. Yeah, that's a sacrifice. I'm going to make less money. But like, that's the, I don't want to live this way. Where proverbially, we all have just been living this way, whatever that means. Okay, I love it. All right. Well, Tyler, this was really helpful. Thanks for helping us make more sense of the book. It sounds like, yeah, we're recommending them. People definitely check it out. It's going to shake things up. And definitely fits with the way we talk about things here, you know, working backwards from huge, huge, human flourishing and the depth, you know, depth in your life and not working forwards towards whatever. So great. Tyler, thank you. Great conversation.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:02:52Cal Newport?

  All right. So that was my discussion with Tyler Austin Harper. I thought that was really useful. I think we really got to some answers about why exactly this book was making such a big impact, what ideas were most important. What I want to move on to next is my takeaway segment where I'm going to go through and isolate the big ideas and conclusions from this investigation. But before we get to that, I need to briefly take another break to hear from our sponsors.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  In the world of expense management, SAP Concur is here to help. From cost control slipping to travel chaos. SAP Concur has an integrated travel and expense solution to help you overcome problems like overburdened teams, decisions looming. When travel, expense, and AP are connected with a single AI supported solution, SAP Concur keeps you ahead of problems. Visit concur.com to learn more.

• 1:03:51Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about our friends at MyBodyTutor. I've known Adam Gilbert, MyBodyTutor's founder, for many years, from all the way back when he was the fitness guru in the early days of my StudyHacks blog. But anyways, his current company, MyBodyTutor, is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, the lack of consistency. Here's how it works. When you sign up for MyBodyTutor, you're assigned an online coach. Now, the coach helps you come up with a nutrition and exercise plan that meets your needs and your constraints. Now, here's the cool part. There's an app you use to check in with the coach every day and talk about what you ate and what activity you did. This gives you accountability, and the accountability

• 1:04:37Cal Newport?

  creates consistency. The consistency creates actual change. Now, to make matters even better, take the holidays that are coming up right now. If you need to change something like, oh, I'm traveling for Christmas, or something like this, and I don't have a gym, or I'm worried about what I'm going to do with food, your coach can help customize your plan for whatever it is you're actually facing. So if this holiday season, you're finally serious about getting fit, you need to try MyBodyTutor. Now, here's the good news. Adam is giving Deep Question listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention this podcast when you join. So go to MyBodyTutor.com. That's MyBodyTutor.com. Tell them that Deep Question sent you, and they'll

• 1:05:17Cal Newport?

  give you $50 off. Now is the time to sign up for a healthier new year. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. Every day, there's a new decision to make, and even the smallest decisions feel massive. So when you find a decision that's a no-brainer, you need to take it. And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no-brainers. Shopify's point-of-sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations. It has very impressive features like endless aisles, ship to customer, and to buy online, pick up in-store. And with Shopify POS, you can get personalized experiences to help shoppers come back, and they will. Based on a report from

• 1:06:02Cal Newport?

  EY, businesses on Shopify POS see real results, like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relative to the market set surveyed. So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com/deep. Go to Shopify.com/deep. That's Shopify.com/deep.

• 1:06:33Cal Newport?

  All right, and with that, let's get back to our takeaways.

• 1:06:38Cal Newport?

  All right, so what I want to do here is summarize my takeaways from our investigation to the question of why Paul King's Norse book is having such an impact and what lessons we should learn from it. Here's some of the big ideas I picked up. First of all, there used to be, back in the early 20th century, as I talked about with Tyler, there used to be a way, and I'm going to draw this on the screen here for people who are watching, instead of just listening, I'll bring up my chalkboard here. Looks nice, right, Jesse? It does. Professorial. All right, so there used to be this way that we would talk about technology's impact, where we would have some notion of a machine, so some sort of like abstraction, some sort of techno-cultural economic abstraction that we didn't create,

• 1:07:23Cal Newport?

  but sort of exist, and it's dictating the way our lives unfold. So there's sort of like particular paths I'm drawing here that come out of the machine, and we don't realize it, but like our lives are kind of being dictated by this amorphous abstraction type of thing. Like, this is the way we used to, commentators used to think about technology. And so here, we would have people like Jacques Alou or Lewis Mumford. Like, they would talk about these big abstractions that we didn't realize existed, but controlled the way we actually, our lives were unfolding, our societies were functioning. Then this transitioned at some point, right?

• 1:08:07Cal Newport?

  And this was one of the ideas that came in this conversation that really caught my attention, is at some point in the 2000s, maybe I'll just label this like the 2000s over here.

• 1:08:18Cal Newport?

  We went away from this way of thinking about technology as being part of these like big hidden systems that dictated our lives and we kind of fragmented these impacts. This is what we talked about in the conversation. We kind of fragmented these impacts into like a lot of little things. You know, so maybe we have like mental health as like a separate thing. Oh, we're going to measure the mental health impact of a, you know, a smartphone with a particular group and be like, oh, there's like a negative impact there. Or we're going to look at what's the environmental impact of like an AI data center. Oh, you know, there it uses a lot of power, a lot of water, and maybe

• 1:09:03Cal Newport?

  that's going to be a problem. Or maybe there's a sort of civics issue, a sort of misinformation on social media is going to create problems with cohesion around certain topics like in public health or something like that. So in the 2000s, we sort of fragmented our understand technology's impact into like all these other little impacts. And this was not, it kind of lacked a big kind of oomph, right? Now we were sort of, oh, there's this and that and this and this affects me, but this one doesn't. It's an environment where no one's like super happy with technology, but it's also not an environment that's necessarily going to inspire a lot of major changes because there's too many just little things,

• 1:09:46Cal Newport?

  some of which affect you, some of which don't. And that was kind of the state of affairs. I sort of put that the turning point from this more fragmented, very narrow understanding of techno issues. I put that turning point maybe right around Nicholas Carr in the early 2000s where he was writing The Shallows, which, which took the internet technology and said, let's look at its impact on the brain. And like, oh, there's like a specific neurological or cognitive issue here. We're using this technology, studies show makes it harder to do this type of thinking. And now we were off to the races. We're now, we were seeing technology through these relatively narrow frames. Then we have Kingsnorth come along. And I think the, the, the way to imagine Kingsnorth is he's going back.

• 1:10:28Cal Newport?

  He's like, no, no, no, I want to understand technology again as part of one of these like big systems that he calls the machine. One of these big systems like we used to talk about with the big tech polemicists from the early 20th century that like really affects how our lives lead. So we're sort of back, we're back to that, that view again. And I think this is partially why we discovered, you know, he's beginning to catch our attention because like this is a, a bigger vision, right? This is like, there's this big system that's controlling so much about our lives. But here is where he gets different than what we saw back in this treatment of it

• 1:11:11Cal Newport?

  from the early, the earlier in the 20th century. His complaints about the machine, they're much more about their impact on us as humans, the kind of humanistic impact. If you read a sort of like Lewis Mumford talking about the mega machine, it's about like how we implicitly organize like labor and machine so that like the pharaohs could build the pyramids. There are often arguments about power and control about if you like a lull is more about the sort of the colonization of a sort of like arts type approach to the world with a sort of scientific worldview, kind of sucking the, the, the inspiration out of like the way we approach things and, and letting like economic forces have much more power.

• 1:11:55Cal Newport?

  And these are really kind of influenced by Marxian type of, of impacts. But Kingsnorth is more saying like, no, no, no, here's the thing about the machine that he's talking about. It makes your life impoverished. It makes your life as a human worse. It's, it's a fiction about like what we should be doing as humans that leads you to have a worse life. And because of that, he says, I, I have a response. If, if like the machine is removing your humanity, you can fight back from the machine, against the machine to make your individual life better. And you do this like, you know, Harper talked about by setting limits. Like you do this.

• 1:12:35Cal Newport?

  By like he, of course, did this to an extreme, right? But you know, like he has some cabin somewhere, a little farmhouse in County Galloway and in Ireland somewhere and he plants crops and you know, he's an Orthodox Christian and he used to be, he used to be a Wiccan and he, there's trees and you know, this is expertly drawn as everyone can see and like he's really happy. He said a bunch of, he doesn't use smartphones. He homeschools his kids, right? And he's kind of built his own life out of this by setting a lot of limits. He said, by resetting limits, I'm able to like create a more human life. This is why I think this caught on. It was this two-fold thing. We

• 1:13:16Cal Newport?

  used to be, you know, we had these big think guys, and they're all guys at the time, like writing these big think books that were like really cool theory, but like in the end, it was like capitalism, you know, is bad or something. Like there wasn't much you could do about it. And then we fragmented into this world of, uh, let's think about anti-tech as just like all these little narrow things and you would care about some and not others. It's not something that's like motivating a lot of action, right? You're like, oh, maybe I should use my phone less or whatever. Then we get Kings North and he gives a different approach here. No, no, let's go back to the idea of like these big, uh, abstract, techno-cultural economic systems that are controlling our lives and we never signed up for it and then we never even really chose them, but they are. It's all focused on like growth and the breaking down of barriers, the denial of our corporality and humanity. And

• 1:14:01Cal Newport?

  he said, but once you recognize that and it's making our lives worse, you can fight back by setting limits again. That limits actually allow your humanity to be expressed. Like what technology do I want to use? How do I want to live? Maybe I don't want to use AI at all. Why do I have a smartphone? Why? It gets rid of this sort of fatalistic, like everyone has to use every tool. What else are you going to do? And said, no, no, no. Human flourishing is about setting these limits. Acknowledging, as Harper summarized Kings North view, that we are, uh, humans are sort of like biological sex beings who like grow up, seek wisdom, appreciate creativity and eventually die. And that is like the reality of the human experience. And so we don't want to deny that. I

• 1:14:42Cal Newport?

  feel like we can live forever or get rid of biology. Uh, we can actually embrace constraints and try to actually flourish and you know, be in nature and touch grass and not be about growth at all limits. Anyways, there's a lot of points captured, but I think this gets to the core of why this particular book was big. It gave us a much more sweeping, ambitious view of technology like we used to have, but then connected it to what individuals could do. This idea that human flourishing could be returned if you're willing to set limits, at least to take a stand, to fight back against a machine. And in that way, I think it fixed flaws of both of the prior models. It's also just different than we've been seeing. So that's why it caught attention. Not all the coverage is positive. We talked about it in the show.

• 1:15:24Cal Newport?

  There's all sorts of like issues or this or that, or hypocrisies or politics that people don't like, but man, it got people thinking because that's a big swing. This picture right here, right, of going from, you know, you have this like really big, you have this like really big philosophical, theoretical idea, and you have these like really exciting like solutions based on limits. I think this caught people's attention and it should catch yours as well. So as you remember, Harper ended our conversation by saying like, yeah, read the book. It's going to shake things up. He's not giving you a prescription, but he's giving you a vision. One where you take control of your life and through limits, you allow your humanity to be expressed in a world where no limit growth technology is trying to take that all away from you. Take it or leave it.

• 1:16:07Cal Newport?

  At least it's an exciting book, so I can see why it is so popular. Interesting point, Jesse, I don't know if you, we talked about this, I guess I talked about it briefly in the, um, the interview, but he left his book tour, Paul King's North. He was like, enough of this. I don't want to like travel all over the place and like be, this is really exhausting and I want to go back to my farm. And he just stopped his book tour and went back home.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  That's incredible.

• 1:16:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So there you go. Living the, the talk, walking the talk, what's the expression?

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Walking the talk.

• 1:16:33Cal Newport?

  Walking the talk. All right. There we go. All right. So that's, that's our, we answer our deep question for today. Now let's hear what you have to say. We'll move on to our second segment of the show in which we answer your questions. Now, who do we got first, Jesse?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  First question is Father Brian. Is it still considered context switching if my phone vibrates in my pocket during a deep work session, even if I don't check the message?

• 1:16:59Cal Newport?

  No, it's not the same as if you checked a message or looked at an email inbox or a chat channel. And that's because the real cognitive harm that comes from context switching is when you actually expose your mind to new information that triggers it to switch its state. But when I see the unread messages in an inbox, I'm being exposed to a particular context, a particular semantic context. Now my brain has to start firing up circuits that are relevant to those people and those requests that I'm seeing in my inbox. And it's that firing up of new circuits that creates the cognitive confusion and leads to the reduced cognitive capacity. So just feeling the phone vibrate won't have nearly that big of an impact because you're not being exposed to specific other contexts. Your brain doesn't know what to load up. Now, it's distracting. It's not

• 1:17:41Cal Newport?

  optimal. It's still a little distracting because you're like, I'm a little, there's something, someone might need me. There's a psychological cost like, oh, what if someone needs me? I'm ignoring them. Like, it does distract you, but it doesn't create that cognitive catastrophe you get from actually looking at a specific, different context than what your current work is. So I would turn off my phone so it doesn't buzz, but I wouldn't think of as like, oh, I forgot to do that and my phone just vibrated. You haven't just destroyed your capacity to concentrate there in a moment. All right, who's next?

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Next up is Ben. How should we think about the quality of information intake across formats? Physical books, online articles, audiobooks, podcasts, interviews, and videos?

• 1:18:22Cal Newport?

  Well, I have a hierarchy, I think about it, but I'm gonna preface all this by saying, don't have too complicated of a formula. We're trying to optimize information, you know, just like, read and watch stuff that's interesting to you and be exposed, got my pencil there, be exposed to interesting things. And like, I don't want you thinking I need 30% of my time has to be books versus, you know, 50% of my time versus this. Just have a good mix. That being said, if you want a hierarchy, I would say books from a quality and perspective are going to be top, right? Because typically, it's an idea that the author has thought about or knows about for years and years, and then they spend a year or two just doing nothing but trying to get their thoughts down for this particular book as clearly as possible, writing, editing, copy editing, having

• 1:19:06Cal Newport?

  things be fact-checked, right? So it's like the most long-term sustained application of cognitive effort towards the delivery of an idea for you, the most sustained effort you're going to see is in the book form. So it's just going to be the highest quality format of ideas that you're going to encounter. Now, the difference between physical and audio?

• 1:19:26Cal Newport?

  It depends. I like both physical and audio books. Physical tends to be better if it's more of like an intellectual idea book. We underestimate the degree to which we will slow down, speed up, go back, let me read that idea again. Wait, now that we got this new point, I want to go back to the top of the page to make sure that makes sense with what I read before. It's not just a linear scan when we're reading idea books. And so in audio, you're stymied because it is linear. But if it's like an interesting, like, nonfiction book, like a historical nonfiction book, or a book that's like about the history of a company, or something like this, or maybe like a simpler self-help book, that's okay. Like, you're not going to lose too much going linear, and you're still getting those, you're getting really good information that's been well curated either way. But if it's

• 1:20:10Cal Newport?

  complicated ideas, physical will be a little bit better there. The next thing I would move down to would be long-form edited articles, like you might see like a New Yorker piece. Trust me, I'm speaking from experience. A lot of effort goes into that, thinking about it, crafting it, editing it, getting the idea just right, crafting the language to deliver it with like, perfect accuracy.

• 1:20:30Cal Newport?

  So a well-edited long-form article, it's kind of like a single chapter from a book, it's going to be really, information's been really thought through, and then carefully presented. After that, I would go to longer-form podcasts. This is not as polished, but because it allows someone to talk for a while about something they know about, you can come away having learned quite a bit, and you can get quite a bit of nuance, because the conversation is so long, focused on something. At the very bottom would be things like social media, or short videos, or other types of takes. Typically, this is very much focused on just the distraction, like what's going to make the algorithm perform well. And because of that, the information quality becomes a little bit more suspect. So that, think about that more like watching a fun TV show, not really where you want

• 1:21:11Cal Newport?

  to be gathering a lot of information. I cover all the media, phonograph records, I don't know, talkies versus silent films. All right, what do I got next?

• 1:21:22Speaker 03

  Next up is Amanda. I keep trying to implement your shutdown routine, but repeatedly fail. I just want to get through my inbox, or finish up various tasks, and so I end up staying at work probably an hour or two longer. The positive side of this is that I start the morning with a pretty clean state. The negative side is that I miss hanging out with my kids in the evenings.

• 1:21:41Cal Newport?

  All right, well, Amanda, that's a common issue, so I'm glad you bring it up. Just so people remember, my shutdown routine, I argue that the end of your workday, you should have a routine you do to close any open loops. So that your brain trusts you're not forgetting something. So it really can move on from work in the evening without you having to ruminate of like, what about this? Or what if I'm missing something? So it's about getting mental relief. It's why my time block planner has an actual checkbox that says shutdown complete that you check after you've done your shutdown routine at the end of your workday. Now, what Amanda's talking about, and this is a common problem, is that she's not just doing a shutdown routine. She's just doing another work block. She's basically just added another like 90 minute block to the end of her day for clean out my inbox.

• 1:22:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah, there's advantages to clean out your inbox at the end of the day because you start the next day with fewer emails in there. But it's a work block like any other. It takes the time it takes, whether you write it down or not. And there's a difference. That's why I want to differentiate. There's a difference between cleaning out your inbox and a shutdown routine. And this is what a lot of people get wrong. A shutdown routine is not about let me clear, deal with everything that's still open. It's let me deal with open loops. And what an open loop means is like, here's an obligation that is not captured in some sort of trusted system. It's an obligation that I need to kind of keep up in just my head. I don't want to forget it. It's hanging in limbo. That's what you're trying to take care of. So if you have a bunch of emails in your inbox, those aren't open

• 1:23:10Cal Newport?

  loops. They're in your inbox. They're not going to be forgotten. Next time you check your email, they're going to be there. Like, that's not a problem. You don't have to answer those emails to be able to enjoy your evening. But if there was an email in there that says, I need to know today what's going on. Well, that's like an open loop. That's something that needs to be resolved that has it like that needs to be dealt with. If there's something that you remembered, but you have it written down anywhere, that needs to be resolved, or it's going to stick around your head, or it's going to distract you. So there's a difference between making sure there's, there's a, there's nothing that's just in your head. Do you have a plan for the next day that makes sense? There's nothing you've forgotten? That's different than let me just keep doing work. And so you can leave those emails is fine, as long as you have a reasonable plan for the next

• 1:23:55Cal Newport?

  day that involves plenty of time to check your emails and to catch up on them. Or if you like finishing your day with your emails empty, you got a time block starting before your day ends. And you got to acknowledge the reality that might take 90 minutes. And that if you want to end work at five, then at 3:30, you have to start cleaning that inbox. But don't mix up doing work with shutting down your work. Shutting down your work is just convincing yourself that nothing bad will happen if you stop now and start again in the next morning. Man, people are gonna look back at this period, this like two decade period and this like idea that we just sat there like wrangling messages all day. They're like, wait, so is everyone like a, like a switchboard operator? Like, why are people spending hours moving messages around? It's just the way this hyperactive hive mind way we work. We just like, I guess this is what

• 1:24:38Cal Newport?

  work is. Like, I'm constantly just trying to keep up with an avalanche of stressful messages. It's such a stupid way to use human brains to create value, but I don't know. It's hard to change, hard to change human nature and the way we work, even though I've been trying. All right, who do we got next?

• 1:24:52Speaker 03

  Next up is Natalia. I use social media for my marketing job. It's still perceived as the must have area of focus for most clients. Do you have any advice on how to reconcile this tension?

• 1:25:04Cal Newport?

  Well, I think there's a couple of things going, a couple of things going on here. So you do social media for your work, but you don't like social media yourself. That's okay.

• 1:25:14Cal Newport?

  That's like saying, like, I work for like Anheuser-Busch, but I don't drink myself. Like, it's okay. There's plenty of people there who don't drink, right? Like, so you can be around the technology you don't use without that having to be like a real problem, unless you have like a real moral qualm about it. In fact, the way that social media is used professionally is instructive. I often tell people about this. There's a whole chapter in digital minimalism about this concept, where I say, if you have to use social media for like your business, use it like professional social media people do, which is not, I look at and scroll things all the time. They're usually on like computer interfaces and they're scheduling things in advance. And it's like, it's all pretty like automated and boring. We got these many posts that go out at set times. We have them all set up in time. Do we have like statistics going on on the comments? It's not about distraction at all. It's just sort of like a boring marketing

• 1:25:59Cal Newport?

  activity. So you doing those type of boring marketing activities is not really a problem. And it's how other people who need to use social media, maybe for like their small business or whatever, should think about it as well. Don't let your need for like once a day at four, I have to, I'm gonna post like a quote carousel to Instagram. Don't let that somehow justify that at noon, you're just scrolling through Instagram, looking at sort of short form videos that are being algorithmically curated. But yeah, but I have to because I need Instagram for my work. If we go back to our drinking analogy, it would be like if you were completely drunk at lunch hour at your Anheuser-Busch job, you're like, it's okay, because we work, it's a beer company. It's all right, everybody, it's a beer company.

• 1:26:44Cal Newport?

  It's all right that I've had five beers at lunch. Right? It's the same type of thing. Don't let the fact that your company deals in this technology mean that you have to be drunk on it. So, you know, professional social media is professional social media. It's your job, do your job. Personal social media is personal social media. There you need to be responsible. There you need to know, need to do what's actually right for you. All right, we got a case study this week. This is where people write in to talk about their experience using that type of advice you talk about the show in their own life. This one actually is a case study with a question on the end. So we'll get a stealth question. But the main reason we do case studies is so that we can hear the case study theme music.

• 1:27:30Cal Newport?

  All right, today's case study comes from Eric. Eric says, heeding the principles of your show, I reframed my approach to my career in two major ways. First, I formulated a more clear vision of what I would like to accomplish with my career and what ends it should serve. Second, with that vision in mind, I leveraged career capital I have accumulated during the last decade to move from a consultant role to a quite qualified position in a government research institution. While this on paper can look just like a standard career step, the key lesson here is intentionality. Earlier in my career, I was working, I worked mostly with a frantic furor to provide for my young family and develop professional skills. While this achieved my material goals, I ended up with a unsustainable and partly dissatisfying lifestyle.

• 1:28:14Cal Newport?

  This is when the principles of vision and career capital became key, and here's how I applied them. I had listed my professional strengths and rated them by one. Rated them by, number one, what people actually pay me for. Number two, what I feel particularly drawn to and subject to methods. And number three, I then searched for organizations and roles, which could provide opportunity to focus harder on my preferred strengths while minimizing the parts I do not enjoy as much in my current position. This set me up to have both my radar calibrated towards certain opportunities as well as being well-prepared to be a top candidate for a competitive position. There's also an unplanned side effect. I became even better at my current job since focusing on my strength further increased my career capital. The process of searching for a new

• 1:28:57Cal Newport?

  job made me better at my last. Now, there's a question, but before we get to the question, let's just briefly reflect on what's cool about Eric's case study here. Most people do what he did early in his life, which is, I don't know, I have this job and I want to just like hustle and move up the ladder. Like, I want to get more responsibility. I'll use my salary as a scoreboard. I want those points to rack up. But what made Eric happy, that was unsustainable. He didn't like his lifestyle, was he did lifestyle centric planning. Wait, what do I actually want my day to day job to be like? What are the things I'm good at that I like to do within this general sort of professional context? What am I trying to avoid? All right, great. How do I move towards doing more of the former and less

• 1:29:38Cal Newport?

  of the latter? And then by getting better at the former, that will give me career capital, give me more leverage and allow me to have even more control over my job and that sort of virtuous cycle of career capital autonomy. That's the type of way we like to think about creating a deep career in a distracted world. And it's different than the like, I followed my passion or I crushed it types of culture. So I think it's a great case study. But here is Eric's question. How would you investigate the appropriate metrics for productivity value in a new context? I'm coming in with a niche expertise to both help in ongoing projects and develop new capabilities for the organization. So any ideas on how I could approach the task of finding out what really matters in a new context would be much appreciated. In other words, when you're in a new job, how do you figure out what things are really

• 1:30:20Cal Newport?

  valuable in this job? So that you can get good at those things and again, get more career capital and get more leverage. There, I always say, talk to people. Talk to people who are actually there. Talk to people who are doing better or in a position that you admire within your organization. Take them out for coffee and ask, what is it that you do that gave you this option? What is it that you do that is actually valued by the company? And in doing this, you'll get the answer to the real question, the real answer. To what's really valuable in this world, if you don't do this type of investigation, you'll just write your own story about what you want to be popular. Like, hey, I got really good at prompt engineering for ChatGPT and the future's AI. So like, do I get to work from home now? And like, we have no interest in that. Who told you that was valuable?

• 1:31:02Cal Newport?

  But when you talk to actual people about what's valuable, you realize like, oh, I didn't recognize that like, understanding statistical analysis is like a super skill here. And if I could do that, then I'm going to have my say. You pick up this information by talking to real people, getting evidence. I call it evidence-based planning, getting evidence of what really matters. All right, Eric, that was a cool case study. Do we have a call this week, Jesse?

• 1:31:24Speaker 03

  We do.

• 1:31:25Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear what we got.

• 1:31:28Speaker 04

  Hey, Cal, living a life of digital minimalism is a core value for me currently. However, it's not for my partner. So I was wondering if you had any advice about how we can reach an agreement point about digital usage? Because just because I believe in digital minimalism doesn't mean I get to force it onto him. So I want to respect his values, but I also would love for him to be a little less distracted. Thank you.

• 1:31:59Cal Newport?

  Well, you know, it's a tough one. We get these calls quite a bit where you have a mismatch on something like this. Well, you're right, you can't force your values onto him. And in fact, even pushing it too much, you might get that type of resistance. Well, just because you're pushing this, now I really don't want this to be the right answer. So you might think, let me just give him a, like a copy of my book or put him towards some of my podcast episodes, but you know, that could backfire. Like, I don't want this being forced upon me, you know, I don't want to admit that I have a problem. Usually what works here is partially being the change you want to see in the world. You be a really good digital minimalist, be very intentional about what technology you do or don't use. Take advantage of that reality to live of a deep flourishing intentional life where

• 1:32:41Cal Newport?

  you're deeply connected with people and causes and stuff that happens in the real world. And when you're watching something, you're watching something, when you're reading, you're reading. And like, make your life very admirable. And you can be, you know, clear about what your influences are there, how your philosophy works, but not really pushing it on him. Like, that's kind of the best you can do. You don't want in the meantime to let resentment begin to bubble up. It's easy like, once you realize the gospel of digital minimalism, you start practicing it. Like, why would anyone not do this? You could start to become resentful when you see, like, guys is on his phone all the time. Like, that's so like, ugh, doesn't he realize that all the value that he's losing there all the time, he could be doing more things? Don't let that resentment grow. That's how most people live their life.

• 1:33:26Cal Newport?

  You are the outlier here for now. You've got to have some sort of empathy and compassion. So build the best digitally minimalist life you can. Find digitally minimalist people to hang out with and see how much of that begins to wear off. But that really is kind of the best you can do. That, or I do offer a service where for a fee, I will come to your apartment and berate them. So that's, that, that works pretty well. That works pretty well, I guess. We come, Jesse and I come and we just, we put the pressure on. We, we let you know. We use cool phrases like, I see you got the Tik Tok monkey on your back there, don't you, junior? We, we talk a lot like, uh, old Italian boxing coaches.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Boxing.

• 1:34:09Cal Newport?

  You got that old, the Tik Tok monkey on your back. You're riding the Instagram highway, right down the Twitter lane. There's stuff like that. We say like, kind of like really convincing things like this and we can, we can convince them like, wow, that, that elderly Italian boxing coach really seems to know what he's talking about. I think I'm going to stop using, stop using my phone. All right. Anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you to Tyler for joining us to help us answer our question. We'll be back, uh, next week with another episode. Wow, we're getting close to the holidays, Jesse. Maybe we'll have to have, break out the, uh, the holiday outfits.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Cal Newport?

  We got the blinking lights. Maybe we'll have a holiday episode coming up at some point over the break. So stay tuned, keep listening, keep watching, and until next time, just stay deep.

• 1:34:57Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.