Ep 383: Why Is Everyone Talking About “Against the Machine”?  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **The Machine As A Cultural Frame** - Paul Kingsnorth frames modern society as a 'machine' that rejects limits and remakes nature and human nature through technology. - This machine-centered view reconnects tech critique to grand cultural questions rather than fragmented policy or brain-focused frames. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. King's North talks about techno capitalism and how it's choking civilization and destroying the earth. It's not a politically careful book. It eschews 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 Lewis 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 King's North hit a much bigger nerve than I would have expected. He was basically everywhere. The New York Times ran a long profile of King's North. 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. King's North in 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, Kings North 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. And then there was a recent review in The Atlantic which called Against a 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? ([Time 0:00:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06ea3133-f9ea-45f1-bcb6-36780c8c716e)) - **From Radical Activist To Recluse Writer** - Tyler recounts Kingsnorth's background as a green radical who grew disillusioned when environmentalism embraced tech-based sustainability. - That shift pushed him from activism toward writing, spiritual searching, and eventually a critique of pro-growth environmentalism. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper 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. 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, 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. ([Time 0:04:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/309caa4e-5bae-4537-a693-e3bda42c94dc)) - **Limits Are The Core Argument** - Kingsnorth argues modern culture privileges anti-limit growth across economics, identity, and technology. - He sees many current debates as arguments about whether to defer to nature or to engineer it away. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper Like our entire civilization has become 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, uh, in the service of our, our, our whims and desires. Cal 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, uh, aesthetic sort of, uh, anti-growth type of mindset? COVID comes, he's online, he's writing sub stacks, and he's like, I'm going to 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 sub stack 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. 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, but? Yes. Okay. Tyler Austin Harper 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 ([Time 0:08:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2fa2965f-824e-46e2-ba98-46a6543cb299)) - **No Grand Political Program** - Against the Machine has little macro political program and leans fatalistic about stopping technological momentum. - Instead it asks individuals to identify and enforce personal limits to carve pockets of human flourishing. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper 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 is 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, know you're you might not agree with everything i say here 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 kind of pragmatic. He's like, look, the limits you can draw if you are a professional class guy with a laptop job in a city, the limits you're going to be able to draw 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, 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, you know, fundamentally human modes of living that aren't just drenched with the sort of, you know, march of technology. So I think it's a really anti-program book. So ([Time 0:24:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e1dccaa9-65ca-4e1c-a7e1-044826521057)) - **Human Meaning At The Center** - Kingsnorth's critique resonated because it frames AI and tech as crises of human meaning, not just labor or environment issues. - Religious-inflected humanist critiques have articulated this meaning-focused concern more forcefully than many secular accounts. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper Know, I think, um, 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 every week or anything like that. Cal Newport As was I, sir. As was I. I know Presbyterianism, we connect on that predestination, but they don't talk about it. Exactly. Tyler Austin Harper So, I mean, I think one of the reasons it's, 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 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. And the people – the owners are bad. Cal Newport The people who own the companies are bad. Tyler Austin Harper 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 exploits the environment and exploits labor and it's their oligarchic companies run by Billionaires. Purpose, human relationships, you know, human meaning. And I think 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 hit so hard is that that's what Kings North is focused on. ([Time 0:30:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/68fef3bd-6362-49a3-9fe6-ceace1f37ca3)) - **AI Replaces Human Intermediaries** - AI accelerates a shift from 'human–algorithm–human' to 'algorithm–only' interactions, replacing human relationships with algorithmic substitutes. - This direct algorithmic substitution makes the technology's human costs more visible and alarming. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper I mean, so I think it's important to think about, uh, 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 is that we're going to convince you that you need an algorithmic layer to mediate your human relationships. Facebook, you need this algorithm in between you and your friends. 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, 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? 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, what are some industries? What are some 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, 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 gonna get this digital paradise of milk and honey and it's gonna remake our economy and we're all gonna have universal basic Income and the robots are gonna 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 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 the rise of AI therapists, right? Therapy is very expensive. But if you don't have good insurance, why don't you try chatbot therapist, right? The rise of AI companions, AI sexbots, 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? 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. Actually talking with a chat bot can really help alleviate some of that loneliness. 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, OK. So like there are all these people who have like AI boyfriends now. I see what's going on here. And so I think that's part of it. ([Time 0:36:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/09094b96-0367-462f-b068-cb2349a3b8a7)) - **Grassroots Frustration Outpaces Politics** - Public impatience with pervasive screens and tech has grown faster than political action to curb them. - That gap suggests a political opening for heavier regulation focused on children's exposure and addictive design patterns. Transcript: Cal Newport 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 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 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? Tyler Austin Harper 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. There were all these people outside with like, you know, booths or whatever. And by far, the longest line at any of these booths was this woman who worked for an anti-tech, anti-screen K-12 organization just handing out information packets. And people were like a long line just waiting 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. ([Time 0:41:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/be40fd7d-45f6-47ec-8cb0-584c8697a2fb)) - **Use Regulation To Save People From Tech** - Regulate dark patterns, addictive mechanics, and algorithmic hooks to protect users and children. - Limit tech in classrooms and ban manipulative game mechanics that mimic gambling to reduce societal harm. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper 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 in 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 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 Kings North, 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? There are some issues here that can be fixed with legislation. And so, yeah, I just think we haven't gotten a political class yet who's willing to mobilize. ([Time 0:43:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/142f6e41-451a-40dc-989c-f5e2f9a897dc)) - **How To Read Kingsnorth Productively** - Read Kingsnorth starting with his short essay 'Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist' to grasp his disposition. - Approach Against the Machine as a provocateur asking you to define personal limits rather than a coherent policy manual. Transcript: Cal Newport Like someone in my audience who's like, uh, yeah, I'm also kind of about technology right now, but I don't know who Jacques Loll is and the Red Mumford and I don't know, this political Stuff sounds weird. Like how should they approach Paul King's North to get the most out of it? Tyler Austin Harper 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 a – and I think that's something where it's less contentious. And I think people – 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 his substex popular, he's a very good writer, 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 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 rooted in a place, right? 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, 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. 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 limits look realistic for me? And I think that's a central question he's asking. ([Time 0:57:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1ed8bc99-c1ac-4a24-8ca8-b5a19ff36bfe)) - **Reconnecting Grand Critique With Personal Limits** - The episode maps a shift from fragmented, narrow tech critiques back to grand systemic critiques focused on human flourishing. - Kingsnorth reunites big-system analysis with individual prescriptions: set limits to resist the machine and restore human meaning. Transcript: Cal 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. It looks nice, right, Jesse? It does. Professorial. All right. So there used to be this way that we would talk about technology's impact we would have some notion of a machine. So some sort of like abstractions, some sort of techno cultural economic abstraction that we didn't create, 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 Allolle 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? And this was one of the ideas that came with 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, 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, it uses a lot of power, a lot of water, and maybe that's going to be a problem. Or maybe there's a sort of civics issue, a sort of misinformation on social media. It's 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 understanding of 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 little things, 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 right in the shallows, which took the internet technology and said, let's look at its impact On the brain. And be like, oh, there's like a specific neurological or cognitive issue here. We're using this technology study 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 King's North come along. And I think the way to imagine Kingsnorth is he's going back. 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 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 bigger vision, right? This is like there's this big system controlling so much about our lives. But here's where he gets different than what we saw back in this treatment of it 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 organized 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. And these were really kind of influenced by Marxian type of, of impacts. But Kings North 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 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 have a response. 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 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's 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 twofold thing. We 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, know is bad or 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 it's just Like all these little narrow things and you would care about some and not others it's not something that's ([Time 1:05:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cfcac5ea-cb85-4733-be6b-b20b7b6e928b)) - **Vibration Isn't Full Context Switching** - Phone vibrations alone don't cause full context-switching because they don't load new semantic content into your mind. - Turn off buzzing during deep work, but don't panic if an isolated vibration occurs mid-session. Transcript: Tyler Austin Harper 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? Cal 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. 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 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 want to 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. ([Time 1:15:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f96c5ba2-c384-4227-b85e-92c2787616de)) - **A Simple Hierarchy For Consuming Ideas** - Prefer books and long-form edited pieces for complex ideas; use audiobooks for linear, less technical subjects. - Treat social media and short videos as entertainment, not reliable sources of high-quality information. Transcript: Cal Newport How should we think about the quality of information intake across formats, physical books, online articles, audio books, podcasts, interviews, and videos? Well, I have a hierarchy. I think about it, but I'm going to preface all this by saying, don't have too complicated of a formula. You'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 percent 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 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 things be fact-checked Right so it's like the 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 The difference between physical and audio, it depends. I like both physical and audio books. The physical tends to be better if it's more of like an intellectual or idea book. We underestimate the degree to which we will slow down, speed up, go back, read, 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 nonfiction book, like a historical nonfiction book or a book that's about the history of a company or something like this, or maybe like a simpler self-help Book, that's okay. 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 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. 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 has been really thought through and then carefully presented. After that, I would go to longer form podcast. 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. You know, 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 to be gathering a lot of information. ([Time 1:17:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61b4e099-6ad1-48d8-aaa4-0d6bc0191360)) - **Shutdown To Close Loops, Not Do More Work** - Treat the shutdown routine as closing open loops, not as another inbox-clearing work session. - Capture unresolved obligations into a trusted system so your mind can stop ruminating in the evening. Transcript: Cal Newport 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 or be like, what about this or what if I'm missing something? So it's about getting mental relief. That'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. 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 is what 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 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 open loop means is like here is 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 loops. They're in your inbox. They're not going to be forgetting. 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 haven't written down anywhere, that needs to be resolved, or it's going to stick around in 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, that there's nothing you've forgotten. That's different than let me just keep doing work. And so you can leave those emails as fine, as long as you have a reasonable plan for the next 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 5, then at 3.30, you have to start cleaning that inbox. But don't mix up doing work with shutting down your work. ([Time 1:20:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9be054b0-7607-48c9-ae74-b4ebee35b508)) - **Use Social Media Professionally, Not Habitually** - If you work in social media, perform it professionally: schedule, automate, and avoid compulsive personal scrolling. - Keep personal digital minimalism separate from job duties and don't let work justify recreational use. Transcript: Cal Newport I use social media for my marketing job. It's still perceived as the must-have area of focus for most clients. Tyler Austin Harper Do you have any advice on how to reconcile this tension? Cal 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. That's like saying, look, 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 mini posts, they 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 activity. So you doing those types 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 going to 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. Like, 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. 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. ([Time 1:23:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7967d0f8-22c7-4e4a-9494-1463ff9525c8)) - **Survey Colleagues To Find Valuable Skills** - In a new job, interview high-performing colleagues to discover which skills the organization truly values. - Use those conversations to evidence-check assumptions and focus career-capital development on measurable priorities. Transcript: Cal Newport 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 chat GPT and the future's AI. So like, do I get to work from home now? And we have no interest in that. Who told you that was valuable? 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 and getting evidence. ([Time 1:29:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b17558cb-6787-49f5-a9f2-804f2e7ecc2e)) - **Model The Life, Don't Force The Change** - When your partner resists digital minimalism, model the lifestyle and avoid coercion or resentment. - Build an admirable, intentional life and invite rather than force change; empathy beats evangelism. Transcript: Cal Newport 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. 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 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 do or don't use take advantage of that reality to live of a deep flourishing intentional life where 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 can start to become resentful when you see a guy 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. 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 um that works pretty well i guess we come jesse and i come and we just we put the pressure on you. We let you know. We use cool phrases like I see you got the tick tock monkey on your back there. Don't you junior? We talk a lot like old Italian boxing coaches. Boxing. You got that old tick tock monkey on your back. You're riding the Instagram highway right down the Twitter lane. There's stuff like that. We say kind of like really convincing things like this. We can convince them. Like, wow, that elderly Italian boxing coach really seems to know what he's talking about. I think I'm going to stop using my phone. ([Time 1:30:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bf7d3e2b-ee7b-4dc8-b79a-fc410b848ead))