Ep. 357: What Worries the Internet’s Favorite Philosopher?  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 357: What Worries the Internet’s Favorite Philosopher? - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/cefcd392-7bd1-4bb1-a052-c15f93d534b5 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Digital Communication Erodes Respect** - Digital communication erodes mental distance and respect due to constant exposure and anonymity. - Respect requires maintaining some distance and knowing identities to foster admiration and civility. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. Passage number one. This comes from pages one to two. This is Han on respect and civility. I'm going to read the quote. I have two quotes here and then we'll get into it. Quote number one. I got to put on my, Jesse, I got to put on my sort of philosophy professor tone here, right? Because you're doing philosophy. You have to have a certain gravitas. So I'll put that on as I read this here. Good. Across the board. No, I just just joke with you. I insisted on doing a high pitch voice. It was just me burning philosophers. Across the board. I don't know. Take that philosophers, move no okay i'll read the series here we go across the board digital communication is abolishing distance and distances the corollary of dwindling spatial Distance is the erosion of mental distance digital mediation works the detriment of respect in contrast isolating and setting apart as in the iton of ancient Greek temples, generates Admiration and reverence. Second quote, respect is tied to names. Anonymity and respect rule each other out. The anonymous communication promoted by digital media is dismantling respect on a massive scale. It is also responsible for the expanding culture of indiscretion and disrespect. So you see what I mean, Jesse? It's very like aphorisms, like it's cones of wisdom. So think about for a second, you can think for a second about what these things mean to you. Let me tell you what I picked up here. All right, first of all, the topic here is respect and civility. There's two factors that he's emphasizing. Factor number one, and he's saying this formally, but I think it's a common sense point. He's basically saying, when I see too much of you, I see your thoughts in posts and in videos and in your reactions, I'm just seeing you and your inner thoughts and your face and your words So much. You slip in your mind from someone that is worthy of a sort of distant respect into someone who maybe is more easily dismissed. Now, here's my sort of evolutionary argument or psych-neuropsychological argument for what Han is picking up here. We have a particular category in our brain for how we categorize people. And if it's someone we know, it's an acquaintance, so it's like a close friend or a family member, we have a certain way that we categorize them as kith and kin. This is someone who is like really close to us, which is useful for having really close social interactions. But that also, think about when we're thinking about close family members or close friends, we don't hold them with an esteem. We're more quickly to see like sort of flaws. It's more of an informal colloquial relationship. And I think what he's arguing is you don't want to take strangers and thinkers and writers and other people that you don't know well and shift them into that category that you would hold For your family, that you would hold for close friends because that demolishing of distance ruins respect. And actually civil society works much better when there's the people I know well, and we have our own special sort of close relationship. And then there's other people with which I have some distance and a certain type of deference and respect. And so that it's sort of artificial what the digital does. That's my take there. The other factor he's talking about here is anonymity. This is sort of well-trod territory. He's basically arguing, look, you get bold when you're not right in front of someone. You get indecorous when there isn't someone standing in front of you who can give you a quick punch to the jaw if you say something particularly mean or off-putting to them, that the anonymity Of the internet breeds incivility, which I think is well-trod ([Time 0:06:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/52fe51d8-ca36-4ff4-8df4-97bbb145fccc)) - **Digital Outrage Lacks Power** - Online outrage lacks the cohesive spirit and resolve necessary to form powerful crowds. - Digital swarms are fluid and fleeting, so they do not generate lasting political energy. Transcript: Cal Newport So the first quote I want to read here is the following. Waves of outrage mobilize and bundle attention very efficiently. However, their fluidity and volatility make them unsuited to shaping public discourse or public space. They are too uncontrollable and calculable, inconstant, ephemeral, and amorphous for that. Jesse, this is just Han trying to get me to mispronounce words. Nice try Han, but I think I got those. Page eight, he has a related quote. Rage in the strong sense is more than an effective state. It means the capacity, our power to interrupt existing conditions and bring new ones. In this way, it produces the future. Today's fits of outrage are extremely fleeting and scattered. Outrage lacks the mass, the gravitation that is necessary for action. It generates no future. Related on page 10, he says, the new mass is the digital swarm. Its features distinguish it radically from the crowd, the classic form that many assumed. For a crowd to emerge, a chance gathering of human beings is not enough. It takes a soul, a common spirit, to fuse people into a crowd. The digital swarm lacks the soul or spirit of the masses. Individuals who come together as a swarm do not develop into a we. And then he adds on page 12, only when a crowd is resolute about shared action does power arise. The mass is power. In contrast, digital swarms lack such resolve. They do not march because of their fleeting nature. No political energy wells up. ([Time 0:10:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d51fd4da-fd29-465d-bee7-07fbffcb63f5)) - **Digital Age Enslaves Leisure** - Digital devices transform all time and space into working hours, causing new constraints and digital slavery. - This neoliberal imperative to always perform damages leisure and even rest. Transcript: Cal Newport What does he say? All right. Page 33. Leisure begins where work ceases entirely. The time of leisure is a separate time. The neoliberal imperative to perform transforms time into working hours. It totalizes a belabor temporality. Breaks represent only a phase of the working day. Today we know time only as time for working. And so this temporality follows us on vacation, not only on vacation, but even when we sleep. This is why we are sleeping so fitfully. Exhausted achievement subjects can rest only in the same way that a leg falls asleep. He also says on page 34, even though we are now free from the machines that enslave and exploited people during the industrial age, digital apparatuses are installing new constraints, New slavery. Because of their mobility, they make possible exploitation that proves even more efficient by transforming every space into a workspace and all time into working hours. This is really the topic space where Han really first came to people's attention is his critiques of work in the modern sort of digital age. He definitely comes at things from a sort of classical critique of capitalism left type perspective, much more so than like a newer academic left identity perspective. I have written about these exact same impacts of digital work, much less eloquently, I must add, but I've written about these same topics and how it helps amplify the sort of totalizing Impulse to perform work. Slow productivity gets into this. Slow productivity gets into this idea of the portability of digital devices, brings work, invades work into all sorts of different spaces and times. This push to always need to be working. These are real problems. I have identified them as have many other writers. ([Time 0:14:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/14e99951-9623-42de-a088-69430051a757)) - **Virality Thrives On Light Content** - Digital communication spreads virally by appealing to emotions without meaningful content. - Lack of substantive info makes content more contagious, bypassing cognitive immune responses. Transcript: Cal Newport You can see this guy covers a lot of interesting topics all in like one book. All right, here's what he has to say on virality. This comes from page 57. Digital communication is not just assuming spectral form. It's also becoming viral. Digital communication is contagious insofar as it occurs on an emotive or effective register without mediation. Contagion represents a form of post-hermetic communication that, in fact, offers nothing to think about. It does not presuppose any kind of reading. Digital content, even if it holds very little significance, spreads like an an epidemic, a pandemic racing through the net. It is burdened by the weight of meaning. No, it is unburdened by the weight of meaning, rather. No other medium can affect such viral infection. Writing is far too sluggish. So this is really interesting. He's trying to give an information theory of virality. He uses similar terminology throughout the book that information creates. Sometimes he thinks of it as like an immune response. He uses this terminology that when something is like richer in information, it's more likely to spur enough, some sort of like consideration or resistance or pushback. And it's like an immune response that slows down that information's ability to take hold or the spread. The digital viral communication is weightless. It doesn't have information content and therefore there's no immune response. It's like it's slipping through our immune defenses. It can just bounce from us to other people and it bounces all around. There's something really interesting here. We could think of this as like a critique of Richard Dawkins' memetics where memetics is all about the nature of the content, that certain content is sticky and spreadable. So because of what it's saying, it spreads better, whereas Han is arguing it's what content's not saying that makes it more spreadable. There's like a lightweight in it. So I mean, look, this is a thread he touches on briefly, but you could probably pull to be more stronger. My critique here is I don't see how you can understand or really give a full treatment of virality in the digital age without dealing with algorithms and networks. So when I've dealt and written about virality before, especially like in my New Yorker work on this, network theory has to be there. Algorithmic curation has to be there. That is a key engine of virality. It's not just the nature of the information. It's the mediums in which it can spread. ([Time 0:19:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e84660b-2184-4c6b-b122-ceada9081d6e)) - **Information Overload Kills Thinking** - Information overload interferes with deep thinking and discernment. - True thought requires selection and rejection, which digital media overwhelms and short-circuits. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, instead, the last thing I want to read here is about information overload and thinking. Here's page 60. The tide of information to which we are exposed today is clearly interfering with our ability to build matters down to their essence. Thinking necessarily involves negativity, discernment, discrimination, and election. In other words, thoughts always process exclusively. Now, this is interesting as well. I think what he's saying here is real thoughts involve you making decisions and selecting, like, this is good, this is bad, I agree with this, I don't agree with that. And in that affirmation and rejection, you build up a complicated understanding of something. And what he's trying to argue here is the information in the digital realm lands on us so fast, we don't have time for curation. It just sort of flows over us. And maybe some things stick out as interesting to us, or they're self-justifying and we hold on to them, but there's no time or space or pace for curation. And without that, we're not really thinking. This is an important thought. I have been ironically to use this verb thinking about this a lot recently because I have an idea for a book about thinking and revitalizing thinking as a movement and taking it seriously, Just like we should take deep work seriously in the world of work. So these type of ideas are ones I'm thinking about, that the art of thinking requires certain circumstances, and the digital is making that worse. ([Time 0:22:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed40c2c1-a326-4c91-8831-54a5c38937c6)) - **Writing Strategies When Traveling** - On business trips, Cal Newport plans time blocks to ensure focused writing. - Family vacations prioritize presence over productivity, with light morning writing as exception. Transcript: Cal Newport Hi, first questions from Frank. When you're traveling, how do you structure your reading and writing? That's a timely question, Frank. It's almost like Jesse knew I'd be traveling when selecting the questions for this week. It depends on the type of traveling. And for me, the big differentiating factor is family vacation, or am I doing business traveling? This is a good example because this trip is both. It's a business trip right now. I'm here in Anaheim by myself, but then my family is coming to meet me and I'll turn into a family trip. So if it's a family trip and it's not like when we go away for the whole summer, I'm not going to write that much. It's about being with my family, being able to spend extra time. When it is a business trip, I actually just make a rough time block plan for the day. Like I've already spent a good amount of time today doing book editing. Yesterday, I spent a good amount of time, this was on the plane, working on this podcast episode. I know what writing and when I'm going to do it tomorrow morning before my family arrives. So when it's a business trip, I get a lot of writing done. I take pride in finding interesting and unusual places to write when I'm traveling, just like interesting places. I write about this a little bit in my book, Deep Work. Like here in Anaheim, for example, the convention center has these cool fountains. There's a lot of benches out there. The water's going. It's beautiful weather here. Good place to write. So I'm always looking for good places to write. With family vacation, not so much. The exception is if I'm on a long trip, like we typically go away for a month or so in the summer, we go up north. ([Time 0:29:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1b29b8c1-393b-4e57-9e39-7f503182b6b4)) - **Master New Business Like Skills** - See new business generation as a skill to master like technical expertise. - Focus on deeper understanding and time investment to excel and retain autonomy at partner level. Transcript: Cal Newport Part of my new job is bringing in new business. Like many, I strove to be so good they couldn't ignore me at executing projects. But now I also need to bring in substantial new business and ideally feed other colleagues with this business too. Any suggestions? So Mary, it's common as you move to the partner level that new business is partially what you're responsible for. If you want to succeed and stick in this position and keep a lot of autonomy, keep that career capital high, you have to become so good they can't ignore you at this new part as well. For some reason, well, for a very well reason, not for some reason, for a very understandable reason, people on partnership tracks often had a hard time with the switch when they make Partner because typically what they're doing up the partner is very much about a technical expertise on like I do this particular type of law or this particular type of consulting, Or I'm a CPA that works on like a very particular type of accounting. You get very good at it and that gives you a lot of career capital. And so it feels really different when you get the partner and they give you this interpersonal thing. You're like, oh, the golf club? Like, what is this? This isn't work. This is like some requirement that's getting in the way of me doing my work well. You've got to see it as part of your work. You've got to see it as part of what you're trying to master as well. It'll make it more fun. It'll make you more successful at it. And if you get more successful at it, again, it's going to give you more autonomy in your job. So I hear about this a lot from people that make partner track. You can get just as good at new business as anything else, break it down, talk to people who are good at it, figure out what matters and what doesn't, put in the time and the stuff that matters. Don't waste time on the stuff that doesn't. Those same depth principle concepts apply right here as well. ([Time 0:31:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d9192d76-c819-45bf-9243-7bc64c5e74e9)) - **Memory Training Boosts Focus** - Memory training improves focus and tolerance for sustained attention. - Enhanced focus skills transfer indirectly to academic and other cognitive tasks. Transcript: Cal Newport Do you find value in memory training? I write about this, Peter, in deep work. In fact, I used to have a part of my deep work keynote, which I just gave a few hours ago this morning here in Anaheim. I had a longer version of the keynote. It's a good talk, by the way. But because it's my paid keynote, it doesn't really exist anywhere on the internet because that kind of reduces its value. It's a good talk that I keep updating. But there was an older version of it where I used to tell the memory training story that I had in deep work. I learned over time that I cut out a lot of these stories so I could put more advice in the talk. Like actually what people want is the concepts and then give me different ideas for how I can put these concepts into action. So that story got cut, but I used to tell this story all the time. I won't tell the whole story, but the reason why I had it in there is that the person that I talk about in the book had this great setup where they were a student. I think his name was Daniel. I have to remember. I think it was Daniel. It's in the book. He was a student who was struggling academically. Then for unrelated reasons, got interested in memory competitions. He like saw someone or met someone who did these memory competitions where an example event would be, we're going to shuffle a deck of cards. And then you have like a minute to kind of just go through, like flip the cards over. And then you have to try to recreate what the order of the cards was from memory. It's like these type of things, like pretty crazy things. And so he got into these type of memory competitions, and he got pretty good at them. He trained. He's Australian. He trained with like the runner-up for the national championship in Australia. What's interesting is his grades went up. He became a better student. And what I was arguing is the memory training got him more comfortable with what it feels like to focus, the control your mind's eye, some of the resistance or discomfort you feel when You want to just like release that steam and just let your mind wander. He got stronger at his ability to focus, which then carried over directly to his academic work. And he had an easier time with the strain of focusing on math or English paper, whatever it is he was doing. And so I use it as a key example of focusing can be trained. So yes, there could be some value in memory training or any other activity that requires you to maintain your mind's eye on a target of focus. And it's because it's not a direct transference, like you're using the techniques from memory training exactly when you're studying a math equation. I think it is that subjective comfort with what it feels like to be focusing and the discomfort of trying to maintain your attention. As you get more used to that in one you can carry it over to another. So, so I mean, anything that requires you to focus, I think is useful to do. ([Time 0:33:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3bfe3bdf-e0cb-4058-a9ba-a51a07dc016e)) - **Creativity and Productivity Intersect** - Creativity and productivity are closely linked; productivity is broader. - Pseudo productivity harms creativity by prioritizing visible effort over valuable output. Transcript: Cal Newport Could you clarify whether creativity and productivity are distinct concepts, overlapping or mutually influential? First thing, I have to emphasize something that if you're not watching, you won't see it. These headphones I'm wearing right now, these are the worst headphones I've ever worn. I feel like I have to say this. I grabbed, is a pair i got for free on a plane and based on their quality roughly in the year 1923 there are terror they are terrible i think i would literally be better off with a really long Piece of yarn connected to tin cans and holding up to my ear i just felt like i needed to say that, Jesse. It basically, what it sounds like to me is that you're in a submarine. This is what it sounds like in my year. We have a very expensive studio setup. It sounds like to me, you're talking to a $600 microphone or whatever. It sounds like to me that you're in a submarine and you're like trying to talk through a tube in the water and I'm on the surface trying to make out what's going on. So I just want to say yet again i missed the studio this equipment's no good i have a nice pair of pure phones that's the same color i grabbed the uh the free ones from the by accident ah see I think that was going to be the follow-up question yeah they look the same they look the same anyways alexander's question creativity versus productivity i mean look the question This question should be like self-evident and or absurd like creativity is creating um valuable new things from scratch productivity is production of valuable things like these Are like very closely linked ideas there really should be no tension between them uh productivity is just a broader topic i suppose like creativity is creative output, whereas you Can be productive on things that aren't necessarily creative, but as implied by this question. So what's important to me is what's implied by the question itself is that we often today see them as very different. And the reason why we see these as very different is when we think about productivity, what we're often really meaning is pseudo productivity. When we say the word productivity, we often mean this heuristic that says visible activity is going to be my proxy for useful effort. Pseudo productivity can stand in contrast to creativity. Pseudo productivity can get in the way of creativity. If you're trying to demonstrate effort all the time, you don't have the time and space required to actually sit there and come up with and polish an idea and then do the hard work of taking That idea and realizing it concretely in the world so yeah pseudo productivity does not play nicely with creativity but if we think about productivity as actual native sense of just Producing stuff that's valuable in an efficient matter with the resources you have these are just very closely linked things i want to be a productive creative means i want to produce Like really good creative work in like a reasonably efficient manner. So they shouldn't be different. The fact that they're being presented as intention, I think, is more an indictment about the way we think about productivity, which itself is an indictment of our current world of work. But when it comes to like the reality of things, create a production is like one of the key things you might want to be productive about. So I don't see them in reality. I don't see them being contrary at all. ([Time 0:36:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06b90773-6829-416d-8508-8470c063b37f)) - **Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning** - Cal Newport designs his career for autonomy, a less crowded calendar, and seasonal variation. - He reoriented academic focus to digital ethics to align with lifestyle goals and reduce overload. Transcript: Cal Newport It'd be fascinating to hear your insights into how each contribute to your personal lifestyle centric career planning. So there's a couple of keys to my lifestyle vision. One is autonomy. All right. So I really like to have control over my time to make my own decisions about what I'm going to do when. Because of that, another big part of my vision is I do not like crowded calendar days. Okay. They're okay occasionally, but I do not want to feel like my day is full of stuff on a calendar and I have to go from thing to thing. I want autonomy. I want some days that are heavier than others. I don't want most of my days to be full of things. And I really wanted huge seasonality. So this is just like some of the professional aspects of my lifestyle plan. It's more broad than that. Busy periods, non-busy periods. Periods where I'm monk mode writing, where other periods where I'm like interacting with other people. I like that variation as well. So by creating a life as a writer and professor, I'm really hitting that vision. There's a lot of autonomy in being a professor. Writing allows me to amplify my impact more than it would be as a professor. And it allows me to, it gives me more flexibility financially and otherwise. Some ways, some changes I've made working backwards from that lifestyle vision, because I have that vision in mind. There's some key changes I've made. Like, for example, more recently, I've really moved, at least for now, my academic profile away from pure computer science and more towards technocriticism, the impact of technology On society, became a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics here at Georgetown. That bought out one of my courses, so it reduced my course load even further. And I sort of fused together my academic work and my writing work. So like my New Yorker articles and some of the academic articles I'm working on about technology, these are sort of interchangeable. So I don't have such split efforts. By temporarily, at least for now, moving my academic portfolio more towards digital ethics, it also took off on my plate. Computer science papers, traveling for conferences, collaboration. There's a huge amount of time that I have now to try to see closer to my lifestyle vision. So no, I'm going to go all in on technology and its impact. Let's see how that goes. We'll try that for a year or two. That's a decision you make when you have lifestyle-centric career planning. It's not a decision you make when you just think, how do I do things even better? You don't give up things that you're doing well at when you're just in an achievement-focused way. But for me, I said, look, these things have to be more concilient because otherwise they're starting to make my calendar too crowded. That goes against my lifestyle vision. It's reducing my impact. That goes against my lifestyle vision. I want to be spending a good amount of my time thinking hard about things to make an impact. Am I bringing these two worlds closer together? I can do that. So this is an example of lifestyle-centric planning. These various parts of my vision is making me lead to various changes, is helping me navigate these various careers. In a lot of other ways, I'm not talking about publicly yet either, but I think about it all the time. And it gives me a big foundation to make these decisions. If I'm just chasing what's like the best I can do here, what's the best I can do there, then it's just all this stuff's going to collide into each other and I'm going to burn out. So I think about this a lot. And my lifestyle-centric plan, which I update every year, plays a big role in how I try to make decisions about what to do or what not to do. But anyways, I think that's a big decision, reducing computer science at least for now. That's a huge decision. That's a lifestyle-centric career planning influence decision for sure. ([Time 0:39:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/62851cba-2836-445d-b169-8054fe053b20)) - **Adventure Work For Creative Projects** - Use 'adventure work' by jotting ideas slowly during breaks, focusing on quality over quantity. - Accept uneven progress while hiking or adventuring, nurturing originality without pseudo productivity pressure. Transcript: Cal Newport Hi, Cal. My name's Juan, and I wanted to ask you some advice on some extended adventure working. I'm currently hiking the Continental Divide Trail. I'm taking a pit stop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before continuing on through the snowy mountains of southern Colorado. And yeah, for the next five months, my only real priority is to make it through this next adventure. However, I don't completely want to pause my creative life. I draw graphic novels for fun, and I'd love for my next project to be about this hike I'm doing right now. So this brought to mind your idea of adventure work, where you make progress on work by engaging with ideas while immersed in a totally unrelated environment. How would you recommend that I use my time on this hike towards that goal? I have some pocket notebooks that I could use as sketchbooks or single-purpose notebooks, and I also have a journal. However, the vast majority of my time needs to be spent on the trail so that I can cover the 20 or 25 miles that I need to do each day. And it's also a little unpredictable if I have the energy and time or even the physical environment during my breaks to really make progress. So yeah, thank you for your thoughts. I love the show. And though I'm giving myself plenty of space away from the inputs of other minds on the trail, I'm still keeping up with all your new episodes. I love the idea of adventure work. It's good to bring that back. This is this notion, as talked about there by the caller, of when you go to cool places or interesting places to do your work, it's more interesting. You have deeper insights, and it makes worse less draining. I mean, this look I already talked about earlier in the show that I worked by the fountains at the Anaheim Convention Center. I'm going to write on Splash Mountain tomorrow. It's going to be brilliant. As I said, when I contemplated the, ah, shit, it's wet. And then that's the end of it. AdventureWorks is a cool idea. Okay. So first of all, you're doing this thing that's using a lot of focus. You're hiking the Continental Divide Trail. So you keep your standards, your expectations very reasonable, real slow productivity idea. So look, I think I can get some cool insights doing this and some cool ideas that can lead to a book. Do not turn that into, okay, I need to optimize like every day. If I could produce a pseudo productivity mindset, well, if I could produce five pages a day, I could have a book done by the time I'm done hiking the trail. And then you're up late at night with your headlamp on trying to like draw pages of a graphic novel. You don't want to do that. What you do want to do is maybe say, what's an idea I want to work out that might be relevant to the book I want to do? Like, what's something I could do that's different? Like, let me just play with this on the trail and take notes in my single special single topic notebook, like a feels note notebook at the end of the day. And then maybe I have some breakthroughs and take your time, go slow. Or I have this interesting idea about what would be new about a graphic novel. Let me kind of work through the plotting a little bit. As I have, you know, some parts of the walk, I'm thinking, I want to take a water break, I'll jot it down. Other parts of the walk, I'm not thinking about it at all. But over the days, maybe this interesting outline comes up. And when you take your time, some really interesting stuff happens. You edit yourself, you come back, you let things marinate, you improve it. And what you end up with might not be like a lot of pages of material, but it could be really good in original. I spent four days just like bouncing around, like what would be good in a novel? What am I missing in a graphic novel? What would be different? And then I worked on this plot off and on. And yeah, it's an outline. It's just a few pages long, but I came back to it and this isn't right. And what if I did this and, you know, and I like this, I just let it sit and marinate and see what resonated, what didn't. In the end, I produced something that's really cool and original. Now when I'm done hiking, I'll sit down and do, you know, three hours a day and do my deep work and turn this into an actual graphic novel and do that sort of more harding, hard sort of grinding Aspect of the work. So use the adventure work and just like take your time producing some original thoughts and really getting them to a place you're happy with. Don't worry about volume. Worry about quality. Don't worry about speed. Worry about originality. And some days you might not do anything. You guys have some single purpose notebooks to capture this. And you might only end up with one single purpose notebook full of notes, but those might be some of the best notes you produce. ([Time 0:46:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/812f4bf9-5c04-4cf9-8c2d-0ea8c08ee67c)) - **Learn From Radical Phone Disconnection** - To disconnect from phones, learn from diverse radical stories showing paths to less distracted living. - Real stories provide practical roadmaps beyond generic advice on phone breakups. Transcript: Cal Newport So I'll start by mentioning a book that is coming out the day after this podcast airs. It's a book I blurbed. It's called Unplugged, How to Break Up with Your Phone and Reclaim Your Life. It's by Richard Simon, who I know from Georgetown. What I liked about this book, why I'm recommending it, yes, we've heard about this topic before, like, hey, strategies for, you know, disconnecting. What made this book cool is it is lots of real stories. Soard's approach is let me get people who have done radical or interesting things to get the phone out of their life and talk to them and tell you their stories there's 25 different stories In there plus the bonus 26 story which is richard's own cool story of disconnection uh some people uh including some people who are pretty well known jesse you'll be happy to hear the Phillies player, Nick Castellanos, professional baseball player. He's in the book, talks about it. Steve Hilton, a cable news host is in there. Regular people as well. Principals, pastors, a couple who did it together. Anyways, that's what I like about this book. If you want to hear how real people, real things they did and what happened to get rid of their phone, you're looking for anything more radical, check it out. I blurbed it. Here's my blurb. I'll read it to you now. Diving deep into the growing community of people who radically reinvented their relationships with their phones, Richard Simon identifies a roadmap for the rest of us to achieve A less distracted and more meaningful life. The quote right after mine was from Cal network and it says, I'm not distracted by my phone. My phone is distracted by me. Cal network, uh, go get it. So there you go. Both me and Cal network blurbed this book. All right. I also want to talk about two articles. I like books. I like articles. The ones I want to talk about today. Here's what caught my attention. They're both on the same topic, ([Time 0:54:35](https://share.snipd.com/snip/17e0dfde-308c-4ffa-8fc5-8456c0bdae68))