ABOUT THE BOOK

You can pick up Cal’s ‘Digital Minimalism’ at all good outlets.

Most of us know that addiction to digital tools is costing us both productivity and peace. But giving them up completely isn't realistic. We're addicted to texting, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter not because we're stupid or shallow, but because they provide real value in the form of connection, community, affirmation, and information. Instagram is how you see new photos of your school friend's baby. Texting is how you let your mum know you're safe in a storm. Twitter is how you hear about breaking news in your industry. But these tools can also disrupt our ability to focus on meaningful work and live fully in the present. Must we choose between one or the other? 

Newport's answer is no. In Digital Minimalism, he outlines a practical philosophy and plan for a mindful, intentional use of technology that maximises its benefits while minimising its drain on our attention, focus and time. Demonstrating how to implement a 30 day digital detox, this book will help you identify which uses of technology are actually helping you reach your goals, and which are holding back. 

If you care about improving your effectiveness but don't want to become a Luddite or a social dropout this book can lead you to increased control over your time, attention, and energy and ultimately, a richer life. Read Digital Minimalism and you'll never again mindlessly sacrifice your productivity to clickbait or lose 40 minutes of your evening to your Instagram feed. 

TRANSCRIPT

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mike parsons 0:10

Hello and welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's Episode 59. I'm your co host, Mike Parsons and as always, we are joined by the world traveller, and co host of the moonshots podcast. Mr. Chad Owen.

Chad Owen 0:24

Good evening. Hey, good morning, Mike. It's so good to be back in the podcasting chair. It's been a little while for us. It has

mike parsons 0:31

and I think we have to thank everybody for their patience as we have been travelling the world. You have done several continents, I think perhaps all four continents. Since we recorded the last Cal Newport show, and it's so it's been a busy couple of weeks Hence, we haven't been as regular as we would like to but we are back. We're in the swing of things and Chad Do we have a show installed for our listeners? This

Chad Owen 1:00

is in a way this is music to my ears. Everything that our author Cal Newport has to share with us in his book digital minimalism.

mike parsons 1:10

He has to be almost like a like a long lost brother of yours is like talking chat is like listening to you. I hate social media. Oh, it's a social thing. It's just distraction. I mean, it is like you two brothers when it comes to your views on social media. Is that not sure?

Chad Owen 1:28

Yeah. Well, I've been following cow actually ever since I was in college. He was kind of a budding academic and has been blogging, I want to say for at least 12 years, and Gosh, yeah, I guess it would it would have to have been 13 or 14 years if it was when I was in college. But there's been like bits and pieces of all of these practices over the years, but he's put them all together into one book, which I think is a really amazing manual for those of us that find ourselves with too. little time being too distracted by our devices and wanting to reclaim some of that. So I'm really excited. We've got a great bunch of clips here on the show to help us do exactly that.

mike parsons 2:12

Yeah. And so so the this is the second Cal Newport book that we digging into. And it's called Digital minimalism, and the subheading is how to digital detox and declutter your online life. And I think it is so present. It's so of the moment and it's such a powerful book by cow and we got lots of positive feedback on the last show on Cal Newport, and he's got a tough gig. We have to admit Chad, he's following up from our epic Simon Sinek series. And cow is holding his own and we're getting a lot of feedback from listeners. I particularly just wanted to say a shout out to Raja and Kira who reached out to us last week and another person I want to reach out to is Renan who gave us a fantastic review on the iTunes podcast so we're almost at 25 star reviews which is

Chad Owen 3:15

yes thank you all you reviewers Yay.

mike parsons 3:17

So we know that you're hungry we're hungry to to dig into this. And I just want to set context about why I think Cal Newport in this work is so important. I have felt since the prevail of social media, I've really felt this weird thing that particularly on my work weekends, I felt this thing that I can't quite chew not turn off from work and I felt a little this very small, underlying shadow of anxiety, no matter how relaxed enjoyable. My weekend has been. There's some something there that I that I didn't have in the early part of my career, even in times of much more stress at work, there seems to have been this new thing of just some some clouds in the background of my mind. And after reintroducing myself to this book, I've stopped doing social media and email on Sundays. And it makes a world of difference. So cow has inspired me to do my own little detox. And I just want to say this is why it matters. I think Cal Newport is onto something about how we use digital devices, how they're affecting our lives. And so for the next hour, we're just gonna dig into his thinking. We've got some great, some amazing clips of this, some of the clips that we've got here about how to pinpoint the problem, but Chad like having a sense of the context of the problem that we're in with digital devices and social media, and how we might solve this problem. For me is hitting a big run.

Chad Owen 5:03

Yeah, I'm, I challenge everyone to to pick up this book for the full programme. But if anyone after this episode changes their habits, I would love to know how you have changed them because as Mike says, you know, picking up all of these practices from from cow has made a big difference in my life as well in terms of separating that that cloud as you send my cane, leaving the cloud at work, and having home, you know, be a good place, you know, so you can spend quality time with with friends and family. Yeah, that's so true. So, if you do have any thoughts or feedback for us, you all seem to have adopted a Chad's favourite feedback mechanism which is email so feel free to send us an email Chad you do. It's been so long since we recorded Do you even remember the email address for the show? You can always reach us at hello@moonshots.io that shoots both mike and i a message We love hearing from all of you. And yeah, I'm very curious if and how our collective habits can change so that we can be a little bit more mindful about our habits when it comes to digital technology. Absolutely, absolutely. So, if emails not your thing, jump over to moonshots.io. You can get archives of the show, show notes, all those sorts of goodies. And

mike parsons 6:22

yeah, don't be a stranger. And without any further ado, Chad, like let's rev up the clip engine. Let's get into the world of Cal Newport and digital minimalism.

Chad Owen 6:32

Where shall we start? Well, cows got some great resources on his website, and we pulled this straight from his digital minimalism. One on one course but here is the concept in his own words.

Cal Newport 6:45

I'm Cal Newport. Welcome to digital minimalism. One on one. The goal of this course is to give you the tools you need to transform your digital life, from something that distracts you from the things that are important and exciting. Do something that supports true sources of meaning and satisfaction. The plan for this course is I'm going to present to you 10 big ideas for my new book on this topic. So the first two ideas are autonomy, not usefulness, and psychological hooks. So these ideas are going to detail what exactly is the problem that so many people are facing with their digital life. The next two ideas are digital minimalism, and the three principles of digital minimalism. So this is where I will tell you about digital minimalism, which is my solution to these problems and help explain the principles that underscore why it works so well. After that, we're going to talk about the digital declutter. This is a 30 day process to help you rapidly transform into the digital minimalist lifestyle. Now, this is something I've had over 1600 people go through and give me detailed reports on it works exceptionally well. I'm really excited to teach you about it. So after that, we're going to do four big ideas, they're going to help you become a master at Digital minimalism, advanced concepts for making this a sustainable and successful lifestyle. So these include, solitude is vital. Social media is not social master leisure, and the attention resistance will then end with a final idea. The App Store wants your soul. And it's here that I'm going to underscore that the stakes we're playing for with this topic really are quite important.

mike parsons 8:34

The App Store once you're so well, we're gonna get so deep into that because there's never been a truer things said and where essentially, we've been fortunate enough from Kaos public speaking to essentially pick some of the best bits of this course that he was introducing. And so we're gonna lock into the problem. We're going to talk about the business behind this and the true cost Social media and then we are I promise you, everybody, it won't be all doom and gloom, we will get into some of the solutions and the opportunities that we have on the other side of this. It's so true chat, isn't it? Like there is such a big business behind how we use social media and until I really got into this, even I didn't really appreciate the forget the the product itself, but the business behind our attention.

Chad Owen 9:27

Yeah, we've talked about it before, but I think a lot of people don't realise that if you're not paying for the product, then you are the product. Yeah, good point. And people have been saying that for a long time, essentially, ever since Facebook got really popular in in the late aughts. But here we are 10 years later, and people still don't understand how it's it's the business of attention. And in a way, our attentions being stolen, or we're becoming addicted to giving maybe things that we didn't intend to give our attention. But we're finding ourselves giving ourselves, you know, giving all of our attention to it. And being academic, that cow is everything that he talks about is very, you know, well researched and backed by by many studies. And so the thing that I think he leads with is how addictive these technologies can be and the effects that it has on our psyches. And here's cow talking about how addictive these digital technologies actually are.

Cal Newport 10:26

What you're looking for it I saw, I talked to some psychologists about this, I asked like, what are we are people addicted to their phones? What's the right terminology? And so what they told me is okay, it's, it's not like a substance addict. Right? And so like a with some rare exceptions that really show up more in video gaming. people's relationships with their phone is not like a substance addiction, what what they would call it is something more like what they call a moderate behavioural addiction. Which means, you know, hey, if I took your phone away, you're not going to sneak out of the middle of night right to get to an internet cafe or something. Such as addiction. I could steal your grandmother's jewellery or something. But with a moderate behavioural addiction, what it's described by is if you have access to it, you use it more that is healthy. Right? And so that's the way that psychologists think about what's going on. And so, the question is do you have the question to ask if you would determine if you have one of these behavioural addictions to the phone is do you find yourself using it even when you know that you'd be better off not you find yourself using it when you're with your kids? You know, it'd be much better just to be here with my kids do you find yourself using it with your with your friends and you can't help but get the food out? Are you you know, you should be sleepy but you can't help them look at it. So it's Are you using it even when you know you shouldn't or using it more than you know is healthy? That's the hallmark of what they call moderate behavioural addiction

Unknown Speaker 11:40

is the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is look at my phone

Unknown Speaker 11:43

before you pray.

Unknown Speaker 11:44

Yeah, it is because I wake up because my alarms on my phone too. So in order for me to turn my alarm off, I have to look at my phone and then I'm like, Okay, did anybody texts me? Did anybody call me

Unknown Speaker 11:54

and then I don't touch my phone until at least an hour after I wake up. I get up. I pray Read my daily affirmations I get in the car right? Like I really don't even get touch it till I get like, like 530 when I'm about to be at work

mike parsons 12:09

no Chad were who were addicted, we can help ourselves when waking up. And it's imagine that it's the first thing that so many people do. Even though as devoted

Chad Owen 12:21

as those, those interviewers, you know, they they pick up their phones before they pray,

mike parsons 12:26

right. Can you imagine and I have to say that I am immensely proud that most occasions I do not sleep with my iPhone in my bedroom. And I think it is kind of crazy that I think that that is such an achievement. But in this context of addiction, I think we can all appreciate that's kind of remarkable, isn't it?

Chad Owen 12:52

Yeah. Yeah. You know, in some ways, the simplest app on the phone the alarm clock is like what keeps the Jews so close to God At night, you know, Oh, I can't you know, not have it in the bedroom because it's my alarm clock. I mean, we've had alarm clocks for what, like 180 years, like, come on. I don't think that's any excuse. I find this definition of moderate behavioural addiction. Really interesting because I think, you know, people wouldn't see their phones as as, you know, addictive substance, like he says, you know, like cigarettes or, or drugs or anything like that. But this psychological term, moderate behavioural addiction, it's like, whenever you feel guilty about it, then you know that you might have this moderate behavioural addiction. So there's that interesting, like tinge of guilt. I think that signals Hey, maybe we are actually somewhat addicted to these technologies.

mike parsons 13:47

Yeah. And if in the end of the day, if it's the first thing we do in the morning, and it's the last thing we do before we go to bed, I think it opens up the conversation of nonlinearities There's moderate addiction. But think about just how your brain is essentially working from start to finish of the day across that, you know, 1617 hours that you're awake. You're using it all day long. for, you know, on average social media uses about two hours a day. Plus, there's all the other technologies, you're doing it first thing you're doing it last thing, the thing I relate to, and it is really set up in this next clip, is the fact that you get no time to rest your brain. Like he is working at a REIT. And I'm old enough to remember life pre internet. And I remember boredom. When I was really young and I was at elementary or what they call in Australia in the UK primary school. I remember just time and boredom, which I think there's a whole new generation that never experiences that that's face so What a what a may an immense change in in social behaviour. So let's let's now have a listen to Cal Newport talking about where we're really getting to, is the deprivation of solitude.

Cal Newport 15:16

What happens if you never give yourself any time alone with your thoughts just it's you and your thoughts. You're bored, you're looking at the world around you, but you're not looking at input that was created by another person. Well, young people have pushed that experiment to the extreme, because we want to find a group of people who never have any time below with your thoughts. It's really like the teenagers with their phones right there audit constantly. And we see the anxiety really jump up for that particular generation. So I think that's the canary in the coal by this telling us when you start batshit type of load with your thoughts, short circuits to braid. And so what happens is you get anxious I think as a culture, we have this background type of anxiety that we've just become used to like Yeah, he's kind of always feel a little bit anxious. But a lot of this is really just for short circuiting the brain because this brain was not meant to be processing it. Put from other people all day long, right? I mean, this is not what our Brady ball for it so it's it's crossing some wires in there so we're all a little bit frazzled, we're all a little bit anxious and we don't realise it's probably self imposed.

Chad Owen 16:11

Hmm, this self imposed overstimulation over activation of the brain. Again, the kind of scientific angle is really interesting. Going back to the caveman days, so to speak, our social circles were very intimate and small. And here we are now exposing ourselves to to hundreds if not thousands, or in some cases, hundreds of thousands and millions of inputs of other social beings and it's as cow saying, you know, it's it's overloading our capacity to to understand it all. Do you do you ever

mike parsons 16:44

have this experience which which what I have is that, you know, when my like, I have a naturally curious brain I'm sure that's why both of us make this this this podcast, but I have these moments where I don't want to read any news. I don't want to listen to a podcast, I don't want to listen to music. I get these moments, particularly when I'm like, getting to meetings and places and on the go, I have these moments where I'm acutely aware of, I don't want any inputs. Like I just need time to think I had a moment like that this week, where I was going to the office in the morning and have a lot to do. And I just needed like some thinking solitude time just to process in order to get ready for the day. And even the thought of some gentle background music felt like too much like I just needed some solitude and reflection. Do you ever have those moments where you just like no inputs?

Chad Owen 17:54

Yeah, well, it's it's funny because, on the one hand, I am like an over consumer Specifically the podcasts, I have over 100 podcasts that I am subscribed to, I don't automatically download all the episodes but I kind of search or browse through over 100 different podcasts to, to satiate my, my podcast needs. And so I listened to them a lot, you know, often when I'm walking to and from work or walking the dog, a challenge that I have given myself recently inspired by cow and I'm gonna issue the challenge to you into our listeners is whenever you find yourself in a situation where you're waiting, along with other people, don't pick up and use your phone. And notice how many people are using their phone. And how few people yes are having a conversation. And what if, what if you decided to just strike up a conversation with the person next to you or even as as you're saying, you know, have a moment to yourself. So an example of this was I went to the dentist And you go into the waiting room. And not only are the people there waiting on their phones, but the people behind the reception desk or on their phones. So it's not just the people waiting. It's the people working there on their phones. And I was sitting there very conscious being like, I'm not gonna use my phone. I'm just gonna sit here and wait. And it's just, it's so it's so pervasive that just being mindful of that I think can help us begin to rewire that moderate behavioural addiction. So yeah, just you know, to be more mindful and understand how pervasive the uses and how automatic it can be. And so taking those intentional moments where you're, you're not using it and kind of paying attention to others who are not in a judgmental wave, just just notice it, I think will, at least for me, it's helped stop me from continually reaching into my pocket to pull out my phone.

mike parsons 19:52

Yeah. You know, just to build on that. One of the things that I've done is I've moved all social media into a Yeah folder on my phone and off the homepage and my usage has dropped dramatically just by oh but cow even.

Chad Owen 20:09

It has we have a great clip from calories

mike parsons 20:13

to motor denticles he's doing but look, we're addicted. Okay cows confirm that we just don't have enough time to like think and process in solitude. But it doesn't stop there this next clip he gets into oh my gosh, look at the impact this is having on how we think feel and experience friendship.

Unknown Speaker 20:36

You talked about consolidate texting and you said phones have become woven into a fraught sense of obligation in a friendship being a friend means being on call tethered to your phone ready to be attentive online.

Cal Newport 20:46

It's true I mean it's all the time right your friends family like Why aren't you answering the text? all the all the all the tests are going on?

Unknown Speaker 20:53

I they do the question mark like Hello. I stepped away from my phone for 10 minutes relax. Yeah.

Cal Newport 21:00

It's been it's been five minutes. Yeah. Well, here's what the things, again we know is that social connections are sort of at the centre of human flourishing, right, like social connections are so crucial that like our social system is connected to our pain centres, right? That we, we actually the same centre that makes us feel physical pain comes into play when we feel isolated or lonely, right. So it's really important. So how do you best you know, satisfy that drive for social connection? Well, if you're sacrificing time and attention on behalf of a relationship, so like I actually, I went to where you are, I've given up some of my time, I'm making a sacrifice for you to come to you. We're gonna do something together. I've showed you a commitment. I've actually sort of making some sacrifice for you. Those type of connections are really strong. We feel really good about it. And what do you replace it with what psychologists called social stalking, which is the stuff that requires almost no sacrifice of time and attention. I just hit like on your thing, or dropped a comment or send you a quick text. It doesn't give you the same satisfaction. And so we get this sort of paradoxical results in the research literature where people who use social media more end up lonelier. And the reason is is because they think what they're doing out here It feels like this has been social but the sort of deep social sitter's that our brain really wants you to be sacrificing it with. So when I took time out of my day, I'm sitting down with you, I'm talking with you face to face, that's what it's craving. So if you're a place that with the easier stuff, you end up paradoxically lonelier because there's this deep part of your brain that doesn't know about text messages it doesn't know about Instagram that says, Well, we have social today. Oh,

Chad Owen 22:26

ha our brain doesn't know that social media isn't social,

mike parsons 22:30

that this is my second most favourite clip of the show. This social stalking. This was such a big aha for me when I first heard it, we're effectively replacing the bountiful plentiful, rich experience of sitting being with friends and chatting and connecting with these low effort. Low Cost likes, right? And so the greatest irony is we're doing less of the meaningful stuff and more of the crap stuff. No wonder we're feeling more lonely in this hyper connected hyper social world. I mean, huge insight for all our listeners. This is massive. And it just reframes not only your personal life, but every business in some way, shape or another is involved in social media. So take a moment to think about how this reflects on how you might see social media as a platform to connect with customers and partners and employees. And it really is something it's an insight you can use in many different parts of your life.

Chad Owen 23:33

Hmm. It it's probably the best example of deceptive marketing ever. The term social media go out on a limb and say that

mike parsons 23:46

it's already a mislead just in in in the title itself. I mean, that's great.

Chad Owen 23:51

Yeah. And just, again, going back to and I'm a total geek about this, you know, evolutionary psychology And neuroscience cow saying that the research says that our brains do not recognise these kinds of social media activities as social activities from like a core fundamental human perspective. And, and so it's you know, no wonder that you can spend all this time interacting on social media but still feel

lonely.

mike parsons 24:22

And what he starts to actually in your comment what you really get us to is behind this very multi dimensional problem of addiction. No time to think it affects our friends and our family. In this Oh, it's all about the Benjamins. Oh, yeah, baby. We are talking about Jerry Maguire moment Show me the money. So now we're going to move into the next chapter of the show because we are going to expose cows thinking around the business, and what the true cost of all this social media is. And where are we going to start? When you think about the device itself, and how you might see business and financial gain from the device, so let's have a listen to capital talking about how money is made from the device.

Unknown Speaker 25:15

Sometimes it looks crazy but that's all

Unknown Speaker 25:17

you got to do look at your screen time and you'll realise you not looking at stuff that is actually a value all most of the time social media

Cal Newport 25:24

yeah at Apple See that? This is smart Apple added that screen type because if you think about it, Apple is not directly wrapped up in the attention economy, right? I mean, they sell the devices but they don't they don't have the products don't make money. The more you use it, Android their competitor androids owed by Google. Google's deep in the attention economy, they make money off of getting your attention and that's his competitor. So Apple says here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna start adding tools to the to the Apple products that are going to get you off your phone more. You know what that is, that's just actually like a really smart competitive move because Android can do that. With their their whole business is built around still on you going online as they want you to look at things

Unknown Speaker 25:58

tend to be more responsive. About people using their phones. I felt like it was in a response right to people complaining about people being so addicted to their phones. Yeah.

Cal Newport 26:08

Well, Apple had some of its major investors push back and say you got to do something about it. They're looking at teenagers that are looking at these things. All the time. Teenagers are gay mental health problems. The activist investors hold apple. Okay, you got to do something about right. Yeah, they listen.

Chad Owen 26:21

Hmm. I think it's fascinating that the investor community had to step in and say, Hey, you know, we're all about making money but this something feels a little bit wrong about

mike parsons 26:32

this. Yeah. So they mentioned screentime there. So I just opened my screen time. And my my daily average last week was just on my iPhone ally was two hours and 41 minutes per day. Interesting, huh?

Chad Owen 26:51

That's that still seems like a little low to me. I feel like some people's will be much, much higher, but I can't look at mine because I was on vacation. So I was

mike parsons 26:59

I have service. But the you know the the interesting thing I just did well if I slept for eight hours and it was two hours on my phone, it's already taken 10 hours out of the day. So I've got 14 hours left to do everything else in my life. And admittedly I do some of my work on my phone, but it's just a big reminder, I'd love to hear like from one of our listeners, who's got the biggest screen time average out there and just I'm really keen to hear how people are using their devices. But we mentioned something here which is the the business design behind the business. And this next clip is Kaos research is so good. He's gonna kind of paraphrase and talk us through around a whistle blow up who is from Google and who gave us some really interesting insights on how businesses really woke up to the financial opportunity in social media and devices. So let's have Cal Newport talking about the social media whistleblower.

Unknown Speaker 28:14

One of the first things you break down in the book is a what a Silicon Valley whistleblower said about social media addiction and comparing it to a whistleblower in the tobacco industry. Can you explain a little bit?

Cal Newport 28:24

Yeah, well, this is what's interesting about smartphones and social media. I mean, we think that looking at the phone all the time is fundamental to the technology. Like that's the way you're supposed to use it. It's not the way we used to use it. It's not the way we use iPhones when they first came out. It's not the way we use social media, when it first came out.

Unknown Speaker 28:40

It was to make phone calls and listen to music,

Cal Newport 28:42

make phone calls to music and social media, you would you would post something and maybe come back later that week and see if somebody else had posted something. Did they re engineered the experience? So that it would be all about social approval indicators coming to you all day long? Right. So every time you hit the app, am I getting to like the like button wasn't there at all? So I've favourites by getting tagged photos, that was on purpose because they realised if they could have something you could see about yourself. Every time you hit the app on your phone, you get a slot machine effect.

Unknown Speaker 29:11

And people get devastated when they post a picture and they don't get enough likes. And they're like, Oh my god, what's wrong with me?

Cal Newport 29:17

Yeah, at Trista. So Tristan Harris, this whistleblower from Google. He claims that Instagram was even artificially holding back. The favourite saw the photos because they had studied the reinforcement schedules for slot machines. And realised if you subtype see nothing, and you sometimes see a lot, it's much more compulsive to come back. And so like a lot of what I've argued is this idea that you have to use the phone all the time, that's not fundable to the technology that was essentially engineered by a small number of companies because they had to get those revenue numbers up before their IPOs. Now are we talking about the phone

Unknown Speaker 29:48

self, the internet being bad or just a social media media

Cal Newport 29:51

element of it? It's it's the social media elephant, not even the social media element. It's the engineered social media experience that gets you to look at the phone all the time. I tried to separate those things. I mean, I think the internet's great. I think smartphones are a miracle. I think the ability to connect with people online is a huge innovation to think to get to be upset is how small of our companies took that good behaviour and use that as the foundation to get us to do this all day long.

Chad Owen 30:17

They turned our phones into slot machines. How frightening is that? To backhoe?

mike parsons 30:23

Ben slot machines in the same sentences? Social media engineering, like does that not put it on a whole different dimension of bad and ugly?

Chad Owen 30:35

Yeah, you know, my, the science fiction hopeful writer and myself, you know, goes to this dystopian future where the vice police are not only you know, policing, the traditional vices, but also how these digital technologies are have infected our brains because they become addictive. He was thinking like Minority Report and whatnot but it is It's true that it's engineered and it's engineered in the same way that the casino is engineered to make more money. And again, it's it's not necessarily the the dollars or the nickels or whatever that you putting into the, into the machines but it's your attention which is very, very valuable,

mike parsons 31:14

valuable and scarce all at the same time. And it is. So when when you hear cow talking, it makes you realise how much the power that that people in technology companies wield. And what we've seen here just to expand this into some themes that have come up both in the show and beyond. I mean, it was definitely last year was like the worst year ever for social media and the big tech Titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of them had the toughest time in recent history around privacy overexpansion, some might say ego let's just have a look at what happened this morning with the CEO of we work at being fired. There's all these unicorns have got themselves into all sorts of trouble. But together with this and privacy breaches, what we're seeing is it's not all rosy. And when you hear the level of engineering for our attention that is happening, it comes back to your earlier point, Chad, for social media when we don't purchase the product, when we don't pay for the product, we become the product and we are exploited in our privacy and our attention. And oh my gosh, this this leads us to a whole new world of implications, doesn't it? chair?

Chad Owen 32:33

Yeah, and we've got a great clip from cow, really just sharing the the true impact of our excessive phone use.

Unknown Speaker 32:42

There's a part in our book, everything that remains and is actually seen as I was driving I 71 to Cincinnati, and it's bumper to bumper traffic, some of the worst traffic in the countries in Cincinnati. And as going south, I'm stopped we're going zero miles. Now I look to my right, and the person in the driver's seat has a newspaper over there. We'll love it and and a bowl of cereal in their hand, like the worst kind of multitasking here. And just milk is dripping down their chin as they're reading the paper. And, and we looked at that like, Oh, that's, that's not right. Yeah. But now we look at and say,

Unknown Speaker 33:16

Yeah, I do that too.

Cal Newport 33:18

Yeah, so they normalised it. So that's a problem, right lack of solitude. The other problem is taking the sort of social processing hardware that again, is incredibly specialised, it's the story of our species success is that we have these social supercomputers that can do this, like I can, I can talk with you guys. I can look at your facial expressions, I can practice limbic consonants where I try to match the pacing. I'm doing something called mentalizing right now where I'm building a model of your mind in my mind, so that I can test against this model how you would react to different things. I mean, right. It's a social supercomputer. But it's evolved for with people, you know, people I've known for a long time, we're in person we're interacting. This just messes with it. It doesn't know how to deal with like, Comment, you know, like a bad tweet or something like that, right? Because we treat it as if the person's right across because our brain doesn't know the difference, right? So it's like, oh, my God, like someone in my tribe is really mad at me like, I gotta get a spear in the back like red alert, right? But it's some rando on Twitter, or the likes coming in that I get more likes or not like our brain is seeing this is like we're around the campfire. And I can see that, you know, the the tribe mates are unhappy with me like this is this is a serious issue, right? I need to manage the social dynamic. So this brain does not know at all, how to deal with this sort of artificial sociality, that was sort of again, schemed up in a dorm room at Harvard, you know, 15 years ago, right? It's not some grand experiment. So that's also and then the final thing is we're losing the ability to concentrate. And this is one of the issues I mean, totally attention spans are just this has economic consequence. I mean, it has huge consequences to quality of life for sure. If you can't just be present in a moment, you can't concentrate on something that you're seeing if you can't concentrate a conversation. It's having economic consequences. I mean, non industrial productivity metrics have been stagnant throughout this last year. 10 years of all this technological innovation, we have a whole generation of people entering the workforce that are incredibly uncomfortable with sustaining attention at the same time that our economy is shifting more and more towards. The thing we do is have brains concentrate and produce value. We're going towards this high level knowledge economy, where this is like the most important resource we have this is our oil fields, right? And we're getting worse and worse at using it so I he's right. I mean, sacks is right about this is that what's happening to our brain is is really non trivial and right TV did this too. But you only let you watch TV in the evening.

mike parsons 35:35

So there you have it, where we're in the idea and knowledge economy, and we're being designed to the point that we're unable to concentrate and to put our attention towards thinking in some sort of meaningful way. Oh, I think we have officially entered the Valley of darkness. Hey, Chad.

Chad Owen 35:57

I think this point is one of my favourite It's of cows it comes across really strongly in the book. There's a fundamental socio economic argument for doing everything that he prescribes which we're going to get to right after this. We've got some really great clips talking about the solutions that he advocates for. But even you said it right like we're in an idea economy and yet we're being designed to not be able to concentrate. And I think I probably just skirted I'm, I'm just old enough to like, I think fully miss the generation that's going to be most affected by this right. The internet was in I grew up with the internet. So there was a there was a time before the internet when I was alive, but this fundamental inability of young people to function in this idea economy because you know, they can't concentrate, I think is going to have some real drastic consequences. Once these people are yours and my age.

mike parsons 36:58

Yeah, I totally agree. And he's his first book, deep work by Cal Newport was really if there was one practice that I could share with you and our listeners as to how might you succeed in a knowledge or an idea economy, deep work, you've got to carve out a couple of hours a day where there's no interruptions and you think you write you produce your records you make whatever it is that your thing. You got to make that time. Too many people I know, I work with clients that I help I literally back to back meetings every single day. And my only question here to use, when do you think when do you work? When do you do deep work? There's just it's not a sustainable way of working and if outside of your back to back meetings, all you're doing is being on a device? I mean, geez, you got to think you got to think there's too much going on in the world. Businesses moving faster than ever. You gotta be able to carve out thinking time it's it's essential, right?

Chad Owen 38:00

Yeah, yeah and for, for those of you that that didn't know, our previous episode was deep work by by Cal Newport. You can also just google maker schedule manager schedule. And you'll find an article by Paul Graham, someone else that we've profiled here on the show, which is a short essay on how to do exactly what you're, you're saying Mike is ensure that you're making time to do the work, you know, that's your unique ability and then also kind of, you know, take some meetings, because you know, we all get a, we've had to go to some meetings, we can't get out of all of them.

mike parsons 38:35

Now, on this note, it feels like we may be turning the corner it's perhaps time to, to look at some solutions, some hacks and tips, tricks, habits. Where do we want to start the ascent out of the valley of darkness Chad

Chad Owen 38:49

at Well, one that I came to just as we were exiting the discussion of screentime. I don't know if any of you listeners know this, but you can actually set time limits. To apps from screentime, where iOS will notify you and kick you out of the app if you've used it too much. So there was a time I think it was about early last year, where I was watching a lot of YouTube clips on my phone. And I just set a time limit for 30 minutes. And after I'd watched it for 30 minutes, I could not, could not get back into it. And now I don't even have the YouTube app on my phone. So there's one Chad special tip there before we get into what we have here from from cow.

Cal Newport 39:32

Digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology use. And it says what you should do is wipe the slate clean of the various apps and services that you have haphazardly downloaded or just started using various parts of your digital life and instead, rebuild it from scratch but very intentionally, so that the tools that you actually use your digital life, directly serve things that you care about. When it comes to social media, I think you have to understand what's actually happening with this product, which is this is an experience that has evolved over time from what it used to be, which was a relatively static way for you to post information about yourself and see information for people you care about.

That shifted from that

experience in which they are city, a stream of social approval indicator about yourself at you all day long likes and retweets and tags of photos that are constantly coming at you deliver through this app that every time you hit this button, you might see some new indication that someone else was thinking about you. That type of behaviour, that experience is something that was not innovated because it made users happier. This is an experience that has been engineered to make you a compulsive user of your phone and therefore should be something that makes you where you put it social media, it's political in the sense that you're taking a stand against the exploitation that a small number of companies are now perpetrated on. Billions of users. But I think what they did, which was saying, okay, we're going to build a walled garden in which the internet's going to exist, we're gonna build our own private internet, we'll make it very easy for you to actually connect with other people to figure out what's going on, come into our walled garden, it's fine, we've made it easy, it's free, don't worry about it. And then once we're trapped in there, they start saying, now we're going to watch every single thing you do, we're going to reduce you to overnight to thousand data points. And then we're going to exploit this data, to try to get you to look at this as much as possible, give us as much data as possible squeeze out every last dollar of value out of your time at attention. This is a serious move that they make. And so I think it's an act of sort of economic activism, as well as a reclaiming of your humanity to say, I don't necessarily want to be the target of this. And so I think there's a lot of people who are coming around to this idea. Now, social media doesn't equal the internet. And we could harness the excitement of all these innovations without having to be exploited by a $500 billion market cap. Puppy,

mike parsons 42:02

huh? It's so fascinating, like the challenge to reclaim humanity and just start again. And it's almost, it's like, it's like a cleanse, right? Like just detox, cleanse, purge yourself, and then try and be more in control of what sort of tools you want to introduce. I think this is such a powerful lesson from cow think.

Chad Owen 42:28

Yeah, I'm sitting here holding my phone again, to see how many apps I have on my phone. So nearly all of my homescreen is folders. So that's nine, nine icons inside of another 20 icons. So you know, that's over. That's over 100 150 200 apps, so so I'm gonna go even further than deleting social media from my phone. I think I might get rid of, of every app on here and and redownload them, I'm not going to do it now. On the show, of course, oh, this week I think that's because it's there's too many apps it's too many things vying for my attention. So while I don't have Twitter or Facebook or Instagram on my phone, I still have other things that suck my attention. So I'm curious. I'll report back on how many how many apps I have post a post cleanse here. I gotta do it. I mean, can you and I've been listening to cow we've been reading cow, we gotta we gotta put his his practices into motion.

mike parsons 43:30

I I honestly, think the big turn here the the the light at the end of the tunnel is it get them off your homepage, get them off your phone completely. Whatever you need to start again, is a chance for you to reclaim so much of your time and attention back and remember, time and attention is the most scarce the most valuable resource in the planet. I mean, that's all We're so thankful that we get all this great feedback from our listeners. And certainly people listen to the show. Because we know that your time is precious. But we've just got a couple more clips left from cow which really and and please hang on I promise you it's worth it because my favourite clip is the is the last clip of the show. But before we get to that, I think we need to kind of frame what what's on the outside here. And it's not always easy, but we give up a lot of our time to social media into our devices. But there is this opportunity to reclaim your your leisure time and the leisure experience. And it's not as easy as you might think. So let's have a listen to Cal Newport talking about reclaiming leisure.

Cal Newport 44:44

Yeah, so that's the hard part about all this right. So I walk people through this, you know, redo your digital life, get back down to what matters, get some rules around how you use it. Now they have all this time free. That's actually really problematic, because it's not at all obvious. What do you do if like the average American uses social Vidya something like two hours a day? What do you do with those two hours? It's actually a kind of a hard question. And a lot of people that did this experiment at the book, had a hard time with it.

Unknown Speaker 45:09

read this book is one thing you could do. You could read, I actually, yeah,

Cal Newport 45:12

you can read the book. But that's gonna take you so many hours, right? And so the book I actually get into, you know, one of the things we crave as humans, so a lot of this book is about, like, what do we actually crave as humans? And what are the ways that some of this Tech has maybe diverted that right? And how do we get back to the things we crave because what we want to do is would it be happy would be satisfied, would it be successful? And so one of the things we crave is really high quality activities. So things we do or participated that are skilled that maybe require some appreciation that we enjoy just for the sake of the quality of the thing, right, like I this is something I do or something I listened to, but something I'm an expert on. I appreciate it. I just like it for its intrinsic quality, right? We need that because life is hard has all these ups and downs, but if you could, if you could just appreciate certain things like this is just really good and I appreciate this a high quality activity. It helps me For us from a lot of that, and so the book talks about, you need to get more of that back in your life, what do you take two hours a day of swiping out of your life, try to fill some of that two hours with something that's like an activity that's high quality, something that you're good at something that requires skill, something that you're getting better at something where you could really appreciate it. When you do that you feel the shift and how you feel like that, that background the anxiety really starts to dissipate and you have more of a calmness or a piece when you start replacing more of the frenetic tap the little glowing screen with you know, I spent an hour today or two hours a day doing something that means something to me, right or it's really important, or it's a skill that I've been building or it's just really quality or it's something I just really enjoy,

Unknown Speaker 46:38

like learning how to cook better learn how to cook better. Yeah, I have a billion cookbooks at home that I don't use.

Cal Newport 46:42

That's that's a great example. I learned how to cook or like athletic, right? You're like I gotta learn to jitsi right? I mean, how many people do you know do that these days right? I gotta go learn like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but they get so much out of it. It's like a couple hours of you know, doing something good. It's hard like it.

Unknown Speaker 46:57

Dry was I'd have to pay all that money to hire somebody

Cal Newport 46:59

else. You got it. electricity from Hawaii.

Chad Owen 47:03

I'm not sure how goes fires teaching myself plumbing. But I, I love I love this idea of reclaiming leisure. And I think he's, I think he's really onto something when he says, We don't know what to do. We don't know how to be bored, as you said at the very beginning here, and it can be kind of paralysing, and of course, the easiest thing for us to do is pick up the attention, the attention hog of our phone, but there's so many rich hobbies and activities and people that we can be spinning our attention on. That would be so much more enriching for us. And I think for me, it's, it's not replacing that full two hours, but like, how can you maybe replace it in 10 or 15 minutes so instead of two hours of social media, maybe you spend 15 more minutes helping your kid with homework or 15 more minutes at the dinner table, you know, with your partner significant other and not not have to like You know, go cold turkey and then replace it with with with full on boredom or something else. Exactly. Well, and

mike parsons 48:07

I think that this leads us to what what do you think if we could get a bunch of your friends together Chad, who were high us, like really high usage on social media and we could reduce their social media and phone use by like 50%. What do you think is the one thing they could spend that empty time with to bring them happiness? Like, think about your friends, if you could slash and burn all of their excessive social use? What would you think is the one thing they could all start doing with that time that would bring them great happiness and fulfilment?

Chad Owen 48:48

I think just having more conversations face to face conversations. You know, it's easy for those of us that have significant others who come home. Yeah. From our days at work, and some times we fall into routine. But I think even if even if you just have a dog, right, or a pet spending more time with another being Yeah, like that, I think cow talking about like, our brains are hard wired to be social in person beings not social over the internet beings, our brain doesn't difference. And that's why we get so confused and why we can be so lonely even though you know we have so many of these online friends. So yeah, I would love to be more intentional about just having fun and interesting conversations with people. Yeah. And he really hits the nail on the head with replace those meaningful conversations with just likes, you know, and that social stalking that we talked about earlier

mike parsons 49:43

that that's the huge insight here. But as you rightly pointed out what you'd want for your friends and what we'd want for our listeners is just to get back into some good old fashioned conversation. And it's with that that we have one more thought from Cal Newport, which is based on how we might reclaim conversation.

Cal Newport 50:06

So the way I see it is, you know what your braid counts as true socialisation? Is it person or analogue, right? I hear your voice. You hear my voice, we're going back and forth. If I could see you it's even better. If I could see body language if we could actually have you in a context. That's what I call conversation. That's what our brain treats as real socialising. And so the way I see it is the the phone. The great advantage of the phone for socialising is logistics, right? It makes it much easier to find out Hey, where are you across the street? Let's meet up over here are your Italia see on social media like you're visiting? Great, let's get together right? It's great for logistics. But you shouldn't think about it as replacing this. Right? And so if you change your mindset so you like what I'm actually add a lager face to face with some of that socialising. This is logistics, that's not bad, but just logistics. It doesn't count that that's going to get you doing more of this and as far as I could tell from sort of my research or the other reason literature makes you a lot happier, right? I mean, you gotta be sacrificing time and attention on behalf of family, close friends and community you do those things. You feel like a part of something you feel very social. If you're not doing those things, you don't no matter how much you're, you know, saved Happy birthday. Facebook post.

Chad Owen 51:17

Yeah, it's about having those face to face conversations. I mean, as as Kyle says, It's investing that time that makes that gives you going all the way back to our most popular episode, Simon synnex. Finding your why like those conversations and that social interaction gives us purpose, right? Because that's our trend fulfilment. Yeah, and fulfilled. Yeah, exactly.

mike parsons 51:40

You know, they feel so good. It always feels so good when you've had friends, because, oh, wow. It's been ages since I've seen them and you just feel so deeply satisfied that that no social posts will ever provide to you. There it is. Chad. I mean, I think it's been it's almost been going like Going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. It's like we've admitted the

Chad Owen 52:03

I don't know, what is it? 1012? Yeah, we're pulling out our phones looking at our screen times and how many apps

mike parsons 52:09

we have made it our addiction, we lack solitude, our friendships are all skew with businesses making a pretty penny at huge, huge impact akin to that of gambling casino in the tobacco industries. But there's hope there's there's real hope, like delete stuff, move it off the homepage, reclaim leisure and conversation. I mean, what a powerful bunch of ideas that I think that affects every single person on this planet that has a device in their pocket. I mean, pay attention, right? Yeah. And this book is a great kind of corollary to deep work. So if maybe you're finding trouble making that time for that deep work, you can dip here into digital minimalism, to free up some of that time and then you can apply it towards doing that deep work which as he said, Mike is really how those of us that work in the knowledge and idea economy provide value. Yeah. So that's the second instalment of our wonderful friend, Mr. Cow, Newport. And honestly, I do propose the idea to all of our listeners that I do think that he is the next Simon Sinek I really believe cow is is onto something in a major way. And I think there's, there's so much to gain from his thinking and he's writing he's, he's wonderful. We've got two more instalments of Cal Newport, we've got one of these other books so good, they can't ignore you, as well as a sort of a best of Cal Newport show. He's written a couple of books around how to be a great student and how to learn. Again, wonderful topics right up our alley. So there's plenty more Cal Newport and You can find all of that on moonshots.ai. So how are you enjoying Cal Newport so far cheddar? I think he's, he, like I said, I feel like he might be a long lost brother. You might want to check their ancestry.com it sounds a lot like you know, it's it's great revisiting him again because while I have gotten rid of social media, there's, like I said, I've got almost 200 apps on my phone. I know I can get rid of even more. So for those of you that want to take up the challenge to do more deep work and do a bit of a digital declutter, don't forget, you can reach Mike and I at hello@moonshots.io and all the clips and everything we mentioned here on the show, you can also find@moonshots.io Yep. So thank you to you, Chad. Thank you to our listeners. Thank you to all the people that have been reaching out to us sending us emails doing Good stuff. We do really appreciate it. We hope you've enjoyed an adventure into digital minimalism and detoxing a little bit from our social and device addictions. And we hope that you found some clues on how you might get on the other side of that. That's it for the moonshots podcast. That's around

Transcribed by https://otter.ai