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Episode #152: Cal Newport
198 Plays6 years ago
Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of six books, including Deep Work and So Good They Can’t Ignore You. You won’t find him on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, but you can often find him at home with...
The post Episode #152: Cal Newport appeared first on PolicyViz.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Hi everyone. Welcome back to the policy of his podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. And on this week's episode of the show, we're going to switch gears a little bit. I'm excited to have Cal Newport on the show. Cal is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown university. He's also the author of six books. His current book is digital minimalism, choosing a focused life in a noisy world.
Cal Newport's Views on Technology and Social Media Usage
00:00:33
Speaker
And I thought it would be interesting to talk with Cal about how we can all do a better job with the technology.
00:00:40
Speaker
and the social media platforms that we use all the time and every day. So we sit down and talk about how he uses social media platforms or doesn't, how social media companies have made their tools and platforms addictive. And as a computer scientist, I was also interested in how much time he spends in front of computers in these tools.
00:01:01
Speaker
So it's a little bit of a different discussion because it's not necessarily focused directly on data visualization or directly on presentation skills. But these are the sorts of things that obviously pervade all of our lives and our readers lives and our audiences lives. And so I found the book really interesting and was fortunate enough to get Cal to come on the show and have a conversation with me.
Technology Addiction and Social Media Tactics
00:01:24
Speaker
So I hope you will enjoy this week's episode of the Policy Vis podcast with Cal Newport.
00:01:35
Speaker
Hi, Cal. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Of course. It's my pleasure. I'm really excited to talk to you. You got this new book out that I just finished. Really enjoyed it. It was a nice read. I felt both stressed out as I was reading it, but also the same time, like eerily calm. I was like, I could feel where I could like strip out all the digital mayhem in my life by going through it. Yeah. Well, that's, that's the secret, right? You need to make the reader stressed and then offer them the only solution that'll help them.
00:02:06
Speaker
It's like my wife is watching the Marie Kondo special on Netflix. And so it's like, I've got both of these things going on at the same time. I can get rid of all of my old socks and I can get rid of all the old app on my phone. So this is great. Yeah, that works for me. And if I could just get her viewership and readership, that would also be good. I think people care a little bit more about the old socks, I guess. Yeah, they might. Facebook.
00:02:30
Speaker
Well, before we dive into the digital minimalism that this book is about, maybe you can just tell folks a little bit about yourself and your background.
00:02:38
Speaker
So I'm a computer science professor at Georgetown University, but I also write public facing books more recently about the intersection of technology and culture as a technologist. I figured that's an interesting topic for me to sometimes delve into. And so digital minimalism is my sixth book, actually. And it really gets at some of these issues that I, like a lot of people, have been noticing going on in our culture at the moment. And that specifically is our addiction to
00:03:08
Speaker
to technology, to apps, to mobile phones. I mean, you're diving in specifically on this one, on this sort of noisy digital life.
00:03:15
Speaker
Right. There seems to be this growing sense of unease that people are having about their digital life. It really tipped about two years ago where we shifted from the self-deprecation addicted to my phone, sort of laughing into this actual serious unease. And so I got pretty deep on this topic because I would hear about it a lot from my readers. And I think the right way to categorize what's going on is that
00:03:39
Speaker
The issue people have with their devices in their personal life is really not about usefulness. So the question is not, in what I'm doing when I'm looking at my screen, is it completely useless or is there some worth? Because of course there's some worth, right? There's a reason why you signed up for these things and downloaded these things. The issue people seem to be having is with autonomy.
00:03:57
Speaker
So this idea that they're looking at that screen way much more than they should, to the exclusion of things they know are more powerful. So it's that sense of, I'm losing control of how I actually spend my time and lead my life, that's starting to get people upset. And that's what I'm trying to address with this book.
00:04:13
Speaker
Right. I want to talk about the balance between the mobile technology and the desktop technology, because I think that's a tension for a lot of people who spend their days in an office. But before we get into that, can you talk a little bit about how the social media companies have made their tools and their platforms addictive? You talk about a lot in the book, but I'm just wondering if you give people a sense of what they are doing so that we are hooked on their services.
00:04:37
Speaker
This is important to understand. We think about today this constant companion model of smartphone use, where we always look at our phone all day long. We think about that as being somehow fundamental to the technology that, of course, this is what you would do if you would have smartphones. But if you look into it, it's actually more recent than that and also more arbitrary. And the social media companies really had a lot to do with that transition. So essentially what happened is maybe six years into the existence of the major social media platforms, Facebook in particular,
00:05:07
Speaker
they realized they weren't getting the revenue numbers they needed for their IPO to succeed. Their IPO needed to succeed because, of course, there's these early stage investors that wanted a huge 100X return. So they needed the promised land was going to be a big IPO. And even though services like Facebook were popular and people like them, it wasn't generating nearly enough ad revenue to support this IPO. So they have this big question. This is right around the time that Sheryl Sandberg was brought on board at Facebook. They started to get serious about revenue.
00:05:34
Speaker
And they had this question, how do we really prop up or push up the revenue numbers from these services like Facebook? And this is where they actually went ahead and re-engineered the social media experience, where it had used to be relatively static. You would post your relationship status, your favorite movies, and maybe photos from your latest vacation. And maybe you would check what your friends are up to on Monday, but you'd have no reason to check again until the next week. It went from this relatively static, I post, you post, we look at each other post.
00:06:02
Speaker
into instead an experience in which all day long you had a stream of social approval indicators coming inbound to you delivered through the app on your phone. So this is like the like or tags of photos or comments or favorites on Instagram. We think of this as being core to social media, but it actually came relatively late into the game.
Psychological Effects of Social Media
00:06:23
Speaker
And what this gave them was a stream of rewards that you could tap into every time you tap the app.
00:06:29
Speaker
And that's what really changed our experience with smartphones from something that we used as a tool. Oh, I don't know how to get to this restaurant. I get to look up Google Maps. This is great. My phone's awesome. Where it changed from that tool into something that we can't help but checking. And that was entirely engineered because these companies needed to find a way to get us to look at this phone 10 or 20 times more than we were before. So now we have this constant stream of rewards coming at us intermittently throughout the day. The rewards about us, the rewards about people thinking about us, which is very hard to resist.
00:06:59
Speaker
and it completely transformed our relationship with our phones and put us on the track we're on today where people are getting increasingly exhausted. Right. So it's this constant need for approval and likes both to support others and also to see what people are saying about us.
00:07:14
Speaker
Yes. And the arbitrary nature, that's what's important to emphasize. So, I mean, originally the Web 2.0 vision was you could contribute your own content to the Web in addition to just reading content coming from large companies or magazines, which is this brilliant vision and part of what makes the Web so magical and so powerful. And so original Facebook, for example, was just, hey, we'll make that process easier.
00:07:34
Speaker
It's a pain to set up your own blog and have a domain. We can simplify it. We will basically run a blog for you. So this notion of, no, no, I have these indicators all day like likes and retweets and favorites. That was largely invented. It has nothing to do with Web 2.0. It has no fundamental connection to actually using the social internet in any profound way. It was instead pushed originally by Facebook and then spread to all the other companies.
00:07:58
Speaker
because it plays with our psychological vulnerabilities in such a way that it makes it almost irresistible not to keep tapping on that app. Right. You talk in the book about loneliness and social media, and there's a part in the book where you talk about how the more someone uses social media, the more likely they are to be lonely. And I wonder how these things go back and forth. You know, does social media in some sense make us more lonely and are people who are lonely to begin with more likely to use social media? And how does that
00:08:27
Speaker
you know, that causality go back and forth. Well, there's been a debate in the research literature about this. And now, like in 2018, if you look at the more recent studies, you can see a converging consensus, which basically says it depends how you use it. So here's essentially the converging consensus is that there are two things that make us unhappy when you use social media.
00:08:51
Speaker
One is social snacking. That's the term the psychologists use. And that's where you replace deeper, more meaningful connections with lightweight connection on social media. So you say happy birthday, or congrats with three exclamation points when your friend has a baby instead of actually calling someone or going to their house to see how they're doing. And so it's not that the social snacking
00:09:12
Speaker
is in itself negative is that it's replacing things that are very, very positive. And that's a big reason why a lot of people feel more lonely when they use more social media is because it's replacing more of this important
Positive Aspects and Community Engagement
00:09:23
Speaker
connection. We also know that social comparison can be a source of negative affect. And so if you're looking at people's beautiful Instagram photos of their family and feeling inadequate, that makes you feel bad and social media is good at that.
00:09:36
Speaker
On the positive side, what seems to be making people potentially happier from using social media is when it allows them to sort of find and connect with groups that are spread out. So maybe a group of people that share some sort of property or some sort of affinity that's important to you, but are relatively sparse so that you can't actually find a group that satisfies these traits that are in your local town or something like this. And so using social media to find across the country, across the world like-minded people
00:10:05
Speaker
research not surprisingly says that's a source of social positive feeling. Well, this is one reason I wanted to chat with you because the data visualization field is very active on social media, especially Twitter. But there's also these other platforms. There's a big Slack channel right now. There's another platform that people use. Instagram is big. And I wonder
00:10:28
Speaker
how you think about people who use those sorts of platforms, not just to see if their friends are having babies or on cool vacations, but they're using it as sort of a mix between work and pleasure.
Introduction to Digital Minimalism
00:10:44
Speaker
And the same sort of things happen with the likes and the retweets and the thumbs up. And I'm just wondering when you talk to people about their anxiety with social media,
00:10:50
Speaker
but they're using it in a way that's sort of mixing their work area, but also there's an overlap with friends and entertainment together. So I'm curious how you think about folks who have that sort of experience with their social media needs.
00:11:05
Speaker
So this is one of the motivating ideas behind the digital minimalism philosophy, which says the key to trying to navigate these various benefits and cost is that you need to step back and get much more intentional and a lot less haphazard. So the people who seem to succeed, the digital minimalists, you get huge value out of tech without feeling a lot of the sense of loss of autonomy or negative affect. They do so by getting really clear on these are things that really matter to me.
00:11:34
Speaker
And then stepping back and saying, what's the best way to deploy technology to satisfy these things, then happily miss out on everything else. And so this is why you'll see, for example, it's common for like a depth digital minimalist to maybe use a certain social media platform.
00:11:50
Speaker
in a surgical strike type manner. There is this group of X that I connect with in a Facebook group or something like this, and I get great value out of it. But it's not on my phone, and that's not an excuse for me just to idly browse this whenever I'm bored. I instead log on Wednesday and Sunday nights on my desktop. I have to type the password and manually so there's a little bit of friction, and then I can really go and catch up with what people are doing.
00:12:11
Speaker
This is what I see people who are really succeeding with leveraging this technology. That's basically the minimalism idea. Get out the big win, huge value from the tech, and then be very careful about stepping away from the more ad hoc or haphazard uses, which is what allows the sort of negative cost to clutter up without us even realizing.
00:12:29
Speaker
Right. So tell folks about the digital minimalism. You have a plan for people to put in place so that they can start to, I don't want to say disconnect, but I want to maybe disconnect in a strategic way from all these platforms. Yeah, I think of it like decluttering. I actually used the term digital declutter because I think it's actually an apt metaphor. So if your closet, for example, is completely overstuffed and things fall out every time you open it, that makes you feel bad. You don't like it.
00:12:56
Speaker
But the solution no one would suggest is, well, you got to stop wearing clothes. Get rid of all your clothes. They say, you got to declutter the closet. I mean, this is Mary Kondo. Go in, empty it out, find the stuff that you really like, put it back in, and get rid of the rest. And you'll be happy. That's minimalism being applied to your clothes. So digital minimalism has taken that idea and applying it to your digital life, especially your personal digital life. Because what you have to do for work is a complicated issue.
00:13:24
Speaker
There's other stakeholders there, so we're going to put that aside for now. So I can't get you off answering your boss's email for now. But looking into your personal life, it's the same idea. So you essentially, the digital declutter process I recommend is that you clean out the proverbial closet. So you step away from all these apps and services that you have passively downloaded. You figure out what you actually care about, what you actually want to do with your time outside of work.
00:13:50
Speaker
And then you start from scratch, figuring out what do I actually want to put back in? And what you end up with is not an empty closet, but a closet where you really like the stuff that's in there and it's giving you a lot of value. Right. It's giving you joy in the Marie Kondo world. It's funny because I didn't know much about Marie Kondo until after this book came out, and now I know way too much about Marie Kondo.
00:14:13
Speaker
Maybe she'll come to your house and we'll see. We could have a minimalism face off. I will say this, the thing that I like about the show, at least, and I've only watched one episode, but the thing I do like about the show, and actually I think it comes through a little bit in your book as well, is that there's no judgment. So when she goes into someone's house, she says, here's your closet of clothes. Do you want to keep that sweater? Fine. Keep that sweater. You want to keep the jacket? Fine. What are the things that you don't want to keep?
00:14:39
Speaker
your message in this book is not to get rid of everything. It's to keep the things that you like and to use them in a more strategic way as opposed to just sitting there looking down at your phone, you know, endlessly scrolling. Yeah. I mean, this is the key idea of minimalism, which is an ancient philosophy because Marcus Aurelius talks about this. Thoreau talks about this. You know, I mean, it's been around for a long time and it's been applied to many different areas of human endeavor.
00:15:03
Speaker
But the core notion of minimalism is sort of exactly what you're talking about, which is find the big wins to things that really matter. Put attention on that.
Balancing Technology Use and Avoiding Clutter
00:15:11
Speaker
OK, that's not controversial. But the hard part of minimalism is and do so to the exclusion of other things that bring you some value, but not as much.
00:15:19
Speaker
And so this is easy when we think about clothes because like, yeah, I guess I could kind of justify why I have this old t-shirt. I mean, there's some maybe I might need it one day when I'm painting the house. But really, it's just clutter. It's not that important. So I'm going to get rid of it. You know, we're used to it with clothes when it comes to our digital life. However, this is new to us. We still tend to have this maximalist attitude, which is I can think of a reason why this app might be useful. You know, like Twitter, there's these accounts I follow that are funny.
00:15:47
Speaker
And I get some comedy out of it, right? You find these little bits of use and we want that to justify keeping the old shirt in the closet. But minimalism says you're better off not dispersing your energy that way. Focus it on the things that really matter. So yeah, there is no right or wrong answer. I mean, for someone like me, I might say,
00:16:04
Speaker
I don't understand why I would ever spend time on Instagram. But then I'm researching this book and I meet all these visual artists that say, you know, looking at other artists artwork on Instagram is at the absolute core of my creative life. And it means that I can be an artist without having to live in Soho and have to be within walking distance of the major galleries is this fantastic democratizing force within the art. So experiences like that teach you there's very few good or bad. I mean, maybe TikTok is an exception. I still can't figure out why.
00:16:31
Speaker
That could possibly be valuable. But for the most part, yeah, there's no good or bad technology. It's just intention versus haphazardness. Right. You've mentioned how it's the approval and the engagement, but it's also part of it, a fear of missing out. I wonder if people, you know, if I don't check my Twitter feed, I'm going to miss some important story. I want to miss some important thing. So when you, when you hear from readers, I'm guessing that's a sentiment you hear from readers.
00:16:54
Speaker
How do you talk about this fear of missing out when it comes to these digital experiences? Well, that's classic maximalism. The classic maximalist idea is that if I miss out on something valuable, it's as if someone took that value from me.
00:17:09
Speaker
And so you have this loss aversion. Because you think about it like someone's taking something from you. I got to avoid losing value. And so to do so, I got to make sure that I don't possibly miss out on anything. But the minimalists know that you're going to get much higher reward in your life if you instead take all of that energy and put it on things that you know for sure.
00:17:27
Speaker
are really important. Net-net you'll end up better. And so I think this is a core notion behind minimalism and the core notion behind my approach that therefore to digital tech is, yeah, there's lots of stuff you're going to miss out on. Who cares? Take that energy and put it on things you love, your life's going to be much better. Right.
00:17:44
Speaker
So I want to switch a little bit because you talk a lot about in the book about looking down at our phone and swiping through the apps. And I wonder, is there a difference between the apps on our phone versus when we're sitting at our desktop? And a lot of people are, you know, we're sitting at our desks a lot of the time, and there are probably countless books. I just finished one on leadership and neuroscience about, you know, checking your email every 20 seconds is such a distraction you can never sort of
00:18:09
Speaker
concentrate and focus. But I wonder, is there a difference between the mobile side and the desktop side of things? There are differences. For one thing, the mobile side is just always with you, which is why digital minimalists often are very wary about what they allow on their phone.
00:18:27
Speaker
Because they really don't want things to follow them everywhere. If they have to be sitting down to use something, that's going to really cut down the urge for compulsive use. And when it comes to social media in particular, we know starting around 2011, 2012, the major platforms starting with Facebook really put most of their energy into the mobile version. And so a lot of the features that make these addictive, that make it compulsive, exist in the app.
00:18:50
Speaker
And so I'm surprised by how many people, for example, have gone through this experience with me where I recommend that they try taking, let's say, Facebook off their phone, not quit, just take it off their phone. And, you know, they swear to me like I need it for all these important reasons, but just adding that little bit of friction that, oh, they have to log in at their computer, they find that they never touch it again.
00:19:09
Speaker
And so there is a difference. I think keeping your phone minimized down to a tool that does a few number of things that you really do need to do on the road, like maybe listen to audio, look up directions or what have you, or look up the menu for a restaurant or something like that, text messaging so you can say, hey, dear friend, I'm over here.
Minimizing Smartphone Apps and Essential Use
00:19:29
Speaker
Come meet me.
00:19:30
Speaker
Minimizing it down to those core things that are sort of inherently mobile, their value, you need to do it on the fly. And then leaving the other things, just a generic entertainment and connection and to the extent possible business productivity, leaving those to the desktop, that alone is going to make a big difference. Right. So here's the question. How many apps do you have on your phone?
00:19:50
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. That's a good question. I mean, I've never had a social media account. Right. Yeah. So I know you don't have a social media account. So I'm curious as to the apps that you find valuable. Clearly, I mean, you have the standard things that come packaged with whatever platform you're on. Yeah. So it's my wife's old phone. So there's a bunch of stuff on here, I guess, that you had downloaded. But in terms of apps I use,
00:20:15
Speaker
I occasionally text message. The browser is useful sometimes when I need to look up whatever. I'm literally looking at my phone now while I talk to you. I have my podcast. I do listen to a lot of podcasts.
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to look at this thing. And then and then probably maps, right? I do use the maps. Yeah. But I mean, it's surprising. Yeah. So basically, not much. Yeah. Sonos is Oh, the United app, that's useful. A lot. Yeah, the United app is a good example for me, because I after I read your book, I went through and started cleaning out my phone. And I have, you know, I'm not the kind of person who tries to fly one airline, I just
00:20:59
Speaker
whatever's cheapest so i have all these apps from all these airlines i've got the you know the southwest app and the united app and the american airlines app so instead of starting to delete them because i'll probably have to add them back on for the trip next week i just put them all in a folder and just sort of tuck them away um but it is true as i was going through them like well when is the next time i'm gonna fly sas right could be months from now but it's still it's still hanging on there on the phone
00:21:24
Speaker
Yeah, but it's probably not going to affect your life that much. The interesting observation is that once you've removed from your phone the apps in which people make money every time you tap on them, the apps that monetize your attention and therefore are engineered to foster compulsive use, once you take those off your phone, it just completely changes your relationship with the device. And it goes back to something that's more like Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone.
00:21:48
Speaker
which is this minimalist idea that this is a wonderful tool that does a few things that you find really useful. It does it really surprisingly well. And so it's sort of a joy to use. Like when you use Google Maps, like, oh, this is great. I can kind of drag and I can stretch it and, you know, wow.
00:22:03
Speaker
What a great piece of technology. It works great. I'm really glad I have it, right? That's the original vision of these phones. It's a toolbox. It does a few things really well. So what's unusual is this notion of like, this is a source of distraction or entertainment. And then that's where people begin to start to worry. So once you take off the distraction entertainment and turn it back into a tool, your relationship really changes. So yeah, that job guy was on to something. I love this thing. Yeah, he was on to something, yeah. Let me ask one last question. And that's about kids.
00:22:32
Speaker
We've been talking a lot about a lot of these apps. Well, maybe they're not for just grownups, but I'm thinking about my daughter who's going to enter middle school next year.
00:22:41
Speaker
There's already kids in her grade that are always on Instagram or always on Facebook.
Digital Minimalism for Children and Adolescents
00:22:46
Speaker
Do you have to change your approach or adapt the way you think about digital minimalism for kids? Well, with kids, I think two things are important. One is modeling. They need to see you not on your phone all the time when you're at home. What I recommend sometimes to parents is just keep the phone by the front door.
00:23:05
Speaker
And if you need to look something up, go look it up. But don't let them see you always looking at this thing. Because no matter what you say, or what rules you try to set, or what lectures you give them, or if you play my book, the audio version of my book, every time they're in the car, it's not going to stick if they see that you're doing the opposite.
00:23:21
Speaker
And so parents often have to get their own house in order before they can speak sort of credibly to their own kids about what a healthy relationship with these tools would be. Second, the research I see makes me very worried about adolescents, especially adolescent girls and social media.
00:23:37
Speaker
And I think this is something where our culture needs to change. I know it seems like everyone is using it. I think it's really dangerous. I don't think the adolescent mind, what it's going through, can properly handle the forces that have been baked into social media on smartphones. The good news is there seems to be a change percolating out there. And this is coming in part from parents and educators. It's also coming apart from teenagers.
00:24:01
Speaker
Right. Are getting exhausted by trying to maintain Snapchat streaks. I mean, they don't really like this either. No. And so I think a change is coming where parents are going to feel more emboldened to say, I don't care. You don't get a smartphone with social media when you're 13. I just you can't have it. We'll figure out how to get around that later. And where kids are increasingly going to say, I'm kind of glad that you laid down that rule because, man, what what a hardship and a burden it is to try to constantly be manipulating all these subtle things online.
00:24:31
Speaker
Right, right. Well, it's an aspiration to keep our kids, I think, free and clear, I think, of some of these things. And we'll see. It's, you know, I kind of want that, like, I'm sure it's out there, the handbook for digital kids, but I feel like it's a combination of your book and the books about shaming online and social media. You know, there's that there's a toolkit there somewhere for adolescents that probably every middle school kid should should sit down and read.
00:24:56
Speaker
Or maybe it could just be a pamphlet that says, don't give them a smartphone. Figure out the issues this causes. Work backwards and solve the issues that cause this. But start, yeah, a pamphlet called, don't give them a smartphone, and that's it.
Conclusion and Encouragement to Apply Digital Minimalism
00:25:08
Speaker
Yeah, well, great. Well, thanks for coming on the show. I'll link, of course, to the new book, Digital Minimalism, your previous book, Deep Work. And of course, I think you have like three or four other books. I'll put all those on the show notes so people can check them out. So thanks for coming on the show. It's been really interesting. Yeah, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
00:25:33
Speaker
And thanks for everyone for tuning in to this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll think a little bit about some of this technology changes that you might incorporate into your life. I will say this, that after reading Cal's book, I went through my phone and started deleting some of those apps that I never use and group them together and things so I wouldn't see them and they wouldn't clutter up my daily life. So maybe you'll be able to take some of the
00:26:02
Speaker
things that we discussed in this week's episode to heart. So if you would like to support the show, please consider rating a review of the show on iTunes or Stitcher, your favorite podcast provider, or if you would like to send a little financial support my way, that would be great. I have a Patreon page set up where you can donate as little as three bucks a month to help me pay for transcription services and audio editing and all the good stuff that I need to bring this show to you every other week.
00:26:31
Speaker
So I think that's all we have for this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you'll be able to use it. Until next time, this has been the Policy Vis podcast. Thanks so much for listening.