The author of this book digital minimalism, choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Professor newport, what you mean by digital minimalism . A philosophy of technology ruse, a way to screen what tech you use and why you use it. The second half of your book is about additional declut digital declutter. Declutterhe word instead of detox where we take a break from the tech, before turning back to the. Behaviors letsutter is currently clean up our act and get into a sustainable state of affairs. Host in the introduction to your book, there is a footnote the fact to some that i cannot draw from a deep well of experience is a liability. How can you crimina criticize sl media view of never used it . Ive never had a social media account, which makes me just about the only one. I figure we have to have one person out there looking at these issues who is not him or herself deeply enmeshed in these forces in a personal way. Host so, when it comes to digital mentalism, you are not asking the people cut off their use of social media and devices . No. Im a computer scientist. For me to push people away from technology and a blanket way would one day put me out of a job. Im more intention for intention. Theink we got caught up in typical cycle of exuberance that follows any new introduction of technology, smartphones. We began to use and without reflection and without critical intention we are now in a place where you feel overwhelmed and im putting people back to say, the exuberance is over. It is time to be self reflective and figure out what is the best use of tech and what we can put aside. Host you use the word addiction quite frequently. Often with addiction, abstinence is the best way to handle that. Toi did quite a bit of work understand is this an addiction . What type . What do psychologists have to say . I could get is what a psychologist would call him moderate procedural addiction. This is difference than a substance addiction. If i take away someones facebook they will not go into withdrawal and not sneak out in the middle of the night to an internet cafe. If you have access to the trickle you use it more than you know is helping. Is a place on the spectrum where we need to be careful. We cannot be un reflective. It is not on a place of the spectrum where we have to walk away completely or have a complete abstinence. I think its possible to walk the line. For me, the way to do that is build your tech use on top of things you really care about. That is the foundation on which you will be able to resist the attraction that is not adding value to your life and get value out of the tools that are. Host walk us through an example. Consider visual artists. Something i learned is if you are visual artist ,a instagram has been a godsend. You have to constantly expose yourself to other people doing work in your genre. That is the fuel for the creative machine. It used to be if you wanted to be a jewel artist you had to live in one of three cities were the happened have a very large gallery scene. Artistagram, a lot of post with a working on. A huge democratizing force. A lot of the artists are work with a instagram is crucial to what i do. The same time theyre unhappy with the notion that they are looking at it all the time. The response would be, ok, maybe want to take instagram off your phone. Maybe you want to curate who you follow down to a select list of artists who are in your genre and maybe you want to schedule. Friday night, tuesday mornings, 20 minutes. Thats pure minimalism. You are not abstaining but you are putting them to use selectively for things you care about. Host from your book you write humans are not wired to be continuously wired. However, we are. We are on work email 24 7. It is very unnatural. It is very unnatural, especially through an evolutionary perspective, because what we ofe here is actually a clash instinct that have been forced in the deep history of our evolutionary landscape. Clashing against new technologies that were not around when these instinct began to erode. For example, we dislike loneliness and we have a drive towards sociology. Social media can hijack that drives and give you the sense of maybe im being social, im leaving messages and typing emojis. All the while youre missing out of the deep connection that that drive pushes towards. Same thing with boredom. Boredom is what used to push us past Energy Conservation to do things that were meaningful, but now we can subvert that drive and weglance at a phone feel like we are busting boredom but we are not getting the benefits. Host in your book you talk about the fact that we are unable to have solitude anymore. This is a radical experiment in Human History. It required miraculous innovations in terms of pocketsize computers and access. Us wireless for the first time in Human History we are trying this experiment when we say, lets take every possible moment and we could be alone with our own thoughts, which is what i mean by solitude, and bust that with a screen generated by other minds. Weve never been able to do this before in Human History, whether king who serf or a always had plenty of time throughout the day along with your own thoughts. Now that we can ban that, we should be wary about what will happen with such a novel we have never had before. When we complete remove our ability to be alone with our own thoughts to reboot our brain, to think and ponder and extract insights from Life Experience or look around and experience the world, if you remove that, what you get is this low level grade of anxiety that i think as a society we are just excepting as normal but i think is actually a side effect of us using our brain and weight was not meant to be used. Host you talked with some College Counselors about this phenomenon, some of the issues they are seeing. Kids andk college below, the digital canary in the coal mine, because they have taken the solitude deprivation and they pushed it to a real extreme. If youre 21 years old, you are looking at the screen essentially ubiquitously. Everything will moment you can. Of solitudeat lack causes anxiety. In this democratic that this demographic that is pushing to an extreme, in that demographic up. H shee anxiety going attention came to our years ago, talking to the head of Mental Health at a Major University and she said are anxiety related disorders has skyrocketed. We used to have this wide variety of the standard Mental Health issues you would assume for 20yearold and not that many of them. And now we have a huge number of students coming in, almost all anxiety related disorders. I say, what is different . We said, smartphones. Camefirst chohort that screen, that is when we saw the anxiety skyrocket. Host 2007 . 2007, we get the smartphone. The original vision of the smartphone did not include this Constant Companion model that were used to today where we look at it all the time. That came later. This compulsion to look at the phone all the time was actually driven in large part gbby the major social media companies. When facebook was getting ready for the ipo and had to switch from user to rubber general revenue generation, that reengineered the social media experience to make a much more compulsive appeal to look at the phone all the time. They had to get average minutes per user higher. So, this was probably closer to when we had a transformation of our relationships were smartphones from steve jobs envisioned, which is here is a tool that takes things you like to do like listen to music and make calls and does it beautifully, into what we can call perhaps the Mark Zuckerberg vision which is we here is a new way of living. You will mediate your life to the screen and look at the screen all the time. Marr the quote bill app store wants your soul. Goes factor we engineer at we tell ourselves this is natural. It is fundamental to having connected phones, but the reality is that we are largely taught to do this. We had to get much more oddball minutes on the screens of their are going to be successful ipos for social media companies. This is where were began to see things unsavory which such as behaviors build into some of tose apps that were meant foster a behavioral addiction for it was saw the reinvention of social media away from web this2. 0 vision where i post things. You post things. This utopian vision away from that and towards the vision where this became a delivery mechanism of social. Approval. Retweets weren, all features that came later and change the experience so that now every time i hit that app a slot machine handle, maybe have a big burst of social approval and maybe this time there is nothing an maiybe this time somebody is mad at me. This is almost irresistible. Explicitly exploits psychological vulnerabilities in our brain and it gets is looking at these screens way more than we know is useful and way more than we know is healthy and to the exclusion of things that we know are more meaningful. Inn i quote bill maher, some sense that is true, especially we go back to pla tos metaphor of the soul as a chariot driver. Steed pulling you this or that way. The addictive smartphone is like giving performanceenhancing drugs to that it noble steed. We realize that thing has been pulling us way off course. Host who is leah perlman. She was heavily involved in the intention of the like button. She, by the way, no longer likes the like button. She now actually has hired someone to manage the facebook presence for her in her Small Business because she recognizes, like a growing number of whistleblowers coming out of social media companies, that these are exploitative and should be treated with some care. Host what changed her mind, and what her purpose of the like button . As far as i could tell in my wasearch the like button introduced for relatively harmless reason, which was they sell redundancy in comments. There a lot of posts on facebook what everyone would take great or so cute if there is a button we can press, that would be more efficient than just writing the wsame comment. They very quickly realized that the like button was a huge turning point because it gave you two things that were not there before but made them the most Profitable Industries on earth right now. One, massively more data about their users. Because you are now out there, telling them i like this and i dont like this. And two, the social approval indicator, seeing a people liked what you posted are not made the checking of your account again and again throughout the day change that from behavior that no one did with old facebook or instagram to now something everyone does. A lot more advertising dollars. Host did facebook know what they were doing, that they were going to attract more people or get more minutes when they put that like button in . As far as i can tell, it was a somewhat happy accident. There was a smaller defund social Media Services that messed around with a like feature. Pretty soon after facebook introduced the feature into a Prototype Version of facebook. I think they recognized quickly what they stumbled onto. All of thethat, other platforms that existed also reengineer their services to be built around easy ways to get social approval back and forth. Host what do you teach at georgetown . What a Computer Science do you teach . I focus more on equations and then i do computers, but where my math is applied is mainly on the theory of distributed systems. Host what does that mean . Ike where you have one computer trying to solve a problem, you have a lot of computers that will Work Together to try to solve the problem. So, there is a lot of complexities that arise when you have to have multiple independent computing processes. In touch withep each other and overcome lag or this computer crashed, how do you write protocols to coordinate them . An interest in perspective on the Digital Tools because i am an expert on the mathematics of what is the right way to use networks to solve problems. I look at what a lot of people are doing in their lives using networks to solve problems and see a lot of inefficiencies. Host how much screen time do you get a day . Well i depends on the day. One thing i do not use very often is a smartphone. I have no social media accounts. There is nothing pulling my attention. Thend it useful to use mapping feature when im lost or when i need to tell my wife i am on my wifway or am late. I dont web surf. I dont use it as a major source of entertainment. It is where i get my information about the washington nationals. Which i think is important. Some days i may not look at a screen at all if im trying to solve something. Another day if im working on an academic paper maybe im looking at a computer screen. Phone . S your wife on her regularly . Do you have kids. I have three kids. There are two effects. One, we are way too busy to be on our phones. Two, the oldest is only six. So, it is not relevant for him now. Host have they been introduced to screens . They know about what a tv is. They know when the car trip goes about two hours, they get to watch a movie. But that is about it. Predictionn, my looking at the cultural trends and talking to people and looking at the researches by the time my oldest is a teenager, i think our cultural stance on teenagers and smartphones and social media is going to have shifted. Years fromr seven now, when it becomes relevant, our cost will be in a place where is considered inappropriate to give someone that age unfettered access to a smart phone or social media. Or everl newport, has better time in our history or Human History like this technological revolution . Yes. Technological revolutions i think that have had a large impact. There have been a lot of revolutions that havent. One of the big pieces of feedback i often get is dont we complain about every new piece of technology . Doesnt it always end up being this was not a big problem . Is a lot ofere technological shifts that have been weather was not that much complaints. There is only a small number of precedences for what is going on now. The arrival of television was something that had massive shifts on the way our culture operated. And obviously the industrial arrival of steam power and innovations in the industrial revolution, that also had a massive impact on the way society and culture is unfolded and i think the Printing Press was another example. I put the arrival of the internet on the same scale as those. Host when it comes to television, we were told dont sit too close. You are going to dumb yourself down. Turn that iditot box down. It had some of the same reactions, correct . Is there a difference between watching tv and interacting with your device . The specific problems are different but i think it is an instructive analogy, because there was a lot of concern when television started to grow, wait a second, people are going to too much of their lives as opposed other activities. That is exactly what happened. The warnings about Television Work quite prescient. To thetime we got 1980s and 1990s were we were watching five or six hours of television a day. It is a good analogy and something we worried this would change our culture, not necessarily in positive ways. That was to a large extent borne out. Host sean parker, former president of facebook, the thought process that went into building these applications, facebook being the first of them weas all about how do consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible . That means we need to sort of give you a dopamine had every once in a while. Of severalwas one whistleblowers from these attention conglomerates who a year to two years ago came out and were talking about the way that these applications have been designed to exploit our psychology to get us to use them more than is healthy. What i think is interesting is if you look at facebooks p. R. Response and the other companies as well, there has been an interesting pivot. Youll notice the pivot has been away from discussing these addictive, ists it a net positive or negative. Tubs ofoted to other issues like privacy, encryption, content moderation. This is not accidental. I think it is because they cannot solve the problems sean parker is talking about without hurting the bottom line. Their revenue falls. Privacy, moderation, encryption, talkingk zuckerberg was about, these are things they can make changes on. I think it has been a very smart pivot by the social media companies. They were terrified by the conversation of these things are exploiting your time and attention and making your life force. They want the conversation to be technical. They want technical fixes that do not require them to actually reduce the number of minutes their users are spending on the tools. Host are we to the point where we have rehabs for social media addicts . We have it for gaming addiction. This seemed to be the first place where we are seeing really powerful Addictive Properties from Digital Tools. There are some of these large multiplayer video games like world of warcraft that have now become so engineer to hit some of these psychological buttons that it is getting to the level almost substanceabuse style. Your life is falling apart because youre playing these games. This is the first place we are seeing rehabs. Were starting to see an expansion of some of these Rehab Centers that started with digital issues like video game addiction and begin to help people maybe get some separation from their smartphones. Host cal newport, this was not the book digital minimalism you started to write, is it . The originalt been plan. I was working on another book and im still working on it now, a World Without email. Consequences of bringing low friction digital to the workplace. A followup to my last book also about technology in the world of work. I k ept hearing from my readers theres something going on with these devices. Im not happy. I am on easy. There are forces at play that is, that needs to be talk about. Gave beganme talks i to bubble up on the internet. Maybe a talk over here that no one had been looking at now had 5 billion views. Five million views. Maybe an article for the times had been spread. Is pushinge that people around when it came to technology in their personal life that is important. So i put that book on hold. Ost have we been able to measure whether or not our ability to concentrate has declined . We have isolated studies about this. That came out of stanford, for example, we could work with selfreported frequent multitaskers. People who change their attention a lot. And selfreported people who do not do that. Were equally confident if they needed to focus on a task, they could do it well. The multitaskers were much worse at it. Host why . It is possible were get nearly getting near permanent changes to our wiring. The ability to focus intensely, which right now is at the core of success in the knowledge economy where we are picking human brains and trying to produce new value with human brains, it is an unnatural activity. The grain was not meant to focus not meant towas focus for a long time and one of the ways we have trained ourselves as a species to be able to do this is by struggling with a hard books and reading for a long time and holding long conversations. Withs the cognitive gin which we prepared our brains for this world we have right now. Were all thinking there is a e concentrationh is valuable. When you when you are alone with your own thoughts, when you move it, it is as if the strength of your brain gets weaker. From a cognitive fitness perspective, our culture is getting increasingly unhealthy. Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln play a large role in your book. Admire for his recognition that solitude is crucial if you want to make hard decisions. He would spend time at a summer house. Beyonda little up petworth, its still there. They are gaetz you go through and you car us there are gates you go through and you cross through the gates and there is a house. He used to to go through the house almost every night during the summer. He would work at the white house, ride to his house to get some solitude, and come back. A lot of the moral questions he was grappling with about the direction of the civil war as well as a love the thought that went into the gettysburg address, also his struggle on understanding what to do with emancipation, a lot about thinking he did at his summer house. He did it because he could get away from the 19th century equivalent of social media, which was the open white house and Office Seekers and petitioners bothering you at all times. He needed space to grapple with whats important. We all need that. We all need a little space alone from our own thoughts so that we can have the Creative Insight so we can build the moral courage and figure out what we are about and what we want to do. I think he is a great example. You can simulate it much more simply, by just doing something, anything during the day, without your phone. Host such as question mark such as . If you have to walk your dog, do it without your phone. When you think about physical isolation isolation is not actually that important for solitude. The definition i took of wherede came from a book the definition is freedom from input from other minds. Thats actually what we need, time where our brain is not directly reacting to something produced by another brain. You can do this in a crowded coffee shop. Physical isolation does not matter. What matters is just you observing your surroundings and thinking or interacting with someone elses thoughts. We need that time free from inputs from other minds, physical isolation may be, but you are better off maybe helps, but you are better off looking at a walden pond than looking at your Instagram Account surreptitiously. Does putnam fit into this conversation . Cal i they get does. There is a real cost to social isolation i think it does. There is a real cost to social isolation, especially as we break down increasing classical and Community Social structures. Where social media enters the picture is we have these results from the psychologists who study does that say people are prone to participate in what they call social snacking, which is to try to feed the fundamental drive for social connection with the lowquality sociology of sending an emoji. Ssage, this can, paradoxically, leave us feeling more lonely than we were before, because we are replacing what we really need, which is sacrificing a nontrivial amount of time and attention on behalf of a relationship with someone else. I came to you. You are important to me. I am showing you this. This is what we need to feed that social drive. This does not feed it. Social snacking can lead you to be more lonely. You would think the introduction of the social Media Technologies would maybe add friction to the social isolation that putnam was talking about. But it seems like it might be accelerating that trend. Host have you ever been called a luddite . If we call someone a luddite, what do you mean . I have been called a luddite all the time, ironic as a computer scientist. The actual definition is something that is quite relevant in our current period of advanced technology change. The actual definition is a political labor movement. Original lead is him uddism is pushing back on the invention of steam looms, because is that tradeoff right . When the luddite revolution happened, these were Big Questions and people were trying to grapple with them. It was a perfectly reasonable stance. Ddism usually means a reactionary rejection of technology. All of theyour book, above scenarios are somewhat improved by better communication tools, but what i do want to emphasize is that most of this improvement is minor. Put another way, in 90 of your daily life, the presence of a cell phone either does not matter or makes things only slightly more convenient or useful. But it is hyperbolic to believe it is a ubiquitous presence that is vital. That was cal newport from his new book with his new book digital minimalism. Thank you for joining us on the communicators. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] q a sunday on in 1962 after nixons last rest conference, 10 years later, he would win a 49 state landslide. And it all came apart. Announcer columnist pat buchanan, who served as a speechwriter and Senior Advisor to president nixon, discusses his book nixons white house broke andbattles that made a president and divided america forever. I made a memo saying you have to keep the five tapes of conversations with dean. I did not think they would be that damaging to us. And keep the tapes with Foreign Policy stuff stuff you need you really should take. I said, take the risk down and burn it and shut down the special Prosecutors Office now before this thing turns into a monster. I did not know it at the time, but nixon had called in hague and entertained this idea that he should burn the tapes. He said it would be obstruction of justice. I did not recommend burning subpoenaed tapes. Secondly, they were his property. Executive privilege existed. If he is simply got rid of them impeach and be damned, i think he would move right through it. President nixon said in his memoirs if he had burned the tapes, he would survive, and i think thats right. Announcer sunday night at 8 00 eastern on cspans q a. Announcer the National Education association held its 2020 president ial forum in houston, texas. Several several candidates share their plans for americas public schools. This is about two hours. Hola, hermanos and hermanas. You know who i am, but there are very special guests backstage listening. We are Live Streaming for the first time across the country. I will take a minute to introduce myself. Will take a mo introduce myself