The Normie’s Guide to Thinking About Tech

1. 0:00 – 35:19

   Is technology good or bad?

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      Have you noticed that it's become increasingly hard to talk about technology? I think this is because a lot of commentators have divided themselves into two different groups, both of which can become pretty extreme. All right, so on one side we have what we can call the techno pessimists. Now, the techno pessimists are worried about the harms that new technologies can cause and the things that we value that new technologies might make go away. I think the, the classic example of techno pessimism would be the Luddite movement from the early 1800s, who were worried about new automated manufacturing technologies like the steam loom and their input on artisan crafts. They felt really strongly about this. I have a letter here from 1812 written by members of the movement and signed by the, the sort of fictional creation of General Ludd, and in this letter, they said they would rather die than see their children, which they called your neighboring fellow creatures, starve because hand weavers were gonna be put out of business. Now, the thing about techno pessimists is that they're often right in the sense that the harms they're worried about are real, and they are harmful, and they do hurt. The issue with the techno pessimist is that sometimes we have to go through short-term pain to get to long-term innovation that ends up making everybody's lives better. If we go back to the Luddite movement, let's zoom out to the Industrial Revolution writ large, and what we see is, yes, for a lot of professions, the Industrial Revolution was very painful in the moment. Techno pessimists of the time were right. But the Industrial Revolution also delivered essentially all of the wealth on which the modern world was built. We would not actually want to be living in a world today in which the Industrial Revolution never happened. Okay, on the other extreme, we have what we can call the techno optimists, who really don't care about short-term harms or things we could lose in the... in right now, things we already value, because they are often i, in love with this vision of some sort of much better future that the technology will deliver, and the short-term cost in their mind is always worth it. This can get to pretty unnerving places. Like, let me play you a clip here. This is Elon Musk talking to Peter Diamandis about humankind and superintelligent AI.

   2. SPSpeaker2:26

      I mean, several years ago, I said humans are the biological bootloader for digital superintelligence.

   3. CNCal Newport2:31

      Yes, we are a transitional-

   4. SPSpeaker2:32

      [laughs]

   5. CNCal Newport2:33

      We're a transitional species.

   6. SPSpeaker2:34

      We're a bootloader.

   7. CNCal Newport2:35

      Yeah. We're the bootloader. So what they're saying in this clip is that humans right now are essentially what they called biological bootloaders, basically just a step that gets us to the technological utopia they really care about, which is one in which we have a superintelligent AI that delivers us some sort of, uh, mystical world where, you know, everyone is happy and our consciousness are uploaded into a Dyson Sphere powered celestial digital consciousness or something like this, right? I mean, clearly we see why the techno optimist view would, pushed far enough, gets to these sort of anti-humanist, pretty icky places. So where does that leave the rest of us, those of us who recognize that we need technological advances to continue to improve the state of human existence, and yet are also not really interested in hanging out with the biological bootloader crowd? Like, we actually do care about real humans who live right now and harms they might feel. I want to argue to you today that there is a third option for the silent majority of people who have a more nuanced practical view of technology. I call this third option technoselectionism. Now, technoselectionism is not new. I actually introduced the term in an essay that I published in The New Yorker back in 2023, but I was rereading it recently and had this epiphany. This is more relevant right now than it has ever been before. So that's what we want to talk about today. What is technoselectionism? How does it differ from these existing, more extreme ways of thinking about technology? And what action can you take right now to become a technoselectionist and, by doing so, regain control over technology and its influence on your life? All right, so we got a lot to get into. Let's get into it. All right, so to start our discussion, I, I thought a visual metaphor would be useful. I'm gonna bring a picture up here on the screen that, uh, I drew. For people who are listening, I'll explain it to you. It's a map, um, I would say a, a, a beautifully drafted map. I think Jesse would agree with this. This is... There's the, the, the, the dew on the leaves of the mountains summon a, a view of a New England fall day or whatever. So I have a beautifully drawn map. Uh, here's what's important about it. In the lower left-hand corner is a region labeled current moment. In the upper right is a region labeled better future, and there's a bunch of obstacles all around this map. I have, like, scary snakes, and there's fire, and I don't know, these Xs, Jesse, I think are, like, thorn thickets, and we got some water or something like that. So we got a current moment, and then we see, uh, far away a better future. All right, so there's two different ways to think about this, um, and I'll draw them. If you are a techno pep- uh, pessimist, and I'll use a... I don't know, let's use a, uh, black line here. If you're a techno pessimist, you're starting at current moment. How are you gonna navigate this landscape? You're gonna stay nearby the current moment because there's dangers out there. So we'll sort of work on technologies similar to what we have because we don't want to run into any of these dangers which could cause pain or harm. So I represented that with this black path that just sort of circles around the current moment. On the other hand, if you are a, uh, techno optimist, you say, "Who cares about that? Let's just make a beeline for the better future So as I drew this line straight from our current moment to the better future, uh, we went over all sorts of dangers. We hit a snake, we went over fire, we clipped over the water. So we go through all sorts of different pains and obstacles on our way to get to a better future, right? So either we have the pessimist approach where we ste-steer near the current moment, or we have the optimist approach where we go straight to the better future, but along the way we have all sorts of pain. Technoselectionism is gonna offer us, uh, a different route. Now, before I show it to you on this visual metaphor, let's take this down for a second, Jesse, because I'm gonna load up that New Yorker article we talked about, and I want to read to you how I define technoselectionism, and then we'll go back and we'll add it to our visual metaphor of a map. All right, so we bring up on the screen here a key quote from that New Yorker article. I'm gonna read this here from the article. "Technoselectionism is a perspective that accepts the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives, but also holds that we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention as inevitable. Technoselectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next, but they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good. Technoselectionists can be enthusiastic about artificial intelligence, say, while also taking a strong stance on settings where we should block its use. They can marvel at the benefits of the social internet without surrendering their kids' mental lives to TikTok." I'm gonna jump down slightly where I then say, "If we aggressively repudiate the technologies that are clearly causing net harm while continuing to embrace those that seem to be more beneficial, we can direct our technosocial evolution much more intentionally." All right, so that is how I describe technoselectionism in the pages of The New Yorker. So to put that more plainly, it's saying the middle route is one where we say we want technology to advance, but we do not do so without curation. We do not do so without change or analysis. We do not do so without intention. So if we go back to our map here, what the technoselectionist is trying to do... I'll draw their path as, let's say, a, uh, orange line here. What the technoselectionist is trying to do is get from the current moment to the better future, but try to steer the path. Can we go around some of these obstacles? And maybe we still clip a few, but if we're more careful, if we navigate our path, we can avoid more of the pain and the harm as we try to get to our destination. So for those who are listening, I drew a line that, you know, it, it went around most of the obstacles, maybe clipped one here at the end. That's what we mean by technoselectionism, okay? So it means you are actively involved. Again, I'm gonna keep hitting this point. To be a technoselectionist means you're actively involved in trying to shape the adoption development of technology to maximize the good while avoiding as many harms as possible. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now look, I know a little something about debt. I took out a lot of loans to attend college, and when it finally came time to start paying them off, the amount had grown to something sizable, especially for a young postdoc, which I was at the time. Now, do you know what tool I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but also helping you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track. In particular, Monarch now has a debt paydown simulator and visualizer that can show your exact debt-free date based on your actual activity. You can also test out different payment scenarios. You can simulate them side by side to see what the difference would be if I paid this much or that. What would the impact be on how long it takes for me to pay everything off? 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You know, uh, you know, I try to slow down and protect my deep work, but unfortunately, whether I like it or not, there are still countless docs and emails and meetings that can be hard to keep up with. AI has promised to solve this issue time and again, but ultimately what I want out of an AI tool is simple, to spend less time on administrative and logistical efforts so I have more time to focus on the things that move the needle. This is where Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly enters the scene. It is different from the a- other AIs that I've tried because instead of jumping from tab to tab and shifting your context from the tool to back to what you're working on or trying to go find where your AI lives and tell it what you're up to, Superhuman Go works along with you in your tab on the sites you are already using. It's there when you need it. Now, here's why I like Go in particular. It's built for what I already do on the websites I already use. No new tabs, no gimmicky nonsense. You get what you need without losing where you are. So check out Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly and see what you've been missing out on. Find out more at superhuman.com. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so then the question becomes: how do you do that? So how do we be a techno selectionist? This seems like kind of a hard balancing act. Well, I'm gonna argue that there are four things you can do to adopt a techno selectionist mindset. Uh, because I like alliteration, I start all the names with Cs. So I'm gonna pull this up on the screen here. I have four Cs up here on the screen, and I will fill them each in. So the first C, which represents the first action you could do to become a techno selectionist, I will fill in as choosing. You can choose what technology you do use or do not. Just because a technology is popular or is a big part of the cultural conversation, or everyone on X keeps saying, "Holy expletive," and then has some sort of, you know, AI written statement about some new breakthrough of the technology, that doesn't mean you have to use it. You are in charge of what technologies you use or you don't. Give you a couple examples. Earlier this fall, I had on friend of the show, Brad Stulberg, we were talking about what I call the AI resistance, and what Brad said, if you'll recall, is he said, "Look, I know there are use cases for LLMs. Not for me. For what I do as a living, as a writer and a coach, I don't need the supposed efficiencies that I've been told, uh, and it gets in the way of me producing my best ideas, and it makes me unhappy. Not for me. I'm not gonna use it." Let me give you another example. Back in the two thousand and teens when I came out and said, "I'm not gonna use social media," people got really upset. There was a fervor. "What do you mean you're not using social media? I don't understand. Are you Wendell Berry? Where's your horse?" But I had done the calculus, and I said, "Yeah, there's benefits, there's harms, and for what I do, the harms outweigh the benefits. I don't wanna use it." And you know what? Now, ten years later, no one thinks that's crazy, and a lot of people have actually joined me in that stance. So that's your first action available to you as a techno selectionist, choosing what technologies you use or not. You're never required to use a technology just because a lot of people do or it's part of the cultural conversation. All right, let's fill in the second C here, and that is configuring. I'll write that. So if you are using a particular technology, you're allowed to set the rules for how you use it or how you don't. You can place constraints on the usage of your technology that best reflects the things that you value. Now, in my two thousand and nineteen book, "Digital Minimalism," I get into this. This is one of the big things I suggest. The term we use in that book is fences. You can put up fences around your own, uh, your own fences around how you use particular technologies. So back then in two thousand and nineteen, there was two big examples I gave. One involved Facebook Groups. I don't know if it's the case anymore. I don't know, it's just what do people use today? I guess more like WhatsApp.

   8. SPSpeaker15:23

      Mm-hmm.

   9. CNCal Newport15:23

      But it used to be the case that Facebook Groups was a very popular technology for if you have a student group or volunteer group or community group, it's how you would organize because the technology was easy to use. And there was a lot of people who were self-proclaimed digital minimalists who said, "I need to use Facebook for the groups because my biking club organizes on there. But that doesn't mean I have to be on Facebook all the time." Uh, for the young listeners, Jesse, Facebook was a social network that used to be popular and a lot of people actually used to use. You read "Digital Minimalism," it's everywhere. Uh, but a lot of these digital minimalists came up time and again at my research for that book said, "So I reconfigured Facebook so I only see groups." They would have it on their computer. They had different tricks they could use to make the news feed be empty, and so all they could see what was in their groups. And so they were choosing, they were configuring rather, how they were gonna use the technology. Another example was Instagram. I gave a story in that book about a visual artist, and he said, "Look, Instagram serves a purpose for me. I get inspiration by following the feeds of other visual artists, 'cause I need to see a lot of ideas to spark my own creativity. But also I don't wanna be on Instagram all day." So they just configured their use of Instagram. They said, "Well, here's what we're gonna do. It's Friday. That's when I look at it. I only follow artists. I check on everything they posted on Friday. I have a glass of wine. Takes twenty minutes. It's, it's, you know, inspiring and creative, and I don't touch Instagram otherwise." Another person I talked to in that book was a fitness influencer, and he was like, "Oh man, Instagram is so hard for me to get away from. It's very addictive, and you have to use the camera on your phone, so I can't get away from it, because I have to take pictures of my muscles, and then I'm on the phone with the app. It's hard not to use." You know what he ended up doing? He got a GoPro, and he would take the photos with that and had his someone else in his company actually do the interaction and uploading to Instagram. So you're allowed to configure how you use technologies. All right, the third thing that matters here, third C, call it changing. You're allowed to change your mind about what technologies you use or don't use, right? Just because you started using something doesn't mean that you have signed some sort of Faustian blood pact, and now you have to stick with it no matter what happens. It's completely fine to say, "This seemed cool. I wanted to test it out because I like cool things. It's making my life worse now. Took a turn. I'm gonna stop using it." You are allowed to do that. That sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't know that that's the case. Uh, this has never been more clear than what happened with social media over the last four years or so, where essentially, and I, I wrote a, a piece about this, an essay about this for The New Yorker that I recommend actually. It was a good piece. It was, it was called, uh, "TikTok and the Fall of the Social Media Giants." So basically what happened is we had these big incumbent social media companies, and it was Facebook, and it was Instagram, um, and it was Snapchat, and I don't know, whatever the kids were using, right? You had these, like, major, uh, networks. Then TikTok came along, right? Not a US company, coming out of China, ByteDance. TikTok comes along and starts eating everyone's lunch. It's doing really well. It's very addictive. People are on it all the time, and it's taking users away from the existing legacy. Oh, Twitter, I forgot to mention there. And so what did these leg- legacy social media networks say? It's like, "Oh, we're gonna be more like TikTok." And see, TikTok doesn't care about your friends. It doesn't care about who you follow. Doesn't care anything about any, uh, social graph that you created, which used to be the entire selling point of social media. It's just an algorithm that shows you stuff, thing after thing after thing, that, uh, in its mental... its internal digital simulation of your reward center seems to generate a, uh, reward. And all it wants to do is generate that sort of neuro, uh, engagement, right? And that's very effective. It gets you to look at the screen all the time. So Instagram, so Facebook, so Twitter, they all move towards this model of, "I don't care who your friend is. I don't care who you chose to follow. Um, we're no longer gonna just play the game where I show you stuff from people you said you wanted to see stuff from. Forget the social stuff. Put it in my veins. Put it in my veins," right? Just boom, boom, boom, boom. That made those services really bad for a lot of people. A lot of people said, "I signed up for Facebook or Instagram, like Facebook to follow my friends. I signed up for Instagram because there's like these particular writers or fitness influencers or trad wives or whatever, but like specific people I chose to follow because I like to see what's going on in their lives. It's like my own TV network. And now I'm just getting these automatically fed, algorithmically curated things which are very addictive. I can't put down my phone. They're making me miserable. It's not why I signed up for these services in the first place." You're allowed to leave. You're allowed to change your mind. I signed up for this. You did that. I don't like it. I think we're seeing a lot of this with AI right now. Early adopters like, "This is cool. I can talk to this thing like a person. I automated this spreadsheet task that I do. This is great." And then at some point, they're realizing, "I'm in full cognitive surrender. I can't even do the most minor of tasks, like I can't even, uh, put my thoughts into an email without talking to the AI and having it write it for me. I'm losing my ability to think. I'm suffering from mild psychosis. The line between fantasy and reality is being blurred." You're allowed to change your mind. Like, "Oh, that got bad fast. I think I'm gonna step away from it." All right? You know, it's like you go on that blind date and you're like, "Oh, this person's attractive. We're, we're, we're having, you know, um, pretty good conversation." Then they bring out the binder of the Pokemon cards. You're like, "I kind of changed my mind about this date. I think I'm gonna back away slowly from the table." All right, so you're allowed to change your mind. All right, final C, fourth C, complaining. You have the right to speak up to the institutions and communities where you're involved about the technologies they're using and, uh, say if you like it or don't like it and why. This is where we get a pretty important bridge between the individual and the systemic. Most of the major changes that we have seen in terms of negative techno impacts being curbed because of community or, uh, institutional rule changes, they come from individuals speaking up and saying, "I don't like this. I don't like this for me. I don't like this for my kids. Explain yourself." Pressure from individuals is what's moves... that's what moves things in this country. Why did 2025 become the year where we got smartphone bans bell to bell in schools across the country? It's not because the schools, you know, got some new data or had a change of heart. It was parents. "I don't like my kid being stuck on their phone all day. You gotta do something about it. I read John Hite's book. The data is compelling. I don't want my kid on this all day at home. I don't want them on this all day at school." And that changed. What happened in 2026? A lot of people don't realize this yet, but there's been a giant groundswell of, uh, pushes coming out of legislatures and direct parental action about other types of tech in the classroom, so-called edtech, the screens, the non-phone screens the students use. Sixteen different states had their legislatures propose laws limiting how much time kids in their state can spend looking at one of these edtech screens. This is all driven by parental pressure. Things are changing, right? So when you speak up and you push back, it has a big influence on the communities and institutions with which you're involved. So this is what it means to be a technoselectionist. You're not just looking at everything in terms of the harms and saying, "Let's just stay where we are because beyond this is dragons and thickets and fires." But you're also not just saying, "The future is coming. We gotta get there. Pain has always happened. Luddites, you know, they were wrong. Industrial Revolution was good. Let's just go. It doesn't matter. We'll destroy things left and right. Pain left and right. It's worth it. TikTok is good because, I don't know, social media is the future," blah, blah, blah. We don't have to be either. We can try to navigate around the obstacles. And so those four C's, choosing, configuring, changing, and complaining, those are four things that you as an individual can do that not only allows you as an individual to navigate the technologies available in a way that preserves benefits and minimizes harms, but it's the foundation on which we have our communities, our institutions, and our culture ma- navigate those changes as well. The more we have that four C technoselectionist mindset, I think the better we can actually navigate this current moment. So I think we need a term and a plan for those who don't like the extremes, right? And I think this is a, this is a bad moment for it. I've really definitely experienced this, especially with AI. I think it's because of the engagement pilling of the people on X right now, who then influence a lot of other people, media and, and people in business or whatever. There's this mood out there right now where it's Sharks and Jets, right? And like the one gang is the engagement pill people who like the bigger disruption, the more they feel like their life has meaning when otherwise it doesn't. And then you have, like, the other gang, um, that, like, really doesn't like those people at all or what's going on, and everyone's trying to claim you from one side or the other. So if you come in... I speak from experience here, Jesse, but if you come in and say, "Hey, the way you're talking about this one thing that just happened, that's not quite right and you're kind of scaring people. Let's, like, make that more realistic," then the sharks are gonna come in and be like, "You think the AI doesn't work at all, and look at this thing it did, so, like, you bad," right? And then, like, you have the, the, the other gang over there. You know, they find out that, like, oh, this... There was a... The numbers are bad or this, this, this, this, uh, was kind of a, a, a hype. Like, uh, Black Monday, Black October, this idea that there was this huge cybersecurity crisis because of a, uh, PHP bug that was... I, I, I don't want to get too much into it, Jesse, but this is important. There was, there was this... There was a lot of hype out there that AI was about to break the internet because it found a, a vulnerability in PHP, which a lot of websites use. Here's the thing. There's hundreds of vulnerabilities in PHP that we've been finding for years. Many of them have never been fixed. We found them the way we always did with various computer tools. There was multiple vulnerabilities in PHP found earlier this year. But because an AI model was involved in this one, it caught a lot of attention, and then they're like... And then... And the, uh, the swarms are breaking into the banks. These were individuals who got their hands on Muse or Dots, these new sort of personal AI agents, which I think you gotta be super careful about because, again, LLMs are very unpredictable, and LLM-driven agents, be very careful about using them. It was just individuals got their hands on these personal agents and sent them to do banking for them, and the banks were like, "We have agents trying to access our banks." Yeah, it's people being dumb. Anyways, I don't mean to belittle the cybersecurity threats of, of, of AI, but just all to say, like, this was a case where there was a huge hype around something that was, like, turned out not to be hype. But you have people on the, the, the jets in my metaphor here be like, "See? I told you AI doesn't work." So it's... We're in this world where you gotta be on one gang or the other. It's, it's basically a techno discourse prison yard, and if you don't join, uh, you know, either the, the, the white nationalist or the fascist group or whatever, you're gonna get beat up in the cafeteria, and it's enough. Most people aren't a part of any of these gangs. And they're willing to say, "That's cool. That's not." So why don't we do more of that and less of that? That's technoselectionism. So we need a third way. I think most people want a third way. So that's what I'm gonna offer. I want to end here by reading one more, uh, quote from my New Yorker piece. I actually don't have this one highlighted, Jesse, so I'll just read off my, my hard copy here. "Just because a tool exists and is popular doesn't mean that we're stuck with it. Given the increasing reach and power of recent innovations, adopting this attitude might have even have existential ramifications. We have no other reasonable choice but to reassert autonomy over the role of technology in shaping our shared story. This requires a shift in thinking. Decades of living in a technopoly have taught us to feel shame in ever proposing to step back from the cutting edge, but as in nature, productive evolution here depends as much on subtraction as addition." So that's my suggestion. You don't have to be a super optimist or a super pessimist. You could say, "Show me the good, and I'm on board. When I see the bad, I'm gonna call it out." Remember the four C's. Technoselectionism, I think, is the right foundation for navigating our current technological moment. So there we go, Jesse. The four C's.

   10. SPSpeaker27:59

       I like it.

   11. CNCal Newport28:01

       I remember that article. Um, New Yorker stuff. The, the term doesn't, like, roll off the tongue, but technoselectionism, I think that's the right way to think about it.

   12. SPSpeaker28:11

       Can you explain to the audience how you use AI for directions and stuff like that?

   13. CNCal Newport28:15

       For directions? You mean like GPS?

   14. SPSpeaker28:18

       Um-

   15. CNCal Newport28:19

       Oh. Oh

   16. SPSpeaker28:19

       ... like how to do stuff.

   17. CNCal Newport28:20

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   18. SPSpeaker28:20

       'Cause you gave me that tip a while ago, and it's actually really helped.

   19. CNCal Newport28:23

       Yeah. Hey, okay. So people are always wondering, like, what... As a technoselectionist, what uses of AI do I choose, right? So, um, I use it a lot... What it's really good for, uh, in, in particular, chatbots. There are a lot of different AI technologies out there, but there's a particular chatbot application I like, which is when you're essentially looking for a missing manual for some sort of, um, piece of software or something like this, where you can say, uh, "I'm using this software. I'm trying to do this. I'm getting this error message" or, "I can't figure this out. What should I do?" Um, it's pr- it's pretty useful for that. Uh, so I, I use, you know, my, my, um... For my Halloween decorations, I got them all running by the way, Jesse.

   20. SPSpeaker29:02

       We'll, we'll provide a picture to the audience somewhere.

   21. CNCal Newport29:05

       We'll provide a picture.

   22. SPSpeaker29:06

       [laughs] On Instagram.

   23. CNCal Newport29:07

       Um, maybe after Halloween so they can't track down the house.

   24. SPSpeaker29:09

       [laughs]

   25. CNCal Newport29:10

       Maybe that would be... Maybe that would be better. Um, but, and I'll just say this 'cause I think this is an important innovation. I'm using the, the open source tools that the Christmas lights people use who do those, like, synchronized to music Christmas light displays where the lights dance while it, it plays, like, music or whatever, which is not my cup of tea, but I use their ecosystem to make immersive Halloween scenes because now I can have, like, thunder and the lightning flash and zaps of electricity and stuff like this, but these aren't super well-documented tools. They're mainly open source. So, so I use a lot of chatbots. Um, they're not perfect though, right? They hallucinate a lot because this is not super well-documented software. So it does Google searches. Basically with these chatbots, they do Google searches, and then they process them to try to give you your answer. Sometimes they hallucinate things a lot, like menu items that don't exist or opt... And you tell them like, "Oh, you're right. That, that doesn't exist in the software, but try this instead." Um, I had some troubleshooting. I had a lot of, a lot of issues when I was... The final push to get my display up and going. The, the, the issue is my controller, which runs on a Raspberry Pi, is on a local isolated Ethernet network with a, a lighting controlling circuit, and then the, um... It's complicated because the Raspberry Pi is also on a separate wireless network, so I can talk to it with my laptop, and I was just really having a hard time getting that local wire isolated Ethernet network to work. I just couldn't, uh, access the lighting controller on it, and I was trying to use ChatGPT to help me there, and it, it, it was kind of leading me down rabbit holes. I was like, "I know this is wrong. I'm not gonna do it." So I went over to Gemini, and it had the right answer. Which was, when Jim and I will more aggressively use Google searching, um, unplug the ethernet and plug it back in to the lighting circuit, that's gonna actually trigger a hard reset of the ethernet configuration, 'cause I had changed the, the static IP address. So, so I use it a lot for that, but you know, it's, it's hit or miss basically. Um, there's a lot of like, "I don't think you're right about that." But so it's like kinda having a friend that knows more about a lot of this, but is also not like your smartest friend, and like sometimes will come up with these theories for what to do, where you're like, "That sounds dumb, so I'm gonna ignore you." And that has actually been a pretty productive relationship. So like, my main two uses of AI is, is that, Halloween lighting decorations. Um, also, I have it write... Every word you're hearing here is an AI-generated script that's being made audible with ElevenLabs. Is that, is that an issue, Jesse?

   26. SPSpeaker31:29

       [laughs]

   27. CNCal Newport31:30

       I haven't, as a person, written or spoken a, a, an actual human word in this microphone in two years.

   28. SPSpeaker31:35

       [laughs]

   29. CNCal Newport31:36

       It's all AI scripts with ElevenLabs. I tried to use ElevenLabs, it's like a s- a, a sound generator-

   30. SPSpeaker31:43

       Mm-hmm
2. 35:19 – 38:19

   Applying digital minimalism to LLMs

   1. SPSpeaker35:19

      Our first question is from Robert, who asks about applying digital minimalism to LLMs.

   2. CNCal Newport35:24

      Digital minimalism to LLMs. All right, this is gonna be relevant, and we can apply our technoselectionism maybe. Let's see. I'm excited about that. All right. Here's what Robert said: "In your book Digital Minimalism, in the context of social media, you stressed how important it was to not simply run digital tools on autopilot. Over-reliance on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, can easily be a time waster, but controlled and responsible access to it can make it very helpful." All right, so I'll pause here for a second. That's the configuring C I talked about in technoselectionism, that idea of you can have rules about how you use technologies. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. All right, back to Robert's letter. "The same principle applies to LLMs. Simply using them to answer questions and offload your cognitive abilities is harmful. However, you can control your use of LLMs and ask them to quiz you or guide you without directly giving you the answer. That's in fact the entire premise of AI study tools. When used carefully, just like social media, they can be really helpful for active recall, creating more practice questions, or to repeatedly explain things in ways that can be exasperating for human teachers." Robert, that's a really good point. That's a perfect example of technoselectionism applied to LLM-powered chatbots. Instead of just saying, "If I'm gonna use this, I'm gonna use it for everything," you can say, "What uses do I, uh, think-" Promote things I value and, and avoid harms. How do I move closer to a better future while avoiding the obstacles? And this is actually a really good use. You could say, "Explain this concept to me. I don't quite understand that. Why doesn't this work?" Um, I know as a mathematics professor that there's a lot of, like, basic mathematics. It's actually really good if you're, if you wanna... don't quite understand something in your notes. It's a pretty good tutor. "Hey, I, I'm looking at this new expectation formula. I don't understand why this works," or, "I tried this and I... Let me show you my answer and this didn't work." Like, if you, if you go back and forth on things that have a, uh, like, a very logical or clear, like, right and wrong answer and something it's trained on, you get tutoring out of it. And if you do that instead of saying, "Just give me the answer," instead of cognitive offloading leading to cognitive surrender, you're actually becoming smarter and will do better on the test and understand the information better. So I think that's really cool. CogM tutor though, as I keep encountering, be careful about what area in which you are doing this because it will also confidently give you wrong information, so there's... Y- y- you need to, um, you need to be careful. It's helpful if you point it towards a page that has an explanation you don't quite, uh, understand and say, "I want you to make this simpler for me." It's more likely to follow the structure of that and get it right. But anyways, stepping back, Robert is right. That's a way to think about LLM-based chatbots right now. All about the configuring C. What makes my life better, not just what's easiest, not just if I'm using this, I better use it for everything. All right, what else do we got?

   3. SPSpeaker38:17

      Our second question is about

3. 38:19 – 40:22

   An overlooked negative impact of using too much AI

   1. SPSpeaker38:19

      an overlooked negative impact of using too much AI.

   2. CNCal Newport38:23

      Oh, another one. All right, let's see what we missed here. This is from, uh, Augustino. "In your newsletter titled The Good Thing About Hard Things, uh, your newsletter, The Good Thing About Hard Things, was very interesting. I'm a professor in a medical field. I am also the chair of the wellbeing initiative committee for our house officers, the, uh, interns and residents. House officers are increasingly reliant on AI for medical records and who knows what else. My big question is that doing hard things is not only important for cognitive fitness, but also for mental, uh, mental fitness," which he puts in parentheses, "mental health." "When we overcome hard things, when we push our boundaries, we get stronger and more resilient. We realize we are capable of hard things. I am so worrying that using AI will not only impact the cognitive function, but also mental health 'cause we're not able to do hard things anymore. Everything comes easily and fast." That is a really good point. So first of all, if you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should. Comes out usually most weeks, and it's just me sharing ideas. They're often, like, more, like, in reaction to something I just saw, so you sort of see my thinking in action, but ideas about this general topic of human flourishing in a technological world that we cover here on this podcast as well. So Augustino was talking about a recent newsletter called The Good Thing About Hard Things, where I was making the case for, uh, doing cognitively demanding things is good, and if you offload them, you can lose your taste for it, and you can lose your ability to do it. But this is a good follow-up point. Avoiding hard things can also hurt your mental health. Again, this comes back to technoselectionism. Just because a tool exists that we can use to offload certain types of tasks that we used to do doesn't mean that we necessarily should. If it's gonna make our mind weaker for other tasks where we have to use our mind, or if it's gonna make us less happy, as Augustino points out, then we don't have to use it. So this is, again, it's the technoselectionist hat. These questions that we have, these first two are trying to illustrate the sort of technoselectionist mindset. All right, what do we got next? We're doing

4. 40:22 – 42:20

   A reformed relationship with social media

   1. CNCal Newport40:22

      well here.

   2. SPSpeaker40:23

      Next, we have Jay, who wants to share his story about how he reformed his relationship with social media.

   3. CNCal Newport40:29

      I always appreciate such stories. Uh, Jay says, "First, I quit Instagram and all other social media four years before when I was in high school and read your book, Deep Work, especially that chapter called Quit Social Media. Then I got a bit stuck with Twitter, uh, but also left it after reading your book, Digital Minimalism, and now that I have started to fill the gap, uh, now I've started to fill that gap by reading newspapers, which also helps me keep up with the world. With limited and useful updates, I wanted in the free time, um, I wanted in my free time that remained, I began developing the habit of reading, something which worked for me in different ways and just wanted to share with you." Um, I edited this slightly. Jay was, uh, English not his first language, so I'm sort of editing it slightly, but what Jay was saying here, he was just walking through an experience of reconfiguring, applying choice, um, and changing his mind. He backed away from social media, but by backing away from social media, he wasn't, he had no idea what was going on, so he started reading newspapers. Now he had this, like, good setup where he would read a newspaper, he knew what was going on in the world, but still had a lot of free time. In that free time, social media is still backing, so what did he do? He picked up the habit of reading, and with the habit of reading, now his time is filled. It's fulfilling to him. He-- So he's choosing a sort of landscape or menu of technologies here, that he's kept up with the world, he's, he's encountering interesting things, and he's not falling into these rabbit holes of digital algorithmic curation that he was stuck in before. That's a great example of someone taking control of their technological fate and saying, "I'm gonna reconfigure this into something better." You can do that. That's what I mean by the, the choosing step here. You can choose not to use this and to use this instead. You can configure how you use what's still there. This is all within your control. All right,

5. 42:20 – 49:52

   An article about focus, writing spaces and New Yorker staff writers

   1. CNCal Newport42:20

      I think we have time for, for one more. What else do we have here? [coughs]

   2. SPSpeaker42:24

      Finally, James shares an article that you th- he thought you might like.

   3. CNCal Newport42:29

      I said Sub Stack. James says, "This covers many things you touch on: focus, writing spaces, New Yorker staff writers. All this is missing is professional Halloween decorations, Jesse." Uh, someone did send me an article, by the way, about AI and professional Halloween haunted houses. I was like, "Oh, that's a combination I love." They were complaining that a lot of professional haunted houses are using AI-generated graphics and flyers and stuff, and it's like, come on, make those look better. All right, so let me load this article. It's from, uh, Substack. It's written by Brian Curtis. It's called Why Lawrence Wright Believes, uh, it's about the acclaimed writer Lawrence Wright, longtime writer for The New Yorker, also the author of many acclaimed books, including The Looming Tower, about the, um, origins of the 9/11 attacks. Okay, so there's a cool article here about, uh, Wright's story. Uh, there's some cool points in here, including the fact that living in Austin took him more out of the mainstream of what was going on and events and hanging out with other writers like would have happened if he lived in New York, but he thinks that's what allowed him to basically just stay focused on just writing stuff that really interests him, which led to better writing. There's one thing in here I wanted to show, though, which I, I found cool. All right, look at this, Jesse. This is his filing cabinet, and I think this is for The Looming Tower. So for those who are listening, uh, this is the, the organizational system that Lawrence Wright uses for his research. It's a bunch of small folders. I think these are... I don't know if these are, like, notebook size or I'm, I'm not sure. Um, and they each have just tabs on them, and there's, what, like, a hundred different manila folders with tabs in here. I think we can... Well, I can't zoom in on Substack, but, you know, I can see if I look closely down here, this is Looming Tower Osama bin Laden, and then the one next to it's Looming Tower Al-Qaeda. So this, like, whole row here on the right is just cards with information related to Osama bin Laden as part of his research for the book A Looming Tower. So w- one says cave, another says Jews. Uh, probably not nice things to say there. I don't think Osama bin Laden was fans of the tribe. Um, health we got here, Syria, jihad, and Wright would actually just write quotations or notes or ideas as he came across them and file them in this filing cabinet. Okay, why am I pointing this out? Looming Tower was a m- uh, a magisterial book. It won major, major awards. It was, like, a really important effort in understanding the, the cultural, political, and religious conditions that led to the 9/11 attacks, and this is a pretty old-fashioned organizational system. It's handwritten cards in folders in a filing cabinet. Here's why I bring that up, because it comes back to our thoughts about, uh, we're just talking about the good thing about hard things. This isn't a super efficient way to do things, and the, the, our current sensibility would be no, no, no, especially if you're, again, on X with the, the AI people. You have to have an AI agent that is, like, categorizing the information automatically into some sort of, uh, cloud database that can do rag-style queries on it and get you the information as you need it and put it in and polish it in a way that is easier for you to bring into, you know, your, your chapter that you're writing on, and you just spend days and days trying to get this thing working using AI itself, the vibe code, the various controls, with a dashboard that you make and JavaScript, and the whole thing's going to be great. And here's the point: None of that matters because the core thing to writing a book is not how automated is your research management system. It's the long, hard effort of touching on ideas, moving ideas, putting them on paper, moving the papers around. When you're writing this section and, and Osama bin Laden's health is relevant, to go to that filing cabinet and find that and pull out those cards and look through them and find a perfect thing to say there, that's what you needed to do, and the slowness was probably part of it. The human brain is slow to adapt. That allows you to sort of reshift to what you're doing. It allows you to craft something important, to craft something original and something beautiful. So the, to kind of put a bow on our whole discussion today of technoselectionism, speed for speed's sake, who cares? Right? The publisher didn't pay Lawrence Wright for how quickly can you organize research. They paid him for how good of a book can you write. Efficiency for efficiency's sake, who cares? Automation because you can, that's great if it's your hobby, but don't lose sight of the things that actually matter, producing the things that are valuable, using your brain in a way that's sustainable and enjoyable and meaningful to the people who are consuming what you produce. Technoselectionism says, yeah, those things matter. So when you cares about technology, you might say, "I don't wanna have an agent that's keeping, you know, uh, embeddings of research in a rag database. My, my filing cabinet slows me down enough that I can actually think and produce good work. That's good enough for me." Right? But when I'm writing, maybe I do wanna use an AI, uh, grammar checker because I keep making the same mistake or I reuse the, but semicolons in the wrong place. It's all about figuring out what matters most for doing the things that matters most to you, right? That's technoselectionism. I thought this was kind of a cool idea, uh, cool example of that, so thank you, James, for the example.

   4. SPSpeaker47:59

      Couple things about that. Holiday does the same thing, right, with his book creation process.

   5. CNCal Newport48:05

      He does, yeah. He keeps, uh, index cards with stories and quotes on them from different individuals and stories because his form is story-based. When it comes time to write one of his books, he just... he can take out and arrange index cards from all of his files and be like, "Oh, that's this chapter." And again, if you talk to Ryan, he'd be like, "Yeah, I don't want it to be faster than that. Like, I need to sit with these." By writing those down, he's told me this before, by taking the time to copy these quotes or ideas onto these index cards, they get filed away in my brain. So then when it-- I'm working on something, my brain can be like, "Ooh, I think I know the perfect thing." Much better than asking, you know, a chatbot, and it's gonna come up with some generic, "Hey, did you think about telling the story of, like, whatever?" If we just wanted generic, like, obvious examples, we don't need to pay a lot of money to writers, right? We could just have sort of, like, generic examples. So he would say that that system is just exactly as efficient as it needs to be to actually be effective. You don't need a AI agent going through databases.

   6. SPSpeaker49:00

      And then last week I liked how when you were talking to Hailey about touching on ideas, like on a weekly basis. It was a little different, but the same concept.

   7. CNCal Newport49:08

      Yeah, I thought that was cool, right? Where she was like, we needed the, the, the... I forgot his name. They're all pseudonyms anyways. But, like, one of our clients wanted to make progress on his most important projects every day, but it wasn't always reasonable to spend a lot of time on it, and they found that, like, just doing a two-minute thing sort of satisfied his idea of I haven't dropped the ball on this. Like, I'm touching base on this idea. Even if I just read it, opened it up, looked at it, shut it again, I haven't given up on it, even if most... Some days I can spend more time, other days I can't. The brain is a weird thing. You've got to be worried about messing around with it, to automate this, offload that. Y- y- you know, there be dragons if you're in the business of using your brain to create value. You've got to be very careful, which is what a techno selectionist would naturally do.

6. 49:52 – 58:16

   What Cal is up to

   1. CNCal Newport49:53

      All right, I'd like to end with a qu- quick updates about what I'm up to. Um, I mentioned finally got my, uh, automated, my immersive Halloween scene up and going. That was a big deal. We're making progress here in the studio. There's gonna be a new, uh, backdrop, so for those who watch, you know, be ready for that. We gotta get rid of the black. I like the black, but it just... It doesn't work in almost any form. Whenever I am next to someone else on a video, like I'm doing an interview, it's like a black hole and the bright light of their scene, and it just doesn't look right. It messes up Zoom, it messes up Riverside. It doesn't know how to deal with the black. We need a lighter backdrop. I'll miss it, Jesse, but, uh, that is what we have to do. I was gonna update you on the October books, the books I read in October. Uh, October's not over yet when we are recording this, but I already finished my five books. I left the list at home. So let's see if I can do this off memory. So I think I already mentioned the book Simplify, and that was written by the founders of Axios. I talked about it on the show. And then I think I mentioned I... At some point I was about to finish the book Telephone from 1975, the history of AT&T, the first book to g- that where the, the author got access to AT&T files. Uh, so I, I, I did finish that. Um, I read Ari Emanuel's memoir, Roll the Calls. Ari Emanuel's, uh, the, the super agent, brother to Ram Emanuel, um, and Zeke Emanuel, and pretty good. I thought... All right. He had... He... It's good, right? Because he's using the same ghostwriter who ghostwrote the Andre Agassi memoir and I think ghostwrote the Prince Harry Spare memoir. Very good ghostwriter.

   2. SPSpeaker51:36

      And he wrote The Tender Bar, right?

   3. CNCal Newport51:38

      Yeah, and he wrote his own book, The Tender Bar, right. So he's a, he's a good ghostwriter. And so I thought it was, I thought it was, it was... So it was psychologically astute and written in the tone of the way his mind thought. The main thing I noticed, 'cause I, I, I know Hollywood books well, if you compare it to Mike Ovitz's memoir, which I also read, Mike Ovitz's memoir does something that I was expecting Ari's to do but it did not. Mike Ovitz's memoir is all about, let me tell you stories about the specific celebrities and projects I was involved with. So, like, in Ovitz's memoir, it'd be like, "Let me tell you about working with Michael Crichton on Jurassic Park," and, like, that'll be a story. "Let me tell you about signing Julia Roberts. Let me tell you about, like, her ascent and what deals I brokered or whatever." Ari really doesn't get into the detail of his clients. He doesn't. He's not giving... He talks about his life and his career, but his style, for better or for worse, he, he does not tell a lot of Hollywood stories of, like, "Let me tell you about..." Like Mark Wahlberg is, like, one of his big clients. "Let me tell you about his rise and what role I had to play in it." So-

   4. SPSpeaker52:37

      Wahlberg was essentially the character in Entourage, right?

   5. CNCal Newport52:40

      Yes. So Wahlberg-

   6. SPSpeaker52:42

      Was Vince.

   7. CNCal Newport52:44

      Wahlberg was Vince. So Wahlberg was, uh, Ari Emanuel's client, and Wahlberg said, "I wanna do a show about my entourage when I first got to, uh, LA." And so Ari brought that to, um, HBO, and they did the show, and Jerry- Jeremy Piven played the agent, Ari Gold, who's based off of Ari Emanuel, which he said actually kind of became a issue because he... they got so conflated with each other. Um, and they, they really took a lot of things from Ari Emanuel's life for the Ari Gold, uh, actual character. So, but it was, it was interesting book.

   8. SPSpeaker53:17

      I was listening to a podcast with Ari recently, 'cause I'm sure he was promoting the book, but he said he makes, like, 100 phone calls a day or something like that.

   9. CNCal Newport53:24

      Oh, yeah. That's, that's what's Roll the Calls. So, like, you have an assistant who's on the line, so you never hang up. It just goes from one call to another call. All he does is call all day long. I'd be the worst agent. I'd be like, "Do we really need to work this year? Gonna call someone back. What are we talking about?" I'd be the worst agent. Um, so then I read, uh, in memoir mode, um, Dave Portnoy, who founded Barstool Sports, which I don't know much about actually. Do you do, do you do any Barstool stuff?

   10. SPSpeaker53:53

       No, I don't, but I know that he has a house on Nantucket.

   11. CNCal Newport53:56

       Yeah. I learned that from the memoir. He bought that early on, and then he kept upgrading it as, as he did better. Um, so I listened to his new memoir about starting Barstool Sports because it has a huge digital component. So podcasts are, like, at the core of it, so I was hoping to get some sort of insights about how they... what they thought about that industry and, like, how they knew to make that pivot. But, uh, it was more just, like, stories about stuff that happened to him that his fans know about and, like, he wanted to tell his story. Like when they got arrested for protesting Roger Goodell after Deflategate, and they handcuffed themselves together in the headquarters of NFL and they went to jail. And it's, like, a lot of stories like that, which I guess if you know who he is, you're like, "Oh." And, and then a lot of him, like, defending himself against various, like, charges and stuff like that. So it was, it was interesting. Like, I, I went through it kind of quick, but it-

   12. SPSpeaker54:45

       He owns High Noon, right?

   13. CNCal Newport54:46

       I don't know. Yeah, he does, the drink. Yeah.

   14. SPSpeaker54:48

       That's popular.

   15. CNCal Newport54:50

       You know how many big podcasts came out of there? 'Cause it was all, like, Alex Cooper, Call Her Daddy, um, came out of his network, and then Pat McAfee Was, came out of his network. And then Part In My Take is still, you know, in his network or whatever. And they have a, there's a whole new book out just about that podcast. So maybe I should read that. But what I've learned is memoirs aren't really about business strategy. I gotta learn this. Like, this book does not get into how they surveyed the landscape of digital media and decided a shift towards audio was gonna be whatever. Um, so it was fun, but it didn't have what I, the, the niche thing I was looking for. What else did I read? Oh, Treeline. So that was a, that was a dense book. I liked that book. It's an environmental book from like 2022, 2023, and my neighbor lent it to me. And this environmental reporter, and my apologies, I don't have his name offhand, kind of went around the world looking at the tree line, like where the boreal forest or whatever type of forest it is, but like where the forest stops. You know, in Siberia at some point the forest stops as you get to the Arctic, or in Scandinavia at some point it stops, or in Alaska at some point the trees go away. And he goes around the world to, to the tree line all around the world. Uh, one place he couldn't visit 'cause of COVID, but he visited virtually. And it's sort of about the, I guess the tree line is shifting up because of global warming. And so it's an environmental book and about these different places. Incredibly deeply researched. Uh, slow going, more so than like other environmental writers like a Bill McKibben or an Elizabeth Kolbert. It's gonna be a little bit more the narrative's final move more, uh, this guy is, is voluminously researched and it's in there. Like, there's no... He's, he's taking his time. You're gonna learn about this type of tree, and that, and this person, the history, and this and that. So it's a very dense book, um, but very well-written and just an, a, a momentous amount of research. So I think those are those. So does that count, does that up to five?

   16. SPSpeaker56:46

       Yeah.

   17. CNCal Newport56:46

       Yeah. There you go. Those are the October books. I finished October early this year. It was like October 20th or something. I was rolling. It's 'cause the book on tapes just rolled.

   18. SPSpeaker56:57

       Got it.

   19. CNCal Newport56:57

       I, I did the two memoirs on tape. Those are like the only things I can listen to on tape. I know I started Warren Littlefield's because I listened to the Seinfeld acquired.

   20. SPSpeaker57:07

       Oh, I just read the Wall Street Journal article about that.

   21. CNCal Newport57:09

       Yeah. No, it's great. Um, I might do a short podcast episode about a idea from that. So then I got Warren Littlefield, who was the, like, entertainment executive NBC that was there who started Must See TV and, like, was there for Seinfeld, his memoir about how they made Must See TV Thursday night on NBC a big thing. But it's not going well on audio because it's a lot of, like, transcript stuff. Like, they interviewed people and they have transcripts of it. So and so said this, so and so said this, like, as opposed to a fully out narrative, and that works better in print, I think, than audio. But I'm still kinda going. I'm learning a lot about making TV in the '80s. So all right. That's enough of this nonsense. Um, we'll be back Monday with another Flagship episode maybe. I'm, I'm trying to do more shorter episodes in between when I can, so maybe you'll see me before Monday, but until you see me next, as always, stay deep. Today's episode was produced and mastered by Jesse Miller. Nate Mechler provided research and newsletter support. The video was edited by Ben Crane and Rob Monks. The theme music is adapted from an original composition by Jay Kerstens. For weekly ideas from me to show up in your inbox, sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com.

Episode duration: 58:16