Ep. 396: Can I Learn To Love My Phone Again?

Do you remember when the iPhone was first introduced? It was an exciting moment. Like I want to play you a clip here. From Steve Jobs' keynote address at the two thousand and seven Macworld where he first introduced this device. I want you to listen to the enthusiasm of the assembled crowd. Three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod.

A phone and an internet communicator. An iPod. A phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Wow, those were the days. And then when we finally got our hands on those devices for the first time, they're everything We had hoped they would be. They were slick and easy to use and they were super useful and they were fun. But then of course over the years that followed

our relationship with the phones began to sour. Now, a big part of this is the attention economy platforms that realize there is money to be made in making us look at these screens longer and longer. So they built their contrived addictive apps and soon we felt obsessed

with our phones, but also it's just clutter. Over the years, we've added more and more different types of apps and services, some useful, some that we've forgotten, some that become habits and some we wish we could get rid of. And now this the whole screen when we turn on that device. is a multicolored, garish, distracting pile of exhaustion. Wouldn't it be nice if we could go back to the way we looked at our phones in two thousand and seven? Well, here's the thing.

I think we can. In recent years there's been a lot of interest in both the app space and the sort of strategy space and figuring out how to transform the f the the actual setup of your phone. So that it is much simpler and more fun. Like the phones used to be when we first got them. And to do this without having to give up. major functionality that still makes smartphones useful.

I call this effort putting your phone into two thousand and seven mode. And it's what I want to talk about today. So I have five big ideas I want to share, five practical ideas for transforming your existing phone into into 2007 mode. The first four come from very popular videos online and the fifth idea will be My own. Collectively, these present a possibility for a much healthier and more enjoyable relationship with your device. And let's be honest, we could all use that.

In our current moment. Alright, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth. In a distracted world, and we'll get started right after the music.

All right, so let's get into it with my first piece of advice for putting your phone into 2007 mode. This is probably the most drastic of the advice I'm going to suggest. So I want to start with it so we can really set the tone right. The idea here is to completely transform the visual interface you use to interact with your app.

In particular, I want to talk about moving away from screens filled with brightly colored application icons to instead a monochromatic screen where your apps are listed. in text. So you'll actually just see, for example, on a dark gray background in light gray text. Messages, the word messages, maps, the word maps, weather, the word weather.

And so on. This type of interface was really first popularized by a feature phone known as the Lightphone, which used an e-ink display like you would have on a Kindle that really could only do monochromatic displays.

But people really enjoyed that. And so there's been a uh a sort of renaissance in apps developed that you can run on a standard smartphone, like an iOS phone or an Android phone, to make your interface look like that lightphone interface. Two of the more popular ones are blank spaces. and dumbphone, but there are others. All right, so how do you technically

Like what are the technical steps to doing something like this? Going from all of these icons to just a black and white screen with text on it. What I want to do here is play a little bit of a clip from a longer video about how to do this. This is from a channel called Nicknology. The very popular video that I'm gonna play this clip from is viewed something like half a million times. Um my I my goal here in playing a clip from this is just to give you a sense of the type of step.

involved these transformations. Uh obviously watch the video for the the full set of instructions. All right, let's hear this, Jesse. Actual light phone. Head to the app store and download the Dumb Phone app. It looks like this. First thing you're gonna want to do when you open the app is set up which apps you want on your home screen. I chose phone, messages, notes.

Spotify, Google Maps, and Settings. These are the most basic things I use on a very regular basis and none of them lead to distraction. As you can see, I already have mine set up, but if you hit this little button in the bottom right, you'll be able to select which apps you feel are best for you.

You can also reorder them to your liking. Once you've completed that, you're now ready to add the Dumb Phone widget to your home screen. You're going to want to start with a completely blank canvas. Long press to activate wiggle mode, then remove all four apps from your dock. Next. Swipe over to an empty page, then select edit at the top left, then add widget. Navigate down until you see Dumb Phone. You can also search for it by typing DP. Add the first widget to your home screen later.

All right, so I'll I'll cut it off there, but that should give you an idea of what's going on. Just to like quickly summarize, and I'll say if you're listening, this might be a case where you want to jump over the video so you can see that on the screen. But just to quickly summarize, when you go to that wiggle mode where you can take individual apps off and on different screens.

You can take the apps off of the dock on the bottom, and now on every screen there'll be no apps on the bottom. And then what they did is they navigated to a blank screen. You know how you can scroll through different screens? And they added a widget from the Dumb Phone app. And then that widget is what you can configure in the Dumb Phone app to say what apps do I want and what do I want to call them?

The final thing, this is the thing that threw me, which I didn't understand when I was watching this video, but now I do when I watched it a little bit more closely. Um how do you make that your new home screen? Just this blank screen with this one widget on it that's displaying the the dumb phone app.

There's a mode I didn't recognize, a settings screen where it shows all of the different screens you can side scroll through on your phone and you can uncheck ones you don't want to see. They don't disappear. You can recheck them again and get them back. But if you uncheck them, they're no longer displayed. So you can just uncheck everything except for the screen that has the dumb phone widget. And so now when you turn on your phone,

You just see this blank screen with the widget on. There's a lot of other tips in that video. You want to set your background the the match it. There's a spacer widget you can add to keep it centered. But that's basically what goes into it. You download an app, you set up what apps you want on your simple screen, you say what names you want, and then you do some settings on your phone to make that the only screen you see is one that has that widget centered.

All right, so if you do that, you already are, I would say, seventy percent of the way or sixty percent maybe towards two thousand two thousand seven mode.

But now we got to start refining this setup even more, which brings us to our second tip. The next tip comes from a name that's familiar to my listeners, Writer Carroll, inventor of the bullet journal method of analog life organization. Uh he has a what I thought in a video that he posted on his site. A clever idea for how to go take the next step. Once you've moved to text based descriptions of apps,

He had an idea for moving to the next step uh to get even closer to two thousand seven mode. Uh let's let's hear it in his own words and then we'll we'll talk about it a little bit more. Jesse, let's hear what Ryder had to say. So here's what I did. I changed all app names to verbs, actions that support who I want to be, like write, connect, move, learn, plan. The shift is subtle but powerful. I'm not reacting to brands or my life. I'm exercising my agency, one intentional action at a time.

So this is a powerful idea. He's saying as long as you're going to have text-based descriptions of your app, be careful about what text-based descriptions you use. describe the aspirational outcome you want from using that app. Use that to describe the app instead of its name. So I want to walk through uh he mentioned them briefly, but let me walk through specifically the examples he gave in this clip right there.

So he began with the following five apps listed text in his sort of minimalist phone setup. He had a a writing app called IA Writer. The messages m app, Apple Notes, Instagram, and Calendar. Those were apps he uses a lot. And he he had those descriptions. Here's what he changed each of those descriptions to to make it more value outcome oriented. He changed uh IA writer to write. So it's just described as right, the action write. He changed messages to the word connect.

So, you know, it's not the messages app. It's I click there if I want to connect to other people. Um and so it changed Instagram to learn, uh, calendar to plan, et cetera. So the the bigger idea here. is the way you see your apps described will change the way that you you think of them. And if you really focus in on the value enhancing action of the app and its description, you now see this device as delivering you value enhancing actions.

As opposed to just this sort of mechanistic, consumeristic, uh transactional relationship with other commercial activities. Um I don't know what you would rename TikTok in this scheme though, Jesse. I don't what what is the action you're trying to I think you I would just put on my phone uh give up. And that's uh when I click give up, that means I want to just scroll through TikTok.

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All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, so let's check in what we have so far. We're two tips into going into the two thousand seven mode. One and most importantly We've now changed our phone to a monochromatics display that just lists apps as text. Two, we've carefully named those app descriptions to focus on the value that we hope to enhance when we use it. All right, now let's keep going with our third piece of advice.

And this has to do with the app experience themselves. So everything so far is about the interface through which you access apps. But once I click on that app

Now I'm back into whatever world that app developer wants me to be in. So I can label Instagram, for example, with whatever aspirational name I want, but when I click on it, I'm in Mark Zuckerberg's world, and all of the things they've optimized that get me mindlessly scrolling through algorithmically curated content or whatever they're doing is still waiting for me in the app. So my third piece of advice is identify the most addictive apps, the apps that tend to uh

keep you on phone longer than you want to be and make you unhappy, identify what those are, and let's re-engineer the apps themselves so that the experience is more useful, functional, and minimalist. So how do we do this? Well, there's some interesting tools out there that can make a big difference. In particular, there's a whole group of apps now, which you might not have heard of, that work as follows. If you access

Social media, YouTube, LinkedIn, there's a bunch of different websites that they they're compatible with. If you access them through your browser, There are now apps that can get in there and manipulate what the experience looks like. Because we can manipulate I can't I can't change what the Instagrab app looks like, but I can have an app that goes in and changes what the Instagram webpage looks like. It can take things off or add things back to it.

Um let me play a clip here that explains this a little bit better. This is from the uh Reisu's channel, very popular video, had 2.4 million views. I want to play a little bit of a clip here where he talks about um using one of these App experience modification app. So let's hear this and then we'll we'll check in on it. And it's all them there.

Which costs three ninety nine on IOS and it's free on Android. But with this app, it gives you some basic modifications for every social media site like YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, even LinkedIn, I think. Or you can remove the algorithmic feed, you can remove like recommended content and they make it more functional and less addicting.

For YouTube specifically, the same developer has another app called Untrap for YouTube, which I've also bought. But it allows you to do stuff like remove the thumbnail or remove recommend videos from the sidebar. Like this is what my YouTube looks like on my phone. It's just a list. where I'm unlikely to fall into a binging rabbit hole. But

All right, so let's summarize what's happening here. Instead of actually keeping individual apps for social media or YouTube or related sort of potentially addictive apps, instead of keeping those apps on your phone, you will now access them through your browser. On your phone. Step two, you will use the type of apps that were mentioned in that Reisu video. And there's a hundred of these, and you can find a lot of videos of these online as well.

That will then modify to your exact specifications what you want the experience to be of using those apps. This is advice that. Keeps Mark Zuckerberg up at night. This is the type of advice that when whatever the head of I don't know who his name is, but the head of bike dance, when he turns around his skull of thrones. the check in on how TikTok is doing, uh, and how many uh young kids they've ensnared into addictive cycles, absolutely fears because it strips away the addiction.

while keeping whatever like small sliver of usefulness you still find in those apps. And their whole point is the small sliver of usefulness is supposed to be the lure that gets you to bite the hook, which allows them to pull you out of the lake. But you get rid of the hook

Then people are getting value without having to use it all the time. They have no reason to use them all the time. They become useful. The phone becomes like we used to have in two thousand and seven. So I love this idea. There's no social apps on your phone anymore. And if you still I don't want to have the debate with you now about using social media or not. We've talked about this a lot on the show. I'll put that aside for now. But

Whatever you are using through the browser modified so you take back control of that experience. I think that's a very powerful idea. All right, let's move on to our.

Fourth idea. Our fourth tip comes from um My embialic. So I'm I we are mispronouncing her name, Jesse, but to you and I, that is people our age, we obviously know her as Blossom. Remember Blossom? The T V show? Uh you were like born in a CrossFit gym and don't know like what's going on in the world. It was like a very popular show in like the mid nineties.

Well what you were doing in the nineties. I remember the Wonder Years from like the eighties. Okay. We're the same age, man. You should remember Blossom. Joey, her brother Joey, you don't remember this? Uh I kinda remember that. Six or seven? She had a friend that had a number for a name. Yeah. Right? I think her name was like six or something. Okay. Yeah. All right. Anyways, I I think uh slightly younger viewers know her as Amy from the Big Bang Theory. Uh she's been around forever. Anyways.

She's been doing a bunch of videos about Lots of stuff. But she did a lot of videos about technology and her struggle to beat her phone addiction. And in one of these videos she hinted at an idea that I want I'm gonna play this clip and I'm gonna run with her idea and develop it to be even more severe. So let's start with the clip and then we'll run with what she's suggesting. Number two, I have an incredibly annoying, damaging habit that I have adopted.

Of scrolling through the news anytime there's a lull in anything, any time of day or night, no matter where I am. I have no clue why I started doing this. I'll be just walking like from my car in a parking lot to a doctor's office and I'm like scrolling through news. I end up looking at all these headlines and they're terrible. It's almost always like

death and tragedy or forgive me, like celebrity gossip that I do not need to be filling my head with. This habit is really hard to break. I'm hoping that just by having an awareness of it It will encourage me to stop doing it, but I might need to take that news app just off my phone. All right, so she gets to the right answer only at the very end. At first she's like

Uh, maybe I should like moderate my online news consumption. This is kind of a problem. I wonder if I should really just take the app off my phone, the apps I'm using to get news. That is actually the correct answer. Now this is an important tip that's often missed because it hits people like me.

People like me who don't use social media, or maybe if you do, you're using the advice from my last tip and now it's moderated, it's in a browser, it's in an experience where the addictive elements are stripped off, you don't really have a problem with it. But you still find yourself coming back to your phone all the time because news has borrowed a lot of ideas that the attention engineers innovated and it can be just a sticky.

And now you're like, I'm still on my phone. Instead of doom scrolling TikTok, I'm doom scrolling New York Times headlines. And this could be just as affecting. Jesse, I've had to put up with this a lot recently because, you know, I'm doing this new these new Thursday episodes, the AI reality check episodes, which requires me to read a lot of AI news so that I can sort of help people feel better about it.

And man, there's so many uh it goes in waves of topics, but like some they'll decide they being like the collective media. Oh, here's some like really negative topic about AI we all need to cover. And then every article is just like pounding this, trying to one up each other in like the worst way. And so like what might start with AI might affect your job. It kind of like builds up until you get to articles that are, you know, talking about

um how to use your dystopian trash can fire to properly cook your dog so you don't starve. Like it's just dark. It it puts me in a bad mood and I know a lot of its BS. I'm an expert in the topic. So don't let news become The hidden addictor. And the right way to do it is don't read news uh using apps on your phone.

Have an alternative way of consuming news. It can involve your phone, but not an app that can constantly refresh. Not something that if you check it when you get out of the car is going to be different when you get back to the car. You want more static. high quality and self contained descriptions of the news. So this could be like daily news podcasts. This could be emailed daily news.

Roundups. Um, that's what I would do. Do not use the news apps because they are just following. I mean, we see this, by the way, like the the New York Times figured this out is that they worried about losing readers to X.

So now what they'll do if there's any breaking news event is they'll put article after article after article, they'll put live updates. They found a way to make sure that there's an abundance of information piling up for you to keep reading through so that you can have that same uh scroll experience you have where it used to be five years ago or ten years ago, if something happened,

Here is an article that explains it. And that's it, right? For that day. That's your news about it. Now it's they pile, pile, pile. Here's it from six different angles and live updates. So that you can keep coming back to it. You have a sense of urgency. So I think news apps isn't something that is a hidden addiction trap on phones. So uh follow Blossom's suggestion here and take those apps. off of your phone. All right, we're going to get to our uh fifth tip.

I wanted to offer one myself and I wanted to offer one that I hadn't actually explained before instead of like one of my standard pieces of advice. All right, so what is my addition to this collection of advice for putting your phone? back into um two thousand and seven mode. All right. I have this idea of seeking functional substitutes.

for in particular the social platforms that are engaging you, overly engaging you on your phone. So we talked about before Changing the icons of the social platforms. We talked about before, uh using a browser-based technology in which you can control the experience of what you're seeing on um your social app.

Here is my addition to this. Find functional substitutes for those platforms, meaning you ask the following question about the platforms you use. What psychological, emotional, or practical role does Do these platforms currently play in my life? Like why is it that I'm going to TikTok? Why is it that I'm going to X? Is it to stave off boredom? Do I go here to try to get hits of inspiration?

Is this a numbing thing when I'm stressed out or anxious I go here because it's just gonna like numb me and I don't have to use my mind? figure out the specific problems these are solving in your life and then say what is a positive functional substitute for each of those uh roles they play. If I use this app to stave off boredom.

What's another way to save off boredom that I think is going to be more positive? If this is something I'm using to numb myself and I'm anxious, what's a more positive activity that I can do uh to save off anxiety? And what I would do is find, you know, add to your interface on the phone like descriptions of those goals, stave off boredom, you know, reduce anxiety or what have you. But now have these links go to these more positive substitutes. So when you pick up that phone.

You see the thing you really want to do listed right there. You know, calm anxiety. And now instead of like going to TikTok, it's gonna go to something that you find to be more productive. It's gonna bring you to a you know, a podcast page of a sort of soothing podcast, or it's gonna take you to a meditation app, or it's gonna take you to your workout app to remind you of like, oh, I should go do some exercise. So I think having functional substitutes for social media

Really helps you decouple from these things that are pulling back to your phone again and again, even when you don't want to be. All right. So there we go. We had five ways. The transform your smartphone into something that's much less distracting um and much more useful. So let me go through what we had here. Number one was going to this sort of extreme minimalist interface, which I think is the crux to all of this. Number two was giving better names.

for the apps on your phone once you're in that interface. Number three was re-engineering the most addictive apps by running them through your browser and using browser modification tools. Number four was don't use phone apps. You self contain static forms of news that are updated, say, like once a day or so, so you get rid of that hidden addictive trigger.

And number five, find functional substitutes for social media and then put pointers on your phone that take you to those functional substitutes. So your phone is helping you in healthy ways and not in unhealthy ways.

Um so look, there's a lot of other good ideas out there. This is a big discussion online. So if you go look at any of those videos that we we pulled clips from today and you watch them in your entirety, you'll see a lot of other suggestions. You'll see a lot of people are talking about this out here. Um you can customize this. as you see fit. But the key thing here is you can take back control of your phone.

You can transform it back to something that supports your life. You can regain a little bit of that excitement that we felt back in 2007. And I think now is the time to do it.

Is your phone set up like that? I'm going to do the minimalist interface. You are? Yeah. I mean I I I don't you know, I don't use social media. I don't uh I don't have as much of a problem, but I like the idea of the minimalist interface. And I and I think I'm gonna use the writer Carol descriptions as well. Um I don't need to re-engineer the addictive ass because I really don't use that many of those, but I think that's, you know, a good one. Um

I guess I don't use news apps. I do use the New York Times app, so I'll have to think about that. And for the last one, I I might do that. Right. So I don't use social media necessarily, but I think it'd be nice to have Things I o you know. relieve boredom, anxiety, like have some links on my phone that take me to a healthy way to do that. So then my phone, like it'll just change my relationship to the phone.

It'd be a source of solutions, you know, for problems. If you were going to a ballgame and you needed like the ticket stubmaster app, how would you do that? You just go to the other page? Yeah, you go to the other page. And it shows up all your Yeah, yeah. So you can have I was watching these videos. So like

What people there's a couple things you can do. There's two options. Some people just have their their home screen now is minimalist. It's black and white with just the things listed. And it's like the main things they use. And then if you go to some other pages, they'll have folders of other apps that like they don't really have as much of a problem with.

Other people build up page after page of minimalist descriptions. So they have like their main things on the first page listed in text. And then the second page might be like sports stuff like the ballpark app and like the MLB app listed just in text. And then another page might be entertainment stuff, you know, listed in text. So some people make everything tech.

Others like just make their main page and like the just the first thing they see when they turn it on just text. But you can in the app you can set up lots of different widgets with different apps and descriptions and then you're just adding the widget the pages on your phone.

And that page is just showing that widget and the widget just shows the text. And so after a while, you could so you can kind of do either way. How long do you think it takes to set up realistically? I watched that video um like six minutes. For non-tech people too? Well, it depends how many pages, but like to set up one page. Yeah. You download this app. And then you go in and configure the widget. And then you go to wiggle mode, clear out your dock.

Then you navigate over to an empty page, you add the widget, you change the background, you add a spacer widget if you want to like keep the text centered, which people care about, and then you uncheck the other pages you don't want to see anymore from the pages selection page, and then you're good. So I don't know, I think ten minutes or less you can have at least like some of these pages up and running and then you can just like customize it as as like you see fit.

Cool. But I think that's a cool way to do it. Um a lot of people are like, look, I like the idea of the light phone, but I need the ballpark app. I need the bus tracking app that I use to see where my kids bus is. Also, I don't want to pay six hundred I I get this phone already pretty cheaply. I don't want to pay six hundred dollars for a light phone, but I love that interface. So it's like kinda cool that you can get that interface. now on your existing layers. Some of these also come with like

Uh social media control. I don't quite understand how this works, but they were they were saying in these videos that some of these minimalist interface apps. will uh come with, you know, built in features. So if you want to look at social media or something, it'll say, Hey, you have to take five seconds first and take a breath and all that type of stuff. And I don't know as much about that. But anyways, I think it's a cool space.

All right, you've heard from me. Now we want to hear from you, so let's open up our inbox. All right, and a quick reminder, uh if you have a question for me or want to share a case study or perhaps just wanna try to get me going on a rant, you can send that over The podcast at calnewport.com. All right, let's get into it. Um Jesse, what message are we going to look at first here? We have a note here from Alexander about a new study on brain fry. All right, let's see here. Alexander said

Hi Cal, big fan of your work. Have you seen this article on AI usage leading the brain fry? By this they mean some kind of decision fatigue stemming from the increased workload workers can accomplish. using AI. I have seen this study. Uh it came out in the the Harvard Business Review. I think it has some interesting points in there. I actually I'm gonna talk about a little bit here. Now look, I know I have this sort of separate Thursday episode.

where I talk about r the AI reality check. But I'm gonna talk about this here because I think the results of this study are not just about AI, but they're pointing to a phenomenon that is relevant for knowledge work in general. All right, so the study is titled When Using AI Leads to Brain Fry. Uh it's a collection of authors led by Julie Bedard. It's a uh some are from Boston Consulting Group and some are from University of California, Riverside.

I'm just gonna read a few quotes from this and then I'm gonna help you interpret how this is relevant even beyond AI. All right, so early in the article the authors say In recent weeks, online AI users have described increased cognitive load, saturated attention and mental fatigue in social media posts. Engineer Francesco Bonacci, founder of QAAI, wrote a popular ex post titled Vibe Coding Paralysis.

When infinite productivity breaks your brain, in which he lamented, I end each day exhausted, not from the work itself, but from the managing of the work. Six work trees open, four half written features, two quick fixes that spawned rabbit holes in a growing sense that I'm losing the plot entirely. As a then the article goes on to say as a research group that studies emergent workforce and AI trends, these signals caught our attention.

To understand what's going on, again I'm reading from the article here, we conducted a a study of fourteen hundred and eighty-eight full-time US-based workers at large companies across industries, roles, and levels. We asked them about patterns. and quantity of AI use, work experiences, and cognition and emotions. We found that the phenomenon described in these posts, cognitive exhaustion from intensive oversight of AI agents, is both real and significant. We call it AI brain fry.

Now that rhymes, that's nice. Which we define as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity. I s as an aside, Jesse, this is my number one research rule. If you're coining a term in a research paper, you better make that thing rhyme. That's the key. Rhyming. Um they went on to say we found that the most mentally taxing form of AI engagement was oversight, or the extent to which AI tools required the workers direct monitoring.

There's some nuance here, however. We found when AI is used to replace routine or repetitive tasks, burnout scores, but not mental fatigue scores. are lower. All right. So how do we make sense of these observations and what does it tell us not just about AI, but knowledge work in general? Well, based on my sort of extensive writing about attention and distraction and knowledge work in the digital age.

It seems clear to me that almost certainly a big factor of these observed results is the cognitive cost of context switching. Switching your attention from one target of attention to another is an expensive operation. And when you do it really quickly, you're now forcing your mind in the complex cognitive scenarios before you have been able to uh fully load up the relevant context and that creates a sense of mental fatigue and confusion um and difficulty actually doing the work.

So if we're looking at AI, what would be the type of AI efforts that would make this the worst? And that would be reviewing or doing oversight of efforts by multiple different AI agents, right? So the the way that we see AI agents being used most often right now, which tends to be in computer programming circles.

They're doing complicated work, the production of code that you then or uh you know, spec writing or specifying architecture documents that have to be reviewed by you, the the the engineer in charge. And that's really hard. And it's in a very specific cognitive context. So when you have to switch between agents quickly, you're switching between, oh, I have to review

the work that this agent just did, which is a very hard mentally demanding task, that review. And then I jump over to this agent and try to review its work, but that's a completely different cognitive context. This is really difficult for the brain to do. It takes context switching and it pushes it to an extreme. And no wonder it's calling brain fry. But the bigger message here is that we all have to worry about this. I mean, I wrote about the negative cost of context switching.

back in my uh two thousand twenty one book, A World Without Email, that this is a one of the key issues that we face in knowledge work is that we have many different ways that we force people to have to switch their context rapidly. And it really exhausts us. So AI, this sort of agent overview approach to AI, which I have a lot of thoughts about because I think it's overblown now and we're going to ran it back in, but I'll talk about that more on the Thursday episodes.

Is really pushing this context switching issue to the extreme because overseeing a bunch of employees that are working very fast, all on separate projects, and you're trying to switch back and forth. Three minutes here, one minute here, four minutes there is almost an impossible task to ask. And of course people are burning out. And so there's something we need to do about it there, but more generally, just remember context switching is productivity poison and something we worry about.

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All right.

All right, Jesse, what other messages do we have? We have a message from Karen about the use of phones on the set of the pit. Oh, I like this one, right? Because we we talked about the pit, the HBO show the pit starting to Miley. Uh a couple of weeks ago when we had Sarah Hart Unger on the show because she's a doctor and I was like you have to explain to me all of these different ranks of doctors for intern to resident, uh whatever.

Uh so we're thinking about the pit. So I guess that's why Karen uh sent this in. So here's what she said in more detail. My first time writing in came across the below Instagram reel with Noah Wiley on the alt uh on the Alternative the cast and crew develop for themselves during long hours on set where they don't have access to their phones. All right, let's let's hear a little bit of this clip here, Jesse.

Michael Robbie Rabinovich on the pit. One of the cool things that we have here because nobody's allowed to have their cell phone on set is we have a lending library. where everybody can come, background, foreground, crew, and check out a book. It's been growing over the last two seasons. And I'm willing to wager that we've got one of the better red casts and crew in Hollywood today.

That's cool. So they're not allowed to have phones on the set of the pit. Now I don't know if that is a a rule they put in place. Because they thought it'd be like good for people's mental health, or if it's a rule they put in place because of security, they don't want people like recording what's going on. But that's pretty cool. They have a lending library for the cast members to go and get books.

Something I found out about the pit when I was reading about him a couple of weeks ago, Jesse, which makes this Linding library even more relevant, is the fact that uh the episode takes place. I mean the seasons each take place. I don't know if you've seen the show. They take place over one day. Right. So each episode is another hour. Mhm. Uh it takes'em about seven months to film a season. So for seven months, uh, you're you're filming one day in the life of this hospital.

Well what that means is the people in the waiting room, because they keep going out to the waiting room. Those extras have to be sitting there in the waiting room for seven months. Right? Because the same people need to be there every time you come out. And what I heard, this was I believe this was an interview. I was listening to an interview with uh

Is it David Wells, the showrunner, who also was the showrunner for The West Wing. Anyways, I was listening his last name is Wells, and I was listening to him being interviewed on The the ringer podcast The Town with Matt Bellmy. And he was talking about this, that they have these really structured days for the extras to make this sort of palatable, right? Because you have to just sit there all day, day after day, and they have like very specific breaks. But he said they're always reading.

So they all get these books and they sit there and they read, waiting for like, oh, we need to do some filming now uh so they put down the books and like film their scene of one of the doctors walking through the waiting room and then they kind of read again. So it's kind of cool. It's like a environment there um where everyone is just Everyone's just reading, so the pit. There we go. All right, let's see. What else do we have here?

A listener named Adams sent a note in response to your email newsletter from last week about the seventeenth century scholar dealing with information overload. He said So essentially this is just the experience of being human. Any amount of data can overload if we let it

I guess that's pretty much true, right? Is that uh our experience of being human is there's specific types of information we're used to taking in, usually information through all of our senses, hearing, sight, smell, touch, so that we can understand what's happening in the physical world around us.

The modern turn, sort of like the turn that changed the entire human experience on what like the whole human experience is now built on in the post-Paleolithic age was also now using those brains to process information in a way we never would have done. On the savannahs, you know, two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. This is I mean this is like a theme of a lot of my thinking and writing about thinking. This is like a perilous balancing act. It is difficult.

to use the human brain to do abstract reasoning about abstract or symbolic information. And so yeah, we get overloaded really easily. So we have to think about it. We have to practice thinking. We have to contain thinking. We have to have plans for how we're gonna think, what information we're gonna r encounter, how we're gonna encounter it, how we're gonna make sense of it, what we're gonna keep away.

We really have to care about that. And when we don't, just like when we don't care about our body and we throw all this modern food into the world and we get really unhealthy, if we don't care about our mind, we easily get into trouble. So I this is the way I think about the the modern human experience is It's a intricate balancing act.

to get a brain that's really not meant for abstract processing of symbolic information to do that all the time in a very productive way and sustainable way. So I think that is uh I think that's a good point.

All right, before we wrap up this episode, let's quickly check in what I've been up to. All right, so there's a couple of things here. Uh I'm trying something new. From a tools perspective, so sort of inspired by Sarah Hart Unger coming on the show to talk about planners a couple weeks ago, I bought a Hobonacci notebook.

Not a Hobonacci cousin, which is the planner she used, is because obviously I'm a big fan of my time block planner, which does I mean, I designed it so it does exactly what I need. But for the purposes of a single purpose notebook, which I've talked about on the show before, where I have a small portable notebook that I'll use for like one problem I'm working on.

as a place to keep coming back to working through thoughts, adding thoughts. I can capture inspiration from a wider net of my daily schedule and I can do more sort of analog hard thinking. Away from a computer screen. I find single purpose notebooks to be really useful, so I'm testing out using a small size Hobonacci, I think it's called the

techno. Um, grid paper, Hobonacci notebook of sort of this size, the I don't you call that, five inches by four or three and a half or whatever. Uh and I'm working on a sort of academic paper about um Oh, it's complicated. Complicated paper. And I'm seeing if this this notebook format's a really nice notebook that has nice pages, very thin, lays flat in interesting ways with this binding.

Trying it out. Maybe this will be the the new notebook I use for my single purpose notebooks. Right now I use field notes primarily, but I'm giving this How much was it? It was like fifteen bucks. Which I think's like a good sweet spot for like, oh, I gotta take seriously whatever project I'm working on, but also not like irresponsible. Um, on the nonsense meter. And by nonsense I mean brutally important. I have an important update.

to what I'm doing now, uh some new things I bought for my Halloween display technology. I am moving on. The last two years I worked on building my own custom light and sound controllers basically from scratch. I would start with a microcontroller that I would custom program and solder the circuits myself for it to interact with programmable lights and sound systems because I thought that was like a fun challenge.

Now I'm ready to move on to using um higher end hardware and more advanced open source software for doing things like Show control and prop control. So uh I'cause I think this will be the new fun challenge for what to do and it's gonna be more reliable and it's gonna open up many more opportunities and reduce the chances that I shock myself by building my own relay board. So I am now moving over to running the the open source FPP Falcon controller software.

on a Raspberry Pi as my main scheduler. Um So I bought a Raspberry Pi. This then hooks into an Ethernet network switch and then you can network into it other device circuit boards that the controller can talk to. So I bought a custom circuit board for uh doing my programmable LED controls. So I'm getting rid of my custom built circuit and that can actually network onto the same network. I'm gonna get a relay controller and a uh motor actuator, motor controller board. And in theory now

Uh I can now have much finer control, much more powerful and reliable control of much more elaborate types of situations. So I am this is like kind of my spring project is to learn all that technology. So I can start thinking about the the Halloween ahead. This is like the stuff that's important. Let's be honest. That's great. So I'm working on that. Um Recent interviews. I did there's a couple things, a couple if you want some more cal, uh I did an interview with Chris Williamson.

On his modern wisdom podcast came out last week. I think it was really good, so it's worth listening. We get into weeds and a lot of like work and distraction type of stuff. I listened to most of it so far. Pretty good, right? Yeah, you've been on a show a bunch. Yeah, I know, Chris. We go back. Yeah.

Working in nightclub? Yeah. Yeah. Like trying to like having to add up the money at the end of the day. Mm-hmm. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. Um good interviewer. I always like going on his show. Uh also This is probably worth watching. It's been viewed a lot, like well over a million times just a couple of weeks. You know, Hank Green, the YouTuber, did a a YouTube video about AI and what worries him.

It was like a twenty minute video on that. And then the next thirty minutes is he had me on the show to talk about the video that he had just aired and we talk AI and uh he's got a huge audience. I've got a lot of notes about that interview. I think it was a really good discussion. So Um, check out my appearance on Hank Green's interview and also check out the AI reality check that I'm doing on Thursdays, maybe not every Thursday, but that's where I'm moving my sort of project of just trying to

be realistic about AI, but also lower the anxiety around it. Uh the first one came out last week. Let's see, when this comes out, two will have been out already. So the first two would would be out. In theory, there'll probably be a new one coming out on Thursday, so check that out. All right, reading and watching. Um not to open up the curtain too much, but we don't always record on the same day. And so we're actually recording. Recording this in the

Pretty soon after our last episode. It's been like four days or whatever. So I uh I've started three new books since the last episode. I did not finish any of those three new books. in the four days that pass between the last episode and today. Um in the latest n uh New Yorker issue though, I did read Joe Lapore's article about the bicentennial and it was pretty interesting, you know?

uh about what happened, the history of of the celebrations, um, and what happened in particular in 76. And it it's like a kind of like a Straight history piece. You pulled from a lot of sources and it's so I enjoyed it. I thought it was worth reading. Are the three books you started all hard copy? No. Um like one is Kindle to or hardcopy. That's what I meant. Yeah. Yeah. One's Kindle to and and

Into a hard copy. But the the two hard copy ones came later and they're kind of taking over my attention. I'll see if I get back to the Kindle one, which I sort of impulsively downloaded. Uh in terms of things I'm watching, I'm I'm not quite done with it because it takes my wife and I multiple nights to watch movies, just the reality of like kids in sleep.

But uh as part of our efforts to watch the Oscar nominated movies for twenty twenty six best picture, we're almost done with uh The Secret Agent. It's actually uh it's a Brazilian film. That uh people really love. It's a fascinating movie so far. I'm not done yet, but I'll just like drop a couple. ideas here to see if this inspires you to watch it or not.

Uh it takes place in the nineteen seventies, like nineteen seventy seven Brazil, and it's the the photography, cinematography is very much in that style. So they film it and there's a sort of um Somewhat desaturated. The color palettes is like very nineteen seventies. It's filmed uh on old glass anthropomorphic lenses like the so that which is like very much like a thing you would see with like the new Hollywood directors in the nineteen seventies.

So you get a more cinematic aspect ratio, but you get a lot of these horizontal flares, which you would get. That's just an artifact of these particular types of Panasonic lenses that when you point them at a light, you get horizontal flares. flares of light across. So it's sort of this cool, like physical seventies style. Um the actors are all like fantastic, naturalistic character actor style actors, really real type uh people. They're all fantastic.

The only thing I here's what I'm gonna say, it's a different style of movie than we make in America now. And the way you know it's a different style of movie is that It's 90 minutes into the movie. Things are just happening, but you don't really know like who is this person? What's their relationship to this person? Is this person on the run? Why? They don't tell you. You just kind of are seeing these things and it's really not till ninety minutes through the movie

That you even really begin to sort of realize, like, oh, I think I see what's going on. This is what this person is doing and how it relates to these people. And now I'm starting to see what's going on here. It's in no rush. It's laying out threads of realities. on not too many spoilers, but multiple timelines, and uh starts to sort of take its time weaving them together. It's more of an experience than like a super by the book

plot bullet point unfolding. In America we don't do these things, especially on Netflix now because We don't trust people's attention span. So, you know, on Netflix we would have, I don't know, like a title card that would just explain it or have a narrator come in and just be like, you know, and the character realized and then just sort of explain who everyone is and everything that's going on. Put titles up on the screen. I don't know.

Have like arrows follow to like remind you who people are, or just every once in a while just cut to like a YouTube style influencer's like, all right, let's hold here. Let me explain to you what just happened. So it's nice to see a a a a much more intentional, sort of slower novelistic, naturalistic um type of screen writing and movie making, but I haven't seen the ending yet. So maybe it goes weird.

So I can't I can't give it my full endorsement yet, but we're gonna finish it tonight, so I'm excited about that. We're almost there, Jesse. We're almost I got yelled at, by the way, by a friend of mine who heard me say that like well my wife saw Hamnet and I saw Frankenstein and we're kinda running out of time, so we're gonna count that on both of our lists.

And he wrote and was like, No, you have to see Hamnet. It's a great movie. You can't skip it. So I I started watching Franciscan. I don't think I could finish it. I saw it in the theater. I wanted to see it at thirty five millimeter. So it's cooler in the theater, I think. Yeah. Um, I like Yellow Mar del Toro, but I yeah, I thought the screenplay.

Could be better in that one. Some crazy visual stuff in there for sure. Yeah. And and as as he does. Um But's pretty good. It's not gonna win best picture though. So we're getting closer. We still have to see sentimental values. And God, what else am I missing? Oh begonia. Which I I like that director. Um I like that director. I'm looking forward to it. But we gotta see it going yeah. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode.