NICHOLAS CARR: The Case for Adding Friction

The more digitally mediated our lives become, the less access we have to the things that make us human.

Deep thought,

skilled work,

genuine connection,

physical presence.

Why is it that the tools we use to connect, create, and get things done keep quietly replacing the experiences

they were supposed to enhance? And what can we do about it?

Hi, I'm Michael Hyatt.

And I'm Megan Hyatt Miller.

And you're listening to the Double Wind Show.

We're excited today to share with you our recent conversation with Nicholas Carr.

Nicholas Carr is an American journalist and author focused on the human consequences of technology.

He wrote Super Bloom,

how technologies of connection Terra support,

that's his most recent book,

his book The Shadows, which I read in 2010 when it first came out,

is subtitled what the internet is doing to our brains,

and it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

He's also the author of the Glass Cage Utopia Is Creepy,

which I just happened to order today,

and several other books,

but earlier in his career,

he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review.

He writes the long-running blog Rough Type,

and publishes work on his site about tech, culture, and society.

Here's our conversation with Nicholas.

Nicholas, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much. It's my pleasure.

We're very excited to talk about this topic,

because we suspect that we're afflicted

with some of the things that you talk about.

And in fact, the first question I want to ask,

I actually wrote down because I want to get this right.

So me, just read it, I said,

I built a business teaching people how to be more productive,

and I spent the last decade using every digital tool available to scale that message.

But lately, I've noticed something unsettling.

Very systems that amplify my voice

seem to be fragmenting my attention

and eroding the depth I used to bring to my work.

Does that sound like the paradox you're describing in Superbloom?

Or am I just getting older?

No, it very much does sound like the paradox I'm talking about it.

You know, I talk about it at a personal level and at a social level,

but at a personal level,

I think that's exactly it.

We want everything to be more efficient,

and that's kind of natural in the modern world,

we're busy, there's a lot going on,

there's a lot we have to pay attention to.

And so we grab any tool that helps us become more efficient in any way.

But I think what we're starting to learn,

because many people like you and like me have this sense that,

as everything speeds up,

we seem to be able to do more,

but actually somehow our attention gets fragmented

and we're not thinking as straight as we used to or whatever,

and I don't think it's age.

You know, I think the basic mistake at a personal level

is the assumption that human attention, human thought,

human communication always gets better as it gets more efficient.

What I argue is that at a certain point,

we simply overload our natural, mental,

and psychological capacity to communicate,

to process information, to make coherent thoughts.

And at that point, a reversal takes place in faster communication,

faster flow of information actually undermines understanding,

undermines productivity,

and in the worst case scenario,

can start undermining relationships as well.

I think for me, one of the things I've begun to realize

is the tools we use, and you write about this,

shaped the way that we think and behave.

And I always thought that the transference was the other direction,

that it was me using the tools to make an impact on the world,

or on other people,

but it's really having an impact on me as well.

Yeah, and I think, you know,

I'm certainly not the first person to it made this point.

It's kind of, if you look at a lot of philosophy

about technology and about media,

it's kind of an undercurrent of it all,

that we create the tools to do some particular function job,

whatever it is, but as we use the tools,

they also shape us.

And I think that's particularly true of information technologies,

communication technologies, media technologies,

because these are the tools we use to think with,

to express ourselves, to communicate with others.

And I think if you stand back,

and just think about a simple example,

you know, in my lifetime, we've gone,

when we wanted to correspond with somebody who wasn't near us,

we went from letters or phone calls to emails,

and now everybody's texting.

And if you look at all of the content of all of those things,

it's all us trying to accomplish the same thing.

But if you look at a text, it's sloppy, it's short,

it's compressed, it's often hard to understand,

it's abrupt, very different from,

you know, if you sat down and wrote a letter by hand.

So that's a simple example of how the technology we use shapes,

what we do, what we think, and how we communicate.

I love that you brought up the idea of texting,

because it made me think of my teenagers,

and you know, 90% of our communication,

when they're not at home, is through texting.

You know, God forbid you have to pick a phone

and call your teenager, you know, they're probably not going to answer.

But that made me think about social media.

And of course, there's been so much work

around the negative impacts of social media on teenagers.

And I think for those of us who are parents,

this is something we thought a lot about,

and we're trying to kind of stumble our way through,

you know, because we know it affects how they see themselves,

their identity, all of that.

But what about adults in social media?

And I asked, because about a year ago,

I decided to get off of Instagram,

and I've not been back on, it's been a little more than that now.

I'm still on Facebook, and I was thinking last night,

I don't think this is doing meaty favors.

So I'd love to just hear your thoughts on that.

What I've always been uncomfortable with is,

whether we're talking about the internet in general

or social media, is framing it in purely generational terms.

Because this is not going to wait for adults to say,

oh, kids these days, you know, they're always on their phone,

they're always texting, they're always using social media.

But this is really a society-wide phenomenon.

And it's true that the way kids use the technologies

tends to be more intense and tends to be

more kind of casual than adults than their parents.

But nevertheless, I think use of all of these things

in particular social media has similar effects

no matter how old you are.

And I think we run into this the same problem with adults

and in some ways, maybe because adults are pressed

to think about their jobs, about politics,

about complex things in ways that kids aren't always,

that if our dependence on social media,

not only to entertain ourselves and inform ourselves

about what celebrities are doing,

but to inform ourselves as our default way of getting news

of hearing public commentary of communicating

with colleagues at work, I do think there's a danger here

that it does have an effect of creating

more superficial exchanges of information.

You have to be fast, you have to be compressed,

you can't get into nuance.

And so here, I think we see this phenomenon

that I, that's at the center of my book,

which is more communication means less understanding.

We're so drawn to the flow of information,

makes everything so easy, but I think sometimes

we need to step back and really ask ourselves,

is this the right way to communicate?

Particularly if I want to, if I'm engaged

in some complex task that requires coordination

with other people.

Yeah, you know, I even had this experience last night

at the time of this recording,

the kidnapping case of Nancy Guthrie is big news,

it's all over social media.

I don't know why, but I have been just like glued

to that story and I just, I feel anxious about it,

but again, at the time of this recording,

we don't know how that turns out,

what turns out to be the cause and so forth.

But I have found that following that story

for which I have no personal connection,

obviously just my human empathy,

but I have also no control over,

I feel physically anxious when I think about it.

And it was a kind of a wake up call last night

as I was following the details of that story

and just thinking, this is so easy to get sucked into

and I think so unhealthy.

Not that we don't care, of course we care

all those kinds of things, but it's a unique phenomenon

that kind of doesn't have a human scale to it.

Like we weren't meant to be concerned

about things at this level, right?

Yeah, when we're exposed to them, we're naturally concerned.

I mean, it's a compelling disturbing story,

but there are no end to compelling disturbing stories

in the world and I don't think human beings evolved

to have to be concerned about so many different things,

most of which are far out of our individual control

and kind of be updated on them all the time.

And you do get into this loop of kind of,

you find yourself scrolling through new stories

or whatever you mentioned to Instagram.

Instagram is the one kind of social media

that I've had for quite a long time.

I just used it in the beginning.

I had like 12 people I followed, family members,

just for photos and stuff,

but then Instagram switched to the feed

that just gives you stuff that not from the people you follow,

whatever they think is going to grab your attention.

And sometimes, even though I know what's going on,

I find myself just sitting there

kind of scrolling through it without it,

even though it doesn't even mean that much to us.

So yeah, compelling things like the kidnapping,

assuming that's what it is and everything

are grabbing our attention, but also a lot of trivia.

That doesn't matter that in we have to recognize

that these platforms, social media platforms

are designed with endless scroll

and the endless automatic play loops and stuff.

They're designed to very, very carefully

to keep us scrolling,

whether what we're looking at is important

or completely unimportant.

The biggest challenge for me is that it's like

we're outgunned, outmaned against these algorithms

and billions of dollars of research that go into them.

And so I'm beginning to think maybe the Amish are right.

There's no moderation here

because the dopamine is so powerful

that it's not like I can go into Facebook

and just say, oh, I'm just going to do this

for a few minutes once a week or even once a day.

It's just like I get sucked into a vortex

where my thinking gets hijacked.

I don't know what to do about that.

I mean, is there a middle way

where there's an appropriate use of social media?

And how do you control that and fight back

knowing that your brain is being hijacked

by the very technology that you're using?

It's very different as all through what I've been talking about.

We're doing things that we don't really want to do

because I think that these technologies

and their design tap into very, very deep instincts.

One is the seeking instinct.

Like other animals, we want to know everything that's going on.

I mean, in evolutionary terms, that's how you state a life.

So anything new in your environment,

you want to know about it.

And so we've created this new digital environment

where there's always something new.

There's always lots of things new.

And so it taps into that deep instinct

and it also taps into our social instinct.

We're very social animals.

And because social media is often about us in some way,

how our posts get reacted to

and our pictures get reacted to.

That's also very compelling.

So at this point, and it takes a big effort

because in some ways, you're excluding yourself

from the social world when you back away

from these technologies.

But I do think that simply limiting the number of platforms

you're a member of or you follow

in trying as best as possible to limit your time,

you know, our basic things we can try to do.

There's also broader issues about how these platforms are designed.

There's one theory that's the big,

one of the big problems is that they take all friction

out of socializing, all friction out of thinking

because you think, oh, we don't want friction.

But actually it's making an effort

when it comes to very human things

like socializing, communicating with others,

making an effort, having to do some work,

maybe even having to pay a little money for a stamp

to put on all of these things,

deep in our connection to what we're doing.

And getting rid of all the friction

makes everything very fast,

but it also makes everything superficial.

So there's one philosophy is we should put friction back

into the design of these things.

So there's limits on how often, you know,

something can be retweeted or reposted.

There's a delay between when you send out a post

or a comment and when it appears

so you can change your mind and stuff like that.

And I think those are good ideas,

but here too, we come up against these big,

established, powerful businesses.

And that's the last thing they want to do

is get people to slow down and be more thoughtful.

So it's really a conundrum at a personal level

and at a societal level about,

now that we've enmeshed ourselves in this world,

how do we extract ourselves?

You know, even just a little bit, not entirely.

I'm just curious, just as a follow up,

you know, you wrote the Shalos in what 2010?

Yeah. And you were talking even then about

what screens are doing to our brain.

And now we are here 16 years later,

were you too optimistic or too pessimistic?

I don't think I was too pessimistic.

The Shalos came out of my own early experience

spending a lot of time online because I really felt it,

you know, I was writing about technology back then,

I was spending a lot of time,

this was with the laptop, our desktop browsing the web,

surfing the web, as we used to say.

And I did feel that my ability to sustain my attention

was being eroded.

You know, I used to love reading books and long articles

and it became a real struggle.

And so I really do think and continue to think that

the more we use the technology,

the more it shapes the way we think.

So I think if you look at everything that's happened

in the last 15 years,

we've switched from desktops and laptops to phones,

which are always with us, always connected,

always pinging us with new notifications, new information.

So I think the phenomenon or phenomena of distraction

and interruption and how it undermines thought

that I described in the Shalos has gotten worse

simply because we've switched to a new device

for connecting the phone.

And you know, back then Facebook was new

and you had to go online in a browser,

you know, on a laptop to see it,

we switched to a new device, the phone

that's always on and always connected.

And social media has become much, much more important.

It's turned into apps that are always there

and it's been ruthlessly designed to grab our attention.

So unfortunately, this is one of those things

where there's a kind of, in many ways,

I wish I was wrong.

Yes, my life, and I think society would be better.

On the other hand, I'm kind of happy that I was right

simply because I was making an argument.

But yeah, I think things, I think what I was concerned about

then are much magnified today.

What do you think will be in five years

given the investment that's been made into AI

and how fast AI is improving?

I mean, I spend a lot of time in AI

and it just seems like every day there's a new announcement.

There's something better.

So where does this go?

Two years ago, I,

I was really trying to be skeptical about AI

and to argue that, you know,

it was being overhyped in everything.

And I still think there's probably some overhyped there.

There's probably some over-investment,

which may play out in nasty ways.

But I do think, and I think your experience is representative

that it's incredibly useful just on a task by task basis.

I might wish that people weren't using as much

or won't in the future, but I think they will.

And I think that's the reality.

So the big question is, you know, there are,

I think there are ways to use AI wisely

to see it kind of as a testing board

to get feedback on your own ideas.

But then this is the problem with automation in general.

There's also a bad way to use it,

which is simply to offload everything onto the machine.

So, oh, I don't need to read anymore.

I can get AI to give me a summary.

I don't need to write anymore.

I can get AI to crank something out.

And then, I mean, the danger is it becomes,

you stop practicing things that are actually important,

communicating, forming your own thoughts,

reading, making sense of what you read.

And so my fear is that if we simply rush forward

and just start adopting it for everything,

we're going to become lesser people as a result,

less capable, less thoughtful.

Again, maybe more efficient,

because the machine is doing all your writing

and communicating for you.

But somehow, you know, my fear is that life,

because we're not really practicing the skills

that are most fulfilling to us in the long run,

that life becomes more efficient, but less satisfying.

Okay, I think that is a great place to kind of shift

our conversation a little bit to trade-offs.

You know, we've talked a lot about why someone

would want to use a lot of digital technologies

and screens and AI and all the things.

And I think especially as we were talking

before we started, our audience feels that tension

between the scarcity of time,

that is just the reality for all of us

and tremendous demands on our life,

not to mention our own aspirations and desires and so forth.

You know, but for somebody who says,

sure, you know, there's downsides,

but on balance, I think the trade-offs are worth it.

You know, I'm more informed, I'm more connected,

more productive than I've ever been.

What are they not seeing that you see

as you think about human flourishing for people?

You know, I'll start by saying that I don't want to,

I don't want to say that everybody who has an experience

that is different from my own is wrong.

A lot of people on the planet,

they use these technologies in different ways,

they have different personalities,

they have different goals for themselves,

and for some people it may be ideal and so be it.

But I do think that what people need to pay attention to

is being conscious of what gives them satisfaction,

what gives them fulfillment.

Is it just juggling lots of information

and sending out messages very quickly,

or is it struggling with difficult concepts?

Is it struggling to express yourself in a clear,

meaningful way to people who are important to you

or to other people in general?

Is it, and once you first think about, you know,

what gives me satisfaction in life?

I think you often find that it's grappling with hard things,

mastering difficult skills that you can then build on

in the future.

It's not simply taking the path of least resistance.

And so one of the big problems is because our phones are there,

our computers are there all the time

because AI now is there all the time,

we're encouraged to take the path of least resistance

all the time.

And if people can just step back and say,

when is efficiency good?

When is getting something done as quickly as possible,

the best way to accomplish it?

And when is the product going to be better

in my own experience better if I actually put more effort

into it, if I work at it?

And just beginning by making those distinctions gives you

a sense of, okay, where can I use the technology,

whatever it is to automate these things?

And where should I step back and either use a different tool

or use my own inner resources to get something done?

We've fallen into a kind of trap of thinking that,

you know, computers and phones are an all-purpose tool.

They're always there and somehow because they're more efficient,

they're always the best tool to use.

And I think that's a false assumption.

And if we can get back to thinking more clearly about,

you know, what's the best tool for each particular job or task?

And when should we use no tool at all?

We'd be able to be more diligent and thoughtful

about how we use these very, very, very powerful technologies

in a way that benefits us rather than simply undermines

our best intentions.

Do you have any rules for yourself

as you're kind of grappling with those questions

like any kind of rubric that you use

that helps you to determine the answer,

knowing that maybe less for you given all the work that you've done,

but for most of us, the impulse is always going to be

to choose less friction and more speed, you know,

given all the choices on the table.

How do you navigate that?

I struggle with this too because I find this flow of information

and new experiences and novelty, very, very compelling

as all people do.

But I guess I'll just give a couple of particular ways

that I try to deal with it that may be applicable

to other people.

One thing is that this really, you know, started,

I started thinking about this very soon

after smartphones arrived.

Is that immediately people assumed that this is a device

that they should have with them all the time?

They should carry it with them no matter what they're doing.

When they go to bed, they'll put it on their bedside table

or if you're a kid, you'll put it on your pillow or whatever.

So it's always there and it's always,

even when we're not using it,

it's always intruding on our thoughts

because we're thinking about looking at it.

And I thought, you know, this is such a powerful technology

that this assumption that we should have it with us

all the time is a big mistake.

So, you know, one thing I do at a very simple level is,

I ask myself, do I really need my phone

for this next thing I'm going to do

if I'm going out to dinner with my wife or a group of people?

Do I want to bring my phone?

Is that going to make the experience better

or should I leave it behind?

If I'm going out for a walk,

do I want to bring my phone knowing that, you know,

I'm going to start pulling it out

to do something completely trivial or silly?

Or should I leave it behind and simply go out

and take a nice walk and look around?

So just stopping and saying, you know,

does this technology in particular the phone,

but it can be whatever,

is this technology going to really make my experience

better or is it going to intrude on it and make it worse?

And then, you know, having the courage,

because nobody likes to be disconnected these days,

but having the courage is just say,

I'm not going to bring it with me.

I'm going to go out and do this on my own

without this aid in my pocket or in my pocket book.

And then just another one is that,

and this relates to AI,

and it sort of comes back to what I was talking about earlier,

I tried to think about what things are really satisfying

for me to do and to struggle with.

And I'm a writer and one of the first things

AI has been adopted for is doing your writing for you.

And it's quite good.

You know, for a lot of students,

I think they can pump out a paper with AI

that's better than they could do, frankly.

And so it's very, very enticing.

But what I realized is, you know,

this work, the work of writing is very important to me.

And so I'm going to draw a line there.

I'm not going to use,

I'm not going to ask AI to write stuff for me.

Even if I get stuck as I do quite often,

and I have to really work on the words

and try to get them right,

I'm not going to bypass that struggle

because I think ultimately,

even though it takes more time and it can be frustrating,

when I get to the end of it,

I've produced something better,

something that's more my own

and something that's more satisfying to me.

And so for me, it's writing,

but for other people,

it might be very, very different things.

And if you can just identify

what things that I do am I proud of doing

and do I really enjoy doing,

even if it's frustrating at times,

and not fall back on technology

to make those activities more efficient.

I think what I hear you saying is just that struggle

can actually be part of the joy of our work.

I think about my marriage,

for example, been married for 17 years to my husband Joel,

and that has not come without its challenges, of course,

or parenting, I five kids.

If I could suddenly remove all the friction

from those two contexts,

in some ways that would be very enticing.

On the other hand,

the friction has shaped me,

just like these tool shape us,

for better or worse,

the friction I think also can shape us,

probably for better or worse,

but it's easy to think that it's always for worse,

and that we should try to eliminate it.

And I think that's maybe not a nuance

enough perspective.

And so I appreciate you highlighting that.

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right.

We have to, everything we know about,

the way the brain works, the way we learn,

you don't learn by having something,

having a technology do something for you or ease the work.

The way we learn, the way we master skill,

any skill is by actually practicing it,

getting in there, coming up against friction,

coming up against barriers, and overcoming them.

That's the only way to raise your level of mastery

or expertise,

and once you've raised that level no matter what it is,

then that gives you a new baseline to raise it again,

and that's a very satisfying process,

that's how we become masters of some task or experts.

And if you just go the path of release,

of least resistance at the very beginning

and relieve yourself of having to do the work necessary

to have that kind of deep learning,

then you never get that deep learning

in your stuck at some lower level of effort and expertise,

and so you never get the joy of becoming talented.

Who would have thought that in 2026,

not taking your phone with you,

or deciding to write on your own

with out the aid of AI or something else,

would be an act of courage and defiance.

But it kind of is, it's kind of a revolutionary act.

And I was thinking as you all were talking,

it's almost like there are these two unspoken values

that have become the super values,

that regardless of your religion,

your upbringing, your ethnicity,

are sort of the governing values of modern society,

and those are fast and easy.

And so it's like they operate unconsciously,

but we always gravitate toward those two things.

I spent most of my career in the book publishing world

and various roles as editor and marketer

and chief executive and so forth,

but I can remember when the Kindles came out.

You know, everybody was forecasting

that that was the end of publishing

and actually didn't hurt it at all.

In fact, I think it helped it.

But could be the end of publishing though,

book publishing at least,

is what AI makes possible with just in time learning.

In other words, I read a book

in the hopes that somehow this information

will serve me in some way in the future.

But I don't really have a specific problem

I'm trying to solve.

It's just information that I'm putting

sort of in the pantry in case I need it.

But with AI, I find myself reading less

because it's right there to inform me

on the specific problem I'm dealing with right now.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts

about the future of publishing or Zidra,

writer yourself, where do you think that's going

long form communication?

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't think it's going

in a good direction.

And I do have to say, you know,

going back to what you just said

about the arrival of a Kindle,

when I wrote the Shadows,

a lot of which had to do with reading.

That was 2010.

I think the Kindle would come out in 2007 or something.

And if you looked at that point at adoption of ebooks,

it was going, it was skyrocketing.

And print books were flat.

So I actually have a chapter in the Shadows,

which is chapter, which I think I get things wrong.

Unfortunately, that basically took these trends

and thought they'd continue in the same way

in that ebooks would just take over

because that's what it looked like at the time.

And in fact, you know, as you said it,

that didn't happen.

Ebooks became kind of like audio books.

They're out there.

Some people like them.

Some people who are print readers will get an audio book

or a ebook for a particular purpose,

but it didn't undermine print books.

And I do think print books printed on pages

encouraged the deepest immersion in the work.

But I think what we're seeing today

is one thing exactly what you said,

which is you can get an immediate answer

without having to go through the process of reading

what might feel at the time like extraneous matter

to whatever you're trying to accomplish.

And so this is, there's always been attention,

I think, infuse of books or essays or whatever,

between, you know, the medium of writing

as an information delivery device.

I'm going to read because I need to get

this particular piece of information.

I need the author to communicate it really quickly

so I can get it and then move on to the next thing.

And reading as an experience that the experience

can be fulfilling in and of itself.

But also, as you said, you're learning things

you didn't set out to learn,

but it's going to fill your storehouse of knowledge

that you can then draw on in the future.

And, you know, my view of learning of reading

is very much the second thing.

There are times when I just want an answer,

but you need to learn to appreciate reading

not simply to get an immediate answer,

but to build up your store of experience, your store of knowledge.

And I do think that now, particularly with AI,

that the first kind of idea of reading that I talked about,

which is, you know, written materials

as information delivery devices like phones

or whatever is taking precedence.

And so even for kids in college,

I need to write a paper.

That's the product.

I need to get certain amounts of information

to put into that paper.

So I'll just use AI to do the reading for me,

to start making connections for me.

And that's actually, ideally, that is not

what writing a paper in college is about.

It's about grappling with hard ideas that you read.

It's about using your own mind to figure out

how to put these things together.

The paper doesn't really matter.

It's the act of being able to write the paper that matters.

And we're kind of turning that all around with AI.

And so I do really think we're at a crucial point now

in the future of books and long form reading in general.

I don't think they're not going to survive,

but the question is, how big of an audience

are they going to have in the future?

And I think if you just look at, you know,

the recent declines, rapid declines

in the number of young people who read for pleasure,

whether it's in the US or the UK,

there's a lot of very deep survey research out.

It's really plummeting very, very quickly.

And to me, you know, I hope I'm,

I turn out to be wrong again,

as I kind of was with eBooks 15 years ago,

but it really seems we're reaching a turning point

where, you know, as some put it,

we're moving into a post literate society.

Well, and unfortunately, that has broad societal implications,

including the ability to manipulate the masses

because people can't think they don't have

the reasoning capability to argue against something,

someone who's screaming the loudest

or has the greatest reach.

And that's to me the ultimate impact of all this,

which I don't like a bit.

If you don't build up this store of knowledge

just through reading and paying attention

to other things, you don't build up the context

in which to filter the new information that comes to you.

So you lose your skepticism,

you lose your ability to think critically.

And I agree that has big profound consequences for society.

I was heartened by the fact that Barnes and Noble announced

that they were going to open 60 new stores this year,

which I don't know what's driving that,

but bring it on or that.

Yeah, and I think a lot of smaller book shops,

independents have thrived,

but I hope they're still selling books

and not just coffee and stuff,

but still it is heartening that there is still

a literary society out there.

How quickly it's shrinking is worrisome to me, but it's there.

Nicholas, I was just thinking as you were talking

that one of the things I've noticed

is that there seems to be a counter movement at play.

And I'm sure you've thought a lot about this.

I think about sub-stack, for example,

a place where, again, long form writing,

not only has a place, but I think it celebrated in many ways,

and at least the little parts of that that I'm a part of,

I routinely see thoughtful work

that people are putting out, for example.

Another place we see this is in the analog movement.

We love around here books like The Revenge of Analog

and The Future is Analog,

and those have been very influential

in our product philosophy at full focus,

to the point that really The Revenge of Analog

was heavily influenced the creation

of the full focus planner,

and we decided not to create an app.

That was telling me before we began recording,

we spent a million dollars on the development

of an app and ended up abandoning it

because we felt that it wasn't ultimately

in the best interest of the people that we serve,

and their attention, and ultimately, they're flourishing,

that a physical analog tool is valuable.

I'm curious kind of what you're seeing

with regard to the counter movement,

and kind of what some of the answers

that people are having to these issues.

15 years ago, when I wrote the Shalos,

there weren't a lot of people worried about what was going on.

We were still in the very honey moon phase

with Silicon Valley, with the internet, with the web,

and so criticizing it, or raising concerns about it,

as I tried to do, was seemed weird,

I think it's fair to say.

And so today it doesn't,

I mean, there's much more skepticism,

there's much more critical thinking about the technology,

there's much more awareness that, you know,

for all the good it can do us,

it can do us a lot of harm as well.

So I think at that level, you know,

we are more aware of both the good and the bad of the technology,

which is a good starting point for having a counter movement.

I still think that the tide is with the technology

in the companies who manipulate the technology,

but I do think, you know,

and you've pointed out some examples,

that there are attempts to go beyond simply saying,

oh, I'm worried about this, to actually saying,

I'm going to change my habits,

or I'm going to change my behavior.

I think it's still kind of small,

but I think it's growing.

You know, I've become, as I've written about this,

you know, more and more up to the present,

I've become convinced that the problems

that the technology creates,

there are personal problems and there's social problems.

We not only carry our phones with us all the time,

society as a whole has decided

that everything has to be done online.

Even if you want to stop or pull back,

you're going to face all sorts of barriers

because you're expected to be online.

So if this is going to change,

it's really going to change

because of a counter-cultural movement.

Because this is how,

this is how these big kind of social things

tend to change.

And I do think that once you get this kind of orthodoxy

in this kind of expectation,

this kind of oppressive expectation

that you need to use this particular tool

for everything, this particular technology,

that does often result in a counter-cultural movement,

often from the young who just say,

no, we're not going to do it anymore.

So I do think that's possible.

And I hope that in some form,

some productive form, it does emerge

because I do think we need more than just individuals

at this point making better choices,

even though that's important.

If we're really going to change the path we're on

and use the technology, I think, in a wiser way,

it really does have to be a cultural social change.

It's funny, yesterday our team,

it was a beautiful day, it was an unusually beautiful day

here at the end of winter.

And we sat outside in that lunch

and we were talking about grocery delivery

like on Instacart.

And I was saying something about,

I decided to use it less.

And I was realizing it was spending a much money,

I didn't need to spend.

And our youngest team member, Hannah,

and Hannah will listen to this

and she's going to chuckle.

But she said, guys, I got to tell you,

I've never used grocery delivery.

And we were all like, what are you talking about?

We couldn't believe that anybody,

all of us in our 40s and 50s,

we're like, this is amazing.

Someone's never used grocery delivery.

But it reminds me of my 24 year old son

who's very concerned with doing things with his hands.

And I just think that 30 and under generation

are thinking about this.

The ones that grew up with phones from the time

they were tiny are like, there's a dark side to this

that maybe mom and dad don't even understand fully.

But they get it in a unique way.

And I find it fascinating.

I sent my family last night an article from Substack

about a show that I love on the BBC

that's called All Creatures Great and Small.

I don't know if you've watched it.

It's a lovely show.

Yeah.

I'm going to link to this in the show notes.

But there was an article on Substack

that a woman named Julie Kilker published

called Live a Quiet Life and Work with Your Hands,

12 Lessons on the Good Life from Jane Harriet's Derribee.

And it's just a beautiful explanation,

I think, of a contrary to perspective

to what you're warning against.

What this could look like.

And obviously, it's not going to look like

the Yorkshire Dales in 1930 and 1940.

But I do think we need models of that.

What are some models that you have

for what this could look like in our modern context?

Yeah.

As it happens, my wife and I are in the middle of the latest season

of the show.

Yeah.

So I know what you're talking about.

And I do think everything you just said there is very important

because one of the dangers of this screen-based life

that we haven't talked about is that it

steals from us certain levels of sensory engagement

with the world.

We're constantly using our near-focus vision

and we're listening to things and stuff.

But there's no texture.

There's no kind of shifting between the distance

and what's close in vision, the smells of the world

and stuff are at a distance.

And I think there's a lot of joy in connecting

to the world with all our senses

that if we're constantly, if we constantly

have this little rectangle of glass in front of us,

we're losing.

So I do think anything that brings us back

to using all of our senses on a regular basis.

And that can be hobbies.

Maybe you knit or maybe you do woodwork or whatever.

The more we can achieve a greater balance

in our sensory engagement with the world, the better.

And I think this is particularly important

for parents raising young children

is to make sure that they interact with the world

in lots of different ways, in lots of ways

that are manual, that puts you in touch

with the texture of the world and stuff.

Because I do think that those habits that you make

when you're very, very young tend to stick with you.

And so if a child uses a computer,

a tablet or a phone for a little bit during the day,

that's fine, but make sure that that's balanced

with very different ways of interacting with the world

and different ways of using your mind

and your hands and all your senses.

In Super Bloom, you open with this story about a scene

of influencers trampling a poppy field

to get the perfect selfie.

You know, there's something about digital technology

that can make us trample the very thing we came to see.

You know, you're in some beautiful situation

like we were in Peru a few years ago

and it was just amazing.

We were hiking like at 12,000 feet.

It was absolutely gorgeous and it was amazing

how many tourists were experiencing that

through their camera, through their phone camera.

They weren't even present experiencing it.

And it's just such an odd behavior,

although I certainly engage in it myself.

Yeah.

But it's almost like people don't believe

that it tells digital.

Right.

I think we're so immersed in media these days.

And it used to be, you know, through television stuff.

You were immersed in TV for maybe a few hours,

you know, during prime time, few hours

and you were just watching it.

You weren't creating it.

Now, you know, with the internet and with social media,

we're immersed in media as never before

and we're producing it, we're consuming it.

And I do think that, and I think this, you know,

that story of the Super Bloom where people go out,

they're drawn to what they think is the beauty

of this natural display and they end up trampling it

because they want to get a selfie.

It shows how very easy it is to start to see the world

as something, as the way it will look

when it comes through your screen,

rather than for itself.

And so you begin to see images of things

and you lose sight of the thing itself.

And I think that's a very dangerous,

a very big danger these days.

And I think we all fall into it.

We've all become kind of, social media has turned us all

into kind of media producers in the content of the show

is our life itself.

And that can lead to this kind of behavior

where not only are you portraying yourself through a screen,

but you're thinking of yourself

as somebody who's portrayed through a screen

rather than as a real person in a real setting.

And so yeah, that, I mean, that's why I started

with that story because I think if you

at a very, very high level of what it means to be,

a human being, what it means to have a self,

I do think the technology is even intruding on us there

and not with our best interests in mind.

We're all living the Truman show, right?

Nicholas, you talk about something called frictional design.

So basically kind of speed bumps for digital life.

And like we talked a little bit earlier about delays

before posting and limits unfolding and all that.

I think you're right, the likelihood

that the tech industry does something like that.

Maybe we get some of that stuff for kids

that slows the kids down.

What are some practical ways that we can do that for ourselves

that actually work?

You know, I know there are just devices,

different kinds of devices that you can get

that are less smart, so to speak, you know, other things,

but like what actually works here

to help us not be kind of zombie in this space?

Yeah, I mean, in this is kind of an irony,

but there are now smartphones that basically act like dumb phones.

You know, people will turn off the color

on their smart phones because black and white is less engaging.

There's also lots of software programs now

that will regulate your ability to use social media,

which I think is kind of an irony to use the software

to prevent you from using software.

And I'm a little suspicious about those things

because I wonder how long people really stick with them.

I've tried them once and I didn't stick with them.

But they work for some people.

So I don't want to denigrate them.

And if they work for you, they work for you

because at least at one level,

it shows how powerful a hold the technology has on us.

That we have to use more technology

just to break that hold even for short periods of time.

I do think it comes down to really making some sacrifices

in saying I'm not going to have accounts on Instagram

and Facebook and X and Snapchat.

And it's pruned away a lot of social media.

And I'm using social media because social media,

I think is the most aggressively designed

to grab and hold our attention.

And pruned that away and by pruned away,

I mean, closing your accounts and getting the apps off your phone.

And then a fairly simple thing, but again,

it's the technology industry makes it more difficult

than it should be is turning off notifications

for a lot of these apps.

Because what notifications tend to do is instead of you choosing

what you're going to look at for moment to moment

and what app you're going to use or whatever,

suddenly the technology is controlling what you're looking at

because it's constantly beeping at you.

It's kind of buzzing at you giving you notifications.

So simply giving yourself more control over your experience

and what you're looking at for moment to moment

and not allowing the technology to do that for you.

And then just going back to something already mentioned

is spending a significant portion of your day

without the technology at hand.

So your experience take on a kind of different tone

and a different texture and different pace.

You know, if this was easy,

we'd all have a really good relationship with the technology.

It's very, very hard both because we're up against

very sophisticated designs that are based

on very sophisticated knowledge of human behavior.

And we're also up against a long term social trend

that says we need to do everything online.

Everybody needs to be accessible all the time

and connected all the time.

You know, one of the things that I've experienced myself

and I've tried a number of different times

to dramatically reduce my phone usage.

I've tried different apps.

I've not tried the dumb phone,

but I've tried different apps.

I've tried all kinds of, you know, more analog things

at one time I was like having the paper delivered to me,

you know, and I thought, that's all get my news.

I'll read the paper.

And none of it has worked well.

I mean, certainly the thing that has worked the best

and maybe the only thing that has worked is saying,

for example, on Instagram or just not on it,

like at all, it's like an auto and nothing.

But what I've experienced is when I try to limit my time online,

I'm immediately faced with dopamine seeking drive

to talk about kind of scientifically with anxiety

with a sense of restlessness.

It's very unpleasant.

I mean, it's like I know why I'm doing what I'm doing, right?

What I don't know how to do well

and I imagine our listeners feel the same way

is put something in that spot,

to be able to backfill that time with something

that settles me in the same way that honestly,

the devices and the algorithms are doing.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

I mean, there's also another thing that makes it difficult

to back away is that often you face resentment

from the other people who are used to interacting with you

in these modes.

I mean, my classic example is with Facebook,

which I stopped using a long time ago.

Nobody wishes me happy birthday anymore.

You don't get cards or anything.

And since you're not on Facebook,

it's well to heck with it.

Right.

I'm not gonna say happy birthday, so there are sacrifices,

but it's true that there's this,

you often hear, oh, well the computer technology

makes everything so efficient.

It frees us up to do more meaningful things.

And then as you said, what it really,

for most people, what it frees them up to do

is less meaningful things to go on their phone.

And then when they don't do it,

then as you said, there's this hole there.

And I do think, and again, these things are hard,

but I do think seeing that panic and that pain

has perhaps an opportunity to say,

what can I do that is gonna be meaningful to me?

How can I best spend my time?

I often think about kids with phones or tablets.

You know, when I was growing up,

there was kind of a rhythm to your day

that there were times when you were with your friends

and you were playing and you're goofing off

and you're having fun.

And then you'd go home and you'd be in your room

and you couldn't socialize.

And at first you said, oh, I'm bored.

But then you kind of had to learn how to amuse yourself.

You had to learn in the act of figuring out

how to amuse yourself, often revealed to you

activities or hobbies that were fun

and that you really enjoyed.

And so that kind of sense of boredom or panic

or oh gosh, I need to do something

that can be an opportunity that motivates you

to explore other things you might be doing

and you'll probably find something

that you really, really like.

But it is you have to get over that initial fear

of missing out and panic and oh gosh,

there's new information out there

and I'm not getting it, which is a really, you know,

a kind of drag on your nervous system.

I mean, it really is.

I think that's really true.

What I find is I do well during the day.

Like I garden, I love to walk.

Like if I can be outside, I'm just fine.

I'm my happiest when I'm outside.

I'm the most regulated in terms of my nervous system.

Like to your point earlier about being

in a sensory rich environment.

Like that is key where I personally struggle

is at night when I'm tired.

You know, I put my kids down to bed.

It's been a long day at work

or maybe something stressful's happened

and I just kind of want to zone out, so to speak.

That's where it's the heart.

Like that's where I'm most vulnerable

and I feel like that's where I'm looking

for a good solution in those moments

because I don't, whereas if it's the afternoon,

I might welcome the friction of gardening

and the physical nature of that or a walk

or doing something outside with our kids.

At night, the friction feels like something I don't want

and that's an easy place to fall into the trap

of the kind of mindless scrolling or consumption of media.

And in many ways, it's the worst time

because it's time leading up to bedtime.

And so this is a mental stimulant

and it gets everything going.

You're thinking about the news,

you're thinking about crimes that are you're following,

you're thinking about people saying things

you disagree with politically

and so it intrudes on your sleep.

And so yeah, that is a big challenge.

You can always rewatch the earlier seasons

of all things great and so.

Yes, actually, and I've watched

even the original one from the 80s, I think,

and that one is also delightful

though harder to understand.

Yeah, we have to put on subtitles for sure.

So Nicholas, I think as we wrap this up,

one of the questions I have,

if you could leave us with maybe two or three

practical tips that would be guidance for people

that are compelled by this,

but maybe they've tried not using social media,

it hasn't worked.

They eventually returned to it.

They've tried limiting their screen time,

but that really hasn't worked.

And asking for a friend, what would you give us to?

Yeah, so we've gone over some of those ways

that if you could do them and keep doing them

would help, but often we fall back into bad habits.

I guess I'll just leave with one thing

and this has been a long-term problem

that people have been talking about

since that book bowling alone a long time ago,

is that as media and computer technology

and smartphones become more dominant in our lives,

we have less face-to-face interaction

with people close to us, neighbors and stuff.

And so I think one of the most powerful ways

to kind of fight back is to join in local groups

and get involved and maybe start them.

Maybe it's a book club, maybe it's a gardening club,

whatever, maybe just going out every once in a while

and having a lunch or a drink or something

with other people.

In some ways that gives you the social interaction

that people often become dependent on their devices for.

So it fills that hole and it also I think fills it

in a richer way than the screen will ever do.

So it's a way to remove yourself

from the screen life in a way that's very stimulating

in some ways, more stimulating

what a screen could ever do.

And it also helps with this broader problem of us

of society becoming more fragmented

and people being less tuned into their local community

which I think is another big problem that we face.

So somehow going out and being with people

in one way or another I think in some ways

is the best way because you don't lose anything.

You do in fact gain a lot.

You know, I've noticed when I try to remove something

it leaves the vacuum and it eventually pulls me back into it.

But I would replace something with something else.

Like last night I met with the men's group

we go fly fishing once a year

and we get together monthly for just to check in with each other.

So we did that last night.

And I noticed that I didn't miss social media.

I didn't miss any other kind of media during that entire time.

I was completely engaged and I went to bed deeply satisfied

in a way that social media and other kinds of media

don't leave me.

So I think you're spot on there.

Thank you.

Yeah, we forget about the power of actually

being with other people.

Nicholas, this has been amazing.

Thank you so much for giving us this time.

We'll go ahead and talk about your books

and the show notes.

We'll link to all those.

But if people want to find all things related to you

today is there sort of a one stop spot

that they could go to connect with all the things

that you're doing?

Yeah, I of course have a website.

So you can go to knicklescar.com

and that'll tell you what I've written

and other things I'm doing.

And you'll get a good overview.

Fantastic.

Thanks again.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Okay, Dad, what did you think about that interview with Nicholas?

I thought it was fantastic.

And part of the reason I thought it was fantastic

is because I realize how unconscious my use of technology is.

It's become so much a part of how I think and move in the world

that the thought of sort of dialing that down

and using less technology kind of makes me anxious.

Yeah.

And I've been a tech enthusiast for as long

as I can remember, my dad, believe it or not, who's now 91,

got me into tech back in the 70s

when he bought a radio shack computer.

I've never been the same.

I enjoyed it.

He enjoyed it and I use tech like crazy now.

But I realized that not all the glitters is gold.

And that is especially true when it comes to technology.

And so I think it's super helpful to have somebody

who's kind of a critic of that.

He appreciates it and uses it.

But he also sees the implications of it.

And I found that worth discussing and worth pondering further.

Yeah, I feel like I'd kind of go through phases

where I'm more and less conscious about my engagement

with technology.

I find that the more time I'm spending outside,

which I talked with Nicholas about a little bit

in one of my questions, the more I don't need technology.

And I think the need is a sort of scary word to use.

But I think it's right.

There's a compulsive nature to it

that I think kind of can only be broken with multi-sensory

experiences.

I can't remember the exact language that he used.

But he talked about that.

That what we're made for and what we crave

are these deep rich multi-sensory experiences.

And they're kind of the only thing that can compete

with the digital technologies, particularly social media,

which is so addictive and so designed

to be compulsive by nature.

But this was a good reminder that it's time

for another check.

Yes, another reset.

Another reset.

Well, I sometimes feel like we're fighting our own biology

because digital technologies give us

not just a dopamine kit, but we can get from other things

like actually writing or actually working out,

those lead to their own dopamine kit, but it's delayed.

It's like slowed dopamine.

Yeah, slowed dopamine.

And so I think all things being equal,

we're gonna give ourselves to the things

that are fast and easy.

And I really think that that two-value system

that's governing a lot of our lives

is also worthy of examination

because not all things that are faster, good,

and not all things that are easy are good.

And yet we keep advocating.

Some people have written books on this about making it easy,

making it faster.

And I saw an ad in my Facebook feed today

where somebody was talking about how you could build

a website in 12 seconds.

And somebody said, I don't think that's a metric

that really matters.

If we're gonna build a website,

we want a beautiful website.

If we're gonna write a book, we want a thoughtful book.

And fast is not equal value.

You know, it's so interesting.

I didn't bring this up while we were talking

because it's kind of just occurring to me now.

But at some level, this is an issue of grappling

with our own mortality.

Yes.

The reality, the inescapable reality

that we have less time on Earth

than we would like or feel entitled to.

You know what I mean?

Like, I don't care how old you are.

If you're 25 or 85 or 45,

you probably feel like you don't have enough time.

And so we're constantly trying to find ways

to do more with the time we have

and not have to face the reality

that it's just not gonna be as much as we want,

no matter what.

And I think the refusal to admit that

keeps us from being able to enjoy

and be good stewards of the time that we have.

And by accepting our limitations,

rather than pretending they don't exist,

or pretending that we can cheat biology

or those kinds of things.

You know, for example, it would be so much more valuable

to have far fewer social interactions

that were meaningful and in person

than endless ones online.

You know, we say we don't have time

to get together with people,

but how many hours a day are we spending scrolling

on our phones?

Like, we do have time.

We're just not using the time

for the things that really matter

because it's so addictive

and we don't even realize that we're doing it.

But I think that's an important part

of this conversation is the only way you can go slower,

which I think is we're so much of the juice of life.

Like, anything that's actually good is probably slow.

Like, what is good that's fast, really?

Not food, not relationships, not experiences.

Like, none of those things.

You're never like, you know what I need?

Is a really fast date with my spouse, you know?

Or a really fast experience of worship

or a really fast meal.

It's like, those are compromises usually in quality

for speed, but the only thing that allows us to go slow

is just say, you know, I'm gonna say,

know to a lot of other things

so I can say yes to this thing fully.

You know, what kind of creates a witch's brew

is this denial of mortality and our own ambition.

And let me explain.

I think because we're exposed to more things,

we have more ambition.

Now we see, oh, what is it like to visit Japan

or Scotland?

And now suddenly that goes on our bucket list.

And then we realized that couple

with our own mortality.

It's like, man, if we're gonna experience all this stuff,

we better hurry up.

You know, we gotta do more faster.

And in the doing of that,

we rob ourselves of the joy of the things that we are doing.

And I think for me, it manages so much easier said than done.

You know, I'm trying to come to grips with the fact

that I'm not gonna be able to accomplish everything

I dream of in my life.

And I'd rather do a few things well

than try to do everything poorly

and not really be present.

And I think all of this wars with presence,

with us being present to the people that we love,

that we say we love.

And to the experiences that we say we value.

You know, if you go to on a tourist trip

to some beautiful place and you're just flying

from one location to the next,

are you really enjoying it?

Are you really experiencing it?

You know, just because you've got it on your photo reel

doesn't really mean much when you can't even remember

how you experienced it when you were there.

Absolutely.

Well, that's kind of what I thought of

when I read the substack newsletter or article

that I mentioned during the show,

live a quiet life and work with your hands.

You can look it up if you put it in the show notes as well.

12 Lessons of the Good Life from James Harriet Stereby

by Julie Kilker.

And that's really what she's talking about.

Is like when you kind of make your life smaller

in certain ways, you actually make it richer.

And it's counterintuitive,

but I think there's really something to that.

And I just encourage you,

if you haven't watched All Creatures Great and Small do it

because I think it's a good,

it's not a total analog because obviously it's,

you know, almost a hundred years ago,

not quite, but you know, 1930s, 1940s.

But it's a good picture of what it could look like

to have a rich life that's very local.

That's not all the things you just mentioned, you know,

and it can be deeply satisfying.

And I find older, I get the more that's what I want

and the less of trying to do all the things

in the bucket list.

I'm so drawn to that kind of thing.

And I think that's why people are watching that,

that series is because it does connect with something deep

in our experience that we want more of.

It's more satisfying than all the short-lived,

digital hits that we get.

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed the show as much as we did

and had some similar ahas.

We'd love for you, if you did, rate the show for us.

Let us know what you think.

That helps us get more visibility for the show

so that people who are interested in human foreishing

and living a rich life and waiting at work

and succeeding at life, all those things,

can find these conversations.

So we'd be grateful if you'd help us out by doing that.

And we look forward to seeing you next week.

Thanks so much for joining us.