Jake Knapp: prediction

Transcript context

…That's a great tip of just coming back to it, not feeling like you're defeated, it's like, all right, let's try this again. Yeah, I think a big part of it is if you can experience the feeling of not having it on your phone. Like I'm old enough to have lived in a world building products where there were no smartphones, and we got a lot done back then, things happened. I mean, for God's sake, they designed the first iPhone without being able to use iPhones while they did it, you can do a lot. So this idea that we have to have it or everything's going to fall apart, that's just not true for 99.99999% of everyone. It's interesting to see what it feels like if you delete all of the infinity pools off of your phone, and this is something I did out of rage at myself in 2012. It was another situation where I was with my kids, who were much younger at the time, and I was spending time with them, we're playing wooden trains, and all of a sudden my son's like, "Dad, dad, dad, dad, dad," and I'm like, "God, what?" And I didn't even realize it but I was on my phone, and I don't even remember what I was doing, email or something, but I think I told him, he's like, "What's on your phone?" Because to him, he was like, we're doing something really fun, so if you're on your phone it must be something really cool, maybe it would be a cool thing to share, because this is great, so it must be another great thing. He wasn't trying to shame me or anything. And I was all defensive, I'm like, "Well, I need to do this for work," which was, I think, my internal monologue of why I was doing this thing that actually was just a really low-friction dopamine hit. And then I thought, God, this is not what I wanted, this is not why I worked so hard today so I would get done with my work so I could be home in time to do this before my kids go to bed. And I was like, screw this, so I just started deleting things on my phone, and I deleted email and I deleted Facebook and I deleted this, everything that had an infinity pool, everything that had an infinite amount of content. News is like this, anything streaming. When we wrote this book, it came out in 2018, I think we said we thought it was going to get worse, and it has. But at that point in time there was really Netflix, and now there's all these streaming services. At that point in time there was Instagram and Facebook, but now there's TikTok, the best part of every video available instantly right here. This stuff, it only gets harder to resist. When you clear all that stuff off of your phone, it's painful, the idea of deleting all this stuff, and each time the phone's going to ask you, "This is going to delete all the data and settings, are you sure you want to do that?" It doesn't want you to. And when you do that though, what does that feel like? And it's usually a feeling of discomfort, but also relief that I don't have to check this, this thing, I don't have to check it, I don't have to. And when you do that though, what does that feel like? And it's usually a feeling of discomfort, but also relief that I don't have to check this, this thing, I don't have to check it, I don't have to. And if you've ever felt like your phone was in the Lord of the Rings, how Bilbo, I guess, yeah, Lord of the Rings, they want to put their hand in their pocket and touch the ring, or put the ring on without even knowing it, Frodo's like, "I didn't even realize I did it." That's what this thing is like. And when you take those off, just that feeling of relief is, to me, so powerful, that having done this for a decade now, and yeah, there's exceptions, like I'm traveling, God, I have to check my email for X reason, and I install it and I check it. And then it automatically, because I'm aware of it, I'll just feel this static. There's this notion of attention residue, and I think the researcher who coined this term is Sophie Leroy from the University of Washington. Anyway, you can look that up, I think I learned about that from Cal Newport. But this idea says, it makes a lot of sense, that you pay attention to some things and they just stick in your head and they create this static, those apps just create this static. The idea of email being on my phone and accessible at any time creates a discomfort, a disquiet that now that I've seen it and felt what it's like to not have it, I could not imagine experiencing it. You do give some things up. You're not going to be as responsive. John and I don't have as many Twitter followers as we'd have if we used Twitter. There are these things that you look at other people, and I just saw a post on LinkedIn because I haven't used plug-in yet, but I looked on this post and it was a colleague that I used to have and she was saying, "Yeah, I posted a few tweets last year and a couple of them went viral and I gained 30,000 followers." And I was like, man, all I have is 30,000 followers, and that was from years and years ago, I thought I was a pretty big deal, oh jeez, maybe I should... And I was like, oh God, don't do it, because I know when I'm doing it, then I'll be thinking about it all the time and the attention residue will spoil my life. So yeah, anyway, sorry, that's just a rant, but you should try it. The distraction-free phone thing is just worth trying, if you can take off everything, if not just try taking off the thing that's your kryptonite. What's the thing that is the hardest for you to resist, sucks your attention the most, makes you feel not good? Take it off for, try it for a day, or try it for two hours, just to feel that feeling. And then once you've felt the feeling you'll always know, I could release that, and I think that's powerful.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.