Welcome to our one-minute podcast. I’m your host. A few days ago, author Cal Newport visited Disneyland, invited to speak in Anaheim and eager to share the “happiest place on earth” with his family. But even as a Disney book binge-reader, he found the experience surprisingly strange. On Pirates of the Caribbean, Newport writes, you enter a “hyperreality”—a world both unnervingly real and defiantly fake—where animatronics move jerkily beneath movie-set lighting and black-painted vents mar the night sky. This “numbing layer of mundanity” keeps you craving another ride, “just enough to leave you craving the next hit.” Newport argues that our phones work the same way: delivering diluted thrills that mimic real adventure or outrage, “Pirates of the Caribbean delivered through a handheld screen.” He loved Disneyland but was done in days—and he refuses to live semi-permanently amid his phone’s artificialities. Thanks for listening!
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