In this episode of the electronic show, we talk to the author of the new book, The Pandemic, about how technology is ruining our ability to connect with each other, and how we can do something about it. We also talk about the impact of technology on our lives, and why it s so hard to live without it. This episode is brought to you by Electronic Illusions, a podcast produced by Gimlet Media and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. We'd like to learn a little more about you to help reach advertisers that you care about. Please take a few minutes to fill out this brief survey. We ll see if we can answer some of the most frequently asked questions about electronic devices and the impact they have on our day-to-day lives. Send us your answers in the comments section below! Thanks to our sponsor, Amazon! We'll be looking out for the best ones! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Please do not use this music on this episode unless otherwise noted. Thank you for the use of this music and any other music used in the show. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. or wherever else you re listening to music is appreciated. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. on this podcast. Thank you! -Jon Sorrentalberta.co.nz.me/joe.fm/jonald.co/joseph.co and jonalden_crane/sue/jodie/josie/davie/tavio/jennifer/jr/javie_tavion/jordan/j.org/jen_sue_szn/julie/sj_sj#joe_and_joe/jao_jose_sz/szn_julio/sajao/j sj/j , and thank you? Thank you so much thank you for listening to this episode? thank you, Jon and I really appreciate all the love and support we really appreciate the support you guys are giving us.
00:00:31.000When you write a book like that, I mean, first of all, the irony is not lost on me that we're doing an electronic show about avoiding electronics.
00:00:42.000Like, it's so much of a part of our life, our addiction to all these devices and games and applications and all these different things, but yet we use them constantly.
00:00:53.000It's such a weird balancing act, isn't it?
00:00:58.000I think a lot of people who write about this stuff and think about it really just focus on all the negatives.
00:01:04.000There are obviously massive positives.
00:01:06.000This is a time when we're being forced to physically distance ourselves from other people, and yet we are incredibly lucky to be able to carry on conversations like this, to be able to connect to other people through screens.
00:01:17.000And so screens are in many ways great, but obviously there are downsides as well.
00:01:22.000Yeah, the good thing is that people can work remotely, and I think there's a lot of people that are recognizing that.
00:01:27.000It's not really necessary to be in a cooped-up office all the time, and many people are finding that they're even more productive from home.
00:01:34.000But then you've got distractions while you're at home that you could just look at whatever you want on your computer if no one's looking over your shoulder.
00:01:43.000And therein lies the problem with being connected to the internet, really, right?
00:01:47.000Yeah, I think that's a really big part of it.
00:01:49.000It's the good stuff, the stuff that brings us value, that makes it possible to connect to people.
00:01:54.000There are huge values that come from being on the screen.
00:01:57.000There's a lot of great stuff there, but it's so close in proximity to all the stuff that takes us away from what we should be doing.
00:02:04.000And so you're constantly trying to balance these two issues.
00:02:07.000Yeah, I know several comics who write on a computer that doesn't have Wi-Fi.
00:02:13.000They've disabled the Wi-Fi on their computer just so specifically they can never get on the internet while they're writing.
00:02:37.000There's this big push in the last few decades, especially in the last decade, called Retromania, which is this kind of falling in love with things that are past, that are from the past, things that people didn't really like at the time that much.
00:02:49.000And so now we've got all these capacities and capabilities on screens that make them phenomenal and they can do so many more things than they used to be able to do.
00:02:57.000But like a writer who's trying to get work done, the only way to really do it sometimes is to roll back time 10 or 20 years.
00:03:04.000And so there are a lot of people who do that.
00:03:06.000They'll disable the most kind of advanced features on the screens they're using because it's the only way to get past that hurdle of trying to do the right thing but have the wrong thing be right there at your fingertips.
00:03:17.000When you're writing a book like yours, which is warning people about technology, what was your motivation for doing this?
00:03:26.000Is this something that you've struggled with personally?
00:03:28.000Is this something that you've just seen other people struggle with?
00:03:34.000Yeah, it's definitely something I've struggled with a lot.
00:03:38.000And I think a lot of us in academia who end up writing about topics like this Focus on the things that are most prominent for us.
00:03:46.000I remember being on a flight once between New York and LA, so a good six-hour flight, and a friend had texted me and said, you should check out a game.
00:03:54.000It was this game that he told me to check out, a game called Flappy Bird.
00:03:58.000I downloaded this game on the runway and I remember as we took off, I started playing.
00:04:02.000I had grand designs of doing work, having a good nap, Having some food.
00:04:07.000And I spent six hours playing this game.
00:04:10.000So that by the time we landed, I had done absolutely none of the stuff I was planning to do.
00:04:15.000And I remember landing and the guy next to me actually turned to me and said, are you okay?
00:04:19.000Because I kind of sat there just tapping the screen like a maniac for six hours.
00:04:23.000I remember thinking, this is not good if I, you know, I'm a reasonably high functioning individual and six hours just melted away.
00:04:32.000We're spending like 15 or 20 years behind these screens.
00:04:35.000And so the question is, are we doing it in a way that's good for us or is it not good for us?
00:04:39.000And so that's what inspired me to research this and to write about it, to try to get a sense of, you know, what I think of as the biggest, the single biggest change in the way we live as a planet in the last 20 years.
00:04:50.000And trying to get a sense of whether that's being mostly good, mostly bad, somewhere in the middle.
00:04:55.000At least, you know, pushing people to think more about this thing that's occupying so much of their time.
00:05:03.000I wanted to understand better, you know, it's fine if you're going to spend one flight doing the wrong thing for six hours, if you have other plans.
00:05:10.000But expand that to the lifespan, talking about 80 years or so, I think it's going to have a huge effect on the way we live.
00:05:16.000And so I wanted to understand it more deeply.
00:05:19.000Which was the game that you wrote about where the maker of the game, even though it was hugely successful, decided to delete it?
00:05:27.000Yeah, that's the one that I started playing.
00:05:36.000This guy was making an absolute killing.
00:05:38.000At its peak, he was making, I think it was something like tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in ad revenue, which for an indie game developer...
00:05:49.000You create this game, it's kind of a move of passion more than anything.
00:05:53.000You just enjoy pouring your artistic talents into making this game.
00:05:57.000You don't expect to make tons of money, but the guy was making and killing.
00:06:02.000Rare in this industry, and I think rare in any commercial industry, he had a conscience and he basically said, I feel terrible about this, and removed it from the market.
00:06:59.000But one of the things that I think made it so hard for me to stop playing was that, you know, if you think about games in the 80s, the 90s, You'd end a game and you'd get this little game over screen and then you'd have to push a button to keep playing.
00:07:12.000And so each time that happened, that was a little prompt that maybe you want to get on with your life, go do something else.
00:07:17.000The thing about Flappy Bird is the bird when he crashes, he just automatically reanimates and he starts flying again.
00:07:24.000And it almost feels rude to the bird at that point to say, I'm not going to keep playing.
00:07:29.000So I felt like, you know, look, we're two hours into the flight, three hours into the flight, but that bird just never stops flying.
00:07:35.000And I don't want to be the guy who just says it's game over, bird.
00:07:39.000And that's how, you know, I mean, it's an exaggeration, it's a bit silly, but it's really how it felt in the moment.
00:07:46.000And I think this is something that a lot of the screen experiences we have as a feature now, that the companies that have produced the products that we're using have systematically gone through their products to remove those little cues that would have said to us, it's time to move on.
00:08:01.000So the maker of video games now doesn't have a big game over screen.
00:08:05.000The game just kind of keeps rolling on.
00:08:07.000And if you do that, you short circuit one of the things that pushes people away from what they're doing onto the next thing.
00:08:41.000And that's what made it so hard for me to resist it at the time.
00:08:44.000The stopping cues or starting cues, that's one of the features that people find uniquely addictive about TikTok.
00:08:52.000Because TikTok videos play immediately.
00:08:55.000I've never used TikTok, but when I was talking to Tristan Harris, he was saying that that's one of the things about it that really hooks people right away.
00:09:04.000You open up the app and it just starts playing.
00:10:58.000It's pretty entertaining, actually, because these people, they have such a love-hate relationship with it.
00:11:03.000These are reviews written around the time it was released in 2014. You'll see these reviews that give it a five-star rating, and then they say next to it, this game will be the death of me.
00:11:12.000They have this perfect kind of addictive relationship with it.
00:11:16.000And they talk about, you know, this one guy was like, I've lost all my friends.
00:11:20.000And it's so dumb because it's this bird who's flying around.
00:12:23.000The sound is 3D and it's very competitive too.
00:12:26.000So you could hop online and you're constantly playing with these other people all over the world really in these servers and There's a lot of people that lose their life to these games.
00:12:38.000And that's not as addictive as, apparently, World of Warcraft.
00:12:42.000Is that one of the things that you were saying is the most addictive game?
00:12:46.000Yeah, I mean, it's been labeled the most addictive experience we can have or we have had that doesn't involve a substance.
00:13:02.000At its peak, I mean, it had tens of millions of users, and they were playing for hours and hours and hours a day, people just foregoing sleep to play in the middle of the night all day.
00:13:13.000Sometimes, you know, there are stories of people who played so much that they would sit in diapers because they didn't want to have to go to the bathroom.
00:13:52.000Same developer, yeah, just preceded Quake.
00:13:54.000And, you know, that was typical of gamers.
00:13:58.000You know, they were often kind of young males, teenage or adolescent age or in their early 20s.
00:14:03.000And that's really shifted with the advent of the iPhone in particular.
00:14:07.000So because most games now are being played on iPhone screens or on smartphone screens, the biggest demographic of gamers from, I think it was about 2014 or 15 on, became middle-aged women.
00:14:20.000So it's a big shift in who plays games and who spends the most time.
00:14:36.000When you see these games and you see this massive addiction that human beings have to them, and then you see the technology increasing rapidly, I mean, do you anticipate us being in the Matrix in your lifetime?
00:14:57.000You know, what's really smart about the devices we use now, at least from the developer's perspective, is most of us resist the idea of having an implanted tech device.
00:15:06.000We don't want something implanted in our brains yet.
00:15:09.000We're still pretty queasy about that idea.
00:15:13.00080% of adults will say that they can reach their phones 24 hours a day without moving their feet.
00:15:19.000So, they're not physically implanted devices, but they're already basically there.
00:15:25.000And then down the road, if you speak to people who work in virtual and augmented reality industries, they'll tell you, you know, we're only a couple of years away from this being a huge commercial success, Just as we now almost all universally from quite a young age walk around with our own personal iPhones and smartphones we're going to be doing the same but they're going to be virtual reality glasses and so you'll be going somewhere and at any moment in time instead of deciding whether to live in the moment or pick up your phone it'll be do I want to live in this moment or live in an alternate reality
00:15:55.000where you know I can go exactly where I want to go do the thing I want to do spend time in a virtual space with exactly who I want to spend time with I think it's going to be incredibly hard for us to resist the temptation to do that, and that's going to create a literal physical barrier between human beings.
00:16:10.000I think we're all going to be living in our own little universes eventually if things go the way they've been going.
00:16:14.000Well, if I was conspiratorially minded, and I kind of am, but only for fun, I would think that someone has probably set that ball in motion with COVID. With COVID and the lockdown, it's almost like if you wanted to make a movie where artificial intelligence wanted to figure out a way to hook us deeper,
00:16:36.000artificial intelligence would release a virus.
00:16:43.000It doesn't kill everybody but it makes people scared so you stay inside and it connects you even deeper to computers and maybe more importantly separates you even more from the human experience of touching and being around each other in social queues and social gathering and it makes it even more compelling to do things virtually Uh-oh.
00:17:34.000People would say, yeah, it's nonsense.
00:17:38.000It's kind of B-grade Hollywood stuff that we're looking at here.
00:17:42.000But, you know, the interesting thing about this pandemic period for me is I think it might have a weird backlash effect where we've all been forced to spend time on screens.
00:17:52.000Instead of going to the screen because we love it and we're attracted to social media and whatever other things we're doing on screens, a lot of us are being forced to use them.
00:18:02.000And one thing that's changed is sentiment towards screens.
00:18:05.000I think a lot of people are just over it.
00:18:07.000And so when we are past all of this, I think there's a chance that's going to be the catalyst to push people away from screens a bit.
00:18:13.000Because if you, you know, before this, if you were, you speak to especially younger people, they'll say, and this is true for me too, I would rather just use the most remote form of communication possible.
00:18:27.000Let me just send a quick text or an email or WhatsApp or whatever.
00:18:30.000And I think there's a shift now where people are like craving that true face-to-face time where you're actually sitting in front of a person having a real conversation.
00:18:41.000That's been, I think, a shift in the last roughly eight or nine months.
00:18:45.000I think there's people like you that are craving the experience of being around other folks, because I think you're aware of the repercussions of this virtual experience that we're all engaging in and I don't know.
00:19:47.000I mean, I think one of the big drivers of screen time...
00:19:50.000If you take psychological needs away from people, the things that are really important to them to function psychologically, that's when they turn to screens.
00:20:41.000I mean, politically, in a lot of different ways, there's a lot of uncertainty right now and for the last while.
00:20:47.000And when you put people in that state, they're going to turn to screens.
00:20:50.000I don't know if that's an enduring thing, but any time you rob people of wellbeing, of some sort of psychological need, They're going to try to find it elsewhere.
00:20:58.000And one of the ways they do that is now the easiest way to do it is to turn to a screen.
00:21:02.000Have you spent any time at all playing virtual reality games?
00:21:09.000When I was doing the research for this book, I spoke to a game designer, a brilliant guy at NYU. He's in the NYU Game Center named Bennett Foddy.
00:21:34.000And he said to me, I know that if I start playing that game, I either don't play it at all or I'm going to basically be giving up years of my life.
00:22:02.000And I grew up watching Ghostbusters and loved it.
00:22:04.000So the ghosts fly through you and you can feel the suit compresses and so it feels like they're actually kind of butting into you, which maybe doesn't make much sense because they're ghosts.
00:22:13.000But you fly around with one of the little Ghostbusters guns and you're in New York City and you're running around This was a 10-minute experience, but if you had told me that I could give up the next 48 hours of my life, put on the suit, run around,
00:22:28.000no food, just do this for 48 hours, it was so incredibly immersive and engaging and interesting, I would have done it.
00:23:46.000There's one of them where you're in a haunted house, and you're fighting off zombies, and they're just running at you, like hundreds of them, and you're gunning them down.
00:23:54.000When they get ahold of you, you feel their touch in the haptic feedback suit, and you see red in front of your face like you're getting torn apart.
00:24:03.000And you know that this is essentially like Doom, right?
00:24:07.000If you play Doom today, the pixels are enormous.
00:24:10.000It looks clunky and squarish and blockish.
00:24:13.000I mean, it's fun still, but it's so crude in comparison to a modern game.
00:24:22.000You know, where the modern games have, like, there's a new Unreal Engine and we were playing a video of it the other day because it's so hard to believe that this is just a video game.
00:24:32.000And in this video game, the lighting and the textures and the shadows are so exact.
00:25:16.000Yeah, I felt the same way about that very brief experience with Ghostbusters, that Ghostbusters game.
00:25:22.000It was just, there was a level of excitement.
00:25:25.000And, you know, you used to have to kind of suspend disbelief.
00:25:27.000Like, as you say, with Doom, you'd have the pixels and you'd be like, yeah, it's not quite real, but it's real enough.
00:25:33.000And then there was this point where everything just – the processing speed, the sophistication of the development, the design, you could make it seem basically real and it's only going to become more so.
00:25:43.000And so you don't have to suspend disbelief at all.
00:25:45.000The minute you're in that experience, it's there.
00:26:31.000There's the one game where you have the drumsticks and the things are coming at you and you're swinging at the air and knocking these things down.
00:28:03.000I think there's a temptation to fall on one end of the spectrum or the other, and I don't think that makes sense.
00:28:08.000As with most issues in life, you know, there's some nuance that's got to come in.
00:28:12.000So there are people who will just talk about, you know, screens are going to be the end of the world, and there are people who will say there's absolutely no problem and everything we're doing is good for us and healthy and making the world better.
00:28:22.000And the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I think it also varies by the person and what kind of experiences you're having.
00:28:29.000If you're someone who is sedentary, you weren't working out, you weren't moving, and suddenly you find this game that encourages you to run and move around, that's got to have some beneficial effects.
00:28:39.000If you're someone who's unnaturally disciplined, like John Carmack, then Great.
00:28:46.000You know, you're able to say, I'm going to take the best from screens and I'm going to resist the worst and I'm just going to move on with my life.
00:30:09.000And then, of course, like the mental experience of being on screens can be very, very positive for us, too.
00:30:14.000You know, you're learning languages that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to learn.
00:30:17.000You're being exposed to people and experiences that you couldn't either experience because you live far away from them.
00:30:23.000I moved to the US in 2004 from Australia, and You know, it's hard to believe.
00:30:29.000It's only 16 years ago, but this is before YouTube.
00:30:32.000This is the same year that Facebook came about.
00:30:35.000I couldn't really find a good enough internet connection to be able to speak with video to my family in Australia, and that only came a couple of years later.
00:30:42.000So, that's a miracle that during this time of lockdown, when we're all so far apart from each other, we are able to actually communicate through these screens in a way that's basically seamless.
00:30:54.000Do you worry when you're researching this and you're spending all this time working on this subject and you accumulate all this data and you look at the big picture and you look at where this is going, do you think that we are on our way to being obsolete?
00:31:10.000That human beings are going to be either replaced or we're going to have some sort of a very bizarre symbiotic relationship with electronics where we're not We're not what we think of as people right now.
00:31:25.000I don't worry about humans being replaced as much as I worry about humans becoming just isolated entities.
00:31:31.000I think humans for all of evolutionary history have always been in groups, in tribes.
00:31:43.000I worry that the way we get most of the psychological needs met, the psychological nourishment, it used to require getting together as a species, coming together in certain ways.
00:31:53.000And I think when you can get so much of what you need from a device that you strap onto your face that basically separates you from everyone else around you, I do worry about that.
00:32:03.000And I also think there are certain critical periods in maturation and development for kids when they learn how to interact with other people.
00:32:10.000They learn how to, you know, work out the difference between someone being angry and someone being afraid.
00:32:15.000They work out, you know, if you take another kid's toy, the kid's gonna bop you on the head and say, that's not okay.
00:32:21.000You've got to learn that stuff through trial and error.
00:32:23.000And I think Because kids are placed in front of screens at such a young age, many of them, and because these devices are going to remove us from the contact with other people, I just think we're becoming a much more isolated species.
00:32:36.000We used to call humans the social animal.
00:32:39.000That's still true, for sure, but it's kind of an impoverished, stripped-down version of what it means to be social if you compare it to even 20 years ago.
00:32:47.000Yeah, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about us being almost obsolete, is that I worry about the advent of AI and I worry about things like Neuralink, where you're increasing the bandwidth that human beings have to access information.
00:33:03.000And I'm not exactly sure what kind of effect that's going to have on human beings, but I'm positive that whatever effect it initially has is going to exponentially increase over the next few decades.
00:33:14.000And then I'm worried that, like you said, most people's phone is never more than an arm's reach away.
00:33:24.000You wake up in the morning, it's right there by your bedside.
00:33:28.000People are always constantly checking their pockets when they get up from the dinner table.
00:33:33.000How long before we let them stick that thing in us?
00:33:35.000How long before you have a chip that sits in your arm or something real simple that just goes under your skin in a very easy way and is not very painful, but you have some access to everything that you want, and then slowly but surely we start replacing body parts.
00:33:53.000I mean, I'm genuinely – I know it sounds science fictiony and ridiculous, but I'm genuinely worried that what we think of as human beings now, this is like a legacy version of human beings, and that 20, 30 years from now, it's going to be obsolete.
00:34:12.000Imagine you could go back to the year 2000 and speak to people and say, hey, you're going to go to the restaurant and everyone's going to be sitting isolated looking at a small device and then they're going to go home and they're going to spend four hours looking at that device and then they're going to wake up in the morning and look at that device.
00:34:27.000I've been asking this question of thousands of people.
00:34:30.000I basically asked them from age 13 up to people in their 90s.
00:34:34.000Would you rather now have your phone broken so you can have your phone shattered in front of you or would you rather have a broken bone in your finger?
00:34:42.000And older adults say, I would rather have a broken phone.
00:34:46.000But if you ask teens and adolescents, about half of them say, well, they want to bargain with you first.
00:34:51.000They're like, when I've broken my hand, can I still swipe my phone?
00:34:55.000But a lot of them will say, I would rather have a broken bone in my hand than a broken phone.
00:34:59.000Now, imagine going back 20 years and saying to people, there's going to be this little device and people are going to be willing to have body parts broken to preserve the integrity of that device.
00:35:08.000And it's going to be worth only a few hundred bucks.
00:35:13.000And I think this has been like a long 20-year process of desensitization.
00:35:18.000You know, the stuff that we're willing to do now, we're willing to give up 4, 5, 6, 10 hours of our days to screen experiences that at the end of the day, we look back and say, man, I didn't really want some of those experiences.
00:35:35.000I mean, this is the beginning of an incredibly long road or a tall mountain.
00:35:39.000We're just at the very base and we're moving upward.
00:35:42.000And that's why talking about VR and AR and Neuralink and all of the kind of augmented reality, artificial intelligence that's around the corner, all of that stuff, we're going to look back at this and this is going to look quaint in the same way that looking at people watching TVs in the 50s,
00:35:59.000looking at that little square wooden box, looks quaint.
00:36:03.000It feels like we're at some destination, but we're on the road and it's still very early on that road.
00:36:09.000And this is one of the really important reasons, I think, for thinking so carefully about this stuff.
00:36:13.000Because if we don't think about it now, if we don't think about how to manage it in our own lives, it's going to affect us as individuals and in our small communities.
00:36:20.000But I think it's going to affect the whole planet on some level.
00:36:24.000So it's really important to at least be mindful about the choices we're making.
00:36:28.000I agree with you every step of the way, but my concern is that it doesn't matter what we're saying here.
00:36:35.000That this is, like, we are holding a thousand bison as they run towards the cliff.
00:37:13.000We are up against, I'm sure Tristan Harris said this to you the other day, that we're up against very powerful, impressive foes.
00:37:22.000They know all the right buttons to push, and if they don't know, they'll collect data to be able to answer that question, and then they'll institute those practices in their products and they'll put those features into their products that seem most capable of bypassing our resistance.
00:37:39.000But I do think I'm a little bit hopeful.
00:37:41.000I'm hopeful because a lot of this is going to depend on, I think, two things.
00:37:46.000There are kind of top-down influences and bottom-up influences.
00:38:35.000Can you shape how companies use email?
00:38:38.000You know, like if you can get a lot of the biggest companies to start saying, hey, you know what?
00:38:41.000Email is kind of destroying the lives of our workers.
00:38:44.000Maybe we're going to try to institute a policy where when they go on vacation, they absolutely don't have to check email.
00:38:49.000There are these companies in Germany in particular and other parts of Europe that have this vacation policy where when you go on vacation, every email that comes into your inbox is automatically deleted.
00:39:00.000So your inbox, the way it looked the day you went on vacation, does not change until you get back from your vacation.
00:39:06.000So you don't need to check it while you're away.
00:39:46.000I think it's a real problem if you let the government intervene in something just because you think it's addictive.
00:39:51.000I think if you're dealing with issues of censorship on social media and things along those lines, I think yes.
00:39:58.000I think the government should probably...
00:40:00.000They should probably figure out some sort of revision to the First Amendment because it seems like these platforms, it's not as simple as this is a private company.
00:40:09.000Because this is a private company that has immense influence over the way the world communicates.
00:40:14.000It's just too big of a pipeline to say this is just a private company and we can decide who's on our platform and who isn't.
00:40:22.000You're seeing things censored by ideology, and you're seeing this polarizing effect that that has between Democrats and Republicans in the United States and the right and the left.
00:40:48.000There's no way you're going to allow emails that come into your inbox to be deleted when you go on vacation.
00:40:55.000If you're one of those people that's all about kicking ass and taking names and our company's going to the top, you're not going to allow that.
00:41:02.000Because what if that email gets deleted and that email could have critical information that could help your company and that could be the next level and you can get that promotion you've been working towards and people are not going to go for that in America.
00:41:13.000They might go for it in Germany and good luck to you.
00:41:15.000But in America, in competitive business practices, I just, I can't imagine that people are going to agree to something like that.
00:41:22.000And the idea that, I don't think that you're suggesting this necessarily, but that the government should step in and say, hey, you know, when you're on vacation, you get two weeks of vacation every year.
00:41:33.000And when you're on vacation, all your emails get deleted.
00:41:46.000When you say the government, like, interview...
00:41:50.000One thing they could do is they could intervene with protected classes like kids, right?
00:41:54.000So kids are incredibly vulnerable on screens.
00:41:57.000A friend of mine who writes about these issues, Nir Eyal, talks a lot about protected classes and that we have to have separate laws for people who, like if they want to sign up, if an adult wants to sign up and say, look, I need help.
00:42:16.000Or for kids who are also a protective class, perhaps the government could intervene and say, we need ways to ensure that we're protecting these classes of people who basically either they've identified as needing help or they are kids and by definition need some help.
00:42:30.000So the government might intervene there.
00:42:32.000I mean, this is the thing about this issue.
00:42:36.000I've been thinking about it for six years.
00:42:39.000It is an incredibly difficult thing to solve because, as you say, if you are telling people, especially in the U.S., We have found a way to make you happier and healthier, but it's going to make you much less competitive.
00:42:50.000And there's a chance you're going to miss out on opportunities.
00:43:32.000I don't know that there's a very obvious set of solutions.
00:43:36.000Although I think we should be very, very mindful, especially with respect to kids, because I think they are unbelievably vulnerable and sometimes their parents don't really know what to do.
00:43:47.000And so there, I think we should be open to more, I don't know if extreme is the right word, but more intense interventions.
00:43:53.000So when you're writing a book like yours, do you get this – because we both have the sort of same conclusions, that it's really difficult.
00:44:01.000It's an enormously difficult problem, and there's no clear-cut solution.
00:44:04.000Do you have a feeling, a sense of almost just – Just futility?
00:44:37.000But what percentage are going to do that?
00:44:40.000It's a weird thing when you write a book like this, because the book for me was, it was supposed to be not an expose, but it was supposed to be a, hey, there's this thing that you haven't been thinking enough about, and it's an issue, and we should probably focus on it more than we have been.
00:45:20.000But when I'm in front of audiences, and they can be anything from, you know, people who work in the tech industry to the parents of kids to school districts to big companies.
00:45:32.000I mean, it varies pretty dramatically.
00:45:34.000But one of the things I always say is, tell me, all of you, from 1 to 10, How big an issue is this for you and how much do you want it to change?
00:45:42.000And most people fall at the top half of the scale.
00:45:45.000They're at like a six or a seven or an eight.
00:46:22.000And I think the best we can do, the best I feel that I can do right now, is to talk to the end consumers of tech.
00:46:28.000And if they want to hear the message and they want to hear that this is a concern and what you could possibly do about it, that's great.
00:46:33.000If they don't, I'm not a proselytizer.
00:46:36.000I'm not trying to convert anyone to my view.
00:46:39.000I just wanted to put this out there and to have people say, oh, yeah, this is a thing.
00:46:43.000And it seems like people are on board with at least that part of it.
00:46:46.000But like you and I, they're not sure what to do about it.
00:46:49.000One of the things that's helped me immensely is doing this podcast because while I'm talking to people like you for hours, there's no phone.
00:46:59.000And it's one of the things that I love about wearing the headphones and just sitting across from someone, in this case virtually, but most of the time in person, talking to someone.
00:47:18.000It's such a strange time where checking a phone becomes one of the most common activities that a person does throughout the day.
00:47:26.000If you just looked at how many times a person checks their phone throughout the day versus all the other things they do, have a glass of water, go to the bathroom, all the various things that people do every day, that's at the top of the list.
00:47:41.000And again, like you're saying, 10 years ago, no one would have ever imagined that was the case.
00:47:47.000Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine there are too many people on the planet who spend more time in conversation than you do.
00:47:53.000And, you know, there's incredible benefit to that.
00:47:56.000And most people, when they have those deep conversations with other people, they recognize that benefit, they enjoy it.
00:48:03.000And so, you know, one of the pieces of hope is that, you know, if you tell people, try this for a while, try this for a week, don't have your phone at the table when you're having dinner.
00:48:13.000It's hard at first for people who are always used to just kind of mindlessly scrolling through dinner, but most people end up finding that there's quite a lot of benefit to it, and they enjoy it.
00:48:22.000So part of this is to get people to have the experience of what the other side could be.
00:49:12.000There are people who play video games more than they would like, but then there are people at the very top end of that spectrum who are just absolutely helplessly addicted.
00:49:25.000They'll play games for five weeks straight, put on 50 pounds, Lose their hair, sit in diapers, pay someone to bring pizza boxes to their room until they're just piles and piles of pizza boxes.
00:49:40.000I met some of these people and spoke to some of them, and those stories I just found completely shocking.
00:49:46.000Tell the story about the football player, if you would.
00:49:50.000Yeah, I mean, he's the one I'm thinking about now.
00:49:56.000He basically told me he was a very strong student.
00:49:59.000He was in college, he was a straight-A student, and he was on the football team, so he was a student athlete, very bright, very capable, and slightly lonely, felt a little bit distant from other people, and started playing World of Warcraft, formed a guild,
00:50:15.000played with some other players, and just found that experience amazing.
00:50:19.000Just incredibly immersive and rewarding.
00:50:22.000He loved the social aspect of it more than anything.
00:50:24.000And he felt a sense of obligation, I guess, that, you know, there were people playing at different parts of the world.
00:50:30.000He was playing with people around the world.
00:50:31.000And so when it was nighttime where he was, other people would be playing because it was daytime where they were.
00:50:36.000And so he started to stay up later and later and later.
00:50:50.000He put on, he told me, I think he said he put on 40 pounds of fat in a period of five weeks, spent five weeks straight sitting at the screen, playing the game 23 hours a day, he said, between 23 and 24 hours a day.
00:51:05.000He told me he didn't use a diaper, and that accounts for the hour a day, but he didn't bathe.
00:51:11.000And he paid this doorman to bring up boxes of pizza, so that's what he was eating.
00:51:15.000He was eating basically pizza three times a day.
00:51:18.000And he was unrecognisable by the end of it.
00:51:20.000Looked different, bailed out of school.
00:51:23.000That to me was one of the two most shocking things, was hearing these stories from people face to face, explaining what they'd gone through.
00:51:33.000You hear these kinds of stories from substance abuse, but the idea that an experience can be compelling enough to have the same effect on some people, I found that really shocking.
00:51:44.000Yeah, and the fact that he relapsed too.
00:51:47.000He got over it, recognized that there was a giant issue, and then the lure of it drew him right back to the computer.
00:51:59.000He was lucky that his family could afford it.
00:52:02.000He went to this facility just outside of Seattle called Restart.
00:52:08.000And they take in mostly young males and they teach them how to cook and clean and all these things that seem to kind of pass by a lot of people and being self-sufficient and not just being stuck in front of the game.
00:52:41.000But one of the things, one of the mistakes he made is that he basically went back to the exact context he had been in when he had that addiction in the first place.
00:52:48.000And so soon enough, you know, a period of loneliness, he was inspired to just fire up the game and he said, you know, I was just going to play one more time.
00:52:56.000Suddenly it happens all over again, which is what you hear from people who have drug abuse issues as well.
00:53:02.000You obviously can't just do it one more time.
00:53:29.000And yeah, he's doing well and I think a big part of what helped him was just completely removing himself from the context that was problematic for him.
00:53:36.000That seemed to be a huge part of what allowed him to get past it.
00:53:40.000There's a certain aspect of people when they get addicted to things that I've heard people try to figure out what that is or why people get obsessed to certain activities and they think that you're hijacking or the games are hijacking Some positive evolutionary trait where you get obsessed at trying to get good at things that will help your survival,
00:54:11.000like be a better hunter, learning how to fish, learning how to fight off your enemies, and becoming obsessed with these things has allowed people to thrive and survive and procreate.
00:54:23.000And that somehow or another these games hijacked.
00:54:27.000Am I... I find that explanation really compelling.
00:54:31.000I mean, if you think about it, if you are driven towards mastery, towards completing goals rather than leaving them incomplete, that's going to predispose you for a lot of the right kind of traits to succeed, especially going back thousands of years.
00:54:43.000You know, if you were on a hunt and you decided, oh, no, I'm good.
00:54:59.000But if we exist today, that's because our ancestors were the ones who said, actually, no, I'm tired, I'm done, but I can't be done because I need to complete the goal.
00:55:09.000And so there's this overhang of this now, which is, as you say, the unproductive part of that is that we are really bad at letting things go as a species.
00:55:19.000You open up a loop for me and you don't tie the loop off.
00:55:32.000And it's productive in some contexts when it's good for us to finish what we start.
00:55:37.000But we're not in prehistoric times anymore.
00:55:41.000We're not hunter-gatherers in the same way.
00:55:43.000And so you get these experiences on a screen.
00:55:45.000Suddenly you're playing Candy Crush and the old hunter-gatherer in you who says, I can't give up on this experience until it's done because otherwise I'm not going to survive, kicks in.
00:55:54.000And suddenly you're playing 14 hours of Candy Crush or 6 hours of Flappy Bird.
00:55:58.000So I think it is a hijacking experience.
00:56:00.000Some of the traits that were incredibly adaptive and beneficial in those evolutionary contexts, but don't make a lot of sense in the modern world in some contexts.
00:56:08.000It's so strange that these traits would translate to flappy bird.
00:56:47.000But that is a hijacking in the same way.
00:56:50.000It's a chip that is in there and it works for us, and it worked for us in prehistoric times.
00:56:57.000But it doesn't distinguish between the occasions when it's going to work well for us and when it's going to work badly.
00:57:02.000I mean, it's the same with food, right?
00:57:04.000That desire for sugar, that craving for sugar, for salt, for fat.
00:57:08.000If you were roaming the savannah and you were looking for something that was calorie-rich, calorie-dense, that was going to be good for you, that was going to sustain you, high sugar, high salt, high fat, great mix.
00:57:19.000But give people the situation they're in today.
00:57:22.000They're still operating on those same principles.
00:57:23.000Their brains are still operating the same way.
00:57:25.000They're just as attracted to those things.
00:57:26.000But they have an endless font of foods that are going to give them those things in massive surplus.
00:57:33.000It's exactly the same with the brain responding to rewards, to mastery, why we do crosswords, why we play games that get progressively more difficult, that suck up more and more of our time.
00:57:44.000The ultra-marathon running thing is particularly interesting to me because one of my very good friends does it.
00:57:52.000His name is Cameron Haynes, and he runs these three-day races where they run 240 miles.
00:57:58.000He did the Moab 240. He's done the Bigfoot race, which is 200 miles.
00:58:04.000You're going through the mountain, and I think there's...
00:58:07.000Interestingly enough, he got involved in that because he is a hunter and he wanted to have better endurance to hunt in the mountains.
00:58:16.000And so he started getting obsessed with running marathons, then ultra marathons, and these crazy multiple day endurance races.
00:58:23.000But it's literally for him that thing that we're talking about, these ancient traits that allowed persistence.
00:58:31.000Allow you to be a successful hunter through that persistence and through that dedication and focus and discipline.
00:58:37.000He's sort of got stuck in this where he's just insane with it.
00:58:41.000He'll run a marathon a day, multiple days in a row to prepare for these things where they used to tell you you have to have six months off when you run a marathon, right?
00:59:36.000I would love to do the Moab, the Western States, Badwater.
00:59:39.000I'm very attracted to the idea of doing that, and I can totally understand why that could be a life-changing experience.
00:59:44.000But running around a half-mile block, thousands of times, 6,000 times I think it is, I struggle to understand that.
00:59:53.000But again, for people who do that, it's all about just pushing yourself and it's about the challenge and stripping it of its beauty, like making it in a place that's not beautiful.
01:00:54.000I remember I crossed the finish line completely depleted.
01:00:57.000And I know this sounds a bit silly after we've been talking about the Sri Chinmoy 3100-mile challenge, but after 26 miles, I was just done and I hadn't eaten enough food.
01:01:06.000I remember crossing the line and this woman put a medal around my neck and she said, how did that feel?
01:02:08.000I mean, I think I should probably do another one where I get the right nutrition because I'd probably be able to do a lot better and enjoy it a lot more.
01:04:00.000I was not happy because I wanted to run a sub-4.
01:04:03.000I basically said to myself, if you don't run sub-4, you have to do another one.
01:04:06.000So I ended up just finding some hidden store of energy and ended up running a 3.57.
01:04:13.000One of the things you talk about in your book is the addiction that people have to fitness devices.
01:04:20.000To these watches and iPhones and I wear a whoop strap.
01:04:25.000A lot of people that wear these things, they start counting steps and they start looking at how many calories they've burned.
01:04:35.000I was in a Sober October contest a couple years back with my friends.
01:04:39.000We were using the MyZone chest strap app and it calculates Points based on how many minutes you're at 80% or above max heart rate and and we were killing ourselves just Putting in six seven hours of cardio a day like just madness Your Your your take on them was mostly negative right you were you were Is that
01:05:13.000I think the bigger issue in the US is, and in the world in general, in the developed world, the bigger issue is that we're sedentary as a species.
01:05:21.000So if these devices are pushing us to do more exercise, that's good.
01:05:26.000But then there are people like you, like me.
01:05:29.000I am an absolute slave to my Garmin watch.
01:05:32.000And if I take it with me on a run, it's game over.
01:05:35.000I could be at the beginning of a run, I'll be standing at the end of my driveway about to go, and I'll say to myself, you are going to run slowly.
01:05:46.000And 30 seconds later, I'm tearing down the street because I'm looking at my watch, which is saying to me, oh, you're running just over a seven-minute pace.
01:05:53.000You should probably dial it down to 650 or something like that.
01:05:58.000So if I want to run and enjoy it, I just can't take the watch with me.
01:06:01.000So, my take is negative just because I think, in the book at least, I have a positive feeling about them in general, but they're just really, really hard to resist.
01:06:14.000And even if you give yourself a bit of self-talk, you're like, I'm not going to pay attention to it, it ends up being the case that you...
01:06:30.000I get what you're saying, but I feel like...
01:06:36.000The addiction to fitness is probably one of the best addictions you could ever have in terms of the overall quality of life improvement, the actual benefit to it.
01:06:46.000But you are still dealing with this weirdness, right?
01:06:50.000You feel helpless and drawn in to the siren song of your watch or your strap or whatever's pulling you in that's making you do all these extra miles and extra rounds and extra this.
01:07:06.000But ultimately you're getting a benefit out of it as opposed to like World of Warcraft or something like that where you're just sitting in front of a screen.
01:07:21.000I was just saying, so you've revised your position.
01:07:24.000You think that sedentary lifestyle is more dangerous.
01:07:27.000So the benefit of being addicted to this is at least you're moving and you're exercising and you're doing something healthy with your body.
01:07:45.000And there are more people in that position than there are people who are working too hard.
01:07:48.000So I think on balance, these devices, if they're getting people off the couch and inspiring more activity, they're great.
01:07:54.000But I think for people like me, people like you, people who do exercise a bit, The danger is that you stop relying on your internal cues and you end up just going by the device.
01:08:06.000So there are people who will be out like 4am because they didn't get to their 10,000 steps, you know, that kind of thing.
01:08:11.000There's nothing inherently wrong with being out at 4am, but it just signals to you.
01:08:15.000It says something about these devices.
01:08:17.000It says that what's fueling your drive to exercise is an obsession that's pretty either unhealthy or not driven by...
01:08:24.000You know, your body telling you you want to run some more.
01:08:27.000There are days where I'll run in the morning and then by the afternoon I'm just itching to run again.
01:08:32.000But that's my body saying, hey, you've got a lot of energy pent up, why don't you go out and have another run?
01:08:37.000But there are also people who will walk in the morning and then they'll look at their watches and say, oh, it's the afternoon and I'm only at 5,000 steps.
01:08:45.000You're driven entirely by these external cues that are not about well-being.
01:08:49.000They don't reward you in a way that's truly deeply rewarding in the way that exercise, I think, should be when you're doing it right.
01:08:56.000But still, better to be doing some With the artificial reward that comes from the chirp on the watch or the Fitbit or the Whoop or whatever it is that tells you you've hit some threshold, that's definitely better than not working out at all.
01:09:09.000And again, these things, these devices are hijacking these traits that have been positive for us, evolutionarily speaking, in terms of our ability to survive and thrive and work through uncomfortable moments and achieve desired results.
01:10:53.000Self-control, doing the thing that's hard right now because it's good in the long run, it's one of the age-old human problems.
01:11:01.000It's something that I think we're all going to struggle with forever on some dimension, whether it's about screens or about getting out and actually exercising and doing meaningful exercise.
01:11:10.000It's easier to sit on the sofa and watch the TV or use your phone or whatever.
01:11:14.000We're all going to have that feeling forever.
01:11:17.000Some of us have enough intrinsic joy for exercising and working out.
01:11:22.000We kind of cultivate that over time, that it pulls us off the couch.
01:11:25.000But for a lot of people, the only way they're going to do it is with this sort of tricking, this hijacking of the brain systems.
01:11:52.000But you could use those same hooks for the good.
01:11:55.000You could use them or apply them in situations like fitness, where they are mostly things that are good.
01:12:02.000And fitness is one, eating healthy foods.
01:12:06.000Things like education, like you could kind of trick kids into learning stuff, trick even my students.
01:12:12.000Like if you could in some way make education more compelling by creating goals and gamifying and all that sort of stuff, there are worse things, right?
01:13:47.000So if you're using a screen to administer meditation or to lead you in yoga or something that's important to you for your wellness, for your psychological well-being, I think that's fine.
01:14:00.000We don't need to demonize tech to the point where we say, you only should do mindfulness activities that involve another human being in your presence or being alone, and you can't use screens.
01:14:10.000I think that's, again, another example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and it seems silly to me.
01:14:16.000Do you think that it's possible to develop some sort of a program or a structured discipline on how to correctly incorporate these technologies into your life?
01:14:28.000Like, so you can give people a framework.
01:14:36.000Because a lot of what people are doing, it's not even compelling.
01:14:40.000I see what you're saying about as long as you're doing something that's compelling, you're getting something good out of it, like an education, or you're learning something new.
01:14:47.000But God, a lot of what I look at is nonsense.
01:15:36.000Yeah, there are people who are kind of puritanical about it.
01:15:41.000They would say you shouldn't be looking at those muscle cars or you shouldn't be doing whatever it is that you're doing that's not enriching your life.
01:15:51.000I think we take too seriously this idea that every minute of our lives needs to be spent in the service of efficiency and maximisation and all that crap.
01:16:01.000You should spend time looking at the cars if they make you happy in the moment and not every decision needs to be made for long-term well-being.
01:16:08.000I do stuff, you know, I find myself on YouTube for hours at a time and actually at the end of it I'm like, you know, was that okay?
01:17:49.000I'm not spending tons of money on experiences that I can't afford online.
01:17:54.000If you answer all those questions, you come out with it and you say, things make sense for me and I'm okay spending a bit of time on these devices, then you're fine.
01:18:01.000But if, like a lot of people, you say, this is not great, this feels problematic, then that's when you know something needs to change.
01:18:10.000I think you're nailing it in terms of getting children to be aware of the problems of these devices now and to get ahead of it with education and to just get it into their mind and maybe have them reinforce it with each other.
01:18:29.000And we weren't even aware of these real issues a decade ago.
01:18:32.000This is why it's not in the curriculum.
01:18:34.000I've always been frustrated at the fact that we spend so little time educating children how to think about things.
01:18:42.000How to think about the way you react to things, why you react to them this way, the way you live your life, the way you treat each other.
01:18:53.000They're just communication issues and observation issues and just Just cognitive issues.
01:18:59.000Just the way we view things and problems.
01:19:02.000And I think we could solve a lot of these issues by educating children just simply on how to think and the positive aspects of looking at things objectively and honestly.
01:19:16.000And then this would fall right into place with that.
01:19:20.000Because if you're being honest about yourself, you're being honest about addictions, you're being honest about the positive and negative aspects of technology, We could at least give children the framework to use that sort of discipline and understanding to not just approach it to electronics,
01:19:36.000but all this future shit that's coming down the line.
01:19:39.000Not the current electronics, but things that we haven't even conceived yet.
01:19:44.000Things that we're not aware of that are going to probably be far more immersive than all these current problems we're handling.
01:19:53.000I mean, I think the education system we use today is an overhang from, I don't know how many hundreds, or certainly decades, but I'd say hundreds of years of a legacy of just bad education choices.
01:20:06.000I mean, I think a lot of what kids are taught is just not useful for them.
01:20:35.000And there are a lot of psychological biases built into us that mean that we are Fundamentally incapable of doing that unless we're taught how to try to at least begin to overcome those biases.
01:20:45.000And then you put us in a world of echo chambers of whether they're political or whether they're just the cultures we happen to be immersed in.
01:20:53.000It's impossible to think about anything objectively and in a kind of canonical true sense anymore.
01:20:59.000If you could teach kids how to do that, it would be a different world.
01:21:05.000I think it's an incredibly valuable enterprise, and I think it's something that is worth spending time on and thinking about.
01:21:12.000And I would like, since we're taking up a quarter of our waking hours by staring at these little devices, I think that should be part of that education, for sure.
01:21:21.000Yeah, I mean, I think it would apply to...
01:21:29.000Out of all the things that we teach children, which are important, you know, history and mathematics and all the other things we teach them, how do we not teach them that?
01:21:37.000Critical thinking skills and how to look at yourself accurately and the benefit of it, even when it's painful and uncomfortable, but that you can actually learn and grow through that and to learn to accept those painful, uncomfortable truths because there's great benefit in that.
01:21:56.000Yeah, some of the research I've done has looked at this idea of the benefit of hardship, basically, that grappling with difficult things, practicing where the practice set that you're doing is harder rather than easier.
01:22:10.000These are all, you know, they kind of go against our natural tendencies.
01:22:13.000We like to do things that are a little bit easier.
01:22:15.000We, as a species, like not to expend effort that we don't have to expend in general.
01:22:20.000But there are tremendous benefits that come from doing that with grappling with complexity, with difficulty, actually being really honest about who we are.
01:22:31.000So the only way you're ever going to get kids to be self-aware and to think about these things is by inculcating that when they're pretty young, by teaching them that when they're the younger, the better, really.
01:22:42.000Because as you get older, the gloss of culture and society and all the kind of stuff that's around us that makes it hard for us to engage in that way starts to take over.
01:22:50.000How long did it take you to write this book?
01:22:56.000I spent six months doing a lot of the research.
01:22:59.000I interviewed about 50 or 60 people for it.
01:23:02.000And then about nine months on and off of writing.
01:23:05.000And then there was an editing phase back and forth with the editor.
01:23:09.000Now that it's done, and you go back and you look at it, and you think about the time that's passed since you released it, is there anything that you would have revised?
01:23:19.000Is there anything that you wish you had added?
01:23:35.000I really, really struggled to get behind the curtain of the big tech companies, and I wanted to write about the business side of what these companies were doing.
01:23:46.000I tried really hard but didn't get that far in delving with these companies.
01:23:52.000I couldn't get past a lot of the kind of...
01:23:54.000There are some barriers and I knew what I was writing about because I wanted to be honest about it and I couldn't get a lot of the information that I wish I had been able to get.
01:24:01.000Now when I speak about it, I have a lot of that information.
01:24:07.000I mean, I still talk about what these companies are doing, but I would like to have known more about the business side and a lot of that was hidden from me.
01:24:18.000I have a PhD in psychology and so I'm interested in what makes people tick and how they think.
01:24:24.000And so the middle big chunk of the book is these different hooks that are embedded in these platforms that make it hard for us to resist them.
01:24:50.000One of the practices I found fascinating was the extent to which these companies use massive data sets to make their decisions and huge amounts of data.
01:25:00.000So, you know, there are two ways to make smart decisions when you're designing a product.
01:25:04.000The one way is you speak to smart people who know a lot about humans and what makes them tick, their motivations, and then you take that information and you embed it in the platform that you're designing.
01:25:17.000That's how a lot of video game development worked.
01:25:19.000And again, speaking to these video game experts who've designed games that have made tons of money, who have been very successful, a lot of them will say, look, I created a lot of games, but You know, a lot of them missed the mark.
01:25:31.000I had a couple that were great successes, but for every two that were successful, there were 10 that weren't.
01:25:35.000So there's a lot of kind of trial and error.
01:25:38.000What the big tech companies do in large part, They avoid the trial and error by being completely agnostic about the theory of what's going to drive us.
01:25:47.000All they need to do is run this series of trials by combat.
01:25:50.000So if you're playing, again, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, what I do is I throw two different versions of a particular mission up, and half the players will play one version, the other half will play the other version.
01:26:01.000Let's say one of them is through a forest.
01:26:03.000The other one's identical, you have to do the same thing, but you're going by the ocean.
01:26:07.000The question is, what effect does that have?
01:26:09.000And you might discover people will play the mission 10 minutes longer if they're by the ocean.
01:26:13.000So then you say, okay, we're going to privilege ocean missions.
01:26:16.000So now we have two versions of the ocean mission.
01:27:04.000What the tech companies do is they make this kind of a sure thing by having access to billions and billions of data points and getting real-time, very rapid feedback from us.
01:27:13.000Isn't it also, to compare it to books and movies, it's not a fair comparison because those things end.
01:27:22.000That's really where the problem lies, right?
01:27:25.000Is that a book or a movie is not going to make you eat pizza three times a day and gain 40 pounds over five weeks because you're trapped in your house doing nothing but enjoying this book or movie constantly because there is no end to it.
01:29:05.000When you played Quake, when I played Doom, when I played Super Mario as a younger kid than that, when Nintendo came out, that was just an incredible product.
01:29:15.000You know, that was designed to deliver a phenomenal A-plus, top-class experience.
01:29:20.000And when you speak to the video game developers, there's a purity to it.
01:29:24.000You know, the creator of Mario and the creator of Tetris and all of these games, they all talk about the kind of love that went into creating these games.
01:29:43.000They're trying to basically get us to part with our time and therefore with our money.
01:29:48.000And yes, there's an ethical responsibility.
01:29:50.000I mean, if you see there's an industrial company and this company is making billions of dollars, but there are major externalities, so negatives that come with that.
01:29:59.000Let's say they're spewing crap into the waterways and into the air.
01:30:03.000That's something that, you know, for the last 25, 30 years or so, the government has said, you know, that's not okay.
01:31:58.000I mean, there's no way in the arms race for our attention and our dollars and all that sort of stuff, no one's going to buy into this idea we should make a shittier version of the product.
01:32:09.000I think, as I said, the model is broken.
01:32:13.000If the model is about attention and about picking the version of the game that's going to extract the most time, that's problematic to begin.
01:32:23.000It would be better if there were a way to basically create a model that prizes consumer welfare, which then translates into people wanting to part with their dollars.
01:32:33.000That's obviously difficult to do in practice, but a lot of industries work that way.
01:32:38.000It just so happens that the model we chose for, in particular social media, this is not as true for games, but for social media for sure, We are the product and our eyeballs are the product.
01:32:48.000And the consumer is the big industry of companies that are buying ads on those platforms.
01:32:54.000So, you know, the reason they're free is because they need our eyeballs.
01:32:59.000But you could imagine an alternate universe where you had to pay a small annual fee to use these products, but there was no advertising.
01:33:07.000And so the money came from revenue, from the billions of dollars of revenue that you got from individual users who are paying to use the platform.
01:33:14.000And that's a universe that I think leads to better outcomes for everyone and designing features based on people enjoying them, getting value from them, rather than features designed to hook us.
01:33:25.000But I mean, I've been thinking about this for, it's now six or seven years, and I'm just as exasperated.
01:33:34.000And that's why I think a lot of the focus now has to be on the individual consumer.
01:33:37.000If you're a consumer who needs help with this, you're spending too much time, you feel bad about it, then let's talk about ways to deal with it.
01:33:45.000But working at the level of the tech companies is really, really difficult.
01:33:49.000I like how honest you're being about it because you can be exacerbated.
01:33:56.000There's no way you're going to say, oh, I found the solution.
01:34:02.000So when you're a guy who's studied this for so long and you're spending so much time and you're writing this book about it and you're constantly immersed in these ideas, if you're not finding a solution, If you're not saying, this is what the tech companies have to do, this is what we have to do as a society,
01:34:18.000this is the path forward as a healthy culture, no one is going to be able to figure it out.
01:34:24.000If it's someone like you who's spending so much time looking at it, when you're looking at the future and if you just take away what you hope people do and what you would like people to do to be healthier and less addicted to these devices and these games and these social media platforms...
01:34:43.000Take away what you want, and if you've got to be really honest, what do you think is happening with us?
01:34:49.000I think we're making inroads in that we're chipping away at the problem in little ways.
01:34:53.000I can tell you a thousand small ways that we're fixing the problem or making it better, but none of them is what you and everyone else is looking for, which is what is the magic solution here?
01:35:03.000What is the one big thing we can do that would reverse this whole thing?
01:35:22.000But I do think consumers are getting more savvy.
01:35:24.000So one of the really interesting developments in the last decade or so is that when I first started thinking about this, parents would come to me and say, this is a disaster.
01:35:35.000But there's been this weird shift where now kids are coming to me and saying my parents won't get off their devices.
01:35:41.000And it's starting to affect older people.
01:35:44.000And the younger people seem to have worked out ways of managing their lives more effectively than older adults can.
01:35:50.000So I'm kind of hopeful that there's this generation, maybe with the help of a curriculum that's more thoughtful about this, which I know a lot of private schools are starting to teach this stuff, that there will be the generation now of kids who have grown up around these devices.
01:36:03.000Give them 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years, they're going to be the leaders of everything, basically.
01:36:12.000Industry, the leaders in a political sense, they will be savvy about this in a way that we are not.
01:36:18.000We were caught in this kind of no-man's land.
01:36:22.000You and I are part of a generation that straddled these two worlds.
01:36:25.000People who are much older than us are still kind of coming to terms with the situation.
01:36:30.000But, you know, there's a group of kids now who are probably 12, 13, 14, 15, who have never known anything different.
01:36:36.000And they're going to get older and older and older.
01:36:38.000Having learned ways to cope, it'll be the kind of native world in which they grew up.
01:36:43.000I am hopeful that they will be more mindful about this stuff.
01:36:47.000They will, I don't know, maybe develop a kind of soft spot for the way we used to do things, if we can teach them that.
01:36:54.000And they'll be more mindful about it in a way that I think the generations that have this visited upon them later on in life have struggled to be.
01:37:17.000There's a great quote that he said, human beings are the biological bootloaders for AI. And when I said that I think that one day we're going to be obsolete, that's my real concern.
01:37:29.000My real concern is that what we are is some sort of An electronic butterfly that's building a cocoon.
01:37:39.000We're building a cocoon and we don't even know what we're doing.
01:37:42.000We're just immersed in consumerism and buying the latest, greatest laptop and iPhone and all these different things.
01:37:49.000But what we don't recognize is that what we're doing is contributing to this pattern of technological innovation that will ultimately make us obsolete.
01:37:57.000Or at least make us become one with it so that we avoid becoming obsolete.
01:38:04.000Yeah, I mean, you know, the ultimate problem for us is that we prize ease, comfort, Well-being, happiness over all else.
01:38:14.000And so give us something that will help us do that and we will be like mindless animals that don't actually have a brain.
01:38:20.000And we'll keep moving in that direction.
01:38:21.000And there are certain drives that will keep pushing us in that direction.
01:38:25.000And if you can meet them with screens, then we'll say, you know, that's fine.
01:38:29.000I'll sell the species and sell the long-term, you know...
01:38:33.000The long-term survival of humanity for that, and that's where we are.
01:38:37.000I mean, what you said I thought was really interesting about the idea that maybe we're all just, you didn't say this, but I was thinking maybe we are all staring, there's no phone, there's a drug that we've all taken, it's in the water, and we're actually just staring at our hands for four to five or six hours a day.
01:39:34.000Depiction of what a person looks like and that's what everyone aspires to and how many girls are self-harming, how many girls are committing suicide and that this massive uptick in depression and medication and all these different things that show this psychological damaging aspect or psychologically damaging aspect of these devices and social media.
01:40:01.000He's also at NYU where I teach and I know his work.
01:40:05.000We've talked quite a lot about these issues.
01:40:07.000I think that people always say, what's the biggest problem with these screens?
01:40:10.000And I think for me, it is this experience, for teenage girls in particular, of spending colossal amounts of time looking at, as you say, Instagram filters, influencers, being bullied online, the effect it's having on depression rates, anxiety, and even rising suicide.
01:40:26.000I know you, I think you have a daughter, is that right?
01:41:57.000I mean, I think you've got to be a bit retro in the kinds of things you expose people to when they're young.
01:42:04.000Well, that's what's weird about raising kids today is that there's not a bunch of past generations that can tell you how to train your kids in a world of immersive technology.
01:42:19.000The internet came around when I was an adult.
01:42:22.000And I sort of have learned to cope with it, but I at least had the foundation of growing and getting through high school and all the formative years without it.
01:42:32.000And kids don't have that today, and parents don't have the experience of having their parents tell them, well, this is where I made mistakes, and this is where you've got to be careful with these devices.
01:43:29.000How do you prevent them from being overwhelmed by the kinds of anxieties that are much more common on screens than they were in the pre-screen era?
01:43:36.000And that stuff, I think, is where we, people who write about this and think about it, can make real inroads.
01:43:43.000I think there's no more important enterprise around this subject than learning how to be parents and learning how to help kids grow up in this world that's become Really full of this kind of new minefield that didn't exist before.
01:43:58.000What has changed for you from studying this and writing this book?
01:44:02.000What has changed with the way you interface with technology?
01:44:07.000And what steps have you gone through to alleviate some of these problems in your own life?
01:44:13.000The biggest thing for me is really just very basic analog interventions.
01:44:19.000So what I mean by that is Physical distance and time are the biggest things.
01:44:24.000So I track my time and how much I use my screen.
01:44:28.000And I make sure that I have certain parts of the day where I religiously and consistently don't have a phone nearby.
01:44:34.000If I have a phone within reach, I'm going to be thinking about it all the time.
01:44:41.000So I did that experiment where you try to sort of get a sense of how much time during the day can you reach your phone without having to move your feet.
01:45:42.000I also have done a number of things that defang the device itself.
01:45:47.000So if you remove all the notifications except the absolutely most critical, urgent ones, there are a few of those that are important to some people.
01:46:00.000The other thing I do is periodically, you know how you have that script, like, you'll go on your phone and you'll be like, it's email, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, email, and you keep going round and round in this kind of loop.
01:46:11.000One way to disrupt that is every, say, month have a reminder go off in a calendar that says it's time to switch my apps around, my icons around.
01:46:19.000And I just, I screw the whole thing up.
01:46:22.000Like I'll put them in different places, make it hard to find them.
01:46:26.000And so what that does is it short circuits this tendency to fall into that loop because every month or so I'm changing the way my phone looks, which most people hate.
01:46:34.000But if what you're trying to do is short-circuit the process of getting into that loop, it's actually very effective.
01:46:40.000One other thing that a lot of people talk about is there's a black and white mode on your phone.
01:46:57.000But the experiences that rely on, like, gusts of color and all that, They are defamed, and that tends to lead people to spend less time on their screens as well.
01:47:15.000I can see some color, but my first book was called Drunk Tank Pink, which was about this color pink that they used to paint inside jail cells to calm prisoners down.
01:47:26.000And that was one of the anecdotes in the book.
01:47:57.000But that's funny because you're saying grey, like you recognize grey as a colour.
01:48:01.000How old were you when you realized you were colourblind?
01:48:06.000So I have this sense, when you're very young, you know the picture books that kids look at where there are colours on the picture books, and then you talk about the colours, like there's a bright red, you'll see a cherry and it's red, and you'll see grass and it's green, and you'll see trees with brown bark on them,
01:48:36.000So, well, so later on, once colors became more subtle, when I was about eight, nine or 10, it started to look like something was wrong because I'd get colors wrong.
01:48:53.000They're called the Ishihara dot tests.
01:48:56.000And you see all these dots, and you're supposed to see a number if you can see normal color.
01:49:02.000But they're very clever tests, because a lot of people say they're colorblind when they aren't.
01:49:05.000Like, if you want to get out of military service or something like that, or you don't want to be a fighter pilot, you can say, I don't want to do these things colorblind.
01:49:12.000These tests are brilliant, because if you are colorblind, you will see a number that people who have proper vision cannot see.
01:49:21.000And so you can't just say, I can't see anything.
01:49:23.000You can't fool the test administrator.
01:51:26.000For colours, I mean, I've made some horrific colour decisions.
01:51:29.000Actually, when I started teaching, when I first started teaching at NYU, this is about just over a decade ago, I was a grad student for years.
01:51:37.000I had no money and I wanted to get some cheap business shirts.
01:51:41.000So I went to this store and I had this bargain bin of shirts and there was just this huge array of white shirts.
01:51:48.000So I was like, it was like 10 for a hundred bucks or something.
01:51:50.000So I got 10 of them, like had a full wardrobe of white shirts, thought that that's all I needed.
01:51:55.000Turns out they were pink, and I had no idea.
01:51:58.000So I'd show up at class every day, every single day in a pink shirt, thinking it was this kind of basic, nondescript white shirt.
01:52:05.000And at the end of the semester, the comments were like, was this an experiment?
01:52:09.000Why did the professor come in pink every time?
01:52:11.000So the only thing they focused on after a semester of teaching was, what's going on with the pink?
01:52:15.000So yes, it's important that I let my wife dress me.
01:52:45.000I did some research on it just to try to work out what the deal was between this, you know, the blue versus pink idea and the fact that these colors are associated with different genders.
01:52:57.000And until about 50 years ago, pink was associated with youth, with young people, with being a teenager or a young person.
01:53:09.000No one seems to know what the original point where that split happened, where it became really a colour that was marked as being for girls.
01:55:40.000It's the only one that's bright for me.
01:55:42.000So for you, the allure of screens must be at least slightly lessened than the average person who concentrates on the latest, greatest OLED screen with massive amounts of pixels and beautiful clarity and high definition.
01:56:27.000So when you watch a movie like Avatar, you just see this sort of gray mess?
01:56:34.000Avatars, it's a little bit like those picture books when you're a kid where the colours are so bright and obvious that I got a good sense of it.
01:56:42.000Maybe it's still washed out compared to what you see.
01:56:44.000But take anything subtle, like look at a real world landscape.
01:56:49.000You'll see trees in the fall and you'll see this wash of colours.
01:56:54.000You'll get some oranges and reds and greens and browns.
01:56:57.000People describe it to me as the most incredible experience to see that if you're in the right part of the country.
01:58:36.000Maybe with stem cells at some point they'll be able to do something with it because it's really just the structure, the anatomy, the physiology.
01:58:44.000I don't know the exact terms, but the cones themselves are just malfunctioning.
01:59:26.000I get much more from the experience, but not as much from the screen itself.
01:59:30.000I was going to ask about the colorblind mode in video games.
01:59:33.000Is that something that's helpful to you?
01:59:34.000Do you see what we see, or are you seeing blood that would appear red here then?
01:59:40.000Yeah, so what happens when I see a colorblind mode, when there's an attempt to sort of improve or fix something for me, it makes two colors that I would see as the same appear different.
01:59:50.000And then what I do is a big part of color perception is top down, which means that if you know stuff about what you're supposed to be seeing, your brain will see that thing.
01:59:58.000So if I see what is supposed to be blood, I'll see it as red, even if to you, you can say, hey, that's green or that's brown, I'll just assume it's red.
02:00:42.000Yeah, so usually to make something more clear for a person who's colorblind, you either make it more yellow or you really make it more red.
02:00:53.000So if I look through red cellophane, like I took transparent red from those old 3D glasses.
02:01:00.000When I look through the red, what that does is it eliminates any green light and so it means that I'm seeing the world the way a person with proper color vision works.