The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter

00:00:08.000 Hello, Adam.

00:00:13.000 Hey, Joe.

00:00:14.000 How are you?

00:00:15.000 What's going on?

00:00:16.000 Yeah, not too bad, thanks.

00:00:17.000 Not much happening.

00:00:18.000 Just the pandemic.

00:00:20.000 I really enjoyed your book, man.

00:00:22.000 It's terrifying and accurate and irresistible.

00:00:29.000 Thank you.

00:00:29.000 I appreciate that.

00:00:31.000 When 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.

00:00:42.000 Like, 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.

00:00:53.000 It's such a weird balancing act, isn't it?

00:00:57.000 Yeah, it is a weird balancing act.

00:00:58.000 I think a lot of people who write about this stuff and think about it really just focus on all the negatives.

00:01:04.000 There are obviously massive positives.

00:01:06.000 This 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.

00:01:17.000 And so screens are in many ways great, but obviously there are downsides as well.

00:01:22.000 Yeah, the good thing is that people can work remotely, and I think there's a lot of people that are recognizing that.

00:01:27.000 It'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.

00:01:34.000 But 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.

00:01:43.000 And therein lies the problem with being connected to the internet, really, right?

00:01:47.000 Yeah, I think that's a really big part of it.

00:01:49.000 It's the good stuff, the stuff that brings us value, that makes it possible to connect to people.

00:01:54.000 There are huge values that come from being on the screen.

00:01:57.000 There'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.

00:02:04.000 And so you're constantly trying to balance these two issues.

00:02:07.000 Yeah, I know several comics who write on a computer that doesn't have Wi-Fi.

00:02:13.000 They've disabled the Wi-Fi on their computer just so specifically they can never get on the internet while they're writing.

00:02:20.000 Because it's such a pull.

00:02:25.000 It's so difficult to imagine that people lived without it.

00:02:31.000 And that now that we have it, it's so difficult to ignore.

00:02:34.000 It's so difficult to get away.

00:02:37.000 Yeah, it's true.

00:02:37.000 There'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.

00:02:49.000 And 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.

00:02:57.000 But 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.

00:03:04.000 And so there are a lot of people who do that.

00:03:06.000 They'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.

00:03:17.000 When you're writing a book like yours, which is warning people about technology, what was your motivation for doing this?

00:03:26.000 Is this something that you've struggled with personally?

00:03:28.000 Is this something that you've just seen other people struggle with?

00:03:32.000 What was the reason?

00:03:34.000 Yeah, it's definitely something I've struggled with a lot.

00:03:38.000 And 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.

00:03:46.000 I 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.

00:03:54.000 It was this game that he told me to check out, a game called Flappy Bird.

00:03:58.000 I downloaded this game on the runway and I remember as we took off, I started playing.

00:04:02.000 I had grand designs of doing work, having a good nap, Having some food.

00:04:07.000 And I spent six hours playing this game.

00:04:10.000 So that by the time we landed, I had done absolutely none of the stuff I was planning to do.

00:04:15.000 And I remember landing and the guy next to me actually turned to me and said, are you okay?

00:04:19.000 Because I kind of sat there just tapping the screen like a maniac for six hours.

00:04:23.000 I remember thinking, this is not good if I, you know, I'm a reasonably high functioning individual and six hours just melted away.

00:04:30.000 Now you blow that up to a lifetime.

00:04:32.000 We're spending like 15 or 20 years behind these screens.

00:04:35.000 And so the question is, are we doing it in a way that's good for us or is it not good for us?

00:04:39.000 And 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.

00:04:50.000 And trying to get a sense of whether that's being mostly good, mostly bad, somewhere in the middle.

00:04:55.000 At least, you know, pushing people to think more about this thing that's occupying so much of their time.

00:05:01.000 Because that's what I wanted to do.

00:05:03.000 I 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.

00:05:10.000 But 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.

00:05:16.000 And so I wanted to understand it more deeply.

00:05:19.000 Which was the game that you wrote about where the maker of the game, even though it was hugely successful, decided to delete it?

00:05:27.000 Yeah, that's the one that I started playing.

00:05:29.000 That was Flappy Bird? 0.90

00:05:30.000 Yeah.

00:05:31.000 Yeah, Flappy Bird. 0.95

00:05:33.000 He removed it from the market.

00:05:35.000 It was an incredible thing.

00:05:36.000 This guy was making an absolute killing.

00:05:38.000 At 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...

00:05:49.000 You create this game, it's kind of a move of passion more than anything.

00:05:53.000 You just enjoy pouring your artistic talents into making this game.

00:05:57.000 You don't expect to make tons of money, but the guy was making and killing.

00:06:02.000 Rare 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.

00:06:10.000 And people reached out.

00:06:11.000 It was almost like he'd taken a drug away from drug users because he removed it from the market.

00:06:15.000 And a lot of them responded and said, can you just give me a copy on the side?

00:06:19.000 He's pretty firm about it.

00:06:20.000 He said no.

00:06:22.000 Wow.

00:06:23.000 So what is so uniquely addictive about that one game?

00:06:27.000 I know there's games like Candy Crush that are uniquely addictive and Subway Surfers, my wife's addicted to that game. 0.98

00:06:35.000 What is it about Flappy Bird that's uniquely addictive?

00:06:40.000 I'd say the thing for me that was addictive, it was incredibly simple to play.

00:06:45.000 Everything about it was incredibly straightforward.

00:06:48.000 There was a clear objective and you could see the little points tick upwards.

00:06:51.000 So what you have to do for anyone who hasn't played the game, it's so simple.

00:06:54.000 It's just a bird who has to fly through obstacles.

00:06:57.000 It's just mindless.

00:06:59.000 But 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.

00:07:12.000 And so each time that happened, that was a little prompt that maybe you want to get on with your life, go do something else.

00:07:17.000 The thing about Flappy Bird is the bird when he crashes, he just automatically reanimates and he starts flying again.

00:07:24.000 And it almost feels rude to the bird at that point to say, I'm not going to keep playing.

00:07:29.000 So 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.

00:07:35.000 And I don't want to be the guy who just says it's game over, bird.

00:07:39.000 And 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.

00:07:46.000 And 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.

00:08:01.000 So the maker of video games now doesn't have a big game over screen.

00:08:05.000 The game just kind of keeps rolling on.

00:08:07.000 And if you do that, you short circuit one of the things that pushes people away from what they're doing onto the next thing.

00:08:13.000 And we call these stopping cues.

00:08:16.000 And if you think about the bottomlessness of social media feeds, they were not bottomless when they were first designed and released.

00:08:22.000 So when Facebook first came out, you had to click a little button at the bottom of the page that said, load more.

00:08:27.000 And that's not true anymore.

00:08:30.000 Things just spool and spool and spool.

00:08:32.000 And so there's no bottom to them.

00:08:34.000 And as a result of that, we've short-circuited that little nudge that used to say, okay, move on.

00:08:39.000 And that was true of Flappy Bird.

00:08:41.000 And that's what made it so hard for me to resist it at the time.

00:08:44.000 The stopping cues or starting cues, that's one of the features that people find uniquely addictive about TikTok.

00:08:52.000 Because TikTok videos play immediately.

00:08:55.000 I'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.

00:09:04.000 You open up the app and it just starts playing.

00:09:06.000 You don't have to click on anything.

00:09:07.000 You don't have to touch it.

00:09:09.000 It just immediately starts playing videos for you.

00:09:12.000 Yeah, it's true on most of the video playing platforms now.

00:09:14.000 TikTok's certainly true.

00:09:16.000 It's true about Netflix.

00:09:18.000 They're all just designed to autoplay.

00:09:19.000 And so that's removing one of the decision points that might have stopped people from engaging.

00:09:24.000 And as a result, we're just kind of automatically right in there.

00:09:28.000 You know, you basically want to take people from not being in I think?

00:09:51.000 Generally losing a lot of money and suddenly an hour has gone by or two hours.

00:09:55.000 There are no clocks.

00:09:56.000 They don't tell you that it's time to move on.

00:09:58.000 There's no sense of daylight.

00:09:59.000 You know, it could be the third sunrise.

00:10:01.000 You wouldn't have any idea that's happening.

00:10:02.000 And that's all by design.

00:10:04.000 Jamie just pulled up a statistic about Flappy Bird and the phones that still have it now are on sale on eBay.

00:10:13.000 Flappy Bird equipped iPhones are listed for $1,000 to $10,000 on eBay with a few priced above $50,000.

00:10:23.000 An iPhone 5S with the app sold for $10,100.

00:10:27.000 An iPad Air listed at over $80,000 has received multiple bids.

00:10:35.000 eBay nixed the auction of a Flappy Bird equipped iPhone as it neared $100,000, the LA Times reports.

00:10:43.000 $100,000! 0.99

00:10:45.000 $100,000 for a regular phone or a regular iPad that has this stupid game on it. 1.00

00:10:53.000 That's how addicted people are. 1.00

00:10:55.000 Yeah, you should read it.

00:10:56.000 Check out some of the reviews of it.

00:10:58.000 It's pretty entertaining, actually, because these people, they have such a love-hate relationship with it.

00:11:03.000 These 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.

00:11:12.000 They have this perfect kind of addictive relationship with it.

00:11:16.000 And they talk about, you know, this one guy was like, I've lost all my friends. 0.96

00:11:20.000 And it's so dumb because it's this bird who's flying around. 0.91

00:11:23.000 I mean, it's the most trivial thing. 0.98

00:11:27.000 The experience is compelling enough that it has that effect on people. 0.91

00:11:31.000 Until you've played it, it also sounds silly. 0.55

00:11:33.000 That's the thing.

00:11:34.000 When I was playing it, when I landed, after six hours of playing it straight, I remember just being like, what just happened?

00:11:41.000 That makes no sense at all.

00:11:43.000 It's a very powerful experience.

00:11:45.000 I had a serious addiction to a game called Quake for years.

00:11:50.000 The first-person shooter.

00:11:52.000 I had a real problem, like eight to ten hours every day.

00:11:56.000 I had a T1 line installed in my house so that I could play it.

00:12:00.000 I wasn't...

00:12:01.000 I mean, I was gone.

00:12:03.000 And one day I just shut it off.

00:12:05.000 I just stopped playing.

00:12:06.000 I couldn't do it.

00:12:07.000 I realized what was going on.

00:12:08.000 I was tired all the time.

00:12:09.000 I was playing till like 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and then sleeping till like noon and then playing it again.

00:12:14.000 It was really bad.

00:12:16.000 And it's a game that is uniquely addictive because it's so immersive.

00:12:21.000 It's a 3D experience.

00:12:23.000 The sound is 3D and it's very competitive too.

00:12:26.000 So 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.

00:12:38.000 And that's not as addictive as, apparently, World of Warcraft.

00:12:42.000 Is that one of the things that you were saying is the most addictive game?

00:12:46.000 Yeah, I mean, it's been labeled the most addictive experience we can have or we have had that doesn't involve a substance.

00:12:53.000 Really?

00:12:54.000 Yeah, based on just the numbers of players, it's not at its peak anymore.

00:12:58.000 It's been eclipsed by some other experiences.

00:13:01.000 But...

00:13:02.000 At 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.

00:13:13.000 Sometimes, 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.

00:13:19.000 Oh, my God.

00:13:19.000 Just incredibly powerful stuff.

00:13:21.000 Yeah.

00:13:22.000 And what has eclipsed it?

00:13:25.000 I think there are just newer experiences like Fortnite.

00:13:28.000 Fortnite's the really big one.

00:13:30.000 I don't know if it surpassed World of Warcraft.

00:13:33.000 I think World of Warcraft was a more kind of colossal experience, disrupted the world of video game playing more profoundly.

00:13:39.000 But there's also been a big shift in the way we play and who plays video games.

00:13:44.000 You know, historically video games were, you know, I was like you.

00:13:47.000 For me it was Doom.

00:13:47.000 I would play Doom for hours and hours and hours a day.

00:13:50.000 Same developer.

00:13:52.000 Same developer, yeah, just preceded Quake.

00:13:54.000 And, you know, that was typical of gamers.

00:13:58.000 You know, they were often kind of young males, teenage or adolescent age or in their early 20s.

00:14:03.000 And that's really shifted with the advent of the iPhone in particular.

00:14:07.000 So 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.

00:14:20.000 So it's a big shift in who plays games and who spends the most time.

00:14:24.000 It's a big change.

00:14:25.000 Those are the ones that were yelling at their sons just a couple of decades ago was middle-aged women. 1.00

00:14:31.000 You know, get something going with your life.

00:14:32.000 What are you doing?

00:14:34.000 And now they're doing it.

00:14:36.000 When 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?

00:14:55.000 Yes, some version of that, I think.

00:14:57.000 You 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.

00:15:06.000 We don't want something implanted in our brains yet.

00:15:09.000 We're still pretty queasy about that idea.

00:15:11.000 But if you ask people...

00:15:13.000 80% of adults will say that they can reach their phones 24 hours a day without moving their feet.

00:15:19.000 So, they're not physically implanted devices, but they're already basically there.

00:15:25.000 And 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

00:15:55.000 where 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.

00:16:10.000 I think we're all going to be living in our own little universes eventually if things go the way they've been going.

00:16:14.000 Well, 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,

00:16:36.000 artificial intelligence would release a virus.

00:16:41.000 And it would force us to stay inside.

00:16:43.000 It 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.

00:17:13.000 Uh-oh.

00:17:16.000 I've got to say, life in the last decade in particular has got way stranger than fiction.

00:17:23.000 The real world right now, there is so much about it that just seems like it can't be real.

00:17:27.000 If anyone wrote a movie with the script of the last five to ten years...

00:17:31.000 How about the last four here?

00:17:32.000 Or the last four.

00:17:33.000 Let's pick the last four.

00:17:34.000 People would say, yeah, it's nonsense.

00:17:38.000 It's kind of B-grade Hollywood stuff that we're looking at here.

00:17:42.000 But, 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.

00:17:52.000 Instead 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.

00:18:02.000 And one thing that's changed is sentiment towards screens.

00:18:05.000 I think a lot of people are just over it.

00:18:07.000 And 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.

00:18:13.000 Because 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.

00:18:23.000 Whatever's easiest.

00:18:24.000 I don't want to have to speak on the phone.

00:18:26.000 I don't want to have to see people.

00:18:27.000 Let me just send a quick text or an email or WhatsApp or whatever.

00:18:30.000 And 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.

00:18:39.000 And that's...

00:18:41.000 That's been, I think, a shift in the last roughly eight or nine months.

00:18:45.000 I 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.

00:19:03.000 I don't know.

00:19:22.000 If you look at the numbers in terms of human beings, like the average screen time, all that stuff's going up.

00:19:30.000 The use of these things is all going up.

00:19:32.000 And I think there's folks like you that would like to think that we're rejecting it.

00:19:38.000 But I think it's a minority that's rejecting it.

00:19:41.000 I think the majority are embracing it.

00:19:44.000 Yeah, I think that may be true.

00:19:47.000 I mean, I think one of the big drivers of screen time...

00:19:50.000 If 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.

00:19:58.000 That's when they turn to drugs.

00:19:59.000 That's when they turn to alcohol.

00:20:00.000 That's when they turn to all the things that soothe us.

00:20:03.000 And screens do that. 0.94

00:20:04.000 They are a non-substance way to be soothed.

00:20:08.000 That's what happened with me on that flight for six hours.

00:20:12.000 It's what happens when you're on social media scrolling mindlessly, when you're watching tons and tons of videos online.

00:20:16.000 All that sort of stuff is a way of soothing you.

00:20:19.000 And I think people need to be soothed more than ever right now because this is a hard time for a lot of people.

00:20:25.000 It's hard financially.

00:20:26.000 It's hard because you're socially distant from people.

00:20:30.000 It just creates this kind of pool of uncertainty that sits above everything we do.

00:20:35.000 And humans hate that.

00:20:35.000 We don't like uncertainty.

00:20:36.000 We don't like not knowing what's coming around the corner.

00:20:39.000 And not just about the pandemic.

00:20:41.000 I mean, politically, in a lot of different ways, there's a lot of uncertainty right now and for the last while.

00:20:47.000 And when you put people in that state, they're going to turn to screens.

00:20:50.000 I 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.

00:20:58.000 And one of the ways they do that is now the easiest way to do it is to turn to a screen.

00:21:02.000 Have you spent any time at all playing virtual reality games?

00:21:08.000 It's funny.

00:21:09.000 When 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.

00:21:19.000 And he teaches game design.

00:21:22.000 He's designed a number of phenomenal games himself.

00:21:26.000 And he told me something that I found fascinating and I took it on board.

00:21:30.000 I asked him about World of Warcraft and I said, you know, do you enjoy it?

00:21:33.000 What do you think about it?

00:21:34.000 And 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.

00:21:43.000 And I don't have the time to do that.

00:21:45.000 So I just have never even opened the game to play it.

00:21:48.000 It's just not something I want to do.

00:21:50.000 And that's how I have felt about most of those experiences.

00:21:54.000 I did play one virtual reality game.

00:21:56.000 It was with a haptic suit, so it basically fits over you.

00:21:59.000 It was this Ghostbusters game.

00:22:02.000 And I grew up watching Ghostbusters and loved it.

00:22:04.000 So 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.

00:22:13.000 But 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,

00:22:28.000 no food, just do this for 48 hours, it was so incredibly immersive and engaging and interesting, I would have done it.

00:22:36.000 It was amazing.

00:22:37.000 And it wasn't even like...

00:22:38.000 That's not even where we're going with this stuff.

00:22:40.000 This was...

00:22:41.000 You know, step one out of step ten in terms of sophistication.

00:22:44.000 This is the early days.

00:22:45.000 It's only going to get more compelling.

00:22:47.000 Are you aware of Sandbox?

00:22:49.000 Have you ever heard of the company Sandbox?

00:22:51.000 No.

00:22:51.000 Sandbox is a virtual reality game destination.

00:22:55.000 So you go to this place and it's essentially a warehouse.

00:22:58.000 And inside of it they have these arenas set up for games and a series of games that you play.

00:23:03.000 And I play them with my whole family.

00:23:05.000 We put the haptic feedback suits on.

00:23:07.000 Virtual reality helmets. 0.76

00:23:08.000 And you kill zombies.

00:23:09.000 You fight off skeletons on a pirate ship.

00:23:12.000 There's a bunch of games.

00:23:13.000 And it is wild.

00:23:15.000 And you see it and you go, I see where this is going.

00:23:19.000 Like this is, right now, pretty immersive.

00:23:21.000 Pretty immersive.

00:23:22.000 Really, really fun.

00:23:23.000 Very engaging.

00:23:24.000 Exciting to do.

00:23:25.000 But you know for a fact that it's just going to keep getting better and keep getting better.

00:23:30.000 And right now it's insanely addictive.

00:23:31.000 I get so pumped up to do it.

00:23:34.000 I'll go with my family every couple weeks or so, and we get so excited when we're on our way over there.

00:23:39.000 Luckily, it's got a set time.

00:23:41.000 It's a one-hour experience.

00:23:42.000 When it's over, it's over.

00:23:44.000 But my God, you're in it.

00:23:46.000 There'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.

00:23:53.000 It's so exciting.

00:23:54.000 When 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.

00:24:02.000 It's wild.

00:24:03.000 And you know that this is essentially like Doom, right?

00:24:07.000 If you play Doom today, the pixels are enormous.

00:24:10.000 It looks clunky and squarish and blockish.

00:24:13.000 I mean, it's fun still, but it's so crude in comparison to a modern game.

00:24:22.000 You 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.

00:24:32.000 And in this video game, the lighting and the textures and the shadows are so exact.

00:24:38.000 It's so incredible.

00:24:39.000 I think?

00:25:02.000 Yeah, and I mean, it's hard to avoid that, right?

00:25:06.000 That feeling, that excitement that you have as you're about to play.

00:25:10.000 Imagine if that were always available to you at any moment of the day.

00:25:13.000 It'd be hard to resist it.

00:25:16.000 Yeah, I felt the same way about that very brief experience with Ghostbusters, that Ghostbusters game.

00:25:22.000 It was just, there was a level of excitement.

00:25:25.000 And, you know, you used to have to kind of suspend disbelief.

00:25:27.000 Like, 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.

00:25:33.000 And 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.

00:25:43.000 And so you don't have to suspend disbelief at all.

00:25:45.000 The minute you're in that experience, it's there.

00:25:47.000 It's real.

00:25:48.000 It may as well be real.

00:25:49.000 What bothers me is people way smarter than me that aren't worried about it.

00:25:54.000 I had John Carmack on the podcast, who I'm a gigantic fan of.

00:25:58.000 He's the guy who created Doom and Quake and engineered those engines.

00:26:05.000 His take on phones was basically, well, people enjoy them and they make life better.

00:26:11.000 And he just doesn't seem to be worried at all.

00:26:13.000 And, you know, obviously he makes games and he's working with Oculus.

00:26:16.000 He was at the time, at least, working with Oculus, making all these games.

00:26:21.000 And he's also a very disciplined person.

00:26:24.000 So he'll code for 16 hours a day, you know, and he's also...

00:26:29.000 He plays that...

00:26:31.000 There'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.

00:26:38.000 What is that game called?

00:26:39.000 Do you know?

00:26:39.000 I can't remember.

00:26:40.000 I know the game.

00:26:41.000 Yeah, I can't remember what it's called.

00:26:43.000 Beat Saber.

00:26:44.000 Jamie says Beat Saber.

00:26:45.000 But he does it at...

00:26:49.000 We're good to go.

00:27:10.000 Or no, HTC Vive I played it on.

00:27:13.000 And when you play this boxing game, you're squaring off against an opponent.

00:27:17.000 And when you get hit, your screen lights up like you got hit in sparring.

00:27:21.000 And you can maneuver around.

00:27:23.000 So it's actually a workout.

00:27:25.000 You actually move around this person coming at you.

00:27:27.000 And they turn with you to try to meet you.

00:27:29.000 They know where you're standing.

00:27:30.000 And they swing at you.

00:27:32.000 And you can do certain things where it's actually beneficial.

00:27:36.000 You can get some exercise.

00:27:37.000 I've seen...

00:27:39.000 Some of them, they're in engineering now with omnidirectional treadmills.

00:27:44.000 So you have a harness around your waist.

00:27:47.000 You're connected in position on this omnidirectional treadmill so you can go any way you want.

00:27:51.000 And you're running and you're shooting at things.

00:27:54.000 And you get this great workout while you're having fun.

00:27:57.000 So it's not all doom and gloom.

00:28:01.000 No, I totally agree.

00:28:03.000 I think there's a temptation to fall on one end of the spectrum or the other, and I don't think that makes sense.

00:28:08.000 As with most issues in life, you know, there's some nuance that's got to come in.

00:28:12.000 So 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.

00:28:22.000 And the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I think it also varies by the person and what kind of experiences you're having.

00:28:29.000 If 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.

00:28:39.000 If you're someone who's unnaturally disciplined, like John Carmack, then Great.

00:28:46.000 You 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.

00:28:53.000 But, you know, the data don't lie.

00:28:55.000 And the data suggests that the amount of time we're spending in front of screens has gone up dramatically.

00:28:59.000 And when you speak to people about it, they don't say, I'm happy about that.

00:29:03.000 They say, what is going on?

00:29:04.000 Where is all that time going?

00:29:05.000 Yeah.

00:29:06.000 So that, to me, is the most compelling thing.

00:29:09.000 We want to try to work out how do we extract the best and leave behind the worst.

00:29:13.000 With screens, with any kind of technology, with any kind of shift in the world, you always want to try to do that across the population.

00:29:20.000 Find the stuff that's damaging, weed it out, and find the stuff that's useful and try to capitalize on it and emphasize that.

00:29:26.000 I think that's what this project is all about.

00:29:30.000 It's about certainly not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and not trying to roll back to the 1950s here.

00:29:36.000 We want to retain the screens but work out the best way to use them and the best way for us to resist them when we need to do that.

00:29:42.000 Yeah, these Dance Dance Revolution people, they figured out a way how to get something positive out of a video game, right?

00:29:51.000 There's a lot of people that played that game that lost a ton of weight.

00:29:54.000 So there are some things that you could say would be beneficial.

00:29:58.000 Because the game is addictive, but while it's addictive, you're also getting in shape.

00:30:04.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:30:06.000 I mean, there's a good example.

00:30:07.000 So, there's the physical side of it.

00:30:09.000 And then, of course, like the mental experience of being on screens can be very, very positive for us, too.

00:30:14.000 You know, you're learning languages that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to learn.

00:30:17.000 You're being exposed to people and experiences that you couldn't either experience because you live far away from them.

00:30:23.000 I moved to the US in 2004 from Australia, and You know, it's hard to believe.

00:30:29.000 It's only 16 years ago, but this is before YouTube.

00:30:32.000 This is the same year that Facebook came about.

00:30:35.000 I 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.

00:30:42.000 So, 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.

00:30:54.000 Do 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?

00:31:10.000 That 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.

00:31:25.000 I don't worry about humans being replaced as much as I worry about humans becoming just isolated entities.

00:31:31.000 I think humans for all of evolutionary history have always been in groups, in tribes.

00:31:38.000 They've had to come together.

00:31:39.000 They've relied on each other.

00:31:41.000 They've formed coalitions.

00:31:43.000 I 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.

00:31:53.000 And 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.

00:32:03.000 And I also think there are certain critical periods in maturation and development for kids when they learn how to interact with other people.

00:32:10.000 They learn how to, you know, work out the difference between someone being angry and someone being afraid.

00:32:15.000 They 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.

00:32:21.000 You've got to learn that stuff through trial and error.

00:32:23.000 And 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.

00:32:36.000 We used to call humans the social animal.

00:32:39.000 That'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.

00:32:47.000 Yeah, 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.

00:33:03.000 And 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.

00:33:14.000 And then I'm worried that, like you said, most people's phone is never more than an arm's reach away.

00:33:24.000 You wake up in the morning, it's right there by your bedside.

00:33:28.000 People are always constantly checking their pockets when they get up from the dinner table.

00:33:31.000 They always want to have their phone.

00:33:33.000 How long before we let them stick that thing in us?

00:33:35.000 How 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.

00:33:53.000 I 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.

00:34:10.000 I mean, just go back 20 years.

00:34:12.000 Imagine 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.

00:34:27.000 I've been asking this question of thousands of people.

00:34:30.000 I basically asked them from age 13 up to people in their 90s.

00:34:34.000 Would 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?

00:34:42.000 And older adults say, I would rather have a broken phone.

00:34:46.000 But if you ask teens and adolescents, about half of them say, well, they want to bargain with you first.

00:34:51.000 They're like, when I've broken my hand, can I still swipe my phone?

00:34:55.000 But a lot of them will say, I would rather have a broken bone in my hand than a broken phone.

00:34:59.000 Now, 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.

00:35:08.000 And it's going to be worth only a few hundred bucks.

00:35:11.000 People are going to say that.

00:35:12.000 People would say that's crazy.

00:35:13.000 And I think this has been like a long 20-year process of desensitization.

00:35:18.000 You 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.

00:35:29.000 That wasn't good for me.

00:35:30.000 I don't feel happier or better off.

00:35:32.000 So you extrapolate, you look forward.

00:35:35.000 I mean, this is the beginning of an incredibly long road or a tall mountain.

00:35:39.000 We're just at the very base and we're moving upward.

00:35:42.000 And 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,

00:35:59.000 looking at that little square wooden box, looks quaint.

00:36:03.000 We're there.

00:36:03.000 It feels like we're at some destination, but we're on the road and it's still very early on that road.

00:36:09.000 And this is one of the really important reasons, I think, for thinking so carefully about this stuff.

00:36:13.000 Because 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.

00:36:20.000 But I think it's going to affect the whole planet on some level.

00:36:24.000 So it's really important to at least be mindful about the choices we're making.

00:36:28.000 I agree with you every step of the way, but my concern is that it doesn't matter what we're saying here.

00:36:35.000 That this is, like, we are holding a thousand bison as they run towards the cliff. 0.98

00:36:41.000 We're like, guys!

00:36:43.000 There's a cliff, guys behind me, and they're just pushing us back, and we can't stop it.

00:36:48.000 That's what it seems like to me.

00:36:49.000 I agree with everything you're saying, and I bet this is going to resonate.

00:36:53.000 Well, all the people that are listening and watching this right now, they're going to go, yeah, it makes a good point.

00:36:57.000 And then they're going to grab their phone and go, huh, who's calling me?

00:37:00.000 Who's texting me?

00:37:00.000 What's this?

00:37:01.000 What's that?

00:37:01.000 And they're going to get sucked right back into it.

00:37:05.000 Yeah, they will.

00:37:06.000 And this is the kind of eternal problem with this.

00:37:11.000 That...

00:37:13.000 We are up against, I'm sure Tristan Harris said this to you the other day, that we're up against very powerful, impressive foes.

00:37:22.000 They 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.

00:37:39.000 But I do think I'm a little bit hopeful.

00:37:41.000 I'm hopeful because a lot of this is going to depend on, I think, two things.

00:37:46.000 There are kind of top-down influences and bottom-up influences.

00:37:49.000 The bottom-up is grassroots.

00:37:51.000 The fact that we're talking about this is a big step forward from where we were just three or four years ago.

00:37:56.000 So, in 2014, I was preparing to write this book, and some of the people I spoke to about it said, this is a storm in a teacup.

00:38:05.000 No one cares about screens.

00:38:06.000 They're all good.

00:38:07.000 There's nothing to worry about.

00:38:09.000 They were already doing a lot of the same things they're doing now.

00:38:11.000 We just weren't really sensitive to those issues.

00:38:13.000 Now, between 2014 and 2017, when the book actually came out, Sentiment swung dramatically.

00:38:20.000 Suddenly, I'd say millions and millions of people started to care about this issue.

00:38:24.000 And now it's many, many millions, maybe even billions of people who are really paying attention to it.

00:38:28.000 So it's good that at least awareness is there.

00:38:31.000 That's something.

00:38:32.000 That's the first step.

00:38:33.000 And then the top-down influence is...

00:38:35.000 Can you shape how companies use email?

00:38:38.000 You know, like if you can get a lot of the biggest companies to start saying, hey, you know what?

00:38:41.000 Email is kind of destroying the lives of our workers.

00:38:44.000 Maybe we're going to try to institute a policy where when they go on vacation, they absolutely don't have to check email.

00:38:49.000 There 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.

00:39:00.000 So your inbox, the way it looked the day you went on vacation, does not change until you get back from your vacation.

00:39:06.000 So you don't need to check it while you're away.

00:39:08.000 And so that's the top-down influence.

00:39:10.000 And then, you know, the question about whether, you know, it's a really, really hot-button issue.

00:39:14.000 Should governments intervene?

00:39:16.000 Should they start changing the way tech companies operate?

00:39:19.000 Should they legislate how we use these products?

00:39:22.000 For very understandable reasons.

00:39:24.000 I think a lot of people bristle at the idea that governments should get involved.

00:39:27.000 But these are questions.

00:39:28.000 They're open questions.

00:39:29.000 And some of the countries around the world have said, yeah, governments should probably get involved.

00:39:34.000 We should It's not going to fix itself, and it's not going to be fixed by grassroots pressure, by consumer pressure.

00:39:40.000 So we're going to have to do something from the top down, which is how a lot of governments deal with drug issues.

00:39:45.000 They go to the source.

00:39:46.000 I think it's a real problem if you let the government intervene in something just because you think it's addictive.

00:39:51.000 I think if you're dealing with issues of censorship on social media and things along those lines, I think yes.

00:39:58.000 I think the government should probably...

00:40:00.000 They 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.

00:40:09.000 Because this is a private company that has immense influence over the way the world communicates.

00:40:14.000 It'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.

00:40:22.000 You'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.

00:40:32.000 But that's one subject.

00:40:34.000 That's just about free expression and free speech, which is a cornerstone of our democracy, a cornerstone of our culture.

00:40:40.000 But addiction?

00:40:42.000 Like, here's the thing.

00:40:44.000 If you want to be competitive...

00:40:48.000 There's no way you're going to allow emails that come into your inbox to be deleted when you go on vacation.

00:40:55.000 If 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.

00:41:02.000 Because 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.

00:41:13.000 They might go for it in Germany and good luck to you. 0.58

00:41:15.000 But in America, in competitive business practices, I just, I can't imagine that people are going to agree to something like that.

00:41:22.000 And 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.

00:41:33.000 And when you're on vacation, all your emails get deleted. 1.00

00:41:35.000 People are going to go, fuck you. 1.00

00:41:36.000 I need those emails. 1.00

00:41:38.000 What are you, crazy? 0.96

00:41:40.000 Yeah, I don't believe they should do that. 0.99

00:41:43.000 I think that's absolutely absurd.

00:41:44.000 What do you think they should do?

00:41:46.000 When you say the government, like, interview...

00:41:50.000 One thing they could do is they could intervene with protected classes like kids, right?

00:41:54.000 So kids are incredibly vulnerable on screens.

00:41:57.000 A 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.

00:42:11.000 I'm addicted to screens.

00:42:12.000 I'm spending 12 hours a day on them.

00:42:14.000 I want some help.

00:42:15.000 Can you help me?

00:42:16.000 Or 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.

00:42:30.000 So the government might intervene there.

00:42:32.000 I mean, this is the thing about this issue.

00:42:36.000 I've been thinking about it for six years.

00:42:37.000 There is no magic silver bullet.

00:42:39.000 It 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.

00:42:50.000 And there's a chance you're going to miss out on opportunities.

00:42:53.000 No one's going to buy on that.

00:42:54.000 They're not going to say that's fine.

00:42:57.000 And different countries and cultures will have a different balance that they strike.

00:43:01.000 But that's what makes this so difficult, is that In the moment, a lot of us want to be doing these things.

00:43:07.000 We don't want to be deprived.

00:43:08.000 We don't want our immediate liberties to be deprived, our ability to scroll mindlessly.

00:43:13.000 If a government intervened and said, you're not allowed to scroll on your screen, I'd bristle at that and I think most people would.

00:43:19.000 Even if we know that maybe that'll make us more productive and happier in the long run.

00:43:22.000 It's just not what we're looking for from governments.

00:43:26.000 So you asked what I think we should do.

00:43:28.000 I think it's incredibly difficult.

00:43:30.000 It's a really difficult problem.

00:43:32.000 I don't know that there's a very obvious set of solutions.

00:43:36.000 Although 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.

00:43:45.000 It's a difficult problem.

00:43:47.000 And so there, I think we should be open to more, I don't know if extreme is the right word, but more intense interventions.

00:43:53.000 So 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.

00:44:01.000 It's an enormously difficult problem, and there's no clear-cut solution.

00:44:04.000 Do you have a feeling, a sense of almost just – Just futility?

00:44:12.000 What is the point of all this?

00:44:14.000 This is moving in a direction that I can't stop.

00:44:16.000 Maybe you can give out advice that a scant few individuals will act upon.

00:44:23.000 That a small percentage of the people who read your book are going to go, you know what, Adam makes a good point.

00:44:29.000 I'm going to cut back.

00:44:31.000 I'm going to delete all my apps.

00:44:33.000 I'm going to get a flip phone.

00:44:35.000 I'm going to do something.

00:44:37.000 But what percentage are going to do that?

00:44:40.000 It'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.

00:44:53.000 That was my intention.

00:44:55.000 So it's not written as a self-help manual.

00:44:58.000 It's written as a, let me uncover what's going on here, and so you can understand the psychological hooks that are embedded.

00:45:04.000 But as I've been speaking about this to audiences for the last three or four years, Everyone wants a solution.

00:45:11.000 And you're right.

00:45:13.000 There are going to be a lot of people who are just like, I don't care about this.

00:45:16.000 I'm fine.

00:45:17.000 I'm happy.

00:45:18.000 Just leave me alone.

00:45:19.000 And that's fine.

00:45:20.000 But 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.

00:45:32.000 I mean, it varies pretty dramatically.

00:45:34.000 But 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?

00:45:42.000 And most people fall at the top half of the scale.

00:45:45.000 They're at like a six or a seven or an eight.

00:45:47.000 Now they're in front of me, right?

00:45:48.000 So it's possible that that's just what they're saying in that moment.

00:45:51.000 And in fact, when push comes to shove, they're not going to do that much about it.

00:45:58.000 But the solutions that I'll share or the suggestions that I'll share, they're incredibly straightforward.

00:46:02.000 They're things like cultivate a habit where you don't have your phone at dinner time.

00:46:06.000 This is not a high-tech solution to a high-tech problem.

00:46:09.000 It works.

00:46:10.000 I've managed to do this.

00:46:11.000 A lot of the people I know have managed to do it.

00:46:14.000 And even these small interventions, they're very analog.

00:46:16.000 They're just like, put your phone in a drawer for a couple of hours a day.

00:46:19.000 Don't put your phone in the bedroom.

00:46:21.000 That stuff matters.

00:46:22.000 And 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.

00:46:28.000 And 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.

00:46:33.000 If they don't, I'm not a proselytizer.

00:46:36.000 I'm not trying to convert anyone to my view.

00:46:39.000 I just wanted to put this out there and to have people say, oh, yeah, this is a thing.

00:46:43.000 And it seems like people are on board with at least that part of it.

00:46:46.000 But like you and I, they're not sure what to do about it.

00:46:49.000 One 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.

00:46:58.000 There's no distractions.

00:46:59.000 And 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.

00:47:10.000 It's just a conversation.

00:47:12.000 That's all it is.

00:47:13.000 There's no checking the phone.

00:47:16.000 And that is so rare.

00:47:18.000 It's such a strange time where checking a phone becomes one of the most common activities that a person does throughout the day.

00:47:26.000 If 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.

00:47:41.000 And again, like you're saying, 10 years ago, no one would have ever imagined that was the case.

00:47:47.000 Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine there are too many people on the planet who spend more time in conversation than you do.

00:47:53.000 And, you know, there's incredible benefit to that.

00:47:56.000 And most people, when they have those deep conversations with other people, they recognize that benefit, they enjoy it.

00:48:03.000 And 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.

00:48:13.000 It'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.

00:48:22.000 So part of this is to get people to have the experience of what the other side could be.

00:48:27.000 But yeah, you're right.

00:48:29.000 These conversations are rare for most people, and picking up the phone is one of the most common things we do.

00:48:36.000 We spend, on average, the average American adult spends four or more hours a day on a cell phone screen.

00:48:43.000 It's a huge amount of time.

00:48:44.000 And most people can't believe it.

00:48:46.000 Yeah, it's hard to imagine when you look down at that number and you go, what?

00:48:50.000 Because you just think of it in these little tiny chunks.

00:48:52.000 Like, oh, a few minutes here or there.

00:48:54.000 But those few minutes, you know, there's 60 minutes in an hour, they add up quick.

00:48:58.000 Yeah.

00:48:59.000 What was the most disturbing thing when you were researching this and you're looking at all these trends?

00:49:06.000 What was the most disturbing aspect of it for you?

00:49:08.000 If there was a most...

00:49:11.000 There were two.

00:49:12.000 There 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.

00:49:25.000 They'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.

00:49:40.000 I met some of these people and spoke to some of them, and those stories I just found completely shocking.

00:49:46.000 Tell the story about the football player, if you would.

00:49:50.000 Yeah, I mean, he's the one I'm thinking about now.

00:49:53.000 This guy who just...

00:49:56.000 He basically told me he was a very strong student.

00:49:59.000 He 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,

00:50:15.000 played with some other players, and just found that experience amazing.

00:50:19.000 Just incredibly immersive and rewarding.

00:50:22.000 He loved the social aspect of it more than anything.

00:50:24.000 And he felt a sense of obligation, I guess, that, you know, there were people playing at different parts of the world.

00:50:30.000 He was playing with people around the world.

00:50:31.000 And so when it was nighttime where he was, other people would be playing because it was daytime where they were.

00:50:36.000 And so he started to stay up later and later and later.

00:50:40.000 His sleeping hours shrank.

00:50:42.000 And he ended up flunking out of college.

00:50:44.000 This happened twice, actually, because he relapsed after he got treatment.

00:50:47.000 But he flunked out of college.

00:50:50.000 He 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.

00:51:05.000 He told me he didn't use a diaper, and that accounts for the hour a day, but he didn't bathe.

00:51:11.000 And he paid this doorman to bring up boxes of pizza, so that's what he was eating.

00:51:15.000 He was eating basically pizza three times a day.

00:51:18.000 And he was unrecognisable by the end of it.

00:51:20.000 Looked different, bailed out of school.

00:51:23.000 That 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.

00:51:31.000 And there's no substance involved.

00:51:33.000 You 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.

00:51:44.000 Yeah, and the fact that he relapsed too.

00:51:47.000 He got over it, recognized that there was a giant issue, and then the lure of it drew him right back to the computer.

00:51:55.000 Yeah, he went for treatment.

00:51:57.000 He went for a dose of treatment.

00:51:58.000 It was expensive.

00:51:59.000 He was lucky that his family could afford it.

00:52:02.000 He went to this facility just outside of Seattle called Restart.

00:52:08.000 And 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.

00:52:19.000 They expose them to nature.

00:52:21.000 They get them outdoors.

00:52:22.000 They teach them how to play sports.

00:52:24.000 They get them to exercise a little bit.

00:52:27.000 They feed them healthy meals, all this sort of stuff.

00:52:29.000 So he went and he did this for a few weeks.

00:52:31.000 And at the end of it, he thought, okay, I'm going to go back to the life I had before and I'm not going to play this game.

00:52:37.000 I'm not going to play World of Warcraft.

00:52:39.000 And for a while it worked.

00:52:41.000 But 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.

00:52:48.000 And 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.

00:52:56.000 Suddenly it happens all over again, which is what you hear from people who have drug abuse issues as well.

00:53:02.000 You obviously can't just do it one more time.

00:53:04.000 So he had to go back to the facility.

00:53:06.000 Now this time when he finished his treatment, instead of going back to college, he actually stayed out there.

00:53:12.000 He lives and stayed out in Washington State.

00:53:16.000 So he's clean now?

00:53:19.000 Are you still in touch with this guy?

00:53:22.000 He's clean.

00:53:23.000 He's a tremendously successful guy.

00:53:25.000 He's a businessman.

00:53:26.000 He's doing very well.

00:53:29.000 And 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.

00:53:36.000 That seemed to be a huge part of what allowed him to get past it.

00:53:40.000 There'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,

00:54:11.000 like 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.

00:54:23.000 And that somehow or another these games hijacked.

00:54:26.000 Is that accurate?

00:54:27.000 Am I... I find that explanation really compelling.

00:54:31.000 I 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.

00:54:43.000 You know, if you were on a hunt and you decided, oh, no, I'm good.

00:54:47.000 I'm done.

00:54:48.000 It's not going to work out today.

00:54:50.000 You know, if you were that person, you didn't succeed and your ancestors don't, your ancestors Progeny don't exist.

00:54:57.000 There's no one here to speak for you.

00:54:59.000 But 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.

00:55:07.000 The mission's got to be complete.

00:55:09.000 And 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.

00:55:19.000 You open up a loop for me and you don't tie the loop off.

00:55:23.000 Don't tell me half a story.

00:55:25.000 Don't teach me half a skill.

00:55:27.000 Don't tell me to read half a book or watch half a movie.

00:55:30.000 Humans hate that.

00:55:31.000 We all hate that.

00:55:32.000 And it's productive in some contexts when it's good for us to finish what we start.

00:55:37.000 But we're not in prehistoric times anymore.

00:55:41.000 We're not hunter-gatherers in the same way.

00:55:43.000 And so you get these experiences on a screen.

00:55:45.000 Suddenly 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.

00:55:54.000 And suddenly you're playing 14 hours of Candy Crush or 6 hours of Flappy Bird.

00:55:58.000 So I think it is a hijacking experience.

00:56:00.000 Some 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.

00:56:08.000 It's so strange that these traits would translate to flappy bird.

00:56:12.000 It's really weird.

00:56:14.000 It's really weird that these things that would have helped our ancestors survive, they can be hijacked.

00:56:23.000 I'm a runner.

00:56:26.000 I'm not extremely fast.

00:56:28.000 I don't run insane distances, but I find ultra running absolutely fascinating, and I find elite marathon running fascinating.

00:56:37.000 There's no good reason to do an ultra.

00:56:41.000 There are a lot of good reasons that are intrinsic, like the reward.

00:56:44.000 I would love to do one one day.

00:56:47.000 But that is a hijacking in the same way.

00:56:50.000 It's a chip that is in there and it works for us, and it worked for us in prehistoric times.

00:56:57.000 But it doesn't distinguish between the occasions when it's going to work well for us and when it's going to work badly.

00:57:02.000 I mean, it's the same with food, right?

00:57:04.000 That desire for sugar, that craving for sugar, for salt, for fat.

00:57:08.000 If 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.

00:57:19.000 But give people the situation they're in today.

00:57:22.000 They're still operating on those same principles.

00:57:23.000 Their brains are still operating the same way.

00:57:25.000 They're just as attracted to those things.

00:57:26.000 But they have an endless font of foods that are going to give them those things in massive surplus.

00:57:32.000 And that's hugely problematic.

00:57:33.000 It'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.

00:57:43.000 It's a huge part of it.

00:57:44.000 The ultra-marathon running thing is particularly interesting to me because one of my very good friends does it.

00:57:52.000 His name is Cameron Haynes, and he runs these three-day races where they run 240 miles.

00:57:58.000 He did the Moab 240. He's done the Bigfoot race, which is 200 miles.

00:58:04.000 You're going through the mountain, and I think there's...

00:58:07.000 Interestingly enough, he got involved in that because he is a hunter and he wanted to have better endurance to hunt in the mountains.

00:58:16.000 And so he started getting obsessed with running marathons, then ultra marathons, and these crazy multiple day endurance races.

00:58:23.000 But it's literally for him that thing that we're talking about, these ancient traits that allowed persistence.

00:58:31.000 Allow you to be a successful hunter through that persistence and through that dedication and focus and discipline.

00:58:37.000 He's sort of got stuck in this where he's just insane with it.

00:58:41.000 He'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?

00:58:51.000 That was ancient wisdom.

00:58:53.000 Like your body's so broken down after running 26 miles.

00:58:56.000 No, he runs a marathon every day.

00:58:59.000 Have you seen the Sri Chinmoy Challenge?

00:59:02.000 I wrote a piece about ultramarathons at one point.

00:59:05.000 What is it called?

00:59:06.000 It's Sri Chinmoy, S-R-I and then Chinmoy, C-H-I-N-M-O-Y. I've heard that term. 0.99

00:59:15.000 It's this insane...

00:59:17.000 So what you do is you go to Brooklyn.

00:59:20.000 I think it starts in May or June.

00:59:22.000 You go to Brooklyn and there's this little block around a school.

00:59:24.000 It's a nondescript block.

00:59:25.000 There's nothing special about it.

00:59:27.000 And you run 3,100 miles over about 60 days.

00:59:33.000 There's no scenery.

00:59:34.000 I can understand running the Moab.

00:59:36.000 I would love to do the Moab, the Western States, Badwater.

00:59:39.000 I'm very attracted to the idea of doing that, and I can totally understand why that could be a life-changing experience.

00:59:44.000 But running around a half-mile block, thousands of times, 6,000 times I think it is, I struggle to understand that.

00:59:53.000 But 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.

01:00:04.000 It's a city block.

01:00:06.000 It makes no sense.

01:00:07.000 That then just kind of exaggerates that it's all about completing the quest.

01:00:11.000 The only reason people will do that is because there is that part of us.

01:00:14.000 That's an extreme expression of that tendency.

01:00:17.000 But we all have some of that in us.

01:00:19.000 And especially people who are high on conscientiousness, who are kind of tenacious.

01:00:25.000 There's something about that that's really compelling, and it's hard to ignore.

01:00:28.000 Yeah, there's something about completing tasks that gives you this little spark of dopamine, right?

01:00:34.000 Something gets you excited.

01:00:36.000 And the more difficult the task, the better the feeling is when you've completed it.

01:00:42.000 I've never run an ultramarathon, but I got a mat.

01:00:45.000 What is the longest you've ran?

01:00:49.000 I absolutely punished myself running the New York City Marathon 10 years ago.

01:00:53.000 It was hell.

01:00:54.000 I remember I crossed the finish line completely depleted.

01:00:57.000 And 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.

01:01:06.000 I remember crossing the line and this woman put a medal around my neck and she said, how did that feel?

01:01:11.000 And I said, that was hell.

01:01:12.000 I'm never going to run another marathon.

01:01:14.000 She said to me, that's what everyone says, but I'll see you next year.

01:01:17.000 And I've got to say, I have stuck to that.

01:01:19.000 I have never run another marathon.

01:01:22.000 It nearly killed me.

01:01:24.000 Did you just not prepare enough for it?

01:01:26.000 No, I prepared really quite well for it.

01:01:29.000 But what I didn't prepare for was the ordeal of trying to get to the starting line in Staten Island.

01:01:33.000 I mean, it's hell.

01:01:35.000 So I ate my breakfast at, what, 3 a.m.?

01:01:37.000 And then the race begins at something like 9 or 10 in the morning, depending on which wave you're in.

01:01:44.000 And so I had some food with me, but I just didn't budget for that six or seven hour period.

01:01:49.000 So I remember being at the starting line and being absolutely famished.

01:01:53.000 I was starving, which is a terrible place to begin.

01:01:56.000 So I was the guy running along the course just asking spectators if they had food, like mashing bananas in my face.

01:02:02.000 I was...

01:02:02.000 I was just eating constantly throughout that whole race because I was so hungry.

01:02:07.000 So that was my biggest problem.

01:02:08.000 I 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.

01:02:16.000 I do run a lot.

01:02:17.000 I still run pretty regularly around where I live, like between 8 and 12 miles.

01:02:23.000 But the idea of training for another marathon.

01:02:25.000 I also have two young kids.

01:02:27.000 It's just not something I have that much time for right now.

01:02:29.000 Why did you eat breakfast so early?

01:02:32.000 Because that's when I left home.

01:02:34.000 The bus, you had to take.

01:02:35.000 So the way it worked was you had to go uptown.

01:02:37.000 I lived downtown in Manhattan.

01:02:38.000 You had to go and get a bus at 3 a.m.

01:02:40.000 That took, I don't know why it took so long, but it took forever to get to Staten Island.

01:02:44.000 It's cold because it's November in New York.

01:02:47.000 It was just unpleasant.

01:02:48.000 I think the key is to run a marathon that you just show up, you drive your car to the marathon starting line.

01:02:55.000 You get out and you start running.

01:02:57.000 That's what I need to do next time.

01:02:58.000 Because the New York City Marathon is an incredible spectacle.

01:03:01.000 Millions of people watching.

01:03:02.000 It was one of the most fun experiences I had for the first eight of the 26 miles.

01:03:08.000 But then it went downhill.

01:03:10.000 How long did it take you to complete it?

01:03:14.000 It's funny.

01:03:14.000 I trained and I wanted to run a sub-330.

01:03:17.000 And all my training runs had been consistent with that.

01:03:20.000 The day of the race, I could tell by halfway through it just wasn't going to happen.

01:03:24.000 I started running with the guy who's holding the sign that says 3.30.

01:03:31.000 This is a pacer.

01:03:32.000 He said to me, I'm going to run this in 3.29.

01:03:35.000 I said, how can you guarantee that?

01:03:36.000 He was like, well, I can run at 2.16.

01:03:38.000 I should be okay.

01:03:40.000 I started running with him.

01:03:42.000 He just receded into the distance because I couldn't keep up by about mile 9 or mile 10. And then the 3.40 went by and the 3.50 went by.

01:03:50.000 I realized I was staring at four hours.

01:03:52.000 And right near the end of the race, a friend of mine ran on and said to me, you're looking at a 4.01.

01:03:58.000 And I was pissed.

01:04:00.000 I was not happy because I wanted to run a sub-4.

01:04:03.000 I basically said to myself, if you don't run sub-4, you have to do another one.

01:04:06.000 So I ended up just finding some hidden store of energy and ended up running a 3.57.

01:04:13.000 One of the things you talk about in your book is the addiction that people have to fitness devices.

01:04:20.000 To these watches and iPhones and I wear a whoop strap.

01:04:25.000 A lot of people that wear these things, they start counting steps and they start looking at how many calories they've burned.

01:04:35.000 I was in a Sober October contest a couple years back with my friends.

01:04:39.000 We 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

01:05:09.000 a fair assessment?

01:05:10.000 Yeah, that's fair.

01:05:11.000 I've revised my position on this.

01:05:13.000 I 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.

01:05:19.000 We don't exercise enough.

01:05:21.000 So if these devices are pushing us to do more exercise, that's good.

01:05:26.000 But then there are people like you, like me.

01:05:29.000 I am an absolute slave to my Garmin watch.

01:05:32.000 And if I take it with me on a run, it's game over.

01:05:35.000 I 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.

01:05:43.000 You're going to do a slow, long run.

01:05:46.000 And 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.

01:05:53.000 You should probably dial it down to 650 or something like that.

01:05:56.000 And I cannot resist it.

01:05:58.000 So if I want to run and enjoy it, I just can't take the watch with me.

01:06:01.000 So, 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.

01:06:14.000 And 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...

01:06:21.000 You fall in line.

01:06:22.000 I never last more than 10 minutes without looking at my watch and saying, alright, it's time for me to really pick things up a bit.

01:06:29.000 That seems...

01:06:30.000 I get what you're saying, but I feel like...

01:06:36.000 The 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.

01:06:46.000 But you are still dealing with this weirdness, right?

01:06:49.000 You're compelled.

01:06:50.000 You 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.

01:07:06.000 But 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.

01:07:12.000 For sure.

01:07:13.000 Yeah.

01:07:16.000 I totally agree.

01:07:19.000 Sorry.

01:07:20.000 Carry on.

01:07:20.000 No, no.

01:07:21.000 I was just saying, so you've revised your position.

01:07:24.000 You think that sedentary lifestyle is more dangerous.

01:07:27.000 So 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.

01:07:35.000 I think it's more nuanced than that.

01:07:37.000 It's that for someone who's going from zero to exercising, that's great.

01:07:44.000 That's a great thing.

01:07:45.000 And there are more people in that position than there are people who are working too hard.

01:07:48.000 So I think on balance, these devices, if they're getting people off the couch and inspiring more activity, they're great.

01:07:54.000 But 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.

01:08:06.000 So 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.

01:08:11.000 There's nothing inherently wrong with being out at 4am, but it just signals to you.

01:08:15.000 It says something about these devices.

01:08:17.000 It says that what's fueling your drive to exercise is an obsession that's pretty either unhealthy or not driven by...

01:08:24.000 You know, your body telling you you want to run some more.

01:08:27.000 There are days where I'll run in the morning and then by the afternoon I'm just itching to run again.

01:08:31.000 That doesn't happen very often.

01:08:32.000 But 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?

01:08:37.000 But 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.

01:08:43.000 I'd better go out.

01:08:45.000 You're driven entirely by these external cues that are not about well-being.

01:08:49.000 They 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.

01:08:56.000 But 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.

01:09:09.000 And 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.

01:09:26.000 So it hijacks these systems.

01:09:29.000 It's the same hijacking.

01:09:31.000 Yeah, it's that idea that there's a binary.

01:09:34.000 If you think about what it is to be a hunter-gatherer, it's binary.

01:09:37.000 Like if you're chasing some big animal, there is no grey area.

01:09:41.000 You catch the animal and you get food, and your group, your tribe gets food, or you don't catch the animal.

01:09:48.000 And so there is a kind of bright line between success and failing to achieve the goal.

01:09:53.000 And there's no way around that.

01:09:56.000 And so we are predisposed to focus on those goals and to make them these big, bright issues.

01:10:01.000 Like, for me, that four-hour mark with the marathon, if I didn't get under four...

01:10:05.000 I mean, there should be no difference between a 401 and a 400 or a 359. There are tiny differences in the scheme of it.

01:10:12.000 It's like a half a percent or a quarter of a percent difference in time.

01:10:16.000 But it felt to me like this really important milestone.

01:10:19.000 And I think that's what these devices do, is they carve out...

01:10:22.000 The difference between success and failure and make it really bright in a way that it was historically.

01:10:28.000 But don't you think some people need that though?

01:10:32.000 Because otherwise, oh, the good enough.

01:10:34.000 Oh, it's fine.

01:10:35.000 Oh, you're getting out.

01:10:37.000 You're moving.

01:10:38.000 You're fine.

01:10:40.000 Some people need that number.

01:10:42.000 They need a very clear, hard line in the sand in order to push themselves, in order to show what they're actually physically capable of.

01:10:50.000 Yeah, I think most of us do.

01:10:53.000 Self-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.

01:11:01.000 It'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.

01:11:10.000 It's easier to sit on the sofa and watch the TV or use your phone or whatever.

01:11:14.000 We're all going to have that feeling forever.

01:11:17.000 Some of us have enough intrinsic joy for exercising and working out.

01:11:22.000 We kind of cultivate that over time, that it pulls us off the couch.

01:11:25.000 But 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.

01:11:33.000 And that's probably okay.

01:11:35.000 One of the things I write about at the end of the book is we know all this stuff It makes it hard for us to resist social media.

01:11:43.000 It makes it hard for us to resist email, texting, checking the news, all that sort of stuff.

01:11:50.000 We go back to it over and over again.

01:11:52.000 But you could use those same hooks for the good.

01:11:55.000 You could use them or apply them in situations like fitness, where they are mostly things that are good.

01:12:02.000 And fitness is one, eating healthy foods.

01:12:06.000 Things like education, like you could kind of trick kids into learning stuff, trick even my students.

01:12:12.000 Like 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?

01:12:23.000 Use those tools for the good.

01:12:24.000 That's one good thing about the Books app on the iPhone.

01:12:28.000 It'll give you, like, oh, you've achieved your goal of reading X amount of pages per day.

01:12:34.000 So there's one good aspect of being addicted to achieving those goals.

01:12:39.000 Is the ultimate irony being addicted to a meditation app?

01:12:45.000 Yeah.

01:12:47.000 This idea that the solution to tech is tech is more tech is...

01:12:53.000 The important thing for me is that we talk about screens.

01:12:56.000 We say, are you addicted to screens or are you addicted to tech?

01:12:59.000 And that's obviously just the massive gloss on what's going on, right?

01:13:03.000 It's not about being addicted to a screen or tech.

01:13:05.000 No one's going to walk around with a blank iPhone screen and just say, I can't get enough of this device.

01:13:12.000 We're good to go.

01:13:31.000 All of that sort of stuff, more power to you.

01:13:33.000 If you're reading on your phone, people always say, oh, I shouldn't be reading your book on Kindle.

01:13:36.000 I'm like, it's totally fine.

01:13:38.000 It's a screen.

01:13:39.000 Whether you're looking at a page or a screen with writing on it, that's fine.

01:13:43.000 It's not a big difference.

01:13:45.000 The issue is not the screen.

01:13:46.000 It's what you're doing on it.

01:13:47.000 So 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.

01:14:00.000 We 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.

01:14:10.000 I think that's, again, another example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and it seems silly to me.

01:14:16.000 Do 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?

01:14:28.000 Like, so you can give people a framework.

01:14:30.000 Like, this is what you should do.

01:14:32.000 This is what you shouldn't do.

01:14:33.000 This is the way to avoid the traps.

01:14:36.000 Because a lot of what people are doing, it's not even compelling.

01:14:40.000 I 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.

01:14:47.000 But God, a lot of what I look at is nonsense.

01:14:52.000 And I was thinking this one day.

01:14:54.000 I was looking at all these people that were just staring at their phone and scrolling through things.

01:14:59.000 I'm like, imagine if there was no phone, but there was a drug that made you stare at your hands.

01:15:05.000 And just like mindlessly just stare at your hands like a lot of people are doing with their phones.

01:15:10.000 You know, you might be watching some video on nothing.

01:15:14.000 Like to me, I watch a lot of muscle car videos.

01:15:16.000 I'm not getting anything out of that.

01:15:18.000 I'm not getting anything out of that.

01:15:19.000 But I'm watching these, look how pretty, look how shiny, listen to the sound, yeah.

01:15:24.000 I'm not getting anything out of it.

01:15:25.000 I might as well be staring at my hand.

01:15:27.000 If there was a drug that made people just look down and stare at their hand, we would be like, oh my god, these people are under a trance.

01:15:34.000 Look how horrible this is.

01:15:36.000 Yeah, there are people who are kind of puritanical about it.

01:15:41.000 They 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.

01:15:49.000 I think that's nonsense. 0.65

01:15:51.000 I 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. 0.73

01:16:01.000 You 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.

01:16:08.000 I 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?

01:16:14.000 Probably not the best use of my time.

01:16:16.000 Is it going to make me a, you know, an impoverished human being who hasn't reached his goals?

01:16:21.000 No, it's fine.

01:16:22.000 I mean, you don't want to do that all the time.

01:16:24.000 Your question about a framework I think is really an excellent one and it's one that I've thought about a lot.

01:16:29.000 One of the things I've started to do is to work with some school districts and thinking about education curricula.

01:16:37.000 We teach kids good manners.

01:16:39.000 We teach them math.

01:16:40.000 We teach them a lot of things that are actually not at all practical, that they're not going to need when they leave school.

01:16:45.000 But one thing that's incredibly practical today is teach kids about screens, digital hygiene or whatever you want to call it.

01:16:52.000 How do you interact with a screen for the best outcomes?

01:16:56.000 I don't know exactly what that course would look like, but it's something that I think smart people should get together on and figure out.

01:17:02.000 I think it's a very valuable use of kids' time.

01:17:04.000 It doesn't have to be like years of education, but just have a conversation with them about this thing.

01:17:09.000 You know, there's this thing that's probably going to try to eat up hours of your life and amounting to 20 years.

01:17:14.000 Let's talk about what the benefits are, what the costs are.

01:17:17.000 Here are the questions to ask yourself.

01:17:19.000 And for me, that framework, that question, like, I could never tell someone, don't look at Don't use social media.

01:17:28.000 I would never want to do that.

01:17:29.000 It's not my sensibility.

01:17:30.000 It's not the way I think about these things.

01:17:32.000 But what I do think is we should all just ask the question, just kind of audit or interrogate your use of these devices.

01:17:39.000 And if you come away from it and you're like, this is fine.

01:17:42.000 Like, I waste a bit of time, but I live a fulfilled, healthy, happy life.

01:17:47.000 I have good social connections.

01:17:49.000 I'm not spending tons of money on experiences that I can't afford online.

01:17:54.000 If 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.

01:18:01.000 But 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.

01:18:10.000 I 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.

01:18:27.000 There's real issues here.

01:18:29.000 And we weren't even aware of these real issues a decade ago.

01:18:32.000 This is why it's not in the curriculum.

01:18:34.000 I've always been frustrated at the fact that we spend so little time educating children how to think about things.

01:18:42.000 How 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.

01:18:53.000 They're just communication issues and observation issues and just Just cognitive issues.

01:18:59.000 Just the way we view things and problems.

01:19:02.000 And 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.

01:19:16.000 And then this would fall right into place with that.

01:19:20.000 Because 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, 0.92

01:19:36.000 but all this future shit that's coming down the line. 0.52

01:19:39.000 Not the current electronics, but things that we haven't even conceived yet. 0.96

01:19:44.000 Things that we're not aware of that are going to probably be far more immersive than all these current problems we're handling.

01:19:52.000 Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

01:19:53.000 I 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.

01:20:06.000 I mean, I think a lot of what kids are taught is just not useful for them.

01:20:10.000 It's not practical.

01:20:11.000 It doesn't help them think.

01:20:12.000 At least if you're going to teach something that's not practical, make it easier.

01:20:15.000 Teach it in the service of some bigger aim that's really important.

01:20:19.000 It's got to have some value to it.

01:20:22.000 You only have kids in the classroom for a certain amount of time.

01:20:25.000 And I think you're right.

01:20:26.000 The most basic skill is critically assessing yourself and the information in the world around you.

01:20:32.000 And it's a really hard one to learn.

01:20:35.000 And 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.

01:20:45.000 And 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.

01:20:53.000 It's impossible to think about anything objectively and in a kind of canonical true sense anymore.

01:20:59.000 If you could teach kids how to do that, it would be a different world.

01:21:01.000 It would be a different planet.

01:21:04.000 It would be...

01:21:05.000 I think it's an incredibly valuable enterprise, and I think it's something that is worth spending time on and thinking about.

01:21:12.000 And 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.

01:21:21.000 Yeah, I mean, I think it would apply to...

01:21:24.000 Every aspect of a kid's life.

01:21:26.000 It's just such a strange thing.

01:21:27.000 You have to learn that on your own.

01:21:29.000 Out 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?

01:21:37.000 Critical 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.

01:21:56.000 Yeah, 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.

01:22:10.000 These are all, you know, they kind of go against our natural tendencies.

01:22:13.000 We like to do things that are a little bit easier.

01:22:15.000 We, as a species, like not to expend effort that we don't have to expend in general.

01:22:20.000 But there are tremendous benefits that come from doing that with grappling with complexity, with difficulty, actually being really honest about who we are.

01:22:29.000 And it all goes against the grain.

01:22:31.000 So 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.

01:22:42.000 Because 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.

01:22:50.000 How long did it take you to write this book?

01:22:54.000 It took about 15 months.

01:22:56.000 I spent six months doing a lot of the research.

01:22:59.000 I interviewed about 50 or 60 people for it.

01:23:02.000 And then about nine months on and off of writing.

01:23:05.000 And then there was an editing phase back and forth with the editor.

01:23:09.000 Now 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?

01:23:19.000 Is there anything that you wish you had added?

01:23:24.000 Yeah.

01:23:25.000 A lot of it, I think, stands.

01:23:27.000 A lot of the stuff is still true.

01:23:29.000 It holds the same sway with me.

01:23:33.000 I still endorse it.

01:23:35.000 I 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.

01:23:46.000 I tried really hard but didn't get that far in delving with these companies.

01:23:52.000 I couldn't get past a lot of the kind of...

01:23:54.000 There 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.

01:24:01.000 Now when I speak about it, I have a lot of that information.

01:24:04.000 I would have folded it into the book.

01:24:06.000 A lot of it's not in there.

01:24:07.000 I 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.

01:24:14.000 So that's a big part of it.

01:24:16.000 There's not much else really.

01:24:18.000 I have a PhD in psychology and so I'm interested in what makes people tick and how they think.

01:24:24.000 And 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.

01:24:31.000 And that hasn't changed.

01:24:33.000 That's as true as ever.

01:24:35.000 And so I don't feel that I would change anything about that part of the book.

01:24:38.000 What about the business practices of these companies was interesting to you?

01:24:45.000 That they're aware of how addictive all these things are?

01:24:49.000 Yeah.

01:24:50.000 One 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.

01:25:00.000 So, you know, there are two ways to make smart decisions when you're designing a product.

01:25:04.000 The 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.

01:25:15.000 But that's really hit and miss.

01:25:17.000 That's how a lot of video game development worked.

01:25:19.000 And 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.

01:25:31.000 I had a couple that were great successes, but for every two that were successful, there were 10 that weren't.

01:25:35.000 So there's a lot of kind of trial and error.

01:25:38.000 What 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.

01:25:45.000 They don't need to know about that.

01:25:47.000 All they need to do is run this series of trials by combat.

01:25:50.000 So 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.

01:26:01.000 Let's say one of them is through a forest.

01:26:03.000 The other one's identical, you have to do the same thing, but you're going by the ocean.

01:26:07.000 The question is, what effect does that have?

01:26:09.000 And you might discover people will play the mission 10 minutes longer if they're by the ocean.

01:26:13.000 So then you say, okay, we're going to privilege ocean missions.

01:26:16.000 So now we have two versions of the ocean mission.

01:26:18.000 This is round two of the trial.

01:26:20.000 You can either rescue an artifact or you can rescue a person.

01:26:24.000 And people, it turns out, are more interested in rescuing a person.

01:26:27.000 So they'll play for an extra 10 minutes.

01:26:29.000 If you do this, this kind of trial by combat, round after round after round, you're evolving a weaponized version of the platform.

01:26:37.000 So you keep selecting the version that's hardest for us to resist.

01:26:40.000 And if you do that en masse, it ends up shaping the user experience.

01:26:44.000 You end up having features on the platform that are designed to be hard for us to escape from.

01:26:50.000 If you're creating a game, you release the version that's most difficult for us to resist.

01:26:54.000 Now, of course, Forever, people who were writing movies or books or any form of entertainment were trying to do this.

01:27:02.000 They just were much less good at it.

01:27:04.000 What 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.

01:27:13.000 Isn't it also, to compare it to books and movies, it's not a fair comparison because those things end.

01:27:21.000 Yes.

01:27:22.000 That's really where the problem lies, right?

01:27:25.000 Is 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.

01:27:41.000 Like, there's something...

01:27:45.000 I completely understand why they would do that.

01:27:49.000 I mean, it makes sense.

01:27:50.000 You're engineering a game.

01:27:51.000 You would want to make this game the most compelling, the most entertaining, the most engaging possible.

01:28:01.000 But do you think that these companies have a social responsibility for recognizing the fact that they are massively addictive?

01:28:10.000 Do they have an ethical or social responsibility?

01:28:12.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:28:13.000 I think they do.

01:28:15.000 I think the biggest problem, the most broken part of all of this is the incentive model.

01:28:20.000 So all of these platforms pretty much rely on...

01:28:24.000 I'm thinking about Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

01:28:30.000 These platforms require your eyeballs for as many minutes of the day as possible.

01:28:36.000 And every minute that you're not spending on that device, you're spending minutes doing other things.

01:28:40.000 That is a loss.

01:28:41.000 They conceive of that as a loss.

01:28:43.000 And it is because it means that they're less capable of attracting advertising dollars, and that drives the whole model.

01:28:49.000 That is a broken model.

01:28:50.000 It's a terrible model because it privileges extracting minutes of time over delivering well-being.

01:28:56.000 Now, historically, products were largely...

01:28:59.000 If I made a great product, like when you played...

01:29:03.000 I think you said it was Quake, right?

01:29:04.000 Was it Quake?

01:29:05.000 Yeah.

01:29:05.000 When 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.

01:29:14.000 I think that was just...

01:29:15.000 You know, that was designed to deliver a phenomenal A-plus, top-class experience.

01:29:20.000 And when you speak to the video game developers, there's a purity to it.

01:29:24.000 You 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.

01:29:34.000 That's gone.

01:29:35.000 This is not about making us happier, giving us a good experience, an experience that we're willing to part with our money for.

01:29:40.000 It's all one big kind of heist.

01:29:42.000 They're trying to trick us.

01:29:43.000 They're trying to basically get us to part with our time and therefore with our money.

01:29:48.000 And yes, there's an ethical responsibility.

01:29:50.000 I 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.

01:29:59.000 Let's say they're spewing crap into the waterways and into the air.

01:30:03.000 That's something that, you know, for the last 25, 30 years or so, the government has said, you know, that's not okay.

01:30:08.000 We're going to penalize you for that.

01:30:10.000 I'm not suggesting they do exactly the same thing with tech companies, but there is an externality.

01:30:14.000 These companies are making billions of dollars.

01:30:16.000 The externality is not that they're poisoning their waterways and the air, but they're changing how we live our lives.

01:30:21.000 And I'd argue in many ways for the worse.

01:30:24.000 Do you think a warning label would have the same sort of effect that a warning label has on cigarettes?

01:30:30.000 It doesn't really matter.

01:30:32.000 When they put those cancer labels on cigarettes, people that smoke cigarettes already know it causes cancer.

01:30:38.000 I don't think it stops anything or helps them at all.

01:30:42.000 Warning labels are toothless.

01:30:43.000 They only work if you don't know, if they're educating you.

01:30:47.000 And everyone knows.

01:30:48.000 Everyone knows about cigarettes.

01:30:49.000 I mean, fighting tobacco addiction is really difficult, both with smokers and with young people who are thinking about smoking.

01:30:55.000 It's going to be the same with these devices.

01:30:57.000 I think no one needs...

01:30:59.000 Well, maybe there's slightly more room to educate people about these things with respect to screen time and what we're doing on screens.

01:31:06.000 But most of us know this stuff, and warning labels don't do much.

01:31:11.000 I agree.

01:31:12.000 So what could they do?

01:31:16.000 You're not going to have them hamstring themselves and make a game that's less addictive.

01:31:22.000 Let's propose they reverse engineer what they've done and do it the opposite way.

01:31:28.000 Going towards the ocean makes people play more so we're going to go to the woods.

01:31:33.000 Rescuing a person makes you play more, so you will rescue a gem.

01:31:38.000 They're going to choose the least addictive out of all of these paths.

01:31:42.000 Then you're going to be non-competitive with the people that are engineering games that are going to choose the most addictive.

01:31:49.000 So then it's almost like everyone's agreeing to make the shittiest game possible because that's the only way people can not be addicted.

01:31:57.000 It's true.

01:31:58.000 I 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.

01:32:09.000 I think, as I said, the model is broken.

01:32:13.000 If 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.

01:32:23.000 It 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.

01:32:33.000 That's obviously difficult to do in practice, but a lot of industries work that way.

01:32:38.000 It 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.

01:32:48.000 And the consumer is the big industry of companies that are buying ads on those platforms.

01:32:54.000 So, you know, the reason they're free is because they need our eyeballs.

01:32:59.000 But you could imagine an alternate universe where you had to pay a small annual fee to use these products, but there was no advertising.

01:33:07.000 And 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.

01:33:14.000 And 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.

01:33:25.000 But I mean, I've been thinking about this for, it's now six or seven years, and I'm just as exasperated.

01:33:34.000 And that's why I think a lot of the focus now has to be on the individual consumer.

01:33:37.000 If 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.

01:33:45.000 But working at the level of the tech companies is really, really difficult.

01:33:49.000 I like how honest you're being about it because you can be exacerbated.

01:33:56.000 There's no way you're going to say, oh, I found the solution.

01:34:01.000 The thing is too big.

01:34:02.000 So 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,

01:34:18.000 this is the path forward as a healthy culture, no one is going to be able to figure it out.

01:34:24.000 If 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...

01:34:42.000 What do you think is going to happen?

01:34:43.000 Take away what you want, and if you've got to be really honest, what do you think is happening with us?

01:34:49.000 I think we're making inroads in that we're chipping away at the problem in little ways.

01:34:53.000 I 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?

01:35:03.000 What is the one big thing we can do that would reverse this whole thing?

01:35:05.000 That I don't see happening.

01:35:08.000 I'm pretty pessimistic about it.

01:35:10.000 I think the big change is I can't predict what the government's ultimately going to do around the world.

01:35:15.000 There may be more government intervention.

01:35:17.000 I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing ultimately.

01:35:20.000 Depends on the nature of it.

01:35:22.000 But I do think consumers are getting more savvy.

01:35:24.000 So 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.

01:35:33.000 I can't get my kids off devices.

01:35:35.000 But there's been this weird shift where now kids are coming to me and saying my parents won't get off their devices.

01:35:41.000 And it's starting to affect older people.

01:35:44.000 And the younger people seem to have worked out ways of managing their lives more effectively than older adults can.

01:35:50.000 So 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.

01:36:03.000 Give them 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years, they're going to be the leaders of everything, basically.

01:36:12.000 Industry, the leaders in a political sense, they will be savvy about this in a way that we are not.

01:36:18.000 We were caught in this kind of no-man's land.

01:36:20.000 This thing was visited upon us.

01:36:22.000 You and I are part of a generation that straddled these two worlds.

01:36:25.000 People who are much older than us are still kind of coming to terms with the situation.

01:36:30.000 But, you know, there's a group of kids now who are probably 12, 13, 14, 15, who have never known anything different.

01:36:36.000 And they're going to get older and older and older.

01:36:38.000 Having learned ways to cope, it'll be the kind of native world in which they grew up.

01:36:43.000 I am hopeful that they will be more mindful about this stuff.

01:36:47.000 They 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.

01:36:54.000 And 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.

01:37:02.000 God, I hope you're right.

01:37:04.000 I don't think you are, though.

01:37:08.000 I'm a romantic about this stuff.

01:37:10.000 You know, I try.

01:37:11.000 Well, I appreciate that.

01:37:12.000 I love optimists.

01:37:13.000 I subscribe to the Elon Musk notion.

01:37:17.000 There'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.

01:37:29.000 My real concern is that what we are is some sort of An electronic butterfly that's building a cocoon.

01:37:37.000 We're a caterpillar.

01:37:39.000 We're building a cocoon and we don't even know what we're doing.

01:37:42.000 We're just immersed in consumerism and buying the latest, greatest laptop and iPhone and all these different things.

01:37:49.000 But 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.

01:37:57.000 Or at least make us become one with it so that we avoid becoming obsolete.

01:38:04.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, the ultimate problem for us is that we prize ease, comfort, Well-being, happiness over all else.

01:38:14.000 And so give us something that will help us do that and we will be like mindless animals that don't actually have a brain.

01:38:20.000 And we'll keep moving in that direction.

01:38:21.000 And there are certain drives that will keep pushing us in that direction.

01:38:25.000 And if you can meet them with screens, then we'll say, you know, that's fine.

01:38:28.000 I'll sell my soul.

01:38:29.000 I'll sell the species and sell the long-term, you know...

01:38:33.000 The long-term survival of humanity for that, and that's where we are.

01:38:37.000 I 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.

01:38:51.000 I basically believe it.

01:38:52.000 I mean, it's as absurd as what's actually going on in the world right now.

01:38:56.000 It's not much different in terms of the actual impact that it has.

01:39:01.000 Well, staring at your hand might actually be better.

01:39:04.000 Because if you stared at your hand, you wouldn't have all the social anxiety that particularly kids have.

01:39:10.000 Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind, paints a particularly disturbing portrait.

01:39:16.000 I think?

01:39:34.000 Depiction 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.

01:39:58.000 Yeah, so I know John well.

01:40:01.000 He's also at NYU where I teach and I know his work.

01:40:05.000 We've talked quite a lot about these issues.

01:40:07.000 I think that people always say, what's the biggest problem with these screens?

01:40:10.000 And 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.

01:40:26.000 I know you, I think you have a daughter, is that right?

01:40:31.000 I have three daughters.

01:40:33.000 You have three daughters, yeah.

01:40:34.000 So I have one daughter and a son.

01:40:36.000 They're very young still.

01:40:37.000 But I think a lot about these issues and what do I want to do to try to encourage them not to be in this position as they grow up.

01:40:47.000 And that to me is the biggest concern.

01:40:49.000 I think John is right to focus on those issues.

01:40:51.000 I think getting them involved in physical activities that don't involve cell phones is important too.

01:40:56.000 Like one of my daughters was really into gymnastics and the other one is into basketball. 0.69

01:41:02.000 And to get them into things that are physical that they have to do.

01:41:06.000 Like you have to do a task.

01:41:08.000 There's a thing that you have to do physically.

01:41:11.000 Yeah.

01:41:13.000 Yeah, I think physical activity is huge.

01:41:16.000 You know, just exposing them to the things that are so hard to be exposed to naturally today.

01:41:19.000 So they'll all end up finding screens, but what they won't end up finding is, you know, hikes, team sports, all that sort of stuff.

01:41:27.000 I think I agree with you.

01:41:29.000 It doesn't have to be a team sport, but just using your body physically.

01:41:34.000 I take my kids, as I said, they're really young, but I take them to this little park.

01:41:39.000 Well, it's quite a big park.

01:41:41.000 It's like a national park around by the water.

01:41:43.000 And so they see the ocean and they see a little beach and they see trees and they climb on logs and all that stuff.

01:41:50.000 The stuff that I used to do as a kid that was very natural in the 80s that's just not available in the same way that they're now.

01:41:55.000 And that's very purposeful.

01:41:57.000 I mean, I think you've got to be a bit retro in the kinds of things you expose people to when they're young.

01:42:04.000 Well, 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.

01:42:14.000 You're really kind of on your own.

01:42:17.000 Like, I grew up without the internet.

01:42:19.000 The internet came around when I was an adult.

01:42:22.000 And 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.

01:42:32.000 And 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.

01:42:46.000 There's no precedent that's been set.

01:42:49.000 There isn't.

01:42:49.000 We're the first generation of parents to have to deal with this, and that makes it especially tricky.

01:42:53.000 There's no common wisdom there.

01:42:56.000 Older adults certainly have no idea how to cancel us on this.

01:43:00.000 And I think that does make it extremely tricky.

01:43:02.000 We're all flying by the seat of our pants.

01:43:04.000 Which is why I think focusing on this issue is really important.

01:43:07.000 So, you know, there are areas of this, as we've said, that you can't really touch.

01:43:11.000 Like, I think tech companies are going to keep making billions of dollars.

01:43:14.000 There's a continued arms race.

01:43:16.000 That's not going to change.

01:43:17.000 They're all going to push as hard as possible to extract every spare minute.

01:43:20.000 But the other side of this is, I think, the much more human side, which is, How do you help your kids stay out of trouble on screens?

01:43:27.000 How do you prevent bullying?

01:43:29.000 How 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?

01:43:36.000 And that stuff, I think, is where we, people who write about this and think about it, can make real inroads.

01:43:42.000 And that seems really important.

01:43:43.000 I 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.

01:43:58.000 What has changed for you from studying this and writing this book?

01:44:02.000 What has changed with the way you interface with technology?

01:44:07.000 And what steps have you gone through to alleviate some of these problems in your own life?

01:44:13.000 The biggest thing for me is really just very basic analog interventions.

01:44:19.000 So what I mean by that is Physical distance and time are the biggest things.

01:44:24.000 So I track my time and how much I use my screen.

01:44:28.000 And I make sure that I have certain parts of the day where I religiously and consistently don't have a phone nearby.

01:44:34.000 If I have a phone within reach, I'm going to be thinking about it all the time.

01:44:39.000 There's no way around that.

01:44:40.000 And I'll probably reach for it.

01:44:41.000 So 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.

01:44:49.000 The answer for me was...

01:44:51.000 Pretty much the whole day.

01:44:53.000 It was by my bedside.

01:44:55.000 Wherever I was, it was there.

01:44:56.000 So one of the things I've done is we have a little box near our kitchen where we have our dining table.

01:45:02.000 We put our phones there when we're having dinner.

01:45:05.000 So there are never phones around physically when we're having dinner.

01:45:08.000 That's true at any kind of meals where possible.

01:45:13.000 I try to keep my phone out of the bedroom.

01:45:16.000 So I have an alarm.

01:45:17.000 I have this little watch that I wear that has a vibrating alarm on it.

01:45:20.000 It doesn't really have much of a screen on it.

01:45:21.000 It just vibrates when it's time for me to wake up.

01:45:24.000 So when I'm in bed, I have absolutely no screens around.

01:45:27.000 And that's been really helpful.

01:45:29.000 Because I think the worst thing is when you wake up in the night, you roll over, you pick up your phone, and it's like instant jet lag.

01:45:35.000 You're basically signaling to your brain that it's daytime.

01:45:38.000 And that's incredibly damaging.

01:45:40.000 So those are the two biggest things.

01:45:42.000 I also have done a number of things that defang the device itself.

01:45:47.000 So 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.

01:45:55.000 That's been very helpful for me.

01:45:57.000 So I've done that.

01:46:00.000 The 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.

01:46:11.000 One 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.

01:46:19.000 And I just, I screw the whole thing up.

01:46:22.000 Like I'll put them in different places, make it hard to find them.

01:46:26.000 And 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.

01:46:34.000 But if what you're trying to do is short-circuit the process of getting into that loop, it's actually very effective.

01:46:40.000 One other thing that a lot of people talk about is there's a black and white mode on your phone.

01:46:44.000 It's called grayscale, I think.

01:46:45.000 Grayscale mode.

01:46:47.000 And the whole experience, it's still a utility.

01:46:51.000 Like, the best things about these phones are, you know, the maps, all the stuff that you get from them are utilities.

01:46:55.000 You still have that.

01:46:57.000 But 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.

01:47:06.000 Do you use that?

01:47:09.000 I have.

01:47:10.000 I'm colorblind.

01:47:11.000 Really?

01:47:12.000 Yeah, I am.

01:47:13.000 I'm not profoundly like.

01:47:15.000 I 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.

01:47:26.000 And that was one of the anecdotes in the book.

01:47:28.000 So I called the book Drunk Tank Pink.

01:47:29.000 And people always used to say to me, does that affect work on you?

01:47:33.000 I mean, I really, I don't know, because I can't really see these colors.

01:47:37.000 So I don't have the same response.

01:47:40.000 Like, I confuse a lot of the colors.

01:47:41.000 And so the color feedback that would be really, like, intense for you on a phone, it's mostly lost on me.

01:47:47.000 I can't tell the difference between reds, browns, greens, oranges.

01:47:51.000 They all look basically, like, fall for me is confusing.

01:47:54.000 Everything's just gray.

01:47:55.000 Really?

01:47:56.000 Yeah, it's weird.

01:47:57.000 But that's funny because you're saying grey, like you recognize grey as a colour.

01:48:01.000 How old were you when you realized you were colourblind?

01:48:06.000 So 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,

01:48:21.000 and You know, the blue sky.

01:48:23.000 I learned very quickly what colors things were supposed to be.

01:48:26.000 And so for the first few years of my life, I wasn't seeing those colors, but I knew what colors I was supposed to be seeing.

01:48:32.000 And so it looked like I was learning my colors.

01:48:34.000 So what do you see?

01:48:36.000 So, 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.

01:48:47.000 And I was old enough to know.

01:48:48.000 And so they took me to an optometrist and And he administered this test.

01:48:52.000 I'm sure you've seen these before.

01:48:53.000 They're called the Ishihara dot tests.

01:48:56.000 And you see all these dots, and you're supposed to see a number if you can see normal color.

01:49:02.000 But they're very clever tests, because a lot of people say they're colorblind when they aren't.

01:49:05.000 Like, 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.

01:49:12.000 These tests are brilliant, because if you are colorblind, you will see a number that people who have proper vision cannot see.

01:49:21.000 And so you can't just say, I can't see anything.

01:49:23.000 You can't fool the test administrator.

01:49:28.000 So what happened was I did this test.

01:49:30.000 There it is.

01:49:31.000 I can't see anything.

01:49:32.000 That actually just looks like dots to me.

01:49:33.000 Really?

01:49:34.000 But yeah, some of them I can see a number.

01:49:37.000 But hold on a second.

01:49:38.000 If that's the case, wouldn't that be that it would be easy to fake?

01:49:43.000 Because I can see a number.

01:49:45.000 So the problem is they have to be the exact right colors.

01:49:48.000 So they're in these booklets.

01:49:50.000 You can do it on screens.

01:49:51.000 If you pull one up, the contrast and the colors are correct.

01:49:56.000 I will see a number that you won't see.

01:49:58.000 Okay, so we're looking at one here.

01:50:00.000 This to us looks just like...

01:50:03.000 Oh, it's 12. Oh, so you can see that and I can't.

01:50:09.000 Wait a minute.

01:50:09.000 Let me see that again.

01:50:11.000 That looks like a 3 to me.

01:50:12.000 Do you see a 3?

01:50:14.000 Yeah, I do see a 3. I see an 8. I see an 8 on that one.

01:50:18.000 There you go.

01:50:19.000 There you go.

01:50:19.000 So you see an 8, I see a 3. If I said to you, I can't see a number there, they would say to me, you're faking.

01:50:27.000 But what happened when I did the test and I saw all these numbers, I was like, I guess I'm not colorblind.

01:50:31.000 And I got to the end of it and the guy was like, you've seen all the numbers that colorblind people see.

01:50:36.000 Like where you would have seen a 12, I'll see an 18. And I'll be confident that I'm getting the right answer. 0.82

01:50:42.000 So it's a really clever test.

01:50:45.000 Is this an inherited trait?

01:50:47.000 Yeah, my grandfather on my mom's side was.

01:50:50.000 And what happens is he passes it down to his daughter who carries this trait, but most women don't actually express it.

01:50:58.000 But then 50% of her sons, if she has sons, will be colorblind.

01:51:02.000 My brother is not colorblind.

01:51:03.000 And I am colorblind.

01:51:05.000 So now I have a daughter.

01:51:06.000 If she has sons, they have a 50% chance of being colorblind.

01:51:09.000 Wow.

01:51:10.000 So do you let your wife dress you? 0.90

01:51:13.000 Yeah, but I'd probably do that anyway.

01:51:17.000 Because you wouldn't match things correctly, right?

01:51:20.000 Wouldn't that be the idea?

01:51:21.000 Or you would do it by shade?

01:51:24.000 Yeah, I would.

01:51:25.000 I'm just...

01:51:26.000 For colours, I mean, I've made some horrific colour decisions.

01:51:29.000 Actually, 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.

01:51:37.000 I had no money and I wanted to get some cheap business shirts.

01:51:41.000 So I went to this store and I had this bargain bin of shirts and there was just this huge array of white shirts.

01:51:48.000 So I was like, it was like 10 for a hundred bucks or something.

01:51:50.000 So I got 10 of them, like had a full wardrobe of white shirts, thought that that's all I needed.

01:51:55.000 Turns out they were pink, and I had no idea.

01:51:58.000 So 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.

01:52:05.000 And at the end of the semester, the comments were like, was this an experiment?

01:52:09.000 Why did the professor come in pink every time?

01:52:11.000 So the only thing they focused on after a semester of teaching was, what's going on with the pink?

01:52:15.000 So yes, it's important that I let my wife dress me. 0.82

01:52:19.000 That's hilarious.

01:52:20.000 It's also such a strange statement.

01:52:22.000 We have a weird thing with pink.

01:52:24.000 I don't understand why pink is such a polarizing color with men.

01:52:29.000 I've never had it explained to me correctly that there's this one color that represents girls.

01:52:35.000 There's no one color that represents maybe blue, but girls wear blue all the time.

01:52:41.000 And no one thinks anything of it.

01:52:44.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:52:45.000 I agree.

01:52:45.000 I 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.

01:52:57.000 And until about 50 years ago, pink was associated with youth, with young people, with being a teenager or a young person.

01:53:04.000 It had no gender association.

01:53:06.000 What happened?

01:53:08.000 I don't know.

01:53:09.000 No 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.

01:53:19.000 It's true, though. 0.82

01:53:19.000 It is the only color that has that strong a gender association. 0.82

01:53:23.000 And it's very strong.

01:53:24.000 Very strong.

01:53:25.000 Very strange.

01:53:26.000 What is it like for you when you looked at...

01:53:28.000 Did you see that internet meme where it was a dress and people couldn't figure out whether it was...

01:53:35.000 What was it like?

01:53:35.000 Gold and black or blue?

01:53:38.000 What were the colors?

01:53:39.000 Do you remember what they were supposed to be?

01:53:42.000 I think it was blue and black and gold and white.

01:53:45.000 Something like that, maybe.

01:53:47.000 What did you see?

01:53:50.000 That worked for me.

01:53:51.000 I did see one of them and I was very firm about it and angry with people who disagreed, which I think is just another way to polarize us.

01:54:00.000 I think I saw the darker one, whatever the darker one was.

01:54:04.000 I didn't see white.

01:54:05.000 I couldn't see that.

01:54:06.000 I just saw, I think it was black and maybe gold.

01:54:08.000 There are a few of these that have come through now.

01:54:10.000 They do work on me because that's really about tone.

01:54:13.000 That's not as much about hue, the specific colour.

01:54:16.000 So I'm good with tone.

01:54:18.000 I'm very good at distinguishing tone.

01:54:20.000 But when you give me a colour...

01:54:21.000 So everything I wear is pretty much either blue, black, white or grey because the only colour I can see very well Is blue.

01:54:30.000 The way I see blue is pretty similar to how you see it.

01:54:32.000 The way I see most other colors is kind of washed out and I don't have a good sense of it.

01:54:39.000 Oh, so some people, there's varying degrees of color blindness.

01:54:43.000 It's not as simple as you're color blind, like you just color blurry.

01:54:48.000 No.

01:54:50.000 Yeah, it's basically like that.

01:54:51.000 So there are different kinds of colorblindness.

01:54:54.000 Basically, there's a problem with the cones in your eye which pick up color, and there are three cones.

01:54:59.000 There's one that's sensitive to red, one that's sensitive to green, and one that's sensitive to blue.

01:55:04.000 And depending on which ones are malfunctioning, and for me, I think it's the green ones, you get a different kind of colorblindness.

01:55:13.000 There are different forms of it.

01:55:14.000 So some people really struggle with blue and yellow.

01:55:16.000 I can see those two and distinguish between them pretty perfectly.

01:55:20.000 My big issue is much more common.

01:55:22.000 The most common kind of colorblindness is red-green.

01:55:24.000 I have red-green, which also means browns and oranges and some other similar colors.

01:55:29.000 And somehow blue kind of escaped for me.

01:55:32.000 So my ability to see blue is untouched mostly.

01:55:36.000 And that's why I like to wear blue because I can see it.

01:55:39.000 Also, it's my favorite color.

01:55:40.000 It's the only one that's bright for me.

01:55:42.000 So 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.

01:55:59.000 Yeah, sure.

01:56:00.000 My first job was I worked at Sony in a retail store that sold Sony equipment.

01:56:05.000 And I struggled to sell TVs when they were kind of the best, most expensive...

01:56:10.000 I could tell people stuff, but I couldn't see it myself.

01:56:13.000 It was kind of wasted on me.

01:56:15.000 I could see the definition, but I could never get the sense of the color.

01:56:18.000 And they started to...

01:56:19.000 This is in the early 2000s.

01:56:20.000 They were really pushing this idea of realistic, rich, bright, vibrant colors.

01:56:25.000 Totally lost on me.

01:56:27.000 So when you watch a movie like Avatar, you just see this sort of gray mess?

01:56:34.000 Avatars, 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.

01:56:42.000 Maybe it's still washed out compared to what you see.

01:56:44.000 But take anything subtle, like look at a real world landscape.

01:56:49.000 You'll see trees in the fall and you'll see this wash of colours.

01:56:54.000 You'll get some oranges and reds and greens and browns.

01:56:57.000 People describe it to me as the most incredible experience to see that if you're in the right part of the country.

01:57:02.000 I've never experienced that.

01:57:05.000 I've been taught that leaves are green and then at some point they fall off the tree.

01:57:09.000 So I know that, but I really do struggle to see the variations.

01:57:15.000 The one color I can usually see is yellow because it's lighter, but if the intensity of the hue is the same, it's lost on me.

01:57:21.000 Is there a treatment for that or some sort of proposed treatment?

01:57:26.000 There are these incredible glasses.

01:57:28.000 You can check them out.

01:57:29.000 I think they're called Enchroma.

01:57:31.000 E-N-C-H-R-O-M-A. And they help some people, but not everyone. 0.99

01:57:37.000 But there are videos online of people who are colourblind getting Enchroma glasses as a gift.

01:57:43.000 They're expensive.

01:57:43.000 They're a few hundred bucks.

01:57:45.000 And you put them on, and it's supposed to make it so that you're seeing the world through the eyes of someone who isn't colorblind.

01:57:52.000 So you get these videos online now of people getting their glasses for the first time.

01:57:56.000 Like a dad will get the gift from his son or daughter, and he'll put them on, and he will break down in tears.

01:58:03.000 I'm watching it right now.

01:58:05.000 I'm seeing it right now, a guy doing it.

01:58:07.000 There you go.

01:58:08.000 I mean, it's emotional.

01:58:10.000 It's like having this...

01:58:14.000 Faculty suddenly visited upon you later, very late on in life.

01:58:18.000 So I bought one of these.

01:58:20.000 I actually got in touch with one of the companies and I asked them if they would send me a trial pair.

01:58:25.000 It didn't have any effect for me.

01:58:26.000 It doesn't work for everyone.

01:58:28.000 I was pissed.

01:58:30.000 But there's nothing medically they can do?

01:58:33.000 There's nothing gene therapy?

01:58:35.000 No.

01:58:36.000 Maybe 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.

01:58:44.000 I don't know the exact terms, but the cones themselves are just malfunctioning.

01:58:49.000 So there's no surgery.

01:58:51.000 There's nothing.

01:58:52.000 It's a really kind of fundamental deficiency.

01:58:56.000 And this is 10% of men.

01:58:58.000 It's not a tiny part of the population.

01:59:01.000 10%?

01:59:01.000 Really?

01:59:02.000 I had no idea.

01:59:03.000 It's 1% of women and 10% of men. 0.53

01:59:06.000 Wow.

01:59:07.000 So if there is any benefit, it would be that you're not as compelled to look at screens.

01:59:13.000 That's right.

01:59:14.000 That is one of the upsides.

01:59:16.000 And I really do feel that.

01:59:17.000 I mean, I don't enjoy the experience of looking at screens the way I think a lot of people do.

01:59:23.000 I just don't...

01:59:24.000 I don't get much from it.

01:59:26.000 I get much more from the experience, but not as much from the screen itself.

01:59:30.000 I was going to ask about the colorblind mode in video games.

01:59:33.000 Is that something that's helpful to you?

01:59:34.000 Do you see what we see, or are you seeing blood that would appear red here then?

01:59:40.000 Yeah, 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.

01:59:50.000 And 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.

01:59:58.000 So 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.

02:00:07.000 So that helps people like me.

02:00:10.000 I don't walk around constantly saying, I don't know what color that is, I don't know what color that is, I don't know what color that is.

02:00:15.000 I may not be seeing it the way it actually is, but my brain thinks I am.

02:00:20.000 We're looking at this screen right now of this video game.

02:00:23.000 Is this Doom?

02:00:24.000 Yeah, I just picked Doom because you guys were talking about it earlier.

02:00:26.000 And it's the new version of Doom.

02:00:28.000 And it's a colorblind version of it.

02:00:31.000 It looks the same to me.

02:00:33.000 It looks the same.

02:00:34.000 Yeah, it doesn't look weird.

02:00:35.000 Okay, so this is just how you see everything.

02:00:38.000 This is sort of like a yellowish hue.

02:00:42.000 Yeah, 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.

02:00:51.000 Red's usually the best way to do it. 1.00

02:00:53.000 So if I look through red cellophane, like I took transparent red from those old 3D glasses.

02:01:00.000 When 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.

02:01:13.000 Wow.

02:01:26.000 Well, I'm sorry to hear that, man.

02:01:29.000 Thanks.

02:01:29.000 I've never known anything else.

02:01:31.000 I'm good.

02:01:32.000 Well, you seem very happy.

02:01:34.000 But listen, thank you for being here.

02:01:36.000 Thanks for writing the book.

02:01:38.000 I really, really enjoyed it, although it's very sobering.

02:01:41.000 And again, it seems like at the end of it, it seems like there's no real solution.

02:01:47.000 But I think that Taking personal steps to mitigate some of the issues that we talked about today is what really everyone needs to do.

02:01:58.000 Yeah, I think that's right.

02:01:59.000 Yeah.

02:02:00.000 Well, thanks very much for having me.

02:02:01.000 I appreciate it.

02:02:02.000 My pleasure.

02:02:02.000 Thanks, man.

02:02:04.000 Take care.

02:02:04.000 Thank you.

02:02:04.000 Bye.

02:02:05.000 Cheers, you too.

The Joe Rogan Experience - November 13, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter

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