Valuetainment - October 12, 2020


Addicted to your phone？ Reaction to “The Social Dilemma” Documentary


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

221.67815

Word count

2,007

Sentence count

147


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the podcast, Pat McAfee and I talk about the dangers of letting our kids get addicted to their phones and how to prevent them from doing so. We also talk about why we should not allow our kids to start using their phones until they are 16 years old.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 So recently I watched this documentary called Social Dilemma, which is about getting addicted
00:00:04.300 to your phone, getting addicted to all these apps. And they had all these different executives from
00:00:08.920 Twitter and the person who created the like button and Facebook and Pinterest. And they
00:00:13.300 were all talking about, oh my gosh, I'm addicted to my email. I'm addicted to Facebook. I'm addicted
00:00:17.900 to this and you got to be careful. And they did a phenomenal job portraying these three guys that
00:00:24.560 are behind. And this one kid that the mom creates a bed and says, if you can keep your phone away for
00:00:31.160 one week and you don't touch it, I'm going to go out there and buy you a brand new phone because you
00:00:35.040 broke it. So the son puts it over there and they lock it and the daughter couldn't do it. She breaks
00:00:40.120 it, takes the phone out because she has to look at what's going on for the phone. So one day he's
00:00:43.620 okay without the phone. Second day he's okay without the phone. The third day he sees a girl saying
00:00:48.280 something that he likes. Then he looks at the phone, takes it. He can't last for one week. He lasts for
00:00:52.720 two days. And the whole messaging is, we got to be careful to not let our kids get addicted to
00:00:57.900 phones. And then at the end, they make all these recommendations what to do at what age, what is
00:01:01.700 you give them the phones. You shouldn't start till 16. Very, very good documentary for anybody and
00:01:07.020 everybody to watch. Having said that, when I watched the documentary, to me, it was kind of like, um,
00:01:13.580 you have to be careful because these social media platforms don't care who you are. So you can do a
00:01:19.640 search for, you know, a certain search for climate change on the West coast because they're mostly
00:01:25.700 liberal and so climate change is real. It's the biggest threat to the world. And then you can do
00:01:31.680 climate change in Midwest with a lot of conservatives. Climate change is a hoax because that's what you
00:01:36.220 want to hear. And you can do climate change in East coast because it's a lot of liberals. Climate
00:01:40.400 change is real. And so they're manipulating their audience, right? And they shouldn't be doing all this
00:01:44.640 other stuff, et cetera, et cetera. Fine. Um, I'm with that just so everybody knows, you know,
00:01:50.120 what my position is when it comes down to, you know, Twitter and censoring and you can't say this
00:01:55.120 and you can't say this and YouTube and Google and all this stuff. They're independent businesses.
00:01:58.920 I spoke, spoke to my very good friends, Prager, Dennis and Sue, and they went through Sue and YouTube
00:02:04.400 because of Prager university. And I saw what happened with them and how, yes, you have freedom of speech
00:02:08.580 from America, but not necessarily companies that can do whatever they want to do with you. Uh, if they want
00:02:12.800 to censor you or not, but you can't work as a platform because, so it's very complex. Long story short,
00:02:18.680 they can censor if they want to, and they're doing it right. However, let's talk about this.
00:02:24.080 Isn't the whole purpose of any business for you to get addicted to their product?
00:02:30.680 Let me ask that question one more time. Isn't the purpose of any business for you to get addicted
00:02:37.260 to their product? What do you mean by that, Pat? I can't stand fantasy football because fantasy
00:02:45.960 football, I have friends who spend 30 hours a week on fantasy football. My draft, my guy's injured.
00:02:54.560 Oh my God, let me get on this side. The whole purpose of fantasy football is for you to get
00:02:57.960 addicted to it. Just so you know, that's the business model. I got friends here in the office
00:03:02.220 for 10 years. I ran a sales office without ever having any coffee machines. You know why? Weird
00:03:07.600 reason. It's my weird, you know, quirk or whatever you want to call it. I don't like stains on carpets.
00:03:13.000 So I never had a coffee in my coffee, in my sales office. 10 years. We had our guys would stand
00:03:18.180 outside to drink the coffee machine, but I got guys on my sales organization, 17,000 people in our
00:03:23.200 company are insurance agents drinking coffee. Some drink four or five, six a day. Some go to Starbucks two,
00:03:30.000 three times a day. Great job to Starbucks for creating a market and getting people to be addicted
00:03:34.880 to coffee. It's addicting, ain't it? Okay. Cigarettes, Philip Morris, what do they do?
00:03:40.620 They created a business model and put something in the nicotine for you to get addicted to it.
00:03:44.780 Look what kind of an empire they created. They even created a movie about it and they created guys
00:03:48.840 going around getting people to say, it's not a big deal if you smoke cigarettes, it's not going to kill
00:03:51.800 you. And you have to finally put that sign on the side. Smoking cigarettes can kill you from cancer,
00:03:56.000 but the business model is for you to get addicted to what? Cigarettes. What does McDonald's do?
00:04:01.040 What do you think Ronald McDonald was about? You think it was for adults or you think it's built
00:04:05.260 for kids to get addicted to say, mom, dad, I want to go to McDonald's. Why? Because Ronald McDonald's
00:04:11.380 going to be there. What's the happy meal about to get you and I to go there? No, it's to get people
00:04:15.500 to get addicted to go there because of kids. What's a radio's business model for you to get addicted
00:04:20.800 to it so you can listen to 24 seven so you can sell more advertising. What's TV's business model
00:04:25.560 for you to get addicted to a TV show? So for that 23 minutes that you're watching,
00:04:29.280 they get seven minutes of advertising. Those seven minutes, they can convert you to buy whatever
00:04:32.840 the product may be. Philip Morris, a drug, a new this or a new car, whatever it is to get your
00:04:38.680 attention. What's the business model of any sports? To create a leader's bulletin with a lot of stats
00:04:43.360 and brackets and a lot of competition and fights and controversy and media for you to watch sports.
00:04:48.000 How much do you consume sports? ESPN, Fox, all this other stuff. Just so everybody knows that
00:04:53.900 they're watching this. The social dilemma documentary is right. But here's the point.
00:04:59.320 It's not on the producer of how they create the product. This whole thing is about marketing. Yes,
00:05:06.320 they're using algorithms, all this other stuff. But it's very easy to say, well, it's dangerous.
00:05:11.280 We got to be careful with our kids. Yeah, I don't I don't disagree. But that's the responsibility
00:05:15.920 of a parent on the set of standards they create for their kids. That's not the responsibility
00:05:20.900 of the product creator. I don't blame Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. I produce it on the
00:05:26.660 person that's allowing their kids to get addicted to it. I'm going to sit there and blame the other
00:05:30.340 guys. How long have drugs and alcohol been around? There was a time I drank a bottle of tequila
00:05:34.740 every week when I was in the army. Every week I was drinking tequila every week for two years
00:05:40.960 straight when I was in the army. I partied every single week. And what I do? Boom. Tequila. Hey,
00:05:45.080 what's up? Contest. Who can drink the most? All this crazy stuff you do when you're in the army.
00:05:49.280 If you've been a military, you kind of know what I'm talking about. It's on the consumer.
00:05:54.440 See, I want to I want to fix this. If I can fix this, then I can be careful about having an
00:05:59.000 addictive personality because I have one. I don't want to get addicted to a lot of new
00:06:02.840 things. I got to control this. It's a great documentary can make you think about a lot
00:06:07.060 of other stuff. Kids. Hey, dad, can I watch the phone? No. Everybody else is doing it.
00:06:14.140 I'm not everybody else. Oh, I wish somebody else was my daddy. You want to go to live in this
00:06:18.920 house? Go ahead. No, I was just kidding. Okay, cool. You're a bit David. Let's figure
00:06:22.860 this thing out. You want to play some Legos? Let's play some Legos. You want to go ride
00:06:27.000 a bike together? Let's go ride a bike together. You want to go swim? Let's go swim. You want
00:06:29.620 to play basketball? Let's go play basketball. What do you want to do? Let's go watch a movie.
00:06:32.380 Let's go watch a movie. No problem. We got to control ourselves from getting addicted to a
00:06:36.860 lot of these other things. That is on us. So as much as I love the documentary that's
00:06:41.720 being out there, if you allow this to get you addicted to it, that's on you. It's the job
00:06:48.800 of a smartphone to do that. It's the job of an app to do that. It's the job of Facebook
00:06:53.400 to do that. It's the job of Twitter to do that. It's the job of Instagram to do that.
00:06:57.980 We can't blame the drug. We can't blame the drug dealer. We have to look at there and look
00:07:05.640 at the user. Drug dealers are going to be around forever. Were you ever approached by drugs?
00:07:10.100 I was approached by it all the time. Spending more time talking to our kids and to ourselves
00:07:16.180 about what things we get addicted to and spend less time trying to blame these other
00:07:19.900 guys. Yes, they need to be held accountable. Yes, Facebook, Amazon, all these guys need
00:07:22.680 to be held accountable on certain things they're doing. Selling our info on the back end. Those
00:07:27.060 things, privacy, yes, 100%. We have to be able to do that kind of stuff. But we can't just
00:07:32.120 point fingers at companies saying they're addicting. Every business model is built for you to somehow
00:07:37.880 get addicted to it. And those who are very successful, guess what? They did a better job than
00:07:42.140 everybody else. All the major channels in America that are killing it, they're the best channels.
00:07:46.140 All the major networks, they're the best channels because they got people to get addicted to
00:07:48.980 their news. Having said that, rather than spending time blaming all the things that people are
00:07:54.020 getting addicted to, why not work on better strategies to make sure you and I don't get
00:07:58.040 addicted to it? Spend time talking to your kids about it, your spouse about it, your family
00:08:02.040 about it, the people in your office about it, and see what happens. And if you got a business
00:08:05.680 model or company you're running that other people aren't addicted to, maybe you got
00:08:10.180 to do something about making your business a little bit more addicting. Maybe you got
00:08:14.220 to do something about people wanting your product more than just once. That is a business
00:08:18.340 model. So maybe this is a crazy message you don't want to hear and it gets you to think
00:08:22.020 about a whole different way, but there's going to be more addicting products that are going
00:08:26.160 to come for a long time. This is never going to stop. So now, get a sheet of paper out and
00:08:34.280 write that on a sheet of paper. What are some addictions you have that no one else knows
00:08:38.040 about? Games? Video games? Porn? You know, Twitter? Facebook? YouTube? What is it? Fantasy
00:08:44.780 football? What is it? How much is it taking away from you? What can you do to minimize
00:08:48.880 it? And if you put that time elsewhere, what will it do for you? Having said that, I want
00:08:53.180 to give you a throwback video from five years ago titled, 16 Time Wasters. If you've never
00:08:57.220 seen that, click over here to go watch that video. And on top of that, have a great week,
00:09:02.320 everybody. Bye-bye.