Offline with Jon Favreau - How to Break Your Phone Addiction

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Catherine Price, science journalist and author of The Power of Fun and How to Break Up with Your Phone, joins the show to close out The Offline Challenge. After a dramatic sendoff from our Offline Chancellor, Catherine talks with Max and Jon about the effectiveness of the past month’s unplug challenges, from cold turkey to clown cases. Then she outlines how to stay broken up with your phone and explains why the guys’ screen addictions are a symptom of a larger problem. The three conclude that a phone breakup isn’t about what you lose, but about what spending less time on your phone can help you gain. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

What I'm hearing you say is that you felt the temptation to go to Twitter. You recognized in real time that that was not actually what you were after, that it wasn't going to make you feel good. You asked yourself, what am I actually after? You determined it was connection. You gave yourself an alternative. You enacted, took action on that alternative. And then you went to bed and felt better about yourself.

Like, that's a huge success. Yeah, yeah. So you guys thought I was just partying. You won. You totally won. All right, all right, Disco John. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the grand finale of the Offline Challenge.

Yeah, I know it's only been a few weeks, but those weeks have been the longest of my life. So we decided to declare a winner and more importantly, come up with a long-term, more sustainable approach to limiting our phone time. So after this intro, you'll hear Max and I recap our final challenge before offline chancellor Carolyn Dunphy returns to crown a champion. The results are very close. After that, you'll hear from our special guest, Catherine Price, a science journalist and ex-phone addict who wrote the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone. Catherine began rethinking her relationship with her phone in 2016 after realizing that her phone habit was interrupting time with her newborn daughter. Since then, her book has helped thousands break their phone addictions.

And her work has been featured everywhere from the New York Times to the Today Show. We wanted to talk to Catherine to get her perspective on the offline challenge. Did we choose helpful challenges? Were the clown cases actually necessary? But we also wanted to talk to Catherine about what comes next. How do we all maintain the progress we've made over the past month? And what should we do when we inevitably fall back into our phone addictions? Some of Catherine's answers surprised us. She offers a more measured approach to breaking up with your phone, reminding us that the breakup isn't about what you lose, but about what spending less time on your phone can help you gain.

It was the perfect conversation to close the Offline Challenge. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please do take a moment to rate and review the show. First up, Max and I recap the challenge. All right. I am here with Max Fisher. Hey, pal.

So far, who's leading the offline challenge well we're all winners here okay okay so this is week five this is the finale flown by it's yeah it's we're we're in uh purgatory here time oh come on time flies when you're enlightened you're connecting with your friends and your family you're not addicted to your phone or it's a nightmare from which you were just waiting to awake you know it's sort of this has been a slow burn let me just say it's like they're like yeah it's fine it's great it's fun i'm enlightened and then by this week i'm just like give me my phone really that's so funny i feel like this week was the week when I was like, I'm just like soaring now. I look, I don't even need the challenge. I'm just so happy not to have the phone.

Well, I would say that I'm looking and this is why it's going to be great to talk to Catherine Price after this. But like I'm looking for something sustainable. Sure. Like I used to feel bad every time I picked up the phone because I'm addicted and it makes you feel bad. And now it's like, oh, did I really need to do that? Or am I going to lose this week's offline challenge? I need that to go away. Yeah, the competitiveness is an element of stress.

I think a little bit is helpful. I do like that we've done a like shock therapy, like put ourselves through like four or five like kind of crazy chaotic difficult weeks and i actually think that anyone who wants to do a version of this for themselves like find the sustainable version find the like map for yourself but like put yourself through a few weeks of like turmoil and it's both like a little fun and i think it's a good way to just reset your relationship to the phone a little bit yeah like on the way to the office just now, I... Did you send some tweets? No, no, the opposite is that like,

I knew that we weren't counting, we don't never count today. So I could have just like been looking at the phone, but I, you know, I didn't look at it at all. And I didn't look at it walking in and I was just walking quietly and I didn't care. And I was like, okay, that's a good, like I've shifted behavior.

You were feeling the desire not to be on your phone come from within rather than from the like competitive urge. Not even, I've shifted behavior. You were feeling the desire not to be on your phone come from within rather than from the, like, competitive urge. I wasn't even thinking about it. That's where I want to get to. Because it wasn't even crossing my mind that I'm not looking at my phone or that I need to look at my phone. It was just like, I'm walking.

The social accountability is important. It's always a choice that I'm glad that I'm making in the moment. But when I'm, like, picking up my phone and thinking, like, do I want to look at Twitter? Do I want to look at Instagram? Knowing that like it's going to punch up that screen time number and I'm going to have to tell somebody about that is like is a useful deterrent. Yeah. Well, then let's talk about this week's challenge. We used Max's rules for social media etiquette. We abided by them or we tried to abide by them. Did we use them? Well, we'll get into that.

And then we set time limits on all of our apps or at least all the apps we use. I did it phone-wide. I don't know what you did. I did it phone-wide and also specific to Twitter and Instagram. As we all know, I don't have Twitter on my phone anymore. That's right. Yeah, yeah, Twitter-less. Which has been great.

Okay. I found that I actually, I think we maybe should have done this one at the start of the challenge because at this point, I'm not using the apps anyway. Right. So I put these time limits on it and was never near hitting them. I was never close to hitting them either. Okay, great. But I, because

Max did a little bragging yesterday about one of his, a couple of his days and the time limit, which makes me think that I lost but anyway um so i thought it's it's important to break up with your phone for the purpose of shaming your colleagues yeah i mean look that's what i was in it for uh so favorite part of the challenge uh this week i mean i would say that the i guess the app limits because that first of all they were easy like we said i think i, so I set them at an hour 30. So hour 30 for the whole phone.

Keep in mind, I used, I was, when we started this thing, I was at like, what? Four hours a day? Six hours a day? No, you were at six hours. Yeah, I was at six hours a day. So I didn't come close to 130. If they were set at,

I think if they were set at an hour, that would have been trickier. When you were actually like bumping up against it. Yeah, but I actually think that 130 could be sustainable for a longer term. and that's what you want right you're not you're not doing it to like torture yourself right you're doing it to find that sustainable limit that you can live with so i liked the i liked the app limits and well what about you what was your favorite part uh well so for the app limits when i heard that you were setting it

for an hour 30 i of course set mine to an hour and 29 minutes because that's right. That's that's the energy I'm trying to bring to this. I like the social media diet. I think I a little bit overcomplicated in giving us all of those rules. I should have just given us the Maggie Haberman rule, which is anytime you're going to post something on any social platform, ask yourself, is this essential to say? And is it essential that I am the one to say it and i actually think it's like a great rule that will 98 at the time lead you to not tweet something um john how do you think you did the maggie haberman rule this week okay all right i just want to i just want to lay out my case here um so we did this we set the last

challenge wednesday uh last wed last Wednesday There was an event happening on Wednesday in your defense. Yeah, and we knew and I knew going into it that just hours after the challenge began Ron DeSantis was announcing his candidacy on Twitter spaces with Elon Musk, which is like

the temptation, it's like just It's the perfect storm of online discourse You couldn't have designed a temptation greater for me It's like the it's it's the it's the perfect storm of online designed a temptation greater for me it's like it's like the end of twister the like category five storm of like online dunk ability and not only that it ended up as everyone now knows a complete disaster crying out for dunks complete disaster i might have been able to abide by the rules if it had been a just a normal announcement that a lot of people were mocking because people would have mocked it

no matter what. But the fact that it was a worst presidential announcement perhaps in history and I'm just going to sit there and not tweet and it's taking place on Twitter? The universe provided the ultimate test of your... I just want to read two

items from Max's social media code of conduct. Just two. No participating in the prevailing discourse of the moment unless it's a topic you're professionally required to speak on. I am professionally required to speak on the prevailing discourse of the moment. That is my job.'m like i'm like i'm like when kendall tells his ex-wife i am the things i'm doing on six continents yeah and that's the kind of spirit that you want to bring to this right is the like kendall with his family with your smartphone yeah and number seven universal carve-out exception for big breaking news universal carve-out exception

so in the breaking the 48 hours after we supposedly began adhering to the social media diet which is supposed to limit and control your addiction to social media you tweeted i counted 45 times did i tweet 45 times you tweeted 45 or were they no You tweeted 45 times. Were they original tweets or were they? No, this is not even counting retweets, tweets and replies, 45. Oh, and replies. Now we're going to kind of replies. Replies will always get you. I do hear you on the carve outs, but if you're tweeting 45 times in the 48 hours after instituting the social media diet, do you think maybe there's a little bit of a like letter verse spirit of the law thing happening here? No, I'm going to defend myself on this.

So you think you did an amazing job. You knocked it out of the park. No, I think there was an unfortunate circumstance that was hard to see past. Would you like to know how many times I tweeted about the Ron DeSantis event? Well, okay. What did you do? Once? Zero.

Zero. Zero. And do you know what? Who noticed the difference? Who cared? Nobody. Zero. Zero. And do you know what? Who noticed the difference? Who cared? Nobody. Because nobody cares. The only thing that you're doing when you're tweeting about the thing everybody is tweeting

about is participating in your own addiction. It was so fun. Your own. Okay, it was a little bit fun. It was a little fun. I will be honest, I was watching a little jealously. If you look at my tweets, number of tweets in the week before Ron DeSantis and certainly in all the days after because we were doing these rules.

You will see that. And I think the before is even more instructive here. Before these rules were thrust upon me, I was not, I was following most of these rules. Anyway. Okay. Because I've been, I just, it was a unique circumstance. Do you feel like you're less addicted

to Twitter though? Because you're not, and I'm sincerely, I'm not trying to give you a hard time. You do seem like you're still on it a unique circumstance. Do you feel like you're less addicted to Twitter, though? Oh, yeah. Because you're not, and I'm sincerely, I'm not trying to give you a hard time. You do seem like you're still on it a fair amount. No, I feel like I am. I feel like I'm much less addicted to Twitter. So what feels different? So I think the addiction was severe. Okay, sure.

But I don't tweet as much. Okay. I use lists now. Oh, nice. So that I'm not just scrolling. So you're not following everybody but just curated accounts. depending on what's in the news so i have like a legal experts list when you know trump crimes are in the news i have a hill reporters list for the debt ceiling i have just news list which is literally people who are just reporting the news no takes just news which

i that's what i use the most that is that has been huge it's also good because that cuts out the algorithm now the algorithm is not choosing what you see. You're choosing what you see. Taking it off my phone has been huge. And so when I wanted to know what's breaking in the news, I'll just like

go to the New York Times or go to the Washington Post app on my phone and I'll just read that, you know, so I don't have to do Twitter. So I am, and I don't get in Twitter fights.

I don't do a lot of outrage. I try to like, I, to the extent that I'm making fun of Elon Musk or Ron DeSantis, it's like sarcastic. I'm trying to joke around. I'm like replying to friends. A lot of those replies were to like you, Tommy, Dan. Yeah, you were tagging me in.

I think almost all of my tweeting this week was replying to you tagging me in. Yeah, I was trying to tag you in. I was trying to drag you in. Just dragging me into the mug but it does go back to what i like about what i always liked about twitter which i feel like has mostly been lost and i think is the best quality of twitter which is it's a place where you can go and joke about the news with your friends you know Or people who are not, like, in your life, like, in person, but you've met on Twitter and they're still fun.

You know, like, I think that's a good use of Twitter. And it's mostly gone away because Elon has, you know, degraded the platform, but I do miss that. So I and a bunch of journalists who were really struggling with our Twitter addiction, and not just the time on the app, but feeling the compulsion to tweet, feeling the compulsion to participate

in whatever is the bullshit commentary, discourse, main character nonsense of the day, and getting dragged into the Twitter view of any news stories, which is just more outrage prone, much more black and white, much more mannequin than the way that you would talk about it in the normal way.

We all switched to a big Slack that we just set set up where there's like 30 or 40 of us. And anytime, and I tried a little bit to write this into the rules. Anytime we want to tweet about something, we all just go talk about it in the Slack, which is great because then you're getting all of the upside, but you're not getting the algorithmic manipulation that comes with posting on Twitter. You're not getting the psychological distortion that comes from getting feedback from a thousand people, which our brains are not wired to handle. You're not getting that feedback loop for outrage or for misinformation. And that took me a long, long time to adjust to. That's more than a one-week thing. It took me a better part of a year, I would say. But I would encourage to the extent that you or people generally

are looking to wean themselves off of not just spending time on the apps, but the like social media way of looking at the world, switching to the slower apps, I find really, really helpful. Yeah, I will say when I tweeted, is this whole announcement

just going to be Elon, Matt Musk and David Sachs jerking themselves off. I was going to read that out to you. That was originally a text to Tommy and Dan and Rhodes and Cody. And you were so happy with it. Yeah, it was a text to them, and I was like, you know what? The world needs to see this. It just can't stay on this text chain.

People need to hear this, and they need to hear it from me. They need to hear it from me. I had two tweets of yours I was going to read off to you to ask like are we social media dieting that was one of them are Elon and David jerking themselves off and the other one was when you quote tweeted a Morning Joe screenshot

of the audience numbers for Ron DeSantis versus like other audience numbers for other events and tweeted the phrase truly historic which is like a good dunk but are we participating perhaps in these social mediafication of our political discourse i saw myself at that moment you were in a great battle against the forces of david zack's nilan musk trying to lie about how great the Twitter spaces thing went.

Okay. So we also had some unplugged hobby time this week. Oh, yeah. What was your hobby? So it's supposed to be an hour a day, right? This is another. It's just tough circumstances for me for this week. So Thursday and Friday morning, because we started Wednesday, I did play piano. Wow.

What did you play? I did do some writing so I I can't I think I mentioned this last week but I am I'm playing a song at my best friend from childhood's wedding on Labor Day I'm also speaking at the wedding so I was like oof I gotta start that stuff now are you stressed about it um I'm not so sure about it yet but I'm a little more stressed about the speech I think he wants the song that he wants is a song i've played for years what's the song your song elton john's wow yeah nice that's a great choice it's a great choice so uh so i practiced that and are you gonna dress up in a white suit with sequins and giants okay cool

yeah you're actually for people who are not watching youtube you're actually wearing your elton john costume right now you look i got the glasses and the yeah it's very cool and so i did that i started doing a like brain dump of things that i might want to put in the speech so i did that writing and then on friday we went to santa barbara and uh emily and i went we took charlie we went with uh the v tours we went with our friends the Duddas. They have two toddlers. Tommy and Hannah have a baby. So my hobby for those days was chasing

kids around. We all stayed in the same house. It was extremely tiring. It sounds like chaos. Let me tell you, when we finally got all the kids to nap or to sleep, all the parents were so tired that people just sat on the couch and they were on their phones. Except me, because I was part of this fucking challenge.

So I was staring off into space. Did I want to go get my Kindle? Yes, I did. Was it in the bedroom? Because Charlie was in our room in the pack and play. Oh, yeah. Yes. So I couldn't get the Kindle either.

So I was just sitting there, just staring into space, hoping one of my friends would talk to me. Emily did at one point. She was like, you can leave while he's doing that. You can take my car into Santa Barbara and go see the world. I was like, by myself? What is that going to do? It's amazing to think that this is a problem we used to have routinely where you have like an hour and a half of downtime

and no phone to lose your soul to. Yeah, so that was tough was tough i did i do i acknowledge that i have an easier version of this because i don't have kids so i'm at home and it's like what do i want to do with the next two hours literally anything that i want i actually the where i really noticed it is so we came home monday and i hadn't even thought about like oh what are we gonna do with charlie monday at home Because it's a holiday. And he takes a nap. He wakes up. Emily is taking a nap.

I start playing with Charlie. And he wants to play with all the Play-Doh in our house on his playground, at the top of his playground, which is just this little spot before he goes down the slide. And so the two of us are up there playing with Play-Doh. I did not bring my phone for two and a half hours after that weekend, sitting there playing with Play-Doh. I did not bring my phone for two and a half hours after that weekend, sitting there playing with Play-Doh. And I was like, what is happening? How much time has gone by?

Where am I? That sounds great. You were disconnected. I was disconnected. What did you make? I was very tired. We just, I don't know. We made pretend cupcakes.

That sounds so fun. We made things for the truck. Then we brought all the trucks up. The trucks were playing with the Play-Doh. It was a lot. did you play with play-doh when you were a kid um yeah but i didn't like a lot of i didn't like a lot of messes oh that's right yeah yeah coming out i was the same way stuff that would like leave a lot of like do you remember slime and gack yeah it would leave a like weird residue on your hands i always had a tough time with so tell me about your week hobbies so it was pretty easy i just went for a hike every day for about an hour, sometimes with friends.

Sometimes I would just go on my own. If I went on my own, I tried to not bring headphones, don't listen to anything, just be out on the trail, make an eye contact with people on the hiking trail, petting dogs, just being an enlightened monk out walking the hills. Isn't that nice? It was great. Yeah, I loved it. Would you recommend these challenges to our listeners? I would recommend so many of these challenges to our listeners.

Like I said, I think it is really essential to start with a hard break. Like just get the flip phone. I know everybody's thinking like, oh, the flip phone was just like a gimmick for the podcast. But just like one week without your smartphone, just take out the SIM card, put it into a $60 flip phone. You can get it on Amazon. You can do it. I can hear all of the listeners being like, oh, it's so hard. I have to check my email. It's not practical. Like, come on, it's not that hard. You're not that important. It completely resets your relationship to your phone and it sets you up, I think, to go into on week two or three, setting a few more challenges for yourself

that are sustainable that you can manage longer term. Here's what I would recommend to people for. I would do the cold turkey for a couple of days because I think that's that's important. I think I would think hard about which social media apps you need on your phone and potentially take them off or at least put pretty strict limits would you replace them with anything uh no so the only thing that i really missed i missed uh like texting with friends yeah and uh and just messaging friends so like whatsapp and i message i missed using those and that's just because i like want the connection with people that i know and then i noticed that because this was a three-day week we left on friday to like because

i wasn't using my phone because i didn't have my laptop with me this was the first time i was part of this challenge with no laptop to go to like there was things like i wasn't checking email austin was trying to get put a title on last week's episode and i were title-less, yeah. We were just adrift. Yeah, we were just a drift. Slack for days. But you know what? It all worked out. It did all work out.

Everything was fine. That is a good point. That is a good point. It always, and I experienced this so many times when we had the flip phone. There's so many times and you think, being away from my email, being away from text message, whatever,

for an hour, two hours, it's gonna create these catastrophic problems. It's gonna be such a big issue. And it never, ever, ever is. If it's an emergency, which it's never going to be, somebody will call you, but it's not going to be an emergency. You don't need to be on your email. And I remember thinking too, I was like, I don't even know what's in the debt ceiling deal. And then I like step back to, I got back home and then on Monday night I was like reading everything. I'm like, oh, okay. I figured it out now. I didn't, who cares that I didn't know.

I have a great email newsletter product for you. Don't need to read any tweets. Just open up Whataday. You're going to be completely informed. Probably pretty outraged. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, social media, time limits, or either off the phone or strict time limits,

and then maybe an overall phone time limit that can incorporate your need to text, check email, whatever else, but like will keep you on, you know, on the straight and narrow. Can I give you my hot take on screen time limits, especially the built in screen time limits on your iPhone? I don't think it works. You think you just blow through them too easily?

I think you blow through them too easily. I think especially the one that is built into your phone. I mean, that's like getting a nicotine patch from the Philip Morris company. Like, come on. You really think Apple wants you to break up with your phone? That's true.

I might've been, I think it was more the competition with you and the fact that there's this public accountability than the screen time apps. Because I had a screen time app on Twitter for a long time before I took it off my phone. And just every time going through, yeah. I think that you need to find,

or at least I needed to find, other ways to make the phone less appealing to physically distance myself from the phone, especially I thought those tricks were enormously helpful. Yeah, the physical distance is very- And that will naturally bring you to a lower number of time on the app. I think the easiest one of the ones

that I would encourage people to do is get the lockbox. And it doesn't need to lock. It can be a shoebox or just a kitchen drawer. It's just someplace to put your phone when you get home. Put your phone overnight. Do not have it in your bedroom next to your bedside table. Don't let it be the first thing that you reach for when you get up in the morning. It's pretty easy because once you don't have your phone with you at home, you actually don't want to look at it. There's other stuff at home that's also fun to do that's nice, that's like better for you than your phone, and you'll enjoy more than your phone. So that will be really easy. The OneSec app, I hate to do like an unpaid product endorsement, but I think it's really helpful, where what it does, you go to open an app that you want to use less of, and it just makes you look at this like five or six

second little screen. I found that that's so often just making me think for a second, do I really want to open Twitter? Of course not. Of course I don't want to open Twitter. Right. And then I would close it and put my phone away. And I found that really helpful for dealing with the addiction. And then a like post-it note over your notifications, this listener suggestion that we got. Amazing. Life-changing. Oh, I forgot to say this is one that I, and just getting rid of notifications or only making, having notifications be badges on your apps and not pop-ups on your screen.

That's been huge for me. And I'm going to keep that. Okay, nice. That's great. The last one, the hardest one is grayscale, but don't do grayscale first. Leave it last. You could do it for a few weeks.

It was hard. So I've kept grayscale on since we started it. Wow. Because it's amazing. It's so effective. I went to send someone a picture and I had to turn on color to like make sure that I got everything like in the frame. And turning on color for just a second on my phone, it was like putting a car battery to my brain. I like had to put the phone down because it really jolted me.

I had that experience when we took grayscale off at the end of last week. And I was like, like the colors on the phone seemed brighter and even more inviting. They do, yeah. It's like a little bit overwhelming. I was like, I'm getting seasickness a little bit from looking at these colors. Alright, when we come back, Carolyn Dunphy is back. Oh boy. And she is going to close out

the Offline Challenge. All right, we're back. And here with us to close out the offline challenge is Carolyn Dunphy. What a ride it's been. Greetings, gentlemen. I mean, apprentices. Of course. For those of you listening at home, know that we are doing our final and lowest budget parody of a reality TV show.

I knew you always reminded me of someone famous. I could never put my finger on it, but now I get it. And it's Donald Trump, baby. That's the one. Wow. You know what's funny is I was wondering what you'd bring up for this.

There's part of me that I was like, are they going to do like succession? But this is sort of in the neighborhood. You know, we went on Friends of the Pod. We went on Discord. We were like, which ones should we pick? Someone had pitched, is it cake? And I genuinely thought, I'll buy a cake.

I'll steal one of your iPhones and put it in there and be like, guys, is it cake? Like that's kind of where we're at. Is my sense of psychological well-being cake? Exactly. It could be. Who's to say? Probably be better if it was. But we're doing The Apprentice.

And as you may notice, I am not doing an impression of Donald Trump. Thank you. And that is because we have reached the limit of liberals trying to master the cadence and demeanor of a sociopath. You're welcome. You're welcome, audience. You're welcome. No one's ever going to get it 100% right. And what's crazier is we don't need to.

He is a walking cartoon already. It's not hard to hear him. But enough about my love life. You're back. I'm back, baby. Did you miss me? We did. Did you miss me?

We did. So we wanted to choose The Apprentice as the last show because we really think it will go out with a bang. So what I'm trying to say is, John, you're fired. Wow. Sorry, John. Already. That was fast. Just ripping that band-aid off. is, John, you're fired. Wow. Sorry, John. Already. That was fast.

Just ripping that band-aid off. So to set the stage, we have Max and Issa in the lead, just by one. And at the end of this segment... Okay, just by one, but one out of like... Just by one round. Out of like three. Okay. We don't need to brag. We don't need to be a brag. I won one round. Sore winner. This is all I have.

Unfortunately, I do believe that to be true. But enough about my. But enough about his love life. So either you both will leave here as friends and equals or you get bragging rights for the rest of your life because maybe you do need something to hold on to. Yeah. I could use it. Yeah. I like this frame.

Right? Wow. We saved the best for last. We saved the best for last. I'm telling you. So why don't we go through, I feel like you hit the ground running. So what was the hardest part of this challenge, like week after week after week? Did you just kind of like mentally prepare yourself? Like, that's it. I'm locking in. This is what I'm doing. I'm Hermit Boy for the next five weeks. The hardest part, honestly, was I was really worried about John.

I was kind of stressed for him. First day out of the gate, he's blowing through the social limits. We already knew that he was worried about losing. And I just kind of want everybody to win. I was always like, as a kid, when we play Monopoly, I was like, wanted everybody to come out as like a winner at the same time. We get really stressed if somebody was losing. Of course, that's you. Of course. Of course. I think you had a rough go. You've had a rough go the past five weeks.

It's been challenging to say. But I have actually a question directed to your family. What was Emily's favorite challenge for you? And what was Charlie's favorite challenge for you? Oh, Charlie's favorite challenge was definitely the clown case. He just visually enjoyed the clown case. Which again is concerning. I haven't asked emily yet was there a one that like she saw that like it really tormented you and there was probably a little bit of her being like this is funny yeah i was gonna say the clown case but she was troubled by the clown case she was

troubled but i think that just having this wasn't one of the specific challenges, but me not having Twitter on my phone, I think she enjoyed that. So she noticed, do you think? She noticed the difference. Yeah, I think so. I don't want to speak for her, but if you asked her, I think she would say that. You know, and now as chancellor of the offline challenge, we have to start the victor, I mean firing ceremony. John, it is now time for you to report your screen time okay okay here we go wrote them all down wednesday 1 hour 19

thursday 49 oh whoa friday 37 he's, people. He came here to win. Saturday, 52. Okay. Went back up. That's still pretty good. Under an hour? Sunday, hour one. Monday, 55.

And then yesterday, just because I'm a procrastinator who likes to cram, 35. Wow! You might have been, so what's the average? I don't know. Okay. We're going to have to,

and we'll figure that out. It's going to go to the judges. So what's the average? I don't know. Okay. We're going to have to figure that out. It's going to go to the judges. But that's amazing. You were at six hours a day. I know. For like years. Yeah. But this one almost killed me.

Okay. But you got to spend more time with your, you know, loved ones. That's nice. That's true. So I had. Max and Isto. Thank you. 77 minutes, 50 minutes, 51, 78, 19.

Oh, that 19 is going to help him. It was great. It was an amazing weekend. 19 minutes, 29 minutes, 34 minutes for an average of 48 minutes, which is down exactly four hours from my average before we started the challenge. It's four hours a day of my life back. I really feel it too. I feel like I have four more hours.

Hey John, you lost by four minutes again. 52. What the fuck? Oh, fuck. Not good enough, Favreau. I am the eldest boy. I am the eldest. I am the eldest boy.

You're not, you're not even, Tommy is the eldest boy. You're not even the eldest boy. You're not. You're not even. Tommy is the eldest boy. You're not even the eldest boy. But hey, it wouldn't be a reality TV show. Six to five on the board. Incredible. Dun-dun, without a twist. I want each of you to make a case for the other of why they get fired off the offline challenge. Wouldn't it be nice if we made the case for why the other shouldn't lose?

No. In the show The Apprentice, which I watched one episode of in order to get the format, you have to tell the other person, this person needs to be fired and this is why I need to be saved. But let's do Nice Apprentice.

I think, John, I think you should win because you are most improved. Because you were starting the baseline at like six hours, 15 minutes, something like that. So if we're off by four, if we're both, and actually, I think it's pretty striking that we are hitting about the same number. Like maybe like last week was like an hour and 15. This week is like 15 minutes. Maybe that's the amount of time you should spend on a phone.

I was going to say, I think we're like cutting it pretty close to the bone with where we are now in our averages. And I think that's also right. I think we're landing at like the natural place where one should land after a number of weeks. So my case, we're both winners. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You know what, though?

Mr. Everyone wins Monopoly. Max stuck to the letter of the law on these challenges. And particularly my Ron DeSantis, Elon Musk faux pas on Wednesday. I think that disqualifies me from being a victor. You did tweet about Elon Musk jerking off, which is a lot. I think that's great. It's good for my department. If we're still in the addiction frame, too, that was just like...

You're like, I have no choice. Yeah. Like Jesus took the wheel. I don't even remember it. Just so hard off the wagon that it was just a spectacular. That's when it's time.

Tim Robinson, who said that? That's when it's time to call your sponsor. When you're tweeting about billionaires jerking themselves off. Exactly.

And so now I have to, with much dismay, John, you're fired. Max and Issa, welcome to eternal glory. Wow. Now both of you go to therapy. My therapist has heard way too much about the offline challenge.

I bet. Why would I need to go to therapy? We're doing more podcasts this is a recurring series yeah you're gonna be back here next week all these guys conflating therapy with podcasts here we go and you here's the thing is that you were on his case about participating in social media like the chaos of that and being on twitter it's like you're also part of the problem too conflating therapy with podcasting but that's it's at least better than social media it's like, you're also part of the problem too. Conflating therapy with podcasting. But that's, it's at least better than social media.

It's like half a step better. So now we're arguing about semantics. Look, I'm saying. Could never think that would ever happen from a New York Times reporter. We gotta hear both sides. Truth is always somewhere in the middle. That's what I learned.

Oh boy. It's number seven in the social media. Don't find the truth somewhere. Exactly. But as chancellor, I can only do so much to keep you on track. But now it's time to bring in the big dogs. After the break, you'll be joined by Catherine Price, author of How to Break Up With Your Phone. Catherine is an expert, having taught thousands to regain control over their phone. It's time for you to not only break up your addiction with your phone for the past five

weeks, but for the rest of your life. Wow. Gentlemen, I'm excited. Good luck. Thank you for being the best chancellor that Offline has ever had. The only chancellor. And the only chancellor Offline will ever have. And the only chancellor that Crooked Media

will ever have. And the only chancellor that crooked media will ever have. Catherine, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. We wanted to bring you on because Max and I, in an attempt to alleviate some of our screen addiction uh have been engaged in what we're calling the offline challenge over the last couple weeks and you have literally written the book on the topic called how to break up with your phone so we wanted to have you on to help us close out the challenges and also help us create a more sustainable path uh forward that doesn't involve our producers abusing us and having fun at our expense, which I think is what they've been doing

last couple of weeks with clown cases and the like. But before we get to all that, I'm really curious about your relationship with your phone, both before and after you wrote the book. Yeah, my relationship with my phone when I thought about writing the book, so I started thinking about this in about 2015, 2016, was not that different, I think, for most people, except that instead of social media, I was scrolling through eBay looking at antique doorknobs.

So maybe that's not at all like normal people. But because we were renovating our- Everyone's got their thing. You know? It's a classic story. Yeah, exactly. It's almost cliche. but because we were renovating our thing you know you know I guess it's really yeah exactly it's almost cliche um but uh but I had these moments we were renovating our kitchen so I did have a reason to do that but at some point I realized I was scrolling through eBay in the

same manner that people scroll through social media when we were done with the renovation I was just looking at doorknobs and I'd recently had a baby my daughter was born in 2015 and I just remember having these moments up in the middle of the night with her where I was feeding her. And I just started having these kind of out of body experiences, probably from fatigue, where I could see what the scene looked like from the outside. And she was looking up at me. And I was looking down at my phone. And it just devastated me. And I have a background in mindfulness. I like to think of myself as a person. And I just realized that that is not the way I want her to interpret a human relationship, and it's definitely not how I want to be experiencing parenthood or my own life just

in general. So that's what inspired me to write the book. And also, I have a background as a science journalist, so there were some actual scientific reasons I thought that might actually be destructive to her. But so I wrote How to Break Up With Your Phone. Basically, at that point, I noticed there were a lot of books that kind of touched on this as an issue, but not ones that solve the problem. And I really wanted to try to solve the problem. And then I figured, you know, I'm not the only person struggling with this. It's just that not many people are talking about it yet. So that's why I ended up writing the book, which combines, as you guys know, a look at

the reasons screens are so compelling, what that's actually doing to us. And then it also combines that with a 30-day plan to take back control. So that was, yeah, in 2015. It came out 2018. And I'm happy to say that I do feel that I have a much healthier relationship with my phone now. I think that it's important to recognize it'll never be perfect, but I feel a lot better than I did then. And I do not look at doorknobs anymore. Well, that's a win. I mean, I know that screen time is sort of an imperfect metric by which to judge this. But how would you say your relationship with your phone is now? Like, are you spending, I'm guessing you spend overall less time.

Like, what does it look like now? How much do you need your phone? Well, I don't focus too much on the time itself. I focus more on how it makes me feel what it's replacing. So in other words, like, is my screen time getting in the way of something else that would be a better use of my time? And then most importantly, what I'm doing with it. So the main things that I use my phone for are communicating with friends, whether it's texting or phone calls. Honestly, I'd like to cut back on the texting because I don't think it's satisfying. And then another big use I have is that I use the voice memos app and

Dropbox a bunch because I actually, as a result of writing this book, I ended up with more free time and I ended up starting to take guitar classes. And now I have an entire community of music friends. So we use Dropbox to share our recordings and voice memos to record ourselves and guitar tabs to see charts when we want to play songs. So if you looked at the objective screen time, it might seem high. But to me, using guitar tabs and voice memo is actually a great use of my phone. Yeah, that's healthy. Yeah, we all have excuses.

It really resonated with me to hear you talking about this story of being with your newborn and starting to realize not just the amount of time that you're spending on your phone, but how it is affecting you and affecting your life away from your phone. I had kind of a similar moment. I started writing about social media later than you, like 2017, but its effects on other people, writing about its effects in the Trump phenomenon or its role in the Myanmar genocide was how I first came to it. But it took me another solid year, even though I was writing and thinking about social media and smartphones all the time, to realize that it was affecting me too when I started reading these studies about how being on Twitter and Facebook changes your emotional valence, not just when you're online, but in your offline life. And it makes me wonder

because I know that you work a lot with other people in helping them to tackle their own smartphone addictions. What kind of stories you hear from people or moments of realization that they have about what it's taking away from them in their life away from their smartphone, because I feel like that's such an important moment for all of us and kind of confronting this. Well, I think that is one of the most important points is the opportunity cost. And then what our interactions with our phones are doing to us as people, you know, how are we experiencing our own lives? How are we treating other people? What is it taking away from us in terms of relationships? I hear all the time from people

who feel that their spouse or partner or some loved one is, in their words, addicted to their phone and doesn't want to listen to them about it. And they feel completely powerless about what to do. Because I think we're finally now coming to a point where we're recognizing this really is an issue. But for a long time, it's been really easy to write it off. It's like everyone's on their phone or I'm just checking Twitter. Like what's the big deal? You're overreacting. So a lot of what I do when I have interactions with people is to really empathize and validate them on the fact that this is a really big deal. For me, I think that one of the most powerful takeaways for myself that really, I don't know, solidified this is the observation that ultimately our lives are what we pay attention to.

And meaning that, you know, whatever you're paying attention to, that's what you're actually going to experience in the moment. And that's what you're going to remember. And that means anytime we're making a moment to moment decision about where to direct our attention, we're actually making this broader decision of how to live our lives. And I think that's something that you both have been touching on in your conversations over the past month about this in different ways. But to me, that's been so powerful. I actually had a bracelet made for myself that says pay attention. And it's, that's like my version of a tattoo. Like I don't want to commit to a tattoo, but I'll wear a bracelet. But it's a reminder that like, that's what's at stake. You know, we're going to die and we have the chance right now to live.

So what do you want to do with it? There go that's my morbid takeaway for you i'm glad you went there because that's that's that's what i've been thinking for the last couple years about this i mean and it's interesting you're the story about um when your child was born because i i really started thinking about this when my child was born which was you know you know, July of 2020. So we were already in the middle of the pandemic. We were all on our phones too much on our screens too much. And I think my anxiety over being a new parent partly manifested itself in me just staring at my phone even more and using the excuse of, well, it's 2020. I didn't know we were going to have a kid or there's gonna be a pandemic. So I thought I was going to be paying close attention to this election every single day

and I need to do it for my job. So I'm going to be on the phone on Twitter all the time. And I sort of missed the first couple of months every time I was like worried about something with parenting, I would just like be on my phone. And now I, you know, part of this offline challenge, I like when I come home now at like, you know, 530, six o'clock, I put my phone down in my office. And then I hang out with my son, Charlie, my wife, Emily for a couple hours until he goes to bed. And it's really it's nice, you know, because it's like, that's to your point about what you pay attention to. Suddenly,

it just it finally takes your mind out of whatever work thing news thing you were thinking about. And now just like, here I am with these two people who are most important people in my life and now I get to actually talk to them and spend time with them huh yeah I mean that's really important I actually really like that you're emphasizing the importance of the ritual of it too that you're now making a point to put your phone away when you come in because I think part of the issue is that there's no boundaries I mean especially during the peak pandemic times there certainly were no boundaries but it's still just so hard when you have work encroaching on home life and your work email is on your phone, but that also has your personal texts and like your podcast, everything, everything is all combined together. So it's so important to create these separations. What are your thoughts on the effect of all these screens and all the screen time on kids and how are how are you dealing with it with your own children oh my god i mean that's a separate how much time do you guys have i don't

think it's good i think it's extremely extremely extremely bad on so many levels i i've heard you guys comment on and i think maybe one of your other guests was talking about you know you hand it, watching a kid get a phone and then seeing what happens to their face and how quickly they become mesmerized. And you see this blue light on the child's face. I mean, you can get a kid to shut up for hours if you're annoyed with your child just by handing them a phone. I think it's having a lot of different effects. I think one of the primary things is the distraction of just training our brains to be constantly distractible. You know, it takes a lot of effort to actually learn how to do things like concentrate. I know you both have been talking about your frustrations with not being able to sit and read books anymore, right? That's in part

because our brains naturally want to be distractible. Because if you're going to be scanning the horizon for threats, it's good to be distractible. You don't want to be lost in a book if there's something that's trying to attack you. So our brains naturally are going to want to be distractible. And it's taken a lot of work for us to learn how to read a book. So imagine that you're a child who's never learned how to really cultivate that sustained attention. And you're giving them, you know, a device that essentially fragments their attention from a very early age. Then there's all sorts of issues with social media and the impact on mental health. That's becoming obviously a much bigger issue. I know that you had the Surgeon General on recently, talk about that. I'm somewhat hopeful in that I think that the

tide is beginning to turn where again, this is being taken much more seriously. There's been health advisories from both the Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association just within the past couple of weeks about social media and teenagers in particular. But for my daughter, I have one kid, what we do is we try to be very intentional about screen usage. She does not have her own devices. And probably the funniest thing that she does is that they do have iPads in her school and she's taken to making pretend phones out of cardboard.

Yes, I'm the author of How to Make Up Your Phone. So she went ahead and she told the pediatrician this. She's like, pediatrician's like, what do you like to do for fun she goes i make cardboard phones the pediatrician goes well that's deliciously ironic but i will say i was so i was like oh my god but then i looked at what she was doing with her phones and ipad i'm like what is on what are her apps on this piece of cardboard and it was like what was she doing with them great question she was calling our dog so like legit phone calls she brought one of these to dinner and she was she had this entire teenage kind of like oh my god like kind of thing of like you wouldn't believe

what tasha's saying i'm like what is tasha saying in your imagined conversation with the dog apparently she was singing a song but she has that she has like in her words and i quote easy math was the name of the app um and then i think she had drawings. So I was like, okay, like that's okay with me. She's thinking about phones as a tool. And that's something I wanted to convey in general is like, the phone's an amazing tool, right? It's when it becomes a temptation, essentially, that's like sucking your life away. That's the problem. But I do laugh every time I'm like, oh my God, seriously, like another cardboard phone or a laptop. She made a laptop out of cardboard. I feel like something that I have noticed, and I'm curious if you found the same thing in working with people on their smartphones, is how many people our age,

because I think we're all about the same age, started to think about their own relationship with their smartphone the first time they had that experience you're describing of seeing their infant or their kid glued to a phone and realizing, first of all, I have this thing around me way too much. And second of all, if it's doing this to my kid, what is it doing to me? Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. I mean, I hope. I hope that that's a wake up moment for people. You know, you have that. You also have people walking down the street with strollers that actually have a built-in phone holder so the kid can watch the phone. Yeah, that makes my heart sink. That's tough.

Yeah. All right, so I know our producers walked you through the offline challenge just for folks at home who might not remember. We did flip phones week one. That was cold turkey. Week two was mindfulness we did meditation the one sec app new wallpapers week three was physical restrictions lockbox uh new phone cases uh we did grayscale too uh week four was willpower we did max's social media code of conduct well we tried one of us some of us tried yeah. There was some unplugged hobby time, to your point about guitar.

We tried to get hobbies. And then we set app limits. What are your thoughts on our approach? And what would you say are sort of the strengths and weaknesses of how we went about this? That's a much gentler way than what your producers told me. Austin's like, throw us under the bus. Tell us what we did wrong. And I was like, okay.

I mean, that's a little harsh it harsh well i actually didn't i didn't hear the i listened to all the ones that were available but i didn't hear how your hobbies and stuff went so i i'm curious about that um but my take is that one of the things i like the most about the approach that you guys took is the playfulness and that you actually made it into almost a game between you because one of the most common mistakes I see people make when they try to change their relationship with their phone is to come at it from this kind of punitive place of like beating themselves up maybe you beat yourselves up as well you may well have um in fact I have yeah no more than we do in our normal day-to-day lives yeah you you don't know but we spent a lot of time

together in the past day because i've been listening to all the back episodes of this so i guess i do know that you have somewhat of a tendency for self-criticism but you're also having fun with it so i would say that we're broken people yeah is that like another offshoot podcast just broken people broken people yeah it's a good idea so i would say that that's really important like a lot of times when people ask me well how can i deal with my family and phones or my partner or whatever i'm like trying to make a game out of it because you don't want to be coming at it with this finger wagging kind of thing but to other people or to yourself because you're not who wants to stick with that that's not any fun um i should say also my follow-up book to how to break with your phone

was about fun so i think about fun a lot so I think that that was a really good part of it. I think that there were elements in what you guys did that were very useful as kind of thought prompts. Like I thought it was very interesting to listen to you guys talk about what you'd done. And to me, the most valuable part of it was not necessarily the exercises you tried, but it was more the insights that you came up with as a result of those exercises. So for example, Max, I know you're talking about how we use our phones as avoidance strategies to avoid feeling bad about the, I'm paraphrasing here, you know, void within ourselves and our existential despair. That sounds exactly like Max. Yeah, that's right. Okay. I was like, I'm not sure if I'm paraphrasing you or just talking about myself. But anyway,

so I think that's a very important insight or your point that addiction is a symptom and not necessarily the problem itself. Those are deep thoughts, like all caps, right? And I think it's very interesting than just making some simple changes to how you interact with your phone can lead you to have these deeper realizations about how we're coping with life and reevaluate if that's actually how you want to be approaching life. With that said, I think that the thing that I would recommend changing about your approach is that some of the stuff definitely felt very gimmicky.

I mean, I think that was part of the point. Although I really want to see the clown case. Fascinated by that. Oh, God. I never want to see the clown case again. The clown case is great. Everybody should get a clown case. There's a clown on the back yeah there's a clown on the back so like a creepy clown like a bozo clown yeah oh i mean my wife did tell me that i

looked like a pedophile so and you did and she was right right okay so you know there's some some value in that maybe i'm not sure but i think that if i were to and i'd love to do this with you guys to come up with a more systematic approach i I think that there's a, it's important to have an actual goal established at the beginning. So in other words, what does success look like? And why are you doing this? And I know you guys talked a bit about this in the sense of feeling like you were wasting your lives on your phones, right? Fair enough. Or looking at the objective numbers on the phone. But I think that there's, it's worth having a bit deeper of a conversation about, okay, well, you will be interacting with your phones.

You know, as you both said, like the flip phone was a useful experiment, but you're not going to stick with the flip phone permanently. So how are you going to create a sustainable relationship with this device that is simultaneously incredibly useful in modern life? Some might say essential, but also, as you pointed out, designed to be a slot machine. How do you create that sustainable relationship? So I think the important big picture thing is there needs to be an overarching plan and goal established so that you can then take steps that all line up with that umbrella goal, if that makes sense. Could you talk about suggestions

or ideas that you have or that you've shared with people on how to make it fun? Because I really agree that that was not something I thought about as an important part of this going into it. It was something that we kind of, I think, discovered along the way, but felt so essential. I know for me in sticking with it and making it feel like it was not this drudgery I was putting myself through, but something that was really worthwhile and in creating like a sense of accountability. But of course, part of how we were able to do that is we have, you know, a podcast and they're like support team that comes with that. And fortunately, not everybody in America yet has a podcast, although it does feel like we're headed in that direction. Yeah, we are getting there. Yeah, yeah, the curve is reaching one for one. But until we get to that

point, what are things that people can do to make breaking up with their phone feel fun and social the way it has for us? Well, I think the first step is to make the shift between just the general goal, which is not to spend less time on your phone. Because like, why? Like, that's a dumb goal. It's like, why? Why? Yeah, it's like a point. Yeah. Right? it's like why why yeah it's like a point yeah right it's like again the symptom versus the problem thing like what i think of it as is that you're trying to feel more alive you're trying to get back in touch with what brings you joy you're trying to enjoy your brief moment on this planet that's the goal at least to me if i were to say

like what's the main goal here? And that simple shift from this attitude of restriction to one of kind of expansion and joy, like that, to me is the first step in turning this into something that goes from being, you know, a restrictive diet, to actually learning to find the foods you love that make you feel healthy and good, like that kind of shift. So I think that's the first step I would take. And then once you have that, you start to actually make these changes not out of a sense of obligation, but more out of a sense of curiosity and playfulness. Like, well, let's see. Because one of the problems now is that we have gotten so used to allowing our time to be filled by whatever is on our phones that we have lost sight

of how we want to fill our own time. And that can actually be very scary. Like that truly, I mean, joking aside, can be an existential moment where you're like, oh my God, I actually don't know anymore what brings me joy. I don't know. And if I do know, I don't know how to make it happen anymore. That's really scary. So I think it's very important to accept that scariness and say, that's all right. Like I'm giving myself the opportunity to play around with what might make me feel better. And that playfulness is actually very essential to the fun aspect. On that same note, I also think that getting other people to do it with you inherently will make it more fun because then you have a sense of connection.

Because honestly, one of the reasons we're reaching for our phone so much is that we're lonely. And so you can actually, in a meta sense, use the challenge of trying to break up with your phone and create a better relationship as a way to connect more with people you care about. And I heard you guys talk about that multiple times in terms of conversations you had. And then you can just like gamify it in your own way. You know, if you're in a family and you're like, okay, we got a contest here. We have a basket by the door.

Everybody puts their phone in the basket or in the closet or whatever at night. And if anyone's found cheating, then that's a point for the person who caught them cheating. And at the end of the week, whoever has the most points gets to choose an activity for the family to do together that they think would be fun. Like there's ways to make it into kind of like a fun, playful competition, but with this very serious goal, which is to reorient ourselves towards what actually matters to us in life. We both had a break between our last challenge ending and today, where we were just sort of on our own. And I had this interesting experience

where towards the end of the challenges, I did feel like it was all getting too restrictive. And my phone checking behavior was transferring to my checking my screen time behavior and like must beat max behavior, you know, which is just like another part of the OCD spectrum. And yet for all of that obsessive trying to win. I still lost. So then sort of like, all right, now I'm going to break. Let's see what happens and i was like so i went to vegas over the weekend with some friends bachelor party i know so you went to the giant smartphone in nevada yeah exactly and the way there and when i first saw my friends i was like the phone was somewhere else i was happy i don't care i don't need the phone it's great and then by the time i came home when i was like a little hungover and tired and whatever it was like that was the

biggest relapse just checking twitter and stuff but at least i like clocked it then and i was like what am i doing like put this thing down but it is it's that exact feeling that you were just describing katherine which is like and this is what made me want to look for more sort of sustainable strategies here, because I was like, okay, I know that the stuff we did was too restrictive, but the relapse is too easy. And I'm wondering how you sort of, you know, what's the strategy to make it a little bit more sustainable once you've gone through the cold turkey phase? Well, first of all, i'm picking up on a theme here because the one of the last episodes i listened to is when you went to a wedding and you had your phone in your pocket and you're like i was so good yeah john is living it up right he's like he's really

you really are like i just mostly in this living room but two years of being home yeah but you're but i you explicitly that you're like yeah and then the next day i was a little hungover and i was tired and then i relapsed so it is pointing that out well it's like eating junk it's like eating junk food when you're tired right it's the same kind i think you've you wrote about this that it is yeah there's a lot of similarities to food there and when food becomes comfort food and it's self soothing right and all that very self-soothing well two thoughts on that one is that i did notice when i first heard you tell that anecdote, I was like, oh, I don't know if they've actually gotten into the subject of what are your

alternatives, right? Because like, you can't break a habit. If I may paraphrase Charles Duhigg here in The Power of Habit, like you can't break a habit, but you can change a habit. And the best way to change a habit is to figure out what your brain is after, and then to give it an alternative. So I think it's very important to try to figure out alternatives and brain is after and then to give it an alternative. So I think it's very important to try to figure out alternatives and then make them as easy as possible. Because as you've also pointed out, one of the main problems with our phones is the lack of friction. It's so easy to get to the junk food. So you want to simultaneously make it harder to get to the junk food, but you also want to give yourself some alternatives that are very easy. So I would

recommend putting some thought into like, well, what do you actually want to do? What makes you feel kind of self-soothed that isn't just scrolling through your phone? I actually came up with an exercise that people have found useful called what for why now and what else www for short that you could play around with. And basically what I normally recommend people do is that you put some kind of like rubber band or something around your phone for a couple of days so that when you pick up your phone on autopilot, you notice that you've done so because a lot of it is on autopilot because you'll be like, why the heck is there a rubber band around the phone? And they'll be like, oh, right, because I'm supposed to just ask myself these questions. And you basically ask yourself, yeah, what for? What was the purpose? Like,

did I actually have an email I needed to send? Was I checking for a particular, I don't know, news story, whatever? Did I even have a purpose? And then you ask yourself, well, why now? Why am I doing it right now? Is it because there's actually a time sensitive reason for this? Or is it, for example, that I'm kind of hungover and tired? Often the why now answer is going to be emotional, which is very important. And I think you both have started to pick up on this, is that a lot of times your mind will come up with an excuse like oh i was doing it because i needed to do blah but in reality it's that you wanted to self-soothe or it's that you felt a little lonely and you wanted to feel a connection so you like go on a dating app or social media or it's you feel anxious or it's you know you need a distraction because you're tired of what you're doing at work and then you

ask yourself the final question which is what else like is there something else you could do to achieve that same result? Again, borrowing from Charles Duhigg's point of like, what reward was your brain after? If your brain was after human connection, maybe you use the phone to call a friend for five minutes. Or maybe if you needed a distraction, you get up, walk outside, like get a cup of coffee, right? You also might decide that you actually don't want to do anything in that moment. Like there's a real power in giving ourselves a moment of stillness.

And you, I think both have been touching on that as well. But we are just constantly exposing our brains to a fire hose of information. And it allows no space for us to have independent creative insights. It's really a problem. So you might decide, I'm just going to, you know what, stare at the elevator lights for five floors and not check anything. And then finally, you might actually decide you want to be on your phone. And that segues into the other point I was going to make is that, again, you want to come at this from a point

of non-judgment. I think that's where the mindfulness comes in. I agree with you that just arbitrarily trying to meditate for seven minutes in the morning with no goal is like going to just annoy you. I would hate that too. But if instead it's kind of like, all right, I'm just trying to be aware of how I'm spending my time in each moment, because again, how we pay attention or what we pay attention to will define our lives. So, you know, if you would decide like, I actually, you know what, I'm hungover, I'm tired. I want to just zone out for a minute, go for it. But then just make sure that you have the awareness, like set up a system for yourself. So it's like, I'm going to do it for 20 minutes, set a timer, and then I'll stop. And then don't beat yourself up over

it. It's I think an attitude of non-judgment that's very important as well. I'm really glad that you brought up this formulation you have of what else, what else could I be spending this time on? And especially figuring out the answer to that by asking why now? Why am I looking at my phone now? Because I was doing exactly what you were describing. I would feel without even identifying the fact that I was feeling it like a little pang of sadness or loneliness and then compulsively spend a bunch of time on Instagram or in a dating app, not because it was doing anything for me, but just as a way to like temporarily paper over that. What did you refer to it? The void at the center of my soul. Oh, yeah. A void of despair, existential emptiness.

Yeah, something like that. Abyss would be a word. Yeah. That's what we're going to rename the podcast Void of Despair, actually. That's a good formulation for us. And I found in that first week when we were going cold turkey, doing the flip phones, I thought it was going to be so hard. It became so much easier for me when I kind of incidentally arrived at that formulation. And I started when I would go to look at my phone, but there was no phone to look at because it's just a flip phone. I would call someone, which when was the last time you did that? Or I would even go meet up with someone just, you know, spur of the moment, let's go meet up at a bar

at seven o'clock at night, which is something I never would have thought to do, but was so helpful because it was feeding that why now, what was the thing I was looking for in a much more sustainable kind of real way. So I'm curious, what are the places that people in your experience have ended up at with figuring out what is the answer for what's the what else that I'm going to fill it with? Right. I think it's a really useful exercise for people to do is just, you know, put your phone away for five minutes, maybe in the other room, and then actually just jot down some, what are the things you say you want to do, but you supposedly don't have time for? Because, you know, like before the pandemic, the best stats I could find on phone usage were

that the average person was spending four hours a day just on their phones. And if you do that math, that adds up to 64 days in a year, and it's a quarter of your waking life. Like that's a lot of time. So we actually do have a lot more time. But you don't have to have these all be huge goals, like maybe make some of them be big goals that you actually do want to, I don't know, learn something or do something that would be much more of a commitment. But also make sure you add in things you'd like to do in those little moments that you find yourself with, like the five minutes or the, you know, right before bed. And if you determine that, oh, I used to really enjoy reading, but I don't read anymore. That's great. So then find something you want to read,

a newspaper, a magazine, what have you, and put it on your bedside table. And then put your phone in a different room while you're sleeping. If you don't take the step to put that book or magazine on the bedside table, you'll probably be able to resist the phone for the first couple nights out of willpower. But then you're going to be tired, you're going to be hungover, whatever, you're going to go get that phone again, it's going to come back in bed with you, you're going to feel like a failure, which is going to make you want to push away those thoughts even more. And you'll just end up back in your old habits. Instead, if it's like, where your phone used to be, there's now a book, it's a reminder that that was what you wanted to do. And you've made it easy. Again, you've

reduced friction, you don't even have to get out of the bed. So that's something I've seen people actually do with great success is to put something on the bedside table. A lot of people will say I used to journal, you know, but now I just scroll. So I think the most beautiful impact this book has had on me is just again, like getting me, I mean, it's truly led to me meeting an entirely new community of people who are some of the most important people in my daily life now, because I asked myself, what's something I want to do, but I say I don't have time for. And in my case, I was like, I say I want to learn the guitar. I have a guitar. I played piano since I was a kid. I've never gotten around to learning the guitar. And I ended up signing up for a music

class. It was an hour and a half on Wednesday nights. And I ended up just feeling this sense of freedom and letting go and presence that I really missed, even though I have a very nice life. And I ended up realizing that the best word to describe that feeling, this sounds like, makes me sound like I was a very unfun person, but it was fun. I was like, I was having fun. It's like, whoa, radical concept. What is this feeling? Anyway, long story short, not only did that lead to me writing the book about fun, but it just opened me up to this entirely new world of people with whom i could regularly have human experiences similar to what you're saying at the bar but it was it's a ritualized thing like even now today's wednesday we're talking on and i am really looking forward to 6 30 because

i go to my guitar class and i guess what I'm saying is that once you start to experiment with what else could you be doing, you might just start with something as simple as reading a couple of paragraphs before bed, but it may lead to a truly life-changing shift in how you spend your time. And all you need to do is to open yourself up to that possibility and become playfully curious about like, well, what could you experiment with? You know, start small and see where it leads. But I personally have been astonished by how powerful the impact has been on my life of just reevaluating, starting with just reevaluating how I'm interacting with my phone. Well, at the same time, it makes me wonder, what do we do when we feel those moments like

you were describing, John, where we're like, where we're describing john where we're like where we're tired where we're hung over which you know is a daily problem for you john as a as a huge partier when you're coming back from the nightclub at three in the morning but it is those are the hard moments it's because i i feel like something that i did at the outset of this and i think a lot of people do at the outset of like trying to break up with their phone is the activities we want to fill that with are very aspirational you know it's like I'm going to learn Cantonese I'm going to learn yeah that's a bad that's a horrible idea well it's a good language before bed before bed you're going to learn Cantonese that's what I always say to people

you're totally right it's like yeah no that's not that's not happening but I mean it's you make a great point about like finding something that you like really want to fill your life with. Like having the guitar practice is great and it's really important to have that. But I think we do something that I have not yet figured out either is like, what do I do? And it's like, I got a bad night's sleep and I came home and I'm like, all I want to do is look at my phone because I feel really crappy. And I don't want to do any of my like high minded hobbies. So like, what do I do then to then to you know not look at the phone okay well you're exhausted and you your brain is tired you don't have the energy to pull out your

harp um dust off the old harp yeah the phone in that case you would be using it to self-soothe and because you're tired and basically to kill time so if you're okay with that and that's what you need in that moment then that's a possibility so then i would i guess just ask is there anything else you could do that would kind of fill that need for you that might not make you feel as gross or hate yourself as much as scrolling through something like for example the one thing i've really tried to do is develop a list of friends who don't think it's incredibly weird if I just call them out of the blue, you know,

because it is weird. And so maybe you have like your short list of people you could just try. And again, you're using your phone in that moment, but it's for a purpose. Maybe you feel better if you zone out listening to a podcast than you do if you're scrolling through Twitter.

And as you've said, like working yourself up and becoming this bad version of yourself. We're all going to have those moments where we're exhausted and we do want to passively consume something or which just feels overwhelming. Like you can't get off the couch. So I would try to give yourself like a menu of options there so that you don't have to default to the phone.

But at the same time, if you're like, do find yourself on whatever your problematic app is and it's a little longer than you want it to be, try not to beat yourself up, right? Like, you can't change what you did. But you can say, okay, I just caught myself. And I don't want to do that again. And instead, next time, like make a plan in that moment. Next time, I'm going to try to, you know, call John and see what crazy party he's at. I will just say, say well so this is very this is very therapy mindfulness but uh you've pointed out that um just just stopping and thinking like why do i need this phone right now why do i want this phone right now is useful and just to let you know how vegas actually went is

we went out friday night i stayed saturday night but i was like i'm not going out with everyone saturday night i can't do this again. Like I'm 42 and have a child. Enjoy the club, everyone. I don't believe you. So I went back to my hotel room and I was like, okay, very rare. Just myself in the hotel room. And I sat there and I was like, oh, no.

It's just me. Relapse time. And then I was scrolling through twitter and i'm like why do i want to scroll through twitter right now because i looked at the movies on the on the in the in the hotel room tv and i was like that feels scary to me these movies because they're like i want it and then i realized i'm like i want to be connected in the moment now that's why i'm looking at the news on twitter but it's not making me feel great to keep scrolling through the news right now and then like my friends were like oh we're hanging out upstairs before we go out. And I

was like, you know what? I'm going to get a lot of peer pressure to go out. But I think what I'm looking for is just to connect with them and to just like connect with someone and talk. So I went upstairs, talked to them for a half hour and was like, all right, now I'm going to bed. Enjoy tonight, guys. Went back downstairs and I was like, and I felt better and I went right to sleep. Yeah. See, that I think is a very important story for you to keep in mind when you're thinking about this because you're never making you remember. One of you were referring to the mindfulness as feeling a little bit too soft as a technique. But what you just described is actually exactly the point.

And I'm assuming, tell me if I'm wrong, but that that would not necessarily have happened before you started this challenge. Because what I'm hearing you say is that you felt the temptation to go to twitter you recognized in real time that that was not actually what you were after that it wasn't gonna make you feel good you asked yourself what am i actually after you determined it was connection you gave yourself an alternative you enacted took action on that alternative and then you went to bed and felt better about yourself like that's a huge success yeah yeah so you guys thought i was just part you won all right all right disco john i do i do want to end just by asking one last question because i think it's so fascinating how your most recent book the power of fun is so connected to how to

break up with your phone and i do and we've talked a little bit about this but i do think like figuring out what we want to do with our life instead of looking at our phone is important. I think the challenge is some people think that, you know, scrolling is fun or being on their phone is fun. Like how how do you define fun in the book? And what are some of your suggestions about how to have fun, which I do think a lot of people have forgotten how to do? Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a whole separate conversation too. But so the book is The Power of Fun and the subtitle is How to Feel Alive Again. So that's what my goal was in writing it. And what I realized from my own experience and then from doing research by doing a survey of my

mailing list, which by the way, it was contemporaneous with you having your baby. So this was in like summer of 2020. So it's kind of a weird time to be polling people about fun. But I basically asked people to look back on their own lives and call to mind experiences that stood out to them as quote, so fun. And I said, you know, what were you doing? Who were you with? What made it fun? What objects, if any, were involved? And I collected at this point, I've got thousands of these stories from around the world. But my theory was that true fun, as I call it, which is to distinguish it from something I call fake fun, but true fun is the confluence of three states. So it's the confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow. And to clarify, by playfulness, I'm not talking about like you have to play games or, you know, God forbid, carry around your phone in a clown case.

Like that's not playfulness. That's just creepy. It's about having, like, a lighthearted attitude about what you're doing and not caring too much about the outcome. You can still care, but just having a spirit of, like, letting down your guard, which actually is very foreign to a lot of adults. And connection is the feeling of having this special shared experience. I gave people a list of descriptors, and I asked them to check off which ones applied to the stories they told me. And one of the absolute top ones,

along with laughter actually, was special shared experience. And laughter, by the way, normally happens when you're with people. And then flow is the state of being totally engaged and present, like actively engaged, not passed out on the couch watching 17 episodes of Netflix, but actively engaged in what you're doing almost to the point where you lose track of time. And that is actually totally essential to fun. And to my mind, it's one of the main problems with our phones is that they're little distraction machines. And so if you have your phone and you're distracted by it, you are completely blocking the chance that you're going to have fun. You just can't. You can't have fun and not be present. On the flip side, that means if you are trying to be more present in your life,

a shortcut to that is to focus on having more fun. Because when you're having fun, you are present and you don't have to meditate. So anyway, my definition is that it is the center of that Venn diagram. It turns fun from this nebulous abstract concept into something that's much more under your control, because you basically just focus on building more playfulness into your life, building more connection, and building more flow in a large part by reducing distractions. If you achieve any of those three goals, you're already succeeding. And if you happen to get all three at once, like congratulations, you hit the bullseye of true fun. But that's how I define it. And just as a quick what is the fake fun part, I realize we use the word fun so sloppily in part because we've never defined it and in part because there's all these products and services that are marketed to us as fun uses of our leisure time, social media being the prime culprit here, that actually do not result in playful connected flow, and in fact, often make us feel gross about ourselves. The thing I found the most fascinating, I think, about the process of thinking about fun and writing the book is I started to recognize that

fun is actually not frivolous at all. We often write it off as frivolous or think it's even irresponsible to be adults who prioritize our own fun. But if you actually look at the things fun does for us from, you know, helping us see each other as people instead of political parties, like difference is a race when you're having fun, to some of the actual benefits it has for creativity, you're in an open minded state, like you have more ideas, but but also the health benefits, like stress and isolation are both really bad for us physically. I mean, isolation is the equivalent of smoking what 15 cigarettes a day. But when you have fun, you're socially connected. And you're actually in a low stress state. So it's actually really good for us physically. So I don't know, I kind of like,

my mind just started to like, it's like blowing my mind to think about how there's this thing we totally write off, but I think it's actually essential to a joyful life. I really like the point that you made about how adults have to learn or relearn a sense of playfulness that is so essential to having fun. And I feel like that really connects back to a point you made at the start of our conversation about how important it is if you're trying to break up with your phone or reset your relationship with your phone to do it with other people, not just for accountability, but to make it fun. And I feel like something that I would really recommend to people who want to try to reset your relationship to your phone is to do with other people and to make part of your kind of like collective activity and collective mindfulness trying to find like a new sense of fun or sense of

playfulness that you can have with your friends that will replace what you're trying to get from your phone that it's not giving you yeah so start a podcast yeah there you go um well katherine thank you so much for talking us through this. I'm definitely going to be following. I'm going to go follow your plan for the next 30 days so I can have a more sustainable relationship with my phone, break up with my phone, reacquaint myself with this fun thing. So thank you so much, Catherine. And we appreciate it. And we'll we'll talk to you again. That would be wonderful.

And can I say I put together a kit for your listeners that they actually want to start on that? Yes. Sure. Please do. Yeah. I actually want to start on that? Yes, sure. Yes, please do. Yeah, I was trying to think of how to actually make that. Like, I'm very into not just talking about stuff, but trying to actually help people with it. So I have a lot of resources I've made. Like, you know, if people want to try an experiment, I recommend people do to like take a 24-hour break from the internet writ large and all your devices, which is, I know, terrifying. I created like a preparation guide for that.

I've got some fun conversation prompts you can use when you're like, what the hell do we talk about now that we put our phones away. So anyway, I made a phone breakup toolkit for people. And it also there's also a course where it actually walks people through a phone breakup. So if people want to check that out, it's at Catherine price.com slash offline. And then I also was gonna say, I just love to help you guys like if you want to keep going and actually do something where we really try to make this into a sustainable thing I am here I am available I would love to help you and I'm so psyched that you're

doing this all of our listeners check out the kit that Catherine has put together for all of us that's so kind of you Catherine Price dot com slash offline and let's talk more about getting us on a long term program here I'm ready thanks Catherine thank you so much and price.com slash offline. And let's talk more about getting us on a, on a long-term program here. I'm ready. Thanks, Catherine. Thank you so much.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz,

Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.