Pints With Aquinas - The End of Porn? (Nick Stumphauzer) | Ep. 556

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

In this interview, Matt sits down with filmmaker and porn-blocker developer Nick Stumphauzer for a conversation about quitting porn addiction. The conversation focuses the defeat of porn via Nick's new software, and how to navigate modernity and technology as modern Catholics. - - - Check out Nick's software here 👉 https://shiftyourphone.com/ Follow Shift on Instagram: @shiftyourphone - - - Today’s Sponsors: 👉 Truthly – The Catholic faith at your fingertips: https://www.truthly.ai/ 👉 Hallow – The #1 Catholic prayer app: https://hallow.com/mattfradd - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, St. Anthony, Desert Hermit, right? I don't know if you've heard the story that he was in the desert where hermits go. And the Queen of Shiva appeared to him naked to tempt him. Okay, I don't know about this, yeah. And it's like, that's, that sounds tough, but imagine being eight and having, having 4K sex acts. 500 women, 5 million women, way hotter than the Queen of Shiva. Probably. I don't know.

Maybe she was beautiful. And I also think that the most violent political act that I can perform is to give away the solution to pornography. I think that is the most vicious thing that I can do to the people who hate me and who I hate in this world and want to see all of us in hell forever. They're drugs free. Okay. Solutions free.

See who wins. Hey everybody. Before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus, Our Refuge. If you, like many people, unlike all of us, to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously. When he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews, and I know it will be a healing balm to your soul. Check it out. Jesus, our refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks.

So Mike Pantile, a mutual friend, sends me like an Instagram direct message or something, which I never check, but happened to check this one day. And he said, my friend, Nick, has come up with this program that blocks distracting apps on your phone. And I thought, you know, like, good for him. That's, I'm, but I'm almost certain it doesn't work because I've tried every one of these things, right? And he said, well, no, he thinks it definitely does. I'm like, of course he thinks that.

And he said, well, would you be interested in meeting with him? I'm like, sure, yeah. And so you, I forget why, where you were or whatever, but you swung by the studio to show me this. I don't want to bury this, so I want to say it right up front. Shift, what's the URL? shift your phone.com. Shiftyphone.com.

And I was shocked that it worked. And it's been such a blessing to me and my family, so I'm really grateful to you. Yeah. So I know we're going to get into all the details about this and why people should be interested. But just so people know, I mean, for years I've been talking about how I hate and love the internet,

how I need to leave internet land to like dedicate my mind to study because I can't seem to live in two worlds at once. but this blocks all distracting apps from your phone and there are zero workarounds and it's been a game changer for me and I'm really grateful. Yeah, I remember your reaction

of like, yeah, but it probably doesn't. And that's the correct reaction. Good, okay, I hope it wasn't insulting, yeah. No, not at all. No, it feels good. It feels like we're doing the magic trick that we set out to do because, yeah, there's always a workaround

except for shift, so. Yeah, so, yeah, we can, can get into this. Sure, yeah. Why did you ever get into the business or why did you have the desire to create something that would block distractions from your phone? Totally. So yeah, I am a filmmaker by trade, always wanted to be. I have no technical background whatsoever. Never wrote a line of code. And by God's grace was freed from a porn addiction for a couple of years. still while being, I would say, classical theist, but not in the church.

I was raised Catholic, left the faith, was a vehement atheist, thought I was the smartest person in the room for several years. Can't imagine everybody consuming the opiate of the masses, that is religion. You know, destroyed my life, my happiness, you know, very, very tragic effects on my spirit. And I actually,

have the the journal entry because I journaled for about 10 years 2015 to 2025 and I have the journal entry of like very shortly after I lost faith the concept of without God everything is permissible kind of came into my mind and I had no defense against it and immediately following that was porn now I had I had encountered pornography when I was 11 by accident that porn companies will buy up domains that are similar to domains that people tried to pursue. So I think I typed in YouTube, the letter U-Tube instead of Y-O-U, and boom, there it is. But it wasn't until years later after I left the faith that, you know, became an issue. But through, again, God's grace and I guess just some natural virtues, I was able to kick that for a couple years,

maybe two years, something like that. And one night I was going to bed, and I just asked myself the question, what would I pay every month to remove self-control from the equation regarding pornography? Because it was always part of the equation, even with Covenant Eyes or canopy or any of these services out there that I knew existed, what would I do to remove self-control from the equation? And I said, $30 a month because I'm cheap.

But that framing of the question, I realized nobody had really asked before. How do I remove self-control from the question of pornography? Because I never accepted, even while I was within the addiction, I never accepted it as reasonable. I was like writing essays about, I was researching like addiction. I couldn't understand why this was such a problem beyond the fact that, like, obviously, it's super stimulating to dopamine. You know, people just throw around neurotransmitters like they mean,

well, this has 100% increase in dopamine, therefore you are now a slave forever. And I was just desperately trying to, for years, trying to understand this. And the drug language around porn was obviously salient. Everybody was kind of using it. You know, your brain on porn did a lot of, a lot of good work on that.

The Great Porn Experiment on, it's a TED Talk. Gary Wilson. Gary Wilson, great porn experiment. And I thought, well, if it's true that this is a drug, we're approaching this so stupidly, because swap it out for a drug, say cocaine, say cocaine, and you're telling people, I want you to bring a bag of cocaine with you

and keep it in your pocket. I want you to have a pile of it sitting on your coffee table. I want you to have some on your bedside, and I want you to only watch movies about cocaine, and then never do it. Yeah, right. Just be strong. Just be strong enough, just reject the thought.

And I saw an Instagram Reel of a priest saying the if your eye causes you to sin cut it out. He says if you're watching porn on your phone, get rid of your phone. I'm like, yeah, if you drive to the liquor store, just get rid of your car. What are you doing? You're not helping anybody here.

And you're also demanding, not just this priest, but like the religious right who has been for decades trying to address the porn question has been, in my opinion, unfairly castigating the victims, I believe that to a large degree, porn consumers, at least at first, are victims. And they're demanding saintly levels of virtue from essentially a crack baby. You come into this world addicted, very nearly come into this world addicted to porn. I mean, 11, 8, now it's 8, 8-year-olds are addicted to porn.

Yeah, 7 right. That was before the internet, so. Yeah. Okay, so get that person in their most formative years just barely escaping the age of reason and give them, my friend Will told me about, you know, St. Anthony, Desert Hermit, right? I don't know if you've heard the story

that he was in the desert where hermits go. And the Queen of Shiva appeared to him naked to tempt him. Okay, I don't know about this, yeah. Yeah, and because he was like a, a man against lust that was sort of like his niche of holiness was to combat lust. And so the demons manifested the Queen of Shiva naked to him. And it's like, that sounds tough, but imagine being eight and having, having 4K sex acts.

500 women, 5 million women, way hotter than the Queen of Sheen. She was probably ugly. I don't know. Maybe she was beautiful. Teeth would definitely better today, you know. Wow. At eight. And you're telling that kid, when he's 15,

just be chased, put it down. I was like, all right, we're coming at this completely the wrong way. And so, yeah, I was asking myself, what would I pay? What should one pay? Is there a way to just subtract self-control? self-control from the equation, is it even fair to ask of people self-control? Like, there was a recent conversation between Peter Hitchens and Matthew Perry from Friends. I don't know if you saw this.

Yeah, I did. I don't know how recent it was because it's a while. Yeah. Ironically, several years, I think, passed from a drug overdose. And they were debating drugs. And I think they were talking past each other pretty strongly. Matthew Perry said this is an addiction. I can control the first drink, but I can't control the second.

So I do all of these things to make sure that I don't have that first drink. Peter Hitchens and his lovely British accent is like, you know, you're full of it. You have total control, which I was surprised that a man who studied as, you know, the church. And I mean, he's an Anglican, but still is studying all this stuff as much as he did. didn't understand like yet grace builds on nature and like virtues are habits and vices are habits and like you become more and less culpable the more you consume or perform certain vicious acts and so on so like free will is not binary you don't have absolute freedom and then make every bad decision this exists on a gradient and they were just talking right

past each other peter hitchens is like you know jail drug dealers jail those who do drugs and Matthew Perry is like, I am a helpless victim of a substance that has total power over me. And I just thought, I think it's both. Like we're not St. Anthony, we don't have that level of virtue and we're being tested in a vulnerable state beyond our capacities and it's, I think, a masterful work of pride to get this narrative

into our minds of just, work harder, just work a little bit harder. Just pray another rosary, do another devotion to St. Joseph. Yes, do all of those things. But you're standing in the shower with a towel trying to dry off. Why isn't this working? Whoa.

So that's that. That is so helpful. Thank you for saying that because, you know, we, yeah, you really, I think, threaded the needle there between those of us who just cry victim and don't wanna change our life. And then the recognition, that as you say, this crap was foist upon us

when we were children and not just once, but repeatedly, like before the time of the internet, my best friend's mom is buying us porn videos to watch every weekend. What a rude lady. Yeah. And then the internet came in and it was good night. Yeah.

And so in saying how do we remove the self-control, you're not saying, how do we not grow in self-control? No. But it's like, how do we take refuge so that we can grow in self-control? Or no. No, yes, something like that. No, that's precisely what I'm saying. Because I think it's pride to pretend that you can build virtue in the midst of practicing vice.

Like, there has to be an overcompensatory mechanism, right? I think Aristotle talks about this. You would know better than me. That, like, if you're habituated in a vice, you have to overcorrect to the virtue. Yeah, bend the stick back the other way more than you need to. Yes. And that, okay, if virtue is habit, if it's practiced behavior of the good,

and then the appetite follows later. Yeah, that's usually the case, isn't it? I mean, I think of working out and eating. Right. You know, like our mate Mike Bantile, you know, like he's, he'd probably be the first to say, like, well, I think we'd also, I wouldn't put it on Mike, because I don't know what he'd say. But I think I would say, and my wife would say,

maybe you would, that like, the kind of non-phan, non-food, the poison we've been fed since we were children. And then we wonder why we can't lose weight and where we can't get in shape and why we're constantly sick. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, some of this wasn't your choice. You sent me that voice memory recently about kind of how our relationship with technology is like eating McDonald's three times a day.

And then we're just aghast at our inability to perform optimally in all areas of life. Yeah. So that was sort of the start of what I thought was a different way of looking at the problem, but not just in the philosophical or psychological sense of addiction, but also in the technological of if this is true, we are so confused about our approaches to this. So for example, why are you subscribing to a porn blocker? red flag number one to me. Are you solving the problem or are you renting the solution?

Now, they might say, well, it's training wheels, right? You want to get yourself to a point where I don't want training wheels. I don't want to ever have access to pornography. I get angry when it shows up on my Twitter feed. I get angry when I'm watching a movie and it and it hits me. Christ says we're supposed to flee from it, not combat it. I don't want this as part of my life, so I don't want to rent the solution. I would like my devices to be void of that. I want them to no longer have the capacity

to present images of sexuality and pornography on my device. Is that possible? These are questions I was asking. I was immediately told no. And who did you ask? I can't say. I won't say. But many people, who knew what they were doing?

One person who really thought they knew what they were doing, and then sort of the general consensus is what I was trying to ask of software, required permissions, required, not just permissions, but access to a level of the software that I was told, specifically Apple would not permit. Right, that's what I've been told. And I was like, well, I don't accept this.

I don't think only evil people can have good ideas. So that was one thing that I wanted. And then another was, I don't like accountability partners. that was confusing to me. I don't want my phone, not naming which company does this, taking photos of my screen every couple of seconds,

analyzing it with AI, and when it's something illicit, sending that to an accountability partner to then create this awkwardness and tension. I think that dissuades a lot of people from pursuing help. You don't see any value in that? I mean, you're not saying you don't see value in accountability, presumably, or are you?

I hope not. I don't think we should be accountable. I think it's the tail, not the dog, where you're trying to create what structure should have been there on a very micro level. And you're putting this on an individual who, it's post hoc, right? Hey, I just got a notification. It looks like you're looking at something. Yeah, yeah. Sorry.

Yeah, I fell. Please pray for me. I'm really tempted right now. Like, it's all post hoc. It's after the fact. Yeah. I had accountability partners. Didn't do a damn thing.

Yeah. You would text them. You just get comfortable. I'm tempted. I'm struggling right now. Please pray for me. turn off the phone, go watch porn. The way the mind works with addiction

is when it's possible, you will find a way. I think that's why cigarettes are so ubiquitous in terms of what they describe as addictive substances. They're not particularly dopaminergic in comparison to other drugs. Even alcohol is more pleasurable than, I mean, personally, I love cigarettes. still do after all these years.

But it's their accessibility. Yeah. You buy a pack of 20, you got it whenever you want it. It's just, it's always there in the palm of your hand, just like a phone is. Alcohol is a little bit harder, you know. You can't drive and drink because we live in a prison planet. North Korea, what is this?

What is this nuts? You know, you can't walk around the street and drink. Yeah. Right? There's a lot more boundaries again. against this, but it's accessibility permits addiction or at least permits compulsive use of a substance. Yeah, I would think those, have you heard of the three A's,

anonymity, affordability, and accessibility. Perfect, yeah. And porn is all three of those. Yeah. And to me, it's just like accountability partners are sort of admission of failure. Hey man, I really wanna drive to the liquor store and get some boots.

Hey man, don't do it, okay, but I have a car my car will start when i get in that car i have money in my bank account means mode of opportunity don't do it like you didn't solve the problem so when you were using accountability software did you find it helpful at all or somewhat but not nearly enough well i by god's grace was freed from pornography without any technical interventions i download Covenant Eyes after, to stress tests, what are they doing? What's the competition doing?

How hard is it for me to get around it? And it's funny because, okay, it's like, these are just a subscription model, 13 bucks, 17 bucks, whatever it is per month. And during that time, it's supposed to be very hard to delete. In fact, you have to call Covenant Eyes and give them a code. and then they'll liberate it from your computer.

And at the time, it wasn't tech savvy enough to know if that actually was, like if I could have done it myself, I bet there's a 50-50 shot that a tech-savvy person might be able to get around it. I don't know. This isn't like encouraging people to do that.

It's just that when you can, you will. And then it just struck me like yesterday. It's like, oh, just stop paying. Stop paying. Stop paying for the subscription. Okay. Right? Because they're not going to service you if you're not paying.

Oh, okay. So wouldn't it make sense for the service to deactivate to stop being effective? But that's not something you can do in the heat of the moment. Just stop paying. No, but just sort of in perpetuity you could. Yeah. I just, but I think that when people have a resolve to, when people want to, as you say, look at pornography, they'll find a way.

But they usually then regret it and have another burst of resolve shortly after. But that I think is extremely. and extremely damaging to a person. So self-esteem, I think, is a relationship that you have with yourself, that you will do what you say that you will do. And when you recruit the assistance of an organization, you say, please help me with this.

I want to exchange my money for your service of helping me build my self-esteem and not lie to my inner child. That after I hit rock bottom, I'm feeling so ashamed of myself and I say never again, and in that moment I subscribe to this service, if I can get around it, You just assisted me in betraying myself again.

How is that different to shift? Aren't I renting your services to not betray myself? We, well, escape is not a subscription. Say what that is. Escape is the name of the porn blocker. So we kind of jumping ahead to what I ended up developing, which is escape, that's the porn blocker. Escape is and always will be free.

When's it available? The viewers watching this can download it. Come on. It isn't always will be free. What's the URL? ESC, escape, esk from porn.com. Okay. I know you want to get to that.

Sure. So I don't mean to make you talk about it. No, no, that's fine. I can't wait to talk about what you've developed here. But okay. Do you want to address that, though? Because that seems like you're throwing stones in a glass house a little bit. Like you're saying to covenantize, I don't want to rent from you.

Doesn't that somehow take something away from me. But how is what you're doing any different? Because it's permanent and you don't pay for it. And it works. And it works. And it works. That's good. Cool.

Tada. And look, I don't condemn, by the way, any of the efforts. I don't think it's immoral to charge for a born blocker. Right. I'm a greedy capitalist. Yeah. I think it's totally fine to service a need. Yeah.

And it costs a ton of money to develop these sorts of things. Not only develop, but to run. You are parsing crazy data that's going from the internet to the device. you're filtering through that's what it is it's a filter so you need to be aware of the content that's coming in and then you need to be discerning about the content that's coming in all of this requires compute all of this requires service base all of that is expensive and the more users you have the more expensive it is so it makes total sense to me that somebody would pay for this I think there's ways to accomplish that without having to pay for it and I also think

that the most violent political act that I can perform is to give away that the solution to pornography. I think that is the most vicious thing that I can do to the people who hate me and who I hate in this world and want to see all of us in hell forever. Their drug's free, okay, solution's free. See who wins.

I think it's really important that we jump ahead and talk about how this porn blocker works because everyone's on the edge of their seat, I think at this point, but like what is this thing? Okay, well, and then we can circle back if you want. Sure. I mean, I'll tell you what it isn't and because it is proprietary, thankfully. When we started this, I had to, we looked at the available tech. And there's a reason why it hasn't been done yet. And as far as I'm aware, it hasn't been done yet. And I've been told by people now, three years later into development, that no, nobody's done this yet. And so normally to achieve, we achieve, you would have to completely factory reset your phone. So you'd be starting with a brand new phone. And I'm speaking exclusively about iOS right now. We do service androids, but that's sort of a

different discussion because they're much less persnickety than Apple. So normally to impose something like mobile device management or supervision on a device, you'd have to wipe the phone. You couldn't bring your own device if you did. It would be wiped. And the main problem, and this is speaking holistically about the objection, I guess this is a good connection back to what we were just talking about, the things that I was considering three years ago at the start of this, is the user is always the administrator, which is a fancy technical way of saying, if you want to stop it, you can't, you will find a way until we came along. Because companies, for some reason, respect their customers. I'm kidding. But like they want to honor changes of mind.

Well, I don't want to pay for this anymore. Well, but I need this one particular thing over here. It's kind of inconvenient now. I had somebody tell us, this is shift. This wasn't escape. But the rehab mode on shift, which I'm sure we'll talk about, is making it more tempting for me to watch porn. They said, but not having access to it is actually,

they were trying to get us to release the rehab, which we wouldn't do. Okay. They're saying not having this, you know, my brain's trying to find a way to go get the please just let me go just let me go and and companies because they're so different to the customer which is in my opinion a philosophical failing about how to serve people in a marketplace say oh okay yeah so with escape the user is not to the administrator when escape is applied to an iPhone it is permanent it cannot be removed your phone cannot be

factory reset and you will forever on that device be unable to access pornographic or sexual content real quick for the people at home so shift is for distractions uh escape will block pornography on your phone forever there's absolutely no way around it unless you go buy a new device okay so just i wanted to make sure we if you buy a new device my understanding nobody's done this yet because it's it's new but my understanding is if you buy a new device and you try to transfer all of your content and data, it will not let you do so unless that supervision applies to the new device. Okay, wow. So. But I just want those two things. I want people to be aware of is shift and escape. So we're going to throw those words around a lot and I want people to know what we're

talking about. Yeah, well, just think, I mean, they're keys on the keyboard, right? Shift, you're going to have, you're going to have a shift in your modality every day and escape, boom, you're gone, you're out of there. Okay. You were no longer bound by this thing. And yeah, escape is mediated through the desktop application that is shift. We should probably mention that these exist on the computer and they interface with your phone. And once it's applied, nobody has to pay for escape. And you're not obligated to buy Shift in order to have escape.

It is a gratis forever, everybody gets escape. Have you done it on your phone? Escape? Yeah. Yeah. The early, the beta versions. Yeah, yeah. I think I actually sent you two screenshots of what happens

when you searched on Instagram. Do you remember this? Yes. Tell people about that. because that's what's shocking to me so we actually developed a way to filter third-party apps which is bananas pretty tough so hard um covenant eyes can't do that canopy can i don't know i don't know if i don't know if covenant eyes does yeah maybe things have developed since i used to be yeah i mean it's not like ground i shouldn't say we developed we implemented a solution to this and that's another thing too part of there's 15 reasons why i've decided to make escape free one of them is that it's

It's sort of penicillin, like we've known about it for a long time. DNS is old. VPNs are old. Internet filtration is old. It's as old as the internet is. And metadata is old. Like, what is this thing that's being sent on the internet? Do we know what it is?

What are the contents of this web page? Can we become aware of it and be selective about what goes to a device or doesn't go to advice? It's all old and it's not hard. So I don't take pride in filtering porn. I take pride in how we've administered the solution and the protections that we've implemented that other people haven't

and maybe sort of the general philosophy behind shift and escape. But porn blocking is not really hard. So the way that we solve the third-party app thing on the phone allows us to, if you're on Instagram, you're on Twitter or Snapchat or Reddit, you can't search for porn on those apps either. It's not just the browser on the phone. That's wild. That's great. That's really terrific. You can't even search on Siri. Really? Yeah, you send me those two screenshots on Instagram and I forget what

you typed in, but you, I think you showed me either. When you type something. I think I just typed in porn. Yeah, and then nothing came up. Well, yeah, so you type in porn on Instagram and you're going to get accounts, either only fans, models, or porn stars, or accounts. that have some variation of the word pornography in order to all active, all full of porn, and then with escape on the same thing, it's like, there's no results for your, you know, whatever. Wow. Wow.

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It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Frad. This reminds me the time we homeschool our kids, but back in the day, my wife was struggling with health. And so we put one of our children in this school for a little bit. And that was what I was terribly concerned about, right? Is my kids seeing porn?

So I'm like, so how good are you? filters here. I'm walking down the hallway typing in all sorts of insane, obscene things on my phone on their Wi-Fi. Yeah. And my wife didn't blink. She's like, good, keep going. But I think the try this one. The principle was a little horrified. In their IT guys, like, what is happening? Are you seeing these logs? That's right. Yeah, well, the benefit of this approach as well is it's not constrained to Wi-Fi. It's network traffic, Simplicitare. So you don't have to be on a router. You have to be on a Wi-Fi network. If you were to impose this on a router, a Wi-Fi network or something, and then the kid just turns off Wi-Fi on their phone, or you do as an individual,

I mean, I'm trying to service everybody as well, the individuals, then you could just get around that. You can't VPN. That's another thing. You can't VPN around Escape. For people who know about VPNs, you cannot implement a VPN to get around Escape either. So you're telling me, get a phone, download Escape for free. Yes. It'll always be for free. And, and, you're not, And I can't look at porn on this phone anymore. Or your iPad. Yeah. Because we service iPads too.

And 2026. And if I call you, go, hey, listen, what if? Just hear me out. You won't, you can't, you don't get, I mean, have you thought about the legality there? Are there people, is there a way that you could get in trouble by denying customers what they want? Well, I mean, they're not customers. They're not paying, right? It's free.

And we've got all the terms and conditions. And the thing is with terms and conditions, and we can talk about privacy later. You know, like we wrote them. This wasn't a lawyer writing them 50,000 pages that you're not reading. It's not chatty GPT writing them. Like we understand how our software works.

When it's on your phone, you can go into VPN and device management and you can look at what we're asking for. And you can validate is what Nick said about what they're asking for from my device. true and am i okay with this and then you can compare like here's here's what apple says about what they're asking for you know we can't access your photos other companies do by the way we can't access your text messages we can't change your pass code we can't wipe your phone we don't know what

in besides like browser traffic internet traffic that's going to and from your phone you know we don't have access to these things um so yeah people can validate are we it's not you don't just have to take our word for it you know i just wonder though what's going to happen when this becomes big and there are a lot of people who would like their pawn back please sorry i can't hear you excuse me i mean is it just a is there a spam account that all these emails are going to get and filed into when they start writing to you and and as maybe a more serious question is have you will it accidentally block things it shouldn't block and then what are you going to do? No, because it's a living document. It's not a document, but it is a living

service. So we are getting customer feedback and implementing it as well as working on it ourselves all the time. So it's learning in a way. It's learning. That's probably a better way to put it is it's learning. So if somebody's like, hey, I'm trying to scan a QR code to get like a restaurant menu and it's blocking this, like, all right, just give us three minutes. Like, okay, now it's good. Now you're free. And because, you know, you're trying to categorize the entire internet. Yeah. But it's easier to say, I don't want to say, I don't want to say. see porn than it is to say, let's filter the entire internet through a bunch of different lenses, like distractions, which is where Shift, we block browsers, except specifically

requested URLs for whitelist. So like if somebody needs a two-factor authentication for work, that's available. But what's not available is your ability to go on Google. Oh my goodness. Guys, everyone watching this, please go get Shift. It has been a game changer for me. I know I said this at the beginning. I want to keep saying it. I mean, my favorite thing to do is to leave my, usually my computer and phone here, go home for the weekend, read books,

hang out with my kids, smoke cigars, chill, walk around the block with my wife. But when I go home with my phone, it's just like this thing that's always beckoning me. And I think, I don't think I'm worse than other people. I think I'm more aware of it than other people. Yeah. I know that sounds arrogant, but I don't think it is.

I look at other people tell me they don't have a problem. And I'm like, you definitely have a problem. I don't know, I think I'm just more sensitive to the fact that I have a problem. Yeah. But my point is these last few weekends, I shift my phone. Yeah. And I go home with my phone. And so now on my phone, I have text messages and I have email.

And that's not a distraction for me. But what I could do before I shift my phone is I could delete email if I wanted and then shift my phone. And now I'm going home just with text messages and phone calls and maps and Uber. And I have my bank accounts, which is just. Like, I've talked about these, these, I, what do I call them, these ideological benders I go on where I go and buy this like dumb phone

for like a thousand, not usually that much, but 500 bucks. And then I realize, oh my gosh, it's just very difficult to live in the modern world without this phone. And I also run a YouTube channel and I need two factor authentication and they don't always email you.

You sometimes need to scan a QR code. So the point is this personally for me and just so everybody knows, real clear, you're not paying me to advertise you. And I don't... I've tried. Yeah, well, I'm not taking a cent to do this. Yeah.

So when I'm pushing this on everyone watching, it's only because I have benefited from it greatly. Sorry. No, no. So shift was the accident. Huh. So this began as just a porn blocker. That's it.

But in order to develop the degrees of control that we needed to block porn in the ways that I set up wanting to do, to solve the glaring issues, the Achilles heels that I saw on the other, services to truly solve the problem once and for all, that led us down a rabbit hole of development where there were no developer docs. You couldn't go on like developer.apple.com and read what they say, well, if you're trying to do this, use this code. We wrote this thing

from the ground up. We were testing. Shift originally took an hour and a half to get on your phone. You know, there have been so many iterations to get to this point. So shift was the accident, but I had never sold software before. I had never developed software before. I didn't know what I was doing. And I thought, well, let me try to sell Shift first, learn all the things that I don't know, and then release, escape.

And to be clear, for people at home, Shift is a one-time purchase of $99, no subscription. Which is so nice, because we're all so sick of these subscriptions that are just draining our bank account. So just to have, like, one payment, which I paid, and then it's like, oh, I think you gave it to me for free, and then it's done.

But $99, that's incredible. Yeah, well, so a new light phone is $6.99. Wise phone is $3.99. Subscriptions to things like Opel is $100 a year. Lifetime subscription to Opel is $400. And just so we're clear, Opel doesn't work. Well, neither does brick, which was the next one I was going to mention. So there was a new scene that arose of, they're called NFC tokens.

And NFC tokens, it's similar to RFID. You tap it to the back of your phone. and it interfaces with the phone in a very particular way. And so there have been these 3D printed bricks or cards called Block, and then there was Bloom, which was like a titanium card or whatever, and they'd have a little NFC token in it.

And when you tapped it on your phone, it would engage the screen time, the Apple native in your setting screen time features to limit stuff. And so their advertisement is this is a physical distraction. you're going to set up your configuration, which I also think is a problem. Oh, Instagram's not a problem for me. I just need to block Twitter.

Yeah, and when you don't have Twitter, what are you going to be on? Right. Right. So the user gets to decide what's distracting for them. They codify that. They tap it to the brick, and it will block it. And unless you tap it back, your phone is restricted. There's a litany of issues with this.

First of all, brick, block, bloom can fit in your pocket. It's pretty hard to fit a laptop in your pocket. Yeah. So you can just take it with you, tap it, undo. Yeah. And the other work, like, I remember I got Opal. I was the biggest, like, advertiser of Opel for, like, 20 minutes. You know, I was telling everybody about it, how great the app was.

And then I realized, oh, you can just go into settings and click one button, and it's not working anymore. Why did I spend money on this stupid thing? Yeah. And then this Catholic fella comes along. It's like, I figured it out. Don't worry about it. How? Is that possible?

Yeah. So they, I don't know how they get away with saying this, that there's no workaround. They say in their ads, well, I don't know about Opel. But Block does on their website, no workarounds. I think Brick, in their messaging, says, you get the sense that. This is a physical thing between you and that, and you just leave it at home. Again, the user is the administrator. And so in screen time settings, the same API, the same request that Brick makes to the device,

is the same thing that you, because you are the owner of the device, has permission to disable and then delete the application. So, security conscious people might be saying, so are you saying I'm no longer the owner of my device when I use shift or escape? Kind of. This reminds me, Henry Ford said if I had have asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.

In other words, shut up, customer. You have no idea where you want. I know what you want. I love that you've taken this. You have to. And guess what? we get pushback. Okay. I won't convince everybody. People buy Shift. They might not read the privacy policy. They might not read the FAQs. They get through the enrollment process. So they're going

through the enrollment process and they go, whoa, wait, wait, wait. You're going to own my phone? No, Apple makes us say this. But there is a transfer of the keys to two parties, your laptop and my company. And your alternatives are you can turn the thing off whenever you want or you share the permission with your laptop and with this company that has pledged to uphold what your stated goals are and we will work together to protect you in perpetuity. So, yes, you can disable brick, block, bloom, all these things, but you might say, well, I can just go back to my computer and disable it. And so we have something called focus sessions, 30, 60, 90 minutes. Yep. Then we have schedules. Then we have holidays.

And then we have rehab. How hard was it to get out of rehab when you accidentally put it on? Well, I mean, that's a different thing. I had to cool you up. Right. Most people don't know you personally. It's a spring shift and then there's screwed. Yeah.

So, okay. So just so people, I know I can answer that question. Sure. Just so people know, you download the shift application to your desktop on your laptop or what have you. Then from there, you connect it to your phone and or iPad, and then only from your laptop can you shift or unshift your phone. Yes. So this is why I left my laptop here. I drive home and I'm out of luck.

There's nothing I can do about it. You also one day clicked rehab, not thinking it was going to work. Yeah. So I clicked re, so just so people know, so rehab is what? Just say it real quick. 30 days and you yeah that's it you can't get out of it you cannot get out of it and yes i clicked it and maybe i don't know maybe i lied to you maybe i bent the truth maybe i did mean to do it and then regretted my whole life oh no yeah forgive me if i did

that um i remember it sounds like something i would do i remember your voice memo you said what theoretically what if somebody had accidentally yeah maybe see how i got around that lie maybe not thinking that it would work what would you do that yeah so there was zero way to get around But of course, I know you personally. So then we get on a phone call with you and some tech guy. And then for 20 minutes, I'm typing code into my computer. Terrified. I was about to blow my computer up.

Yeah. Well, and to those hackers, those smarty pants is out there who think then that they could just come up with the code. That's actually not how it works. The reason why we were able to liberate yours was because we had the administrative permission on your device. Yeah. So my point being is that just because you have your computer. does not mean you can unshift your phone if you have selected. So, for example, my shift starts at 8 p.m.

Yep. I'm a family man now. Got to get off the phone. 10 a.m. and unshifts because if it's 6 a.m., I ain't praying. Yeah. Yeah, or it's hot.

I feet hit the ground. I'm on social media. If my phone's not shifted. Okay. A lot of people are like that. I'm not above that. I'm not pretending to have saintly virtue here. I'm not too good for that.

I'm not too good to be on Twitter before my feet at the ground. Yeah. I mean, let's be honest, a lot of times it's in bed. You know, I just check the notifications, right? Exactly.

So we solved the administrative issue that, and Opal, it's funny, I saw in 2024, I think November, 2024, there's like a forum, an Opel forum, and this one guy's comment stands out to me to this day, He says, they have to figure out a way to stop us from getting around this. I feel like an idiot paying for this app.

Yeah. And they said that they solved it. And the irony was they solved it via the shortcuts widget within. Are you familiar with this? I was on there. For that 20 minutes, I was an Opel fan. Oh, hilarious. You tried to.

I couldn't even figure it out. But yeah. Right. Well, it's 15 steps to just follow these simple, 400 steps. to manually create a shortcut that redirects you when you try to go to the spot that you can disable.

You just kick the can down the ride, right? So just delete that shortcut. Right. And now you're free to delete Opal. Yeah. So again, it's sort of like the security conscious people. I think that privacy, this concept of privacy is, I want to be kind.

I want to be kind to people who care, but I really think it's misplaced. I don't think the concept of privacy is misplaced. I think how it's being leveraged is misplaced. When you have an iPhone, first of all, single greatest surveillance technology on the planet next to a Huawei phone. Huawei phones are even worse.

What phones? Huawei, it's a Chinese phone. Oh, okay. Can you tell me why this is the case? Yeah. Let's take TikTok. as an example. So with TikTok, when you accept the terms and conditions, there are thousands of pages of, yeah, I agree, whatever.

Yeah, I've never read one of those things in my life. No, of course not. Never will. People don't understand that they are agreeing to send hundreds of thousands of packets of information off their device to TikTok, whoever owns it, it was China, now it's Israel, to their servers with complete unfettered access. So you're giving them access to not just your photos because it'll ask you if you want to upload something,

for example. Would you like to allow some permission, all permission to your photos? Everyone's like, yes, it's all permission. Yeah, I don't be bothered. Do you want to have dinner with us then? And then there's also microphone access.

There's camera access. Well, of course, because you want to take a TikTok, right? You want to film a TikTok. But what about when you're not in the application? Do you have that option to choose only in the application or not? That's typically location services tracking the location. Not microphone.

Well, microphone you can choose to not turn on, but it gets more sinister than this. Because just having TikTok on your phone, there is, in my understanding through my research, somebody might fact check me on this. But as far as I can tell, TikTok, Instagram, specifically, 24-7 microphone and video camera access. Meta actually was sued because, have you ever, so you do face unlock on your phone? Yeah.

Have you ever not been looking at it? But the moment your eyes move to the screen, it unlocks. Yeah. There's a setting, some attention, something, I can't remember what it's got, but the word attention's in it. You can see it in the face lock settings in iOS. There is an infrared camera on the top of your phone that if you were to peel the infrared filter off of any one of these cameras here,

we could see this live. Your phone three times a second is taking a picture of your face. And this is why when you scan into your phone, you do this. Yeah. Right? So it's kind of no matter what angle you're at, you can unlock your phone.

but then there's this attention setting where maybe you don't want your phone to accidentally unlock there. So it's waiting for the cat's eyes, rebound of the infrared light on the back of your eye and it sees it right there. Well, meta goes, oh, cool. So I know where you're looking, right?

So when you're scrolling on Instagram, I know where your eyes are. It's called a heat map. So I know what you're attending to. Oh, my gosh. I know what you care about. I know this. I feel like an idiot

for not realizing they must have that technology. but that's that's wild and so so i run meta ads now i'm just learning the whole terrifying world of how do i yeah solicit to every human on the planet and there's this ephemeral concept of the algorithm just let the algorithm give it money it'll find your customers because your credit card information your IP address your email address and your geographic location are associated to you as a person and every bit and bite of information that you experience on the internet is associated with that.

And that is parsed by the algorithm, by huge data centers, so that when you mention something in the vicinity of your phone, you will get an ad for that. Five years ago, seven years ago, that was cookie. Nobody believed that. Now it happens all the time.

Well, how does it happen? How does it happen if these apps are sandboxed, allegedly, if they're constrained? Well, because you agreed to the terms and permissions when you download an Instagram. You agreed to the terms and permissions when you download a TikTok. So the front and rear-facing camera are observing your surroundings, and it's listening to you 24-7, and it has access to your SMS text messages, your I-messages.

I promise you that. I promise you that. When I was, before I searched the internet for an engagement ring, I texted one friend, Twitter in the next day, engagement ring ads. So it's either the text messages or the conversations that I'm having around it, even though I wasn't saying this out loud. All of these things are working together to create a profile on YouTube to make a better customer out of you, to target you. All of that stops when you shift your phone. Because we don't block the apps.

The apps aren't on your phone anymore. So people say, okay, you just blocked it, right? So I can go into my app library and it's no. The phones, the apps are not on your phone anymore. The packets of information cease transmitting data elsewhere. But they come and ask us, hey, where's my data going? Where's my privacy? It's like you're barking up the wrong tree here.

Your phone has never been less porous than when you have shift on your phone activated. So what do you say to those who have security questions for you or privacy questions? for you. I mean, we have a privacy, I get on the phone with them. Try doing that with Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, but I mean, you're probably going to be doing that for about three more days. I mean, because this thing is and should blow up from what I can tell. It is hard to keep up, but it's important to keep up. And so when, I mean, please don't text us unless you have a problem. But if you have a problem, you text us. And what you get is either me, our very intelligent developer or our support guy.

Yeah, you're going to need more people real quick. But I would rather scale that than ever kick someone over to thank you for opening a ticket with support at shift.com. We will get back to you in three to five business days. People call me, people text me, or they text to the other two gentlemen, and I will keep building that because I need to not just. do the tech different. I think people's experience of tech needs to be different of tech services, of software as a service. So what do you see on people's phones? Like, what's telling

me about the privacy? Make people comfortable who are terrified to shift or escape their phone wondering what is? Well, I'll put it to you this way. I'll be specific first with there's a feature of geo-fences, which is coming out soon. So you could pick, for example, your home. You just select geo-fence your home as you walk in, your phone shifts automatically. Okay. So you could do that with your kids' phones or whoever. I saw that. I wasn't sure what it meant.

Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, it's coming out soon. So for that, you voluntarily give us location data. And that's asking, are you in the geo fence or are you out of the geof fence? Yeah. So, okay, that's optional.

Don't have to give us location data. If somebody hacked our company, they would get your email. So when there's a data breach, I don't know if you've ever gotten these email. You know, I'm sorry, this company that you, Rocket Mortgage has just been hacked and we lost everything, you know, 600 million passwords and usernames and email addresses and maybe your social security number, right, if you're doing hard credit polls. Yep. On stuff. Well, we use Stripe, so we don't have your credit card information. And we don't even have a login.

It's an email and a license key. So if they hacked our servers, they would get your email. Okay. So you might get like a spam email from something. Do you see, can you see what people are doing on their devices? No. Okay. So it's not like.

Well, with escape, there's the, when you filter the internet, yes, you do see network traffic. That's how, that's how you filter the internet. So with escape, yes, shift now. With escape, you have to ingest everything that's going to the person. person's phone and pass it through the VPN, pass it through the DNS first and say, is this a good site or a bad site? Kick it either way.

But when you're talking, like, we don't have time to like, you know, read, oh, wow, this guy's on Reddit or whatever. Okay. And, you know, we don't see, you can't access bank information through this. And again, I encourage anybody who's skeptical about this sort of privacy thing. I understand you don't have to use this. But what I'm describing is extremely old. Like internet filtering for pornography is very old.

We're not using a new method of that. So like if you're okay, for example, nor VPN. Yeah, nor VPN gets all your data too. Actually, they just sell it. It's a VPN's their total scam. But dash lane VPN. All these VPNs are parsing internet traffic as well. It's like how it works.

But what's, again, what kind of blows my mind is 2008, Edward Snowden's like, hey, guys, the NSA, NSA is spying on all of you. And everyone was like, what's for lunch? Like, who cares? This isn't, we willingly give our information to the Egregor who hates us. Yeah. And we're coming along using a thousandth of the ability. to try to offer a service that would protect, actually protect you against the pernicious aspects of this.

And then, you know, when we get questions about privacy, I'm like, I mean, I'll talk to you on the phone. You can read our privacy policy, and you don't have to use this service, but like you're barking up the wrong tree here. So how come you figured this out? How were you able to create something that opal and brick and... Do you want a corny answer?

Yeah. So I've been a close-up magician for 21 years. Okay. And a very good card magician named Danny Dorothe's has a philosophy about how to do magic. He says, start with the miracle. Don't care about how you're going to do it. Start with the miracle. What do you want to see happen?

They pick a card. They write their signature on it. And then it appears in their shoe. That's what you want to have happen. Okay. Okay. Now go study. How are you going to make it happen?

Go talk to other magicians. go read books, come up with some stuff on your own, then figure out how to do the miracle. I wanted, you push a button, porn's gone. You push a button, distractions are gone, and that's it. And I just fought for that magic trick. And people react that way. You literally said it in the video, you said, it's magic.

Did I? Like, that's what I want people to experience. It's like, whoa. Because I think that's what Steve Jobs did. Yeah. I don't hate phones. I don't hate the internet. I don't hate social media.

I don't think any of those things are the problem. What's the problem? You ever heard of Rat Park? Maybe, yeah. Is this the lever? Yeah, water. Tell me what it is, because I don't think I know what it is. It's in the 90, late 80s, I think.

Scientists last name, Alexander, did a study because the addiction. studies that had been done up to this point using mice and rats were typically solitary mice in a cage. And so they would give them like a water bottle full of water and a water bottle full of sweetened morphine because of the taste of morphine's pretty bad. And all the mice would just overdose. And this Alexander guy is like, well, maybe it's because they like hate their lives? I mean, that's not how he approached it, but he's like, perhaps there are environmental conditions. Yeah. And so he built cages that were 200 times bigger and filled it with like

things that rats like, tunnels and other rats so that they could socialize with them. Yeah. You know, the lighting environment's different. Wow. They were 19 times less likely to even consume the drug. They just preferred water. So I believe that shift is not the solution. Shift is 50% of the solution, and it reveals 100% of the problem, which is we live in hell. Our existence is intolerable.

There's, I mean, not to get like, doomer on you, but like, it's, why would you stop scrolling? Right. Seriously, what do you have to live for? Not you, Matt. No, you have a lot to live for. But, like, the kid who saw porn at eight

and it's been addicted for seven years, And the value of the dollar is one-third of what it was, and he lives in a world that hates him and anything good that he would ever pursue, this world wants him to not have that, like actual objective good. Why would he ever stop scrolling? No reason to. Truthfully is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help you know, live, and defend the Catholic faith with clarity and confidence, whether you're navigating a tough conversation, deepening your understanding, or looking at you. for daily spiritual guidance, Truthly is your companion on the journey. It's like if Chat GPT went through OCIA, got baptized and made it its mission to proclaim the truth of the Catholic Church. But Truthly is more than just a Q&A tool, its formation in your pocket. Take audio

courses on topics like the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, Purgatory, and why the Catholic Church is the one founded by Jesus Christ. Each course is designed to be accessible, engaging, and deeply rooted in the teachings of the church. You'll also receive daily audio reflections, short, powerful meditations to help you grow in prayer and stay grounded in your spiritual life. Already downloaded by thousands of people worldwide, Truthly is transforming the way we learn, share and live our faith. One question, one course and one prayer at a time. Start your seven-day free trial today. Download Truthly on the app store. And this is what's so insidious about the ability to delete a screen time blocker or delete a porn blocker or stop paying for it.

The moment that you start to get that withdrawal, that you're just like sitting in quiet and you're like, wow, I kind of hate everything about my life. There's no beautiful places in nature to walk around in. I don't want to get a degree to get a job that I hate. I kind of don't have friends. One in five millennials don't have any friends. I've spent the last 3,100 hours per year of my life looking at other people's lives on Instagram and I kind of don't measure up to any of this stuff.

I guess I'll just sit here and keep scrolling. And the moment you feel that pain, if a company lets you go back on that, you'll never leave. You'll never leave the Matrix. If it lets you, say that again, when you feel the pain. Yeah, that's, when you feel the pain, that's your first bit of awareness that you live in hell.

And you have two options. You sleepwalk toward Armageddon or you try to do something about it. And those are our two options. So if an 18-year-old lives to 75, we'll spend 19 years looking at their phone. Holy crap, what? Say that again, sorry? If an 18-year-old today, they just got a phone today, by the way,

disregarding the fact that they get phones in fourth grade, third grade, second grade. Forget the first 10 years of their life. From 18 to 75, they spend an average of 8.5 hours a day on their phone, a third of their life. So by 75, they'll spend about 19 years looking at their phone. 3,100 hours a year, 5.5 hours a day, which is typically social media, the other three hours is going to be online shopping, pornography, YouTube videos. Now, every year that passes, you didn't dedicate time to creating a life of any kind of meaning whatsoever.

And so it gets harder and harder to find a reason to stop scrolling, to stop watching Netflix. Why would you? so if you're going to offer somebody a way out you have to do two things and you have to be very certain about them first you can't let them go back because it'll break their heart it will destroy their inner child because they weren't parented right their parents didn't protect them from porn i was talking to a lady a couple years ago it's one of the most disgusting things i've ever heard It's not explicit. It was just disgusting.

Her son was 17, and she was in her late 40s, divorced. And I had had the idea for escape, and I was trying to workshop it with somebody at this gathering. Her son's right there, and I bring up something about porn. She's, like, kind of tipsy on a glass of wine. She goes, oh, he's been watching porn since he was 11. I would have struggled to not push her over. That's why I see escape as violent.

Yeah, explain that. I love how you're saying it, but just so people in the back understand what you mean. I don't want to be a criminal in God's eyes or man's. And what my passions would want me. I mean, like, I think all pornographers should be hung in the street. I think the fathers of pornographers, the fathers of Only Fent's models

should be incarcerated for life. No, I don't agree with that. I mean, a father can't control his daughter's decisions. I think a father can form her and love her. Sure, and maybe some of them have. I agree with you about neglect and what that can lead to. Yeah.

But the violent aspect is... I'm with you on pornography. if not hung in the streets at least locked up forever yeah why don't you think that fathers should be incarcerated for if their daughter is forging an ID so that she can get on only fans at age 13 how much neglect must be there well that's a different thing than you said earlier i mean earlier i got the impression that you're talking about someone choosing to destroy their life at the age of 20 or 25 by going on only fans no i mean i mean we all know good parents whose children decide to be disgusting and we also know is that is that cope

no i don't think it's cope no i think i've been a parent for 15 minutes i think adam and eve i think adam and eve had the perfect parent and decided to destroy the world so yeah so i just think it can be it can be more complicated i agree you know i i think i could agree with you to some point well but then the other thing is so yes that's my statement no i think i think the parents can be can be neglectful and could be held responsible, but a daughter could have a good father and choose to destroy her life and that not be the father's fault, I think.

Don't you think? I struggle to figure out how. Yeah, no, I, well, that's my opinion. But, well, don't worry, I have zero political influence. Well, but I am increasingly the opinion that, well, I mean, I've been of this opinion for a long time, that pornography destroys people's lives and families. And I do not understand those who would say

we shouldn't criminalize it. Right. Well, and that's another aspect of my phrasing of this being a violent political act to release escape for free because I don't have political power in the system. I also believe in subsidiarity. And so I'm not trying to lobby for, I mean, Maybe it should.

Maybe it shouldn't. That's a question for smarter people who actually have college degrees to answer whether or not that should be illegal. And why it was made legal with the Obergefell decision and the separation of churches,

all that stuff. People smarter than me understand that. What I can do is make a zero friction solution that does agress pornographers. It aggresses their bottom line. Yeah. Because I don't, I think there's very, very few people who experience shame who don't, I'm sorry, who do not experience shame after consuming pornography. And in that moment, I could capitalize on it. I think justly, I think morally I could capitalize on it and say, give me $99 or give me $13 a month. And I'll take porn off your phone forever. Right. Yeah. But instead, what if I said, here, it's free. You'll never go back to it either. They just lost a customer. Mm-hmm. I love that.

And like that's, you know, free market violence or, you know, whatever. Like, vote with your dollar. Like, that's what I'm able to do with that. And I think that the tech minimalism world, this idea of limiting screen time is at least 40% a cover for porn addiction. I think it's a socially acceptable way to discuss porn addiction. Oh, that's good. Because 30% of, you. 84% of pornography is consumed on mobile devices.

That's per Pornhub. 84% is on mobile devices. It's not that it doesn't happen on the laptop. It's just, again, accessibility, anonymity, right? It's right there. But if you combine the monthly visitors to Twitter, Netflix, and Amazon, it's less than visits to porn sites.

whoa, think of how much we watch Netflix, we scroll Twitter and we online shop. And if that's less than visits the porn sites, there's a big gap in our math here that kind of no one's talking about. And I don't see the ascendance, if that's truly a bigger problem, that's per Forbes, if their data is correct,

then it seems a little suspicious to say, hey, let's all get off Instagram, like, okay, well, what do you, maybe Instagram is a gateway for a lot of people. Yeah. And you had, what was the Magdalena in, Magdalena program, Rachel McCoo. Oh, yeah.

Magdalene's daughter, something. Oh my goodness. You know what I'm talking about. Yes. Yes. I'm going to look this up. Yes. Great podcast that you did with,

I think her name is Rachel. Yes. And Kill Collie. Yeah. No, not Kilcoli. Oh, my gosh. I'm too dyslexic to remember that name. We're going to get this right now.

Can you look something up on your thing? Yeah, yeah. Pull out the phone. Yeah, let's do it. This is good, too, because it's a good advertisement for this lovely woman whose name I've forgotten

because I'm a horrible person. The reason I bring them up, though, is praise me to God, is that you can't search on iPad. So she kind of blew the lid off the myth that women don't struggle with porn. Yeah. And so it's not just men.

Oh my gosh, let me put her in touch with you. because that's what we want. We want, we need to get her women trying this. Yeah. Well, and again, it's, like, there's no barrier to entry. Just like, here, everybody, like, it's free. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So I really do think that it's a cover. And awkwardly look at my phone ironically while we do this. Well, good, then I'll look at, I'll look at some notes that I have about. Sure. Because there was a 30% number that I remember. Yeah. Oh, no, Kalaki.

I said Kukali. Yeah, Kalaki. Oh, thank you. 30% of all, that's where the 30%, 30% of all internet traffic is pornography. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all. You may have heard me say this, but there was back in the day, Jordan Peterson was on stage with Dr. William Lane Craig and they were talking about meaning or something. And he had this really, what? Meaning. Yeah, no, no, something trivial. And he's had this great line. He said, sometimes people say, how could anybody

ever do like hard drugs? It's like, what are you talking about? How can you know? Yes. He's like, that's not an interesting question. What's interesting is why people choose not to do drugs all the time. All the time. That's interesting. All the time. Yeah, I think that's a callback to a 60s or 70s quote from somebody in like the Timothy Leary psychedelic world, you know, government hates us. Totally true.

And saying, why doesn't everybody? The question is, why do people? Magdalas ministries. everybody is a fantastic website that would help you if you're a young woman or older woman wanting to quit porn check it out they have small groups and all sorts of beautiful things magdala ministries.org yeah she had a fantastic interview with you and I was surprised to learn that they work with ex only fans models or women who are trying to get out of that's great

yeah it's your interview she was working with them mm-hmm I don't remember this conversation I mean, I watched it. I watched it like three months ago. You know it's funny that it's like, models meant something different for me. Well, because I grew up in the 80s, you know. It's like a model used to mean something, you know. Even a porn performer, let's say, used to mean something. Yeah, to earn that.

Yeah, now, yeah, now anyone can just decide to be gross. Well, there's an interesting aspect of this, of the democratization of sin. Yeah, okay. Yeah, sin used to be local. We need to make sin local again. Right. No, but it was, and as a result of it being local, it was not anonymous. Yeah.

Well, it was harder to be anonymous. Yeah. Right? And so the name of my company is Return, Return Inc. And the thought behind that was, I just want to take us back 40 years when porn took effort to acquire. I'm not trying to take us back all the way, because there's always a way, and there always was a way.

I just wanted it to be the people who use my products they have to go buy a playboy and hide it in a bush that's as far as I can take this that's a great tagline field company you won't pull it

you gotta find a playboy and hide it in a bush no but no the actual mission statement is we want to permit a generation to rise in the absence of pornography that's our mission statement yeah that's great

I'd love that to happen. Oh, my gosh. So you said that Shift, again, for those at home who are trying to keep up, is what blocks distractions from your phone. Yes. That was an accident. Total accident. That's wild.

I thought shift was the point and then escape was something you tacked on. No, I realized about a year into development that because of what we had discovered, we had mechanisms of control over the device that created a superior screen time blocker and didn't know the whole world that existed. So the screen time API is recent. It's 2023. 2022, it was just family controls. Apple said if you're in a family, you can control the screen time that your kids have. And that actually does give a decent level of control. But the problem with family controls, again, this is an Apple setting that you could put on your kid's phone is iMessage allows you to open things and like watch YouTube videos

and like navigate to stuff through iMessage. So there's even work around and family controls and it's not individualized. So like you can't put family controls on your own phone. Yeah. Yeah. You got to ask someone else like a loser. Like a loser. I'd do that with my wife. I'm like, can you please just like, yeah. Yeah. And it's sort of defeating. It's like, gosh, just why, why isn't this been solved? Yeah. Like, we can develop these extraordinary technological marvels. Because there's no money to be made.

That's why. I'm less of a customer if you can get rid of all my apps that easily. Right. Right. Yeah. So then, you know, then the ScreenTime API came out and everybody jumped on making an app, but apps can be deleted. And then there was...

That's why that all arose around that time. It was because of that. Apple opened up the ability to manipulate the settings of screen. via a user interface that you could download from the app store. And so everybody had their own take on, Opel didn't start as an app, it started as a VPN. It's a French company. And I don't know how it has anything to do with anything, but they're French.

So now everybody has their own take on, well, how are we going to help our customer? You know, we'll have a different color scheme or a different activity or a different thing that pops up on screen. It's like all of them, just press and hold and delete. But then there's the dumb phone world. And I discovered light phones, which in 2015, 15 or 16 raised $2 million on Kickstart. What does that say about our addictions if we're willing to do that?

I think it's a beautiful testament, actually. Okay. I think the existence of this market is actually a very good signal. Oh, I totally agree with that. But the fact that it exists at all shows that it's not just weirdos like you and me who want less time on our screen. It's everybody like realizing something is wrong. And they just need, I think,

a guiding hand to take them all the way to the solution. So the other half of what we're trying to do is not just make them aware that they live in hell, that they're longing for a world that's dead and the world that they live in hates them. First, you have to make everybody aware of that fact. That's why you're scrolling eight and a half hours a day. Yeah, companies, yeah, they hate us,

they hate our children. Think of Delta, allowing sex scenes to be on the videos in airplanes. I can't think of another reason than Delta hates your children. Not to pick on Delta, it's also the other airlines as well. I don't know. Southwest doesn't have TVs. Perhaps they're a more virtuous company.

I would rather accidentally see porn than have to stand in that line full of people and go, sorry, I'm A-32. Oh, God. No, but I mean, that's horrible. Yeah. We think it's okay. We think it's okay that there should be a thousand screens in this plane

right by your children showing sexually explicit imagery and all sorts of violence. We think that's fun. They put a little warning on there. This program contains. They won't even put like a visor. Yes, so that you have to be.

Or on the screen, you know what I mean? So that people can't see it. They won't do that. That's how much they hate out children. I can't think of another reason. And you have to, and that's why you have to treat it like they're aggressing you. Yeah. They are.

They want your money more than they want your well-being. This is what happens when you live in a society, the size of planet Earth, where dollars, God and your soul doesn't matter and you are reduced to do you produce or do you consume you're valuable both ways consumers and producers are valuable to the aggregate or in both ways and this is this is kind of a funny like productivity these apps are are in the app store category of productivity what are like the screen time blocking apps which I find so funny yes produce more is that what your point yes that's my point it's like okay

we're going to block Instagram so you can make more widgets so you can really get this Excel spreadsheet where it needs to be for the company that hates you so you have more screen you have less screen time so you can watch more Netflix so you can be indoctrinated and and crapped on by the world in other ways because your value as a as a unit of human capital is are you consuming the meta ads that we're producing and the content that our influencers are producing or are you producing that content are you transporting the door dash are you delivering the amazon package are you making the widget this is and and that's what happens when there is no virtue of utopelia right like right leisure rightly ordered leisure that in that in that space created by shift

And you awaken and you go, wow, this life is not really what I want it to be. I guess I could work more because nobody has the other tools in the tool belt of what is right leisure, right? Like, oh, I'm exhausted. I'm just going to scroll for a little bit. This is nice, you know, hit a dopamine, I feel. I just want to turn my brain off. I recently sold our TV. My wife was all for it.

Because I was thinking, like, got a newborn, everyone's tired. I'm working 10, 12, 14 hour days on shift. I work from home, praise me to God, so I can help at home. But still, I'm working a lot during the day. Nighttime comes around. My brain's spent. My wife's brain is spent from bringing this child through another day of existence. Let's just watch a show.

I just watch a movie. I just want to watch a movie. Totally. I'm like, okay, so two hours every other day, 10 years, my wife's gonna hate me. I'm gonna hate my wife. She's not gonna be my best friend. Like think about, I think at 3,100 hours a year,

a third of your life spent on the phone, not yours, but the average person, how much time does it take to build something worth living in? How much time does it take to love your wife well and treat her as a friend? as a friend, like a friend that you actually, you're excited to go talk to her at the end of the day or vice versa, a spouse. How much time does it take, I mean, prayer, when you told me that you were able to start praying like three rosaries a day, I was like, glory be to God, this is amazing.

But we cannot expect as Christians, as Catholics, to spend two to three, decades of our life, watching other people's lives on our phone, die and meet God and him have any idea who we are. Or even want to spend time with him. You guys have Netflix? Have you seen season five of Stranger Things? I'm ready for it. Let's all sit down. Yeah.

Like, he won't know you. Yeah. He won't know you. Your kids won't know you. Your spouse won't know you. you do you said you had more statistics did you look some of that up or is that what you've already gone through oh no there's there's some more can you throw some at me yeah the the idea of i've heard of dunbar's numbers yeah i have no idea what it means it was um i in the early 90s

i think 92 robin dunbar it was like studying primates and how many relationships they were able to maintain yes and so you had like these concentric circles of what was sustainable for primates. And then they sort of extrapolated this out to humans and found that this actually does map on to humans pretty reliably as well. Even on Twitter, the number of interactions typically is capped at 150 people

in your active network. So it goes active network, affinity group, so 150 to 50 is your affinity group, your sympathy group, your close friends is 15, and then your support click. Very, very close friends is about five people. And this is a rough characterization of what we as a human person can sustain and find meaningful. And what I think is so disgusting about what social media has done is we have all of the proximity and none of the intimacy.

We are proximal to everything, everyone at all times, they can reach through your phone and tap you on the shoulder on a Sunday evening like I tried to do last night. And they're like, I know you saw the message. It says. It says red. It says you read the message. All of the proximity and with this assumed intimacy that doesn't exist. But then there's also this idea that we have to care. You're obligated to care about more people than just your consensurate circles.

And not just them. But all of the problems, all of the world events, you must have an opinion about Israel, Palestine. Yeah, and you must care about it and feel deeply affected. You should. This should operate at the forefront of your mind. To quote my dad, he said, when I was 19 and freaking out about everything, he said, if everything is priority number one, nothing is priority number one. But we feel immoral. We feel like a bad person.

if we are not attending to everything with just gushing energy and zeal all the time. And you're calloused and you're cold and you're unempathetic if you don't do that. And I think people get mad if you start to live your life that way. Oh, you're better than, don't you care about ice? Don't you care about ice raids? Didn't you see the Pope blessed an ice cube?

Yeah, you're not angry? Why don't you angry? You need to be angry. You need to be angry with me. To quote Duncan Trussell, I think you've quoted him before. Somewhere there's a man under a waterfall without a cell phone, not knowing how angry and afraid he should be. Yeah.

So, yeah, that's interesting. So you're saying, yeah, if you don't care about what you shouldn't have to care about, then people get frustrated with you. Is that what you were saying? Yeah. Yeah, I think there's a societal expectation. Did you see? Yeah.

Did you see the... You didn't see? You didn't see? Yeah. I remember three years ago, I gave up the internet for August, and it was like two weeks in, and the McCarrick scandal had broke. And I'm at, you know, divine liturgy with my good wife, and the priest is talking about it.

And I'm like, what's he talking about? She's like, oh, right. Yeah, so I think we should bring back peasant Catholicism. Okay, yes. Tell me about this. I reverted when Francis was Pope didn't make a damn bit of difference what he was saying or not saying

or how he said it to me. That's not how Christ brought me back to Holy Mother Church was not through Francis. Now we have a pope who I don't have to interpret but not a long time ago, very, very short time ago

you and I could attend to our wives and our kids and receive the sacraments and pray daily and grow in holiness and serve our community and die and go to heaven and have no idea if the pope was still alive. Right. What his opinion is on something. And guess what? It doesn't matter. To you, to me, it doesn't, I don't, hey, guys, I don't have to be angry about what you're angry about. Yeah. I don't. And no amount of you shaming me is going to make me become an activist. Because I don't love my wife well enough yet. I'm an impatient, uncharitable son of a bitch.

And marriage is going to sanctify me. And the work that I'm doing is going to sanctify me. And the sacraments and spending more time in prayer is going to sanctify me. We couldn't read the Bible until that jerk, Gutenberg, started printing it. I don't know how true that is. But we didn't need to read the scriptures to get to heaven for 1,500 years. you could practice the virtue of religion, and you're going to be okay.

And I think that this is, I guess, sort of a crossover of that obligatory attendance to the world and Catholicism space thing. Like, no, I don't have to. Yeah. It's, I said to Jacob E. Mom, who I had on the show recently, that because it was the weekend and I was going home

and I was leaving my phone and computer here, and I said to him, And this always happens. And I don't know what it says about me or if it's common with people who give up their technology, but there's this fear in me when I give it up. Don't nod too quickly because maybe you'll regret nodding because you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Like I'll turn, maybe you do though. Like I'll turn it off and I'll drive, you know, I live like an hour or so from here. And there's nothing. And there's this like, oh gosh, don't give it up. Yeah, man. But then like this whole weekend, I didn't have my phone, and then I picked it up Monday morning.

And I, but last night I was feeling great. I read so much, like my son wanted to wrestle me. He's got this new thing that he does. He wrestles me so he can fart on me. It's disgusting. And I love it. How does he have them in, like, in the repository to, like, deploy on command? I don't know.

We're not feeding him appropriately, apparently, because he's got, like, 10 in the bank. And I keep thinking to myself, I had one because I, but I don't, because I just eat meat. I would rip one on you, buddy. And he's so cool. And so we were wrestling, but he's not in the way when I don't have my phone and my internet. When I have my phone on my internet, the people I'm supposed to love the most are in my way. Yeah, you get, just a second.

Give me one second. I'm doing a thing here. And there's always a good reason. Okay. But I do want to unpack this with you because this, this, this, this, I think it's so wrong. to say that the internet's not real. I don't like this argument that what's happening on our...

That's not real life. Uh-huh, okay. Because I think it hamstrings us from solving the problems. It is real, but something terrible happened with the integration of the digital world with our world,

such that these Dunbar circles have been infiltrated and we do care and we do have relationships and we do have business enterprises and we do have high stakes things happening at an echelon that they shouldn't be happening and that's stressful and that's why you feel fear when you drive away it's yeah but like I do consequential things interacting with people who I care about interfacing with the world and I think yeah because we weren't supposed to Ted Kaczynski is kind of right about it, you know, wrong about other things, but, well, they, man, he's, uh, his, what is it, his manifesto? Yeah. Go read that. The industrial revolution and its consequence has been a

disaster for the human race. Imam, I love his interview. I didn't know that the federal highway system was a 50, late 50s invention from Eisenhower, but immediately it clicked to me. Yeah, you didn't, you didn't get to drive from one state to another, from one side of the country to another to do commerce, to commute into work. Like the size of our, of our circles exploded, faster, it's not even a speed question. We can't sustain it. It's not what we're built for. It's not like we'll somehow evolve to be able to. Never. And it's parabolic. It's getting, it's getting faster. It's getting more integrated. And so of course there's overcompensatory mechanisms. I'm going to buy a light phone. I'm going to go off into the woods and build a cabin.

or whatever you're gonna do. Yeah. But I think it's illusory to a large degree. I think removing yourself from society in the way that these overcompensatory mechanisms do is it's delusional and it's reserved for the wealthy. Ha, yes.

You have to be a millionaire to fight for the standard of living and the mental and physical well-being that people 125 years ago had. So my great-grandfather, William Adelbert, and my great-grandmother, Catherine, had a farm stand and a grocery store in Ohio where we live right now. And they would send my grandfather and his brothers down Detroit Road into the Cleveland Market with a wagon full of grapes and sell them at a...

at $4 a ton. When I buy grapes, it's $9 for two pounds. Uh-huh. Okay, that world's dead and gone. You can't even buy the land, the house, the agricultural infrastructure, the livestock, and all the education needed to do subsistence farming without millions of dollars today.

You're not getting rid of your phone. You're not becoming Amish. you don't have the community, you don't have the infrastructure, you don't have the education, that world doesn't exist anymore. So when Scarlett Johansson says, oh, I don't have a phone. And Christopher Nolan says, you know, the director, I don't use a smartphone. Cool.

You have a fleet of people who make your food, who drive you around places, who tell you what's on your schedule today. And then you have, you know, ballerina farms. I don't know who this person is. Yeah. Yeah. So a good-looking Mormon with a beautiful family?

But she was going to be a ballerina. I think so. And she has a bunch of kids. Yeah. And her husband's a bazillionaire. And they do the home setting thing. Yes. I don't watch her content, but I know what it is.

And I've seen like a couple of, and I think people are rightly upset when they see that. Like, oh, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, it would be nice. That's not you. And I tell guys my age, I'm 27. And I tell anybody who will listen who's within my generation, you have two options. I believe, you either have to get monk level comfortable with poverty, like van by the river eating tuna around a fire with homeless people and cool, you got to be cool with raising your

kids in that, or you have to be a millionaire. You have five to ten years, figure it out. The middle is dropping out. And if you think you're going to ditch your phone and do that, you're delusional. Like this world is built to chew you up and spit you. out and the things that we are longing for that we know we need because that's what was built into us. You have to be ruthlessly creative to figure out how to get those today. And cutting off your knees just before you run this marathon is not going to help you do that. And the analogy

to cutting off your knees is getting rid of the phone. Okay. Just just checking out. I'm going to unplug, right? You need the tools and social media is a tool, right? It's a dance. It's Tai Chi, it's other martial arts that I don't know. You know? And that's how you're going to move this energy back into something that matters, something that's meaningful to you, that when your phone is off, like, cool, you have food on the table. You have a family who doesn't hate you. You a relationship with your wife you have neighbors who you trust that something happens you can rely on them um and i i do think the clock's taking on that on the middle dropping out yeah so what's can is there any solution or no we just have to get rich or decide to be poor or what yeah one of those

maybe i mean i'm not i'm not a profit feels weird man everything feels different night night Bargatsi has this line where he says I have more in common with the with the pilgrims than my daughter with how you know fast things have and and I think of my childhood it was another world away yeah and and my father and mother's childhood looked way more like my my childhood right then the difference but the difference is accelerating is what I'm saying I mean even think about travel yeah like like the how big the world has become the fact that you were able to go to and then you know a girl from Texas and then get married and now you're living in Ohio and then you're in Florida and all these like we're not from anywhere

anymore accents are dialed coming together languages are it'll be Spanish and English yeah we live in five minutes most size like Cantina and and I think that I think that leads to suicidality and the depression and the anxiety because there is no home like in the platonic sense of home you're not home you don't feel good your house isn't even your house not your family's house it's not your family's land you went to the bank and you got a mortgage for a house that you're going to hope the market goes up

so that you could sell it for a profit and you don't get upside down in your mortgage that you'll never pay off because you don't make enough money to. And you're not going to leave it to your kids. You're not going to bring your kids into your trade. There's no home. There's no lineage.

There's no heritage. There's no community. Of course you're scrolling eight hours a day. Of course you are. But the solution is not just stop scrolling. So what has your solution been? Build shift. build shift yeah and you use it yeah yeah i do i haven't done a rehab yet yeah don't i wouldn't

yeah um no i use i use shift i like i said sold sold the tv recently um but really i think that and this is part of the reason why we can give escape away for free is i believe in the profitability of shift so when you use shift do you uh how do you stick to that? Because you can go back to your laptop or what have you and change it. Unshift. So how?

I mean, I use a schedule, so you can't unshift during a schedule. I didn't know that. Oh. I'm still learning. Sorry. Thank you.

No, you probably told me and I wasn't paying attention. Yeah. I think I was a little bit interested in how you were using shift because I was like, we have a couple of buttons for that.

That's funny. Yeah, you can put a schedule on. So mine goes on at 8 p.m. and at 10 a.m. and on shifts. Okay. And I mean, like, yeah, I can get around it because like, I created it.

It's mine. But I almost never do because it is actually still somewhat of a hassle for me to do it. Now, but I mean, if I set, you know, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. or what have you, during an unshift period, I can go in and change the hours of when it's, yeah. Yes. But basically, what's cool, though, is by that point, you don't want to. He's like, well, I actually want to do this. I do want to live like this. Yeah. Yeah, golly.

And that's like a holiday. Some guy messaged us panicking. He texted and emailed us. He said, I actually sent a holiday for five years. And part of me wishes I didn't respond. Like, would have been the best thing that's ever happened to this guy. Yeah. I just ejected from the Matrix.

Let me back in. Let me back in. Wow. What happens if I lose? So, okay. So, again, I download. Again, I download shift on my computer, sync it to my phone, shift my phone.

Yeah. I can only shift and unshift from my laptop. What if my laptop breaks? You just get a different laptop or use a friend's laptop. And is it your username and login that? It's just your email and the license key that was emailed to you. And so I have to hold on to that, do I? Because I have no idea where it is.

Well, you know me, but yeah, I would. So when you sign up to shift, you get an email saying here's your. Here's your license key. So that when you, oh, yeah so if you don't have that yeah i mean but that's where customer support comes i see like because we know okay this person bought on this date we have a record of the email that was sent to them yep on our g-mails we just oh here's your here's your thing wow um there's another statistic if you're interested because we're talking about i find the statistics that are thrown around

somewhat problematic about screen time and depression and anxiety because they're very correlative and they're kind of zoomed too far out. So they'll say something like from 2011 to 2021, suicidality in girls went up 167 percent. This is per the CDC. Governor Yon quoted this in his executive order 33 for the state of Virginia. He says, you know, we've got to get phones out of schools.

We've got to do something about phones in schools. Suicide is going up over the last 10 years. But that's too broad. Because as I just belivated for the 10th time, And there's a lot of things to be sad about in this world. And you can't just blame phones. So what you have to do is you have to come out from the other angle and say, okay, if this is our hypothesis that phones increase depression, anxiety, suicidality,

then we need to be able to A, B, test that. And there have been a couple of studies that have done that. The first one was in 2021, and they just A, B tested more or less than three hours of screen time per day. more double the risk of what they say severe psychological distress categorized as anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, severe psychological distress for greater than three hours of screen time use per day. Put a pin in that. I'll circle back to it in just a second. Another study, February of last year, they got a cohort of people to just block mobile internet. So this is eerily similar to what Shift does, because all your tools are still there, but there's no

online shopping, there's no YouTube videos, there's no pornography, there's no social media. So mobile internet blocked, 73% of people said, we feel better. In 10 days, our psychological well-being went up. Our depression went down. Somehow they expressed that being up. So you take both of these things together, and what you realize is, well, nobody's just, spending three hours on their phone. Teenagers alone are spending five and a half hours on social media, eight and a half hours on their phone every day. So if limiting mobile internet out competes antidepressives, drugs, I propose that it's the inverse

is true. Using your phone to this degree is the equivalent of taking a depressive. And we can prove that now with these studies because we're not just saying there's a correlation between people being unhappy over the last 10 years and phone use going up or Instagram coming out. But when we specifically limit mobile internet access, it's not Maps. It's not Spotify. It's it's ingestion of content. Within 10 days, everyone feels like they took it better than when they took an antidepressant. What does that tell you about? What is it that's about the phone that's making? us anxious, probably a consolation of things. Are you familiar with the Coolidge effect? Explain it to me. I've heard of it.

This isn't thus saith the psychiatrist. This is thus proposeth Nick, but the Coolidge effect is that novelty drives reproductive interest in rats. Oh yeah. That when there's the same sexual partner for a rat, yes their libido drops off yes when novel partners are introduced it's infinite functionally to the point that the rat will just exhaust itself and potentially die um this is why porn works

but it's also why social social media works because you're you're i mean i don't like this type of materialistic language but your brain is a novelty seeking organ i would say i would say that our soul longs for that. And I think God who is infinitely complex and magical and majestic will fulfill that for us. But I think that is an innate desire for us to be learning, to be seeing new and exciting things, to be shown aspects of the world, but it can't just be pleasure. And this is why porn consumption always derails into more and more corrupt things. But social media does this as well, because not only will you accidentally see porn sometimes, but you're also gonna see a heinous act of violence happen on a street.

Then you're gonna see children somewhere in the world starving or dying or being blown to pieces. Then you're gonna see a hilarious tweet from the president of the United States. Wow, I can't believe the president of my country just said this. And then you're gonna see a hot take from somebody that you know. And it's just gonna go through 25, 50, 100 different kinds of stimulus,

not uniformly pleasurable. And that is endlessly, endlessly satisfying to whatever that little thing is that we need. Endlessly satisfying. And I think it, now our attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds, human attention span is now eight seconds. Yeah.

How can you have a coherent relationship with people in your life? how can you ever build something? How could you write a book? How could you care about your life if eight seconds is about all you got in the tank for anything? Yeah. And so once again, like the path opens up,

which way, Western man? You can either turn it off and confront the abyss or never turn it off. Yeah. And I think most people are gonna be like Cypher in The Matrix. Yeah. You know, he's cutting the steak.

He says, I know, this is, I know this isn't real. I know the Matrix is telling my brain that this is a delicious, juicy steak. And he takes a bite and goes, ignorance is bliss. Mm. And I think that's why we get some aggression around shift too.

Mm. Have you? Take it, but don't take it. Ah. Wake me up, but don't wake me up. Okay, but I want you to, wake me up in this way. Can I keep this?

Yeah. And that's where we've kind of just been, nope, here you go. You don't have to, you don't have to. But I'm going to tell you what's, I'm going to tell you what's best for you. Yeah. We're going to play the role of Patriarch.

We're going to play the role of society. We're going to play the role of benevolent authority. We're going to love you the way that society should. Society should have said, no, we're not having porn. porn. Society, your town, your whatever, however many concentric circles you want to take this to

should have protected you. Your parents should have protected you. Maybe they were ignorant. Maybe they didn't care. Maybe they didn't love you enough. Delta Airlines should have protected you. Will there ever be anything like this for the computer? Yeah, early 26.

What? Yeah, same thing. Same thing that shift and escape. You're kidding, really? Yeah, yeah. Wow. I was nervous to ask that because I didn't want you to be like, no, never. No, no, we just, it's a two-man team. How on earth are you doing this?

I mean, I found an unbelievably brilliant young man who has been... Big balls? Sorry. A huge... You know that reference, right? No, I don't, so now I just feel awkward. Elon Musk had someone working with him to cut waist at the government level, and his nickname was big balls. Sorry, you feel awkward.

I just looked at you in the eyes and said, big bulls for no discernible reason. We're over here just like pontificating about pornography. Big balls, yeah. Okay, a brilliant young man, not big balls. Yeah, also named Nick, actually. We only hire people named Nick at my company.

And he's just a real wonder kind. And he has like the spirit that we needed of, I propose a magic trick. I propose a miracle. And he's like, yeah, we'll figure it out. There was no precedent for what we did. Wow. Which is why it doesn't exist until now.

That's what blows me away. You've got these presumably, I don't know, multi-million dollar companies running brick and opal and what have you. And yeah, you're a two-man team who's able to do something that they haven't from what I can tell. Yeah, I mean, praise be to God.

We're just... Is there any legality around what you're doing? Like, I don't know... Do you remember Vid Angel tried to, like, filter movies and then Disney sued them? Yeah, destroyed, yeah. Are you able to, what you're doing, is it legal? Yeah, totally. Yeah.

It does, I mean, it's not a jail break. It doesn't violate Apple's terms of service. It doesn't violate Google Play's terms of service. There's no breach of anything. Excuse me. And there's nothing, I mean, again, with the filtration stuff, there's nothing new that we're doing. on the filtration front. We are gonna be limiting ads.

When you use escape, you won't have ads on your phone. Nice little perk. But I don't think there's any, I mean, ad blockers are illegal. Yeah, all of it's legal, so. How is it going to become, what's your next thing? What's the, how is shift about to get better? Or what are you working on to make it?

Great, yeah, great questions. So, Right now, I mean, probably at the point of people watching this, this might already be resolved, but you'll be able to curate what your apps look like in the shifted state in two ways. So you can organize them. Right now they're just, they're just there, which I think there's an advantage to because we have a reflex of going to where the addictive apps were. And I think it's nice to just see the tools that you have at your disposal. Some people say, no, that's overwhelming. I want to be able to organize them.

Okay. So we're working on that. And then you can also further limit. So we did the decision of... These will not be used. You will never... People love it. Ask, can I have YouTube?

No. Good for you. Thank you for doing that. No, you can't. Well, my, I don't get distracted about it. I don't care. Did I ask? my product that I'm selling to you that you don't have to buy limits all distracting apps that

you can entertain yourself and waste time on. If that's not for you, please see Opel. Please see Brick. Yeah. Thank you. But the apps that we do allow, for example, email or Slack or Spotify, sometimes people might say, like, I don't want those either. We're going to let them even further deselect those. So you can be more hardcore, just not less. Yes. And I personally need that because there's a couple apps that, like, Telegram, that's a messaging app. But it kind of touches social media a little bit. People can post on Telegram. And in the absence of all the really good ones, I go to Telegram. Yep. You know? And so for me, as soon as that's available, I'm going to get rid of Telegram on my phone and a couple other things. So that's kind of short-term.

So how would that work on the interface? How do you say, when I shift my phone, I also want these not seriously problematic apps blocked on our desktop application there'll be an app list and you just simply uncheck the ones that you don't want present on the year so there's that um geo fences are coming soon you can pick you know i i always study in this library on my university or i go to this coffee shop and i you know or i'm having friends over and i want to geo fence my house so you know whatever it is you can pick those sorts of things so what does that mean geo so when you geofense a location just your device will shift when you're in that location.

It's not like other people come into your house and they don't have their apps. Unless, yeah, I wish that would be too totalitarian idea. I'd probably get some heat for that one. Nick owns my phone. Who is Nick? I didn't agree to this.

Yeah, but we did actually run a promotional for a while and we might do this again as well where, so we don't have to ask for permission to geo-offensive place because it's kind of just an imagining Dumbledore's Age line around the Goblet of Fire. We can just pick a place and do it. And unless the user opts in to that protocol,

their phone is unaffected as they enter. But what we started to do is, we actually did this with Steubenville's Library and Ave Maria. You've done this? Yeah. You've been hired by them to do this? No, we just did it. Okay.

Yeah. Oh, I see what you mean. And so the members, people who have shift. If some, then we have. Then we advertise to the students. Would you like to have your library distraction free? Yes. Now just download shift.

And when you enroll in that, then again, didn't have to ask the university because it's not even real. Like it's an imaginary line of code. Then when they walk in, boom, their phone shifts and now they can study. Right? And they don't get to like, oh, but I just want to check that, you know? Yes. So. Oh, that's beautiful.

We might bring that back. You know, it's brought up other things for me as well. So I like Spotify, like everybody else. And that's one of the apps that you permit in shift mode, right? Yes. But I don't like it because I do find it too distracting. Like, I'll go on and I'll just piss around. So what are you doing on Spotify?

Well, I guess just I listen to podcasts. Yeah. That's it. So I, look, it depends on the day, right? Some weekends, I want it. When I go to the gym, I'm totally accustomed to listening to music. Okay. But here's the simple point.

What I've been doing sometimes is I'll go home for the weekend. You know what? I don't even want to be listening to a podcast, so I'll delete Spotify, and then I'll shift my phone, right? Oh, that works, by the way? What? You delete it and then when you shift, it's not there? Right. I've never tried that.

Yeah. Same thing with my email. Sometimes I'll delete my email, shift my phone and then the only apps. We're going to integrate that, but that's a great. I didn't even think to do that. That's amazing. Sorry. That's all right.

But, you know, what I've realized is, and then what I'll do is I'll say, well, I'm going to the gym and I don't have Spotify, so what am I going to do? So I'll go to YouTube, I'll download through an illegal app, presumably, on Minecraft, not in real. I would never do this in real life.

I'll download an album, email that to myself, and then it's in my drive. So this morning, my phone was shifted and I was at the gym. So I have this, like, Metallica workout list. And I listened to that through my drive. That's amazing.

Yeah. But that totally speaks to this idea that like we are an octopus going through a keyhole. Like we will get the thing that we want. And that is why I refuse. I refuse the avenues of particularity that our customers request. And you can hate me for it. And that's fine. I'm offering a different service then.

That's terrific. Yeah. Because people will drop by. themselves Metallica. That's genius. That's so funny. Yeah, that's what I did. That is, that's it.

That's one of the themes of this podcast, right? If you can and you want to, you will find a way. So Tim Ferriss, I think it was in four-hour work week. He was kind of on this early, early, early. The idea that we should meticulously craft our environment so that doing the right thing is the path of least resistance. And this kind of goes back to my proposition that, like, a lot of us are pretty arrogant about our level of virtue. Yes.

And it's like, you need to. So when I am exhausted, we don't have a TV. When I do want more social media, I can't delete the app on my phone. I can't help but make the decision that the better version of me identified as the good decision. And I think we have to viciously craft that environment. Yeah. So, Jordan Peterson, one of his rules is treat yourself like someone you're in charge of caring for. Yes, yes.

Another rule might be like, treat yourself like the idiot you actually are. Yes. You're not good at things. You make resolutions. You break them all the time. And that's why the, I see it as a retreat to prayer when people try to stop porn with just prayer. It's like, yes, pray. pray unceasingly, but it's arrogance to think that you're going to do a 33-day consecration to

St. Joseph, and that's, I mean, it may be, it's not his fault. It's not his fault. You went back to Paul. No, but like you've habituated this for years and you're, like I said, you're standing in the shower, soaking wet with a towel. I love that analogy. Thinking like you're going to solve the problem here. And we don't have the humility to say, I need help. Yeah, that's awesome. Have you got any feedback from, I'm sure you have, not just from angry people who would like YouTube, but have you got feedback from people who found it helpful? I mean, I've been telling you all the time. Yeah. And the feedback that we get, it's so, it's so touching because the internet's an ugly place full of disinhibited people with keyboards. And we get, I get, I didn't, I confess,

I didn't have shift on Instagram for the first several months because I didn't want to with that. I was afraid to deal with people just like crapping on. Because I saw it happen to brick. I saw it happen to Opal. I said, I can just do this. This is just a this solution. Just you self-gritcher. This is stupid. And I was like terrified that we were never going to take off if I like had that public presence. So I just didn't do anything. But now, man, the stuff that we hear, people are, people are saying things like, I'm joyfully frustrated at this. Or I, you know, my screen time's down 50%, or this is helping with my family so much, or the only way I was going to let my son have a phone

is if he had shift on it. And I'm like, I wish I had shift on my phone when I was 16. Well, I mean, and here's another glorious story, as we used to call them for you, is that we homeschool and my kids are getting older, and my daughter, my eldest is 16. She doesn't have a phone, but I'm not saying you have to not let you're 16 year old have a phone, but we're glad that we made that decision.

But so we, my wife wanted an iPad so they could do Zoom calls with thing, you know, tutors or whatever. And you know what's funny? I actually, I don't mean to, hmm, well, here we go. Love it. I was really hoping covenantized would be the answer because I, I have a great deal of respect for Rhonda Hos who started covenant, God bless him. When everybody else, yeah, I mean, he was one of the.

pioneers here. And I still have a lot of respect for what carbonized does, but it was just too complicated. And then I think I reached out to you. I'm like, you shift on the iPad? Yeah, of course. I'm like, oh my gosh. So I just shifted my kid's iPad. Here, here's an iPad. And praise me your God, man. Yeah. It was the only thing that gave me peace of mind to be able to give them, yeah, of course you can use the iPad because what can you do on it? You can text, you can zoom. That's about it. Yeah. Yeah. And the shift is, the state, by the way, is the most strict. If somebody's interested,

if somebody wanted like a hardcore mode, yeah. They could just shift their phone for five years or 10 years, 100 years, it doesn't matter, just like set it on the computer. Tell us that you're doing that. We'll never release you. And if there's ever a productivity app

that you need, we'll make sure it shows up on your phone. You'll never be without the thing that you needed. Yeah. But we will honor that if you want just a shifted phone. And that, to me, is the like full, porn solution because escape is it's it's like a like I said a living learning thing and unfortunately porn is like an infinitely evolving hydra so that will be a lifelong journey but if you want just like okay cut it off and you know I don't want social media because I just don't even want it

then you can do that yeah we you're asking about other things that are coming down the pike here when I realized what I'm about to share that was that was when I felt like I mean I hate to ascribe things to God telling me things. You can say, I think he did. I think he may have put on my heart in the moment when I discovered this that I should make escape free is when I started to realize

what the education market is. So right now in education, there are two solutions, a yonder pouch, put your phone in a pouch. You know when you buy clothes, there's like the little magnetic thing that they have to click,

click off that ink that magnet is at the top of yonder pouch and when you when the kids walk into school they put their phone in a pouch and they click it on the the kiosk and at the end of the day they can unclick it or whatever and it's a fair day pouch so no nothing goes in nothing comes out so they get to keep their personal property but it's effectively nuked during the day it's about $25 to $30 per pouch for the school and you can open it with a mechanical pencil Didn't realize that. Or a magnet. That's option A.

Option B, which a lot of states are trying to push for right now, is no phones in school, none. Which I go back to the, you're delusional. We live in a very different world. You know, so-and-so has a peanut allergy. God forbid there's a school shooting. I need to pick you up at this time instead of this time. You're going to want to be able to communicate with parents. There are apps that facilitate learning, but you don't need TikTok shop while you're at school.

So we geofence the school. Geoffense the school administration or the parents put shift on the kid's phone. The kid can't take it off. Now their phones are shifted during school. In addition to that, so that's called school mode. We also have drive mode. You start driving your car, your phone shifts. And it shifts beyond the consumer shift.

There's no texting. In addition to all the other stuff, there's a lot less. It's literally just like maps, music. car play, whatever it is. And that's that we have a like sort of an insurance angle to that, to that whole thing. Are you working, so have you worked with any schools to get this? I can't report who exactly, but we're in the great state that is most considering the implementation. We have some some pretty interesting intent from some big districts.

Wow, fantastic. on the East Coast right now. Yeah. So that would be our attempt to say it's a false dichotomy. You don't have to, you know, put the phones in a pouch or get rid of them completely. Because parents don't like that either. Parents are pushing back really hard against taking phones away from kids, obviously. They spent $1,200 on a device to be able to communicate with their kids.

Yeah. And most parents, I don't know, actually this might be. I never attribute to ignorance what I can attribute to malice. Maybe parents do. I think it's supposed to be the opposite, but I am cynical. Good. I don't think parents are thinking about

the effects of social media and pornography. I think they're thinking, I want to be able to call my kid whenever I want to call my kid. So you have an iPad there and you have statistics. What else you got? Shift is on the iPad too. I don't know if you have to download an application for the iPad.

Is that right? The Shift app, but not for the phone? No, so the app is a companion. No, you've got that completely wrong. Okay. So you haven't been paying attention to anything I've said. No, the app, the app is kind of superfluous. On the iPad, I don't need it.

And on the phone. Okay. It's if you wanted to set a geo-fence or start a focus session. Okay. But other than that, you don't need it for anything. No, I just, I think statistics don't change behavior when we hear them. Because I think if they did, for example, like smoking wouldn't be a thing. be a thing. And the only reason to bring this up is kind of all of the marketing around screen

time blockers or whatever is about time that you're wasting. And I don't think that's a meaningful value proposition to people because people are enjoying the time that they're wasting. Yeah. And they don't have something better to do, as we've kind of already shared about. So saying like 3,100 hours a year is going to be spent like, okay, what else was I going to be doing? Like building a table? Yeah, you look, that's amazing.

I'm going to tweet about that. Put more stuff on wine about that. You know, like I started smoking cigarettes on purpose 20 years after the smoking ban and like 75 years after everybody in a white lab code said that that's a bad idea. And I don't regret a single one I ever smoked.

wish I still were. Every time someone smokes, I'm like, you know? Sure. If I hadn't consecrated it, I would be smoking right now. Have we had this conversation? I know you told me that this morning, but have we had that conversation before?

Did I offer you a cigar once and you said you can't? That's what I wanted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good for you. And I just think that hearing stats about screen time or about smoking or about things that we like to do, It was meaning of us. Do you know that just real quick, Elizabeth Anscone,

who was a professor at Oxford, I think, and debated C.S. Lewis and famously beat him. She promised God if such and such happened, she would give up smoking cigarettes. And so it happened and then she started smoking cigars. That's a true story. Oh, that's so. You could do that.

No, I gave up tobacco. Oh, bummer. Yeah. All right. Yeah, tobacco. Think about it like a girlfriend I used to be a girlfriend. I used to be with... Tobacco.

Yeah. But yeah, statistics. Fair enough. It's sort of, yeah, it's almost like they're too big to care about and too distant. So it's like that same thing when people talk about how many abortions take place every year. Yeah. You have this momentary shock. And now, what do you want to do about that?

But if you, but if your friend said, you know, so-and-so in our friend group just had an abortion, like you would weep, you know, would break your heart. And I think this is a friend said, you know, so-and-so, and a friend group just had an abortion, you would break your heart. And I think this is. same thing's true with the screen time stuff. And like the reason I stopped watching pornography had nothing to do with statistics and it had nothing to do with software. It was because at a certain point in my very early 20s, I somehow, by God's grace, had a very clear awareness of the life that I wanted, the marriage that I wanted, the sex life that I wanted, and I knew that that was in complete antithesis to continuing with pornography. And it wasn't like easy, but it was way easier

after I had like a full awareness of the life that I wanted, and I knew that pornography excluded that reality, never watched it again. And if you just tell people, like, you're going to waste 19 years of your life over the next 75, yeah, but you didn't tell them that they're going to gain something good. And the other hard part about this is it's also going to require a lot of effort, which is, I think, a decent segue into the prayer conversation, like why prayer is hard. Because Shift gives you no excuse as a Catholic anymore to not pray. Like, if your screen time went from eight and a half hours down to 90 minutes a day and you still haven't prayed, like you're just a terrible person.

yeah but it speaks to like prayer yeah prayer is a an energetic output it's an application of the will it's an orientation toward the divine this takes effort this takes consideration it takes attention that we don't have because now we're all goldfish we're dumber than goldfish and I think there's something quite convenient. I don't know that it was architected to make us bad at praying, but I think there's something quite convenient

about fragmenting our attention spans such that we cannot contemplate the things that we're supposed to. Yeah, Satan has desired to sift you as wheat is what I think of. Yeah, our interior life is scattered like, coins dropped in the middle of the street. Yeah.

Like, how can you expect to have an interior life when your mode is, I love what Jacob E. Mom said about, like, a screen is designed to change. Based on the imposition of your will. Almost no output. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no effort, very little effort. And, like, well, a spiritual life,

like, you're supposed to be receptive, you're supposed to be quiet. and then I would imagine it adds to the frustration that like the vending machine God that you worship isn't giving you the same stuff when you're like pushing the prayer button. But I want to hear you told me that you started praying more rosaries.

It was three a day. I'm feeling really bad about myself. Well, I mean, first of all, I'm not prescribing that for everybody. nor am I committing to it for my life. I'm just saying that, yeah, for the last several, probably the last couple of months, I've been praying three rosaries a day.

I think yesterday and I got two in. So, but I don't, but I, so what do you want to know about it? Well, you associated it with some liberation that shift allowed or this, that's how I interpreted it. I don't want stolen valor here. No, I mean, I still do it whether my phone is shifted or not. Um, so maybe this is a separate discussion, but maybe we can bring them together. I think that, I think the reason we don't like prayer is that we're not good at it and we don't

like be doing things we're not good at because it exposes us and makes us feel impotent. Netflix doesn't make me feel that way. It makes me feel pacified, entertained, TikTok or whatever. I don't use that, but those sorts of things do the same thing. They give a quick response. Prayer doesn't do that. I said, I said my prayers this morning. you know, but I get up, I'm groggy, I'm exhausted, I'm kind of, you know, I'm saying my prayers,

but I'm not feeling anything. I'm not feeling any pious feeling. You know, I'm before my icons. I'm doing the stuff that I do. But it's not nearly as fun as, or meaningful. It doesn't even feel as meaningful. That's a strange thing to say, isn't it? Because we know objectively it's more meaningful, but often pray doesn't feel that way, nor does reading scripture. You might pick it up and go, I feel guilty that I don't feel as inspired as I should be as I read this. So I think that's a lot of the reason we give up on things that we know we should do. But my point is I think once we decide to do something, it turns out it's way easier to do. It's in that intermittent state or that prior state where you're like, I should maybe work out three times a week.

I should maybe eat well. I should maybe pray. Then it's impossible. Yeah. But once you go, I'm going to bloody well do it. You realize how easy it is to do. But it means things have to give. And I, so anyway.

Can I ask a somewhat glib sounding question? You ever smoked marijuana? Yep. And are you, can you recall how profound it made the mundane? Ah. Yeah. Um, I think that that's similar to how social media works. Because I feel, like when I open Twitter,

I feel importance immediately. Okay. I feel the gravity of the information that I'm consuming, the world affairs, the comments of the people who I've intentionally followed, the movement of the markets. This feels very important,

and that is almost completely illusory. We know it's illusory because in the absence of it, everything's fine. And this is different than, you know, maybe running a business or whatever, but I think there's somewhat of like an intoxicating,

effect similar to marijuana where it's like you feel a profundity that's not quite there and prayer in contrast to this is it's very different and i think we're seeking intoxication with prayer we're seeking euphoria everyone would pray if that's what it was yeah this is this thing you pray you say three hail mary's and you fall into ecstasy oh my everyone no one would be at the coffee shop no one would be on the roads we'd all be at home and and it's so I hate the David Gaggins, Jocko Willink, discipline, good, you know, like that kind of perspective, like do hard things. I think I do too, but tell me why.

I always thought it was because I was weak. It might be that. Because it's... What is it about that? It's confused. It's anti-human. It lacks charity. And it's prideful, I think.

It's very workspace. It's not relational at all. I think if you have a relationship with somebody, it's not work to talk to them. I think if you're passionate about something, you do it. It's very Protestant, right? When you've dispensed with the sacraments, then you sacramentalize work and output and productivity

and the sweat on your brow. It's against grace, right? Like grace is something that you didn't earn. You couldn't have ever earned it, and yet it's given to you. and you're better for it, you're a better person for it. But if you don't believe in that,

if you think you have to earn everything, then it's like a cult of self, right? Look what I did. I have the flu. I slept for two hours. My femur is broken, but I woke up and I got after it. Yeah.

Good. You know? Yeah. I'm running a 200-mile marathon on two broken tibias. Good. Yeah. I mean, there's something about that

that's virtuous, isn't there? getting up and going after it and choose, because we have that part in us that just wants to take the easy way out. And sometimes maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, but there's surrogate activities to, again, quote Ted Kaczynski. Like, the gym is lame.

The gym is Mike. Is that why you smiled when I said went to the gym earlier? Yeah. You were just judging me secretly? Well, no. I'm waiting for like Mike Pantelia to drop from the rafters

and like hit me with a barbell. I think the gym is stupid. All right. And that's coming from somebody who did Olympic weightlifting and power lifting. Well, what do you do, do you do anything? I mean, I don't live on a farm, so I can't just carry bottles away.

I walk with, I walk outside with my wife and my daughter. Yeah, I do that as well. Do you want to build muscle too? I got, no, I got, I can do it. I can carry my wife. I can do pull-ups. I can do push-ups. Like, I don't.

But do you do those things to stay in shape? Yeah, sometimes. Build muscle. I think as you get older, it's helpful to. Yeah, I think people should be fit, but I think there's a difference between wellness in the body fitness, athleticism, and going to the gym and training. What are you training for?

Have you heard Seinfeld's joke about this? No. It's like we're all going to the gym so that we can be better at going to the gym. That's it. That's the only reason. I told Fantilia, I was like, number go up so that number can go up. This is a surrogate activity. You have no meaning in your life, you know?

Like seriously, if that's your thing that you're doing, and I'm not saying, I'm not saying, got to give caveats to everything. I'm not saying it's bad to be fit. I'm not saying it's bad to build muscle. I'm not saying it's bad to be strong or to lift weights. But all of that is like 60 years old. All of, yeah, right. Like Joe Weeder took Arnold Schwarzenegger

and put him on stage and greased him up in underwear with a bunch of other dudes who were taking steroids. And then like the exercise industry blew up. And you have like these like videos at home and like these ab machines or whatever and you start going to the gym and then Nautilus is invented and for thousands of years

none of this was relevant well sure I get that it's what's the word you use? I like that word compensatory. Compensatory. I haven't used that word before. Compensatory, I'm gonna use that now. Compensatory and by using the word compensatory

I'm probably compensating for something, but compensatory but I mean what's the alternative then if you, I mean I get that the compensatory behaviors exist because we've started acting less like humans or less natural maybe but I mean

what would you have people do not engage in those activities because if they didn't do that and still live the lifestyle that they lived wouldn't they just? Yeah well the answer to eating poison

isn't a planet fitness membership no I don't think the answer to Oh I agree with that yeah like but the answer of being like weak physically might be? Yeah. Again, if you don't live on a farm or if you're not engaging in

manual labor. Agreed. I think though, because we're all competing with the world now because of social media, because of the internet, it is immediately a disoriented project. I'm laughing. Here's why I'm laughing. I'm going to put this very delicately. Oh, no. of our family members was posting an image of themselves at the gym and we knew that if my wife and I would say to this person don't don't it's very vain yeah we knew he wouldn't he wouldn't listen so instead we both my wife and I was like it's kind of gay and he stopped so that was okay okay but it is but but it's the fitness industry yeah the fitness industry this is not people separate physical well-being and the fitness industry.

Contrast, my favorite example of this, contrast Sean Connery as Bond and Daniel Craig as Bond. Daniel Craig looks like a rotissary chicken. Okay. Sean Connery looks like a man. Yeah. Sean Connery weighed probably about the same despite being taller, right?

Less muscle. Yeah, all right. Just a trim, well-defined man. Yeah. And now we've got the most roided out people as superheroes. And it's not, I mean, it's not just Daniel Craig. Like, look at Creed, the movie Creed with Michael B. Jordan from Creed 1 to Creed 3. Look at any superhero person.

Man of Steel. Yeah. Right? Like. I don't know enough about fitness and roids, as they call them. It's the kids say it. But can you see that? Like when you see someone like that, do you know?

Instantly. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I figured if people were massive, come on. What are you doing? Yeah, well, I mean, just look historically at it. And so it's like, well, what are you doing?

What are you training for? Why are you trying to look this way? I once compared it to the difference between agriculture and gardening. Like, gardening is what you do to beautify some nice plants. That's the fitness industry. agriculture is I think what you're advocating for it's like let's nourish our people let's be strong men let's be fit men who can wrestle with their kids and get farted on you know we let's be strong enough for that and not be tired and fat yes yes okay

signed off brilliant okay but stop preening what and what does that mean oh what are you doing who for whom what are you training why you want your deltoids to get why yeah So that they're, so, so that what? Yeah. I don't get it. And like this is just one of a million surrogate. Well, you must get it. You said you used to be a bodybuilder.

Well, I used to, I used to power lift. Oh, sorry, power lift. Yeah. Big day, we, we get, powerlifters get fat, bodybuilders look good. Okay. Powerlifters get strong. So why did you do it? I'm not saying you haven't learned.

A body body, body just for fear. Okay. Yeah, I hated myself. And I did do a lot of bodybuilding. What does Mike think about these conversations? I think, you know, that was actually one of the first conversations we had when I interviewed him in person in Canada. We were driving around. And I was like, somewhat of a Jim Gaffigan point, I was like, dude, you made it.

You did it. Like, you won the gym. Stop. What else are you doing this for? And we had a really good. conversation about like fears and insecurities and desires and stuff like that and I really think that it's a it's a it can easily become very vain and oh the kind of the reason any of this came up was this idea about discipline I don't think that the discipline associated with the gym

maps on barely to the spiritual life barely and Mike might kill me for that one and he'd be able to because he's really buff. And he can, because he's strong. Maybe that's the virtue in it, is killing your enemies. Well, let me ask you something else that's going to sound out of left field, but I don't think it is.

Whenever I see these new fads pop up in culture that immediately seem like, oh, that's a great thing that people are doing. I are now old enough and cynical enough to pause and go, is it? So here's the thing I'm wondering about. The whole, we're giving up alcohol that everyone's doing.

What's, yeah, tell me, why do you not like that? Well, because I'd also like to not like like it, but it's hard for me not to be like, good for you. I mean, it's not going to not be bad. No, no, don't buy into that probably. Okay. So, yeah, the new thing to say is that no amount of alcohol is safe.

And have you seen that phrasing? No, but the safest amount of alcohol to drink per week is none. That's like what the health people are saying, you know, the Rhonda Patrick's, the Andrew Hubermans, the Brian Johnson's of the world. Okay. And I would contextualize this in the same place that I would, I would smoking, which is that tobacco and alcohol have, are eternal. They've been here by our side to bring joy and delight into our lives with good reason since we've been around.

But that's contextualized by everything else that's going on in your environment. And I don't think that people are healthy enough for tobacco and alcohol today. Okay. I think there's about a thousand other things that are burdening. I just so, you know, I feel great out of tobacco. every day. Do tobacco? I do. Yeah. You sure you're healthy? I do. I do it so bad. And then I usually do a whiskey. Yeah. I feel great. You do alcohol. You think doing alcohol is cool. Kind of. There was this comedian. She once said that her kid was in the back seat and the mother was having a smoke. And she went, I'm never going to smoke when I grow older. What am I going to say to that? So I just looked at her and I went, well, you'll never be cool then, will you?

that was great. Yeah, I mean, that's another huge lie. Like, cigarettes, yeah, cigarettes make you cool. Yeah, it is. I had a friend said to me that cigarettes accentuate, this is Josiah, my old producer, they accentuate whatever you're doing at that moment. So if you're angry, it accentuates it,

if you're happy, if you're philosophical. All right, so it sounded like you were saying, you don't like the new, don't drink alcohol thing, but then it sounded, then I think you said that people shouldn't be because they're unhealthy. Yeah, I think people should get healthy so they can drink more. Okay.

There you go. I think how much you can drink is a metric of your health, actually. And that's true with respect to the liver. Like the seed oils. We're not encouraging drunkenness? No, no, no. Don't drink to the point of hilarity,

but you can be funny. The liver is very sensitive to what you eat and what you do to your body. And if you can't handle alcohol, it's a very good indicator of health. That's funny you say that. My wife gave up alcohol years ago because she's being sick as a dog.

Yeah, no, it's, I mean, that's where it hits first. the American used to drink, like, colonial America. I think it was something around four and a half gallons of ethanol per year distributed throughout beer and mead and wine and all these things. And now we're under like a gallon and a half per American per capita. Oh, interesting.

We're all drinking way, way less. But even the little bit that we do drink, everyone's like, oh, I just can't even drink anymore. I feel so terrible. And so instead I'm going to smoke weed. And that's, I know that's the other thing I've noticed. people like, I haven't been drinking alcohol, but I've been drinking my THC drinks or whatever.

Yeah. Is that what they're called? THC, DHC? THC. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. So you think, okay, interesting. Do you drink alcohol?

Rarely. Rarely. I see every like three months, my stress will peak and I'll have like a glass of wine and go, oh, alcohol is incredible. Yeah. I get it.

Everyone should drink. all the time. I'm going to drink every day. And then I like, don't for another three months. That's kind of my. That's really, that's nice. I usually have a couple of fingers of whiskey a night. I just love it. Yeah, I just dip my fingers in. And then I look at my wife while I, anyway, this is going out of control. We should bring this back. Yeah, we came up here with the intent to talk about holiness. Yeah. No, but that's interesting. And I wonder, like, It makes you cynical of any new move in culture that seems positive.

So now I'm like, well, what about what we're doing? Well, they're getting people to get off their computer. So, yeah, to bring it back to that, we are not a, we're actually anti-discipline because we did all the work for you. That's kind of the point is you're barking up the wrong tree, if you're just going to light-knuckle it, that the best man is the man who, and I, okay,

so I wanted to actually ask you about this. This is the dichotomy between, I guess, like appetites and virtue. And I have an answer, and I want to see if you agree with me or disagree with me on this one. So Dr. John Cuddebeck from Christendom has an analogy, I guess. My wife shared this with me, which is the more moral man? Two men walk into a store, we'll say like Cabela's. And there's a beautiful knife on display, and they both observe the knife, see that it is good.

and pleasurable, and it would be amazing to have this knife. And one of them thinks to himself, I could just steal it, but I shouldn't, and he doesn't. And the other guy, it never occurs to him to steal it. Which man is more moral? The man who, to whom it never would be, I would think. I'm thinking of Aristotle's vicious to virtuous man, right? The virtuous man is not only the man who does the good,

but wants to do the good. Yeah, so the four stages of continents. Yeah, exactly. So, am I wrong? No, no, I think you're correct. Yeah. But, I mean, there's, there's certainly a sense in which the first man was tested and, and overcome, and so good for him.

But, yeah, like, I've never had a desire to climb a clock tower and shoot people with a Uzi. And I don't think I'd be more virtuous if I wanted to do that, but repressed it. So the question, I guess the dichotomy that, that is being. debated here is, is it immoral to use a porn blocker? Are you a better man when you have free access to pornography and you simply white knuckle it, David Goggins it, and you're like, I'm not going to do this until you beat yourself into submission and now you're the type of man who doesn't want it, right? You can get to the first level of continents that your appetites and the good are

aligned. And I think that the conversation right now around our around fitness, around productivity is very much in favor of be unavoidably saturated with all of the temptations and just don't do it. And they look down in the people who need, whatever that means, some assist, some grace, right? And I've been wrestling with that. Are we serving the virtuous development of people, or are we inhibiting it? I think I have an answer, but I'm curious what you? I guess I'm missing the question. It would seem to me that there isn't a clean cut answer.

Do you want to ask the question again? Do you think that man should employ tools to assist in doing the right thing, or should man simply internally develop? I don't think there's anything wrong with tools that assist you in doing something that you feel like you can't do or cannot do right now. Are you less of a virtuous man

that you needed the tools or that you used the tools? Yeah, I mean, surely, if there's a man who doesn't look at pornography because he has a porn blocker and there's a man who doesn't look at pornography and doesn't have a porn blocker, clearly the second person is better off.

Is that not what you're asking? But I don't think that the first man, I think a lot of the temptations that we experience is sometimes out of our control. They have a lot to do maybe with our history. We talked about being exposed to porn at a young age. So if the second man wasn't exposed to porn

until he was 25, he's far less likely, I think, for this to have a grip on him in the way that someone who was exposed to it when he was 11 is. I think I realize what I'm failing to ask here. It's about the vehicle by which you increase your continents. It is... Oh, what would be the better way?

The better way to do it. Yes, I agree that the man who already desires the good is a better man. Yeah. I don't disagree with that. I'm saying if you're taking two people and you're setting them toward the path of becoming more continent.

Yeah, both have equally tempted. Yes. Should you as a person striving for holiness and continents and virtue employ tools, training wheels, whatever you want to call it, assists? Or is it, are you a more moral person? Are you a man of greater character, of greater willpower?

Is there something there that makes you better for just saying, no, I'm gonna, I'm going to white knuckle this. I'm going to do it alone, so to speak. Well, I would think, though, maybe I'm missing the point, but I think shift is a tool. Shift is training wheels, or it could be accused of being all those things.

It is, and as a result of developing this, I've asked the question, am I hamstringing? Oh, I get you. No, I don't think, I think it takes courage to look at yourself and say, I need this thing. You know, and it would be great if I didn't. I'd be a better man if I didn't.

I hope to one day be the kind of man who doesn't, but self-knowledge, which is vital, is telling me that I need it. I mean, that clearly seems to be the case. I mean, you wouldn't go to a porn convention to show yourself just how capable you are of resisting temptation. I mean, some people do that.

There was this old thing called triplexchurch.com back in the day. I don't know if you remember it. But they were actually, yeah, they were one of the first groups out there that were trying to get people to quit porn. Oh, okay. It sounded like a religion of pornography. And that's why they did it, right? They were trying to be provocative. But they would go to these porn conventions and chat with porn performers.

And I just think unless you have the purity of St. Joseph, that seems like the stupidest idea in the world. Well, we're supposed to flee from it. Exactly. So I, yeah, because I think in some ways, like the online world can be like a porn convention. And so the man who says, yeah, I don't, I want to, yeah, what is it, St. Paul, don't let there be a hint of impurity among you, not just within you, but what you're spending time with. So, no, I don't know how, I mean, it sounds like a cool novel idea to say that the man who chooses not to use shift or carbonalize is going to be far better off in the future. So I'm tempted to adopt that idea just because it's novel. But on the face of it, it seems like, no, that doesn't seem like a good idea.

Well, it's, it's not just novel. It seems to be the milieu right now to say, of your own willpower, that the better man, better men across the board are men who, without dopamine, without motivation, without external validation, without any assists whatsoever or graces, do what is what is best. but it's funny because it's typically limited to things like working out or waking up early or like starting a company, I don't know, just like kind of more surrogate activities as opposed to, you know, being exhausted and treating your family well when it's hard, right, and stuff like that. And your thing about the porn convention, it was actually the analogy that kind of got me to my answer, which is the same answer that you arrived.

at which is like no you wouldn't go to a strip club to show what a man you are and be like no it doesn't bother me i don't even think about you know i don't care i don't even i don't even care not even look at it um and uh and then it struck me i was like yeah actually the answer is is the same answer as infant baptism because if we really believed that we should do everything of our own power we should raise our kids outside of the faith teach them all of the different world religions expose them to drugs, expose them to pornography, and then when they're old enough, say, figure it out, what do you think is the best? And I realize like, oh, it's a very Protestant idea to not be led by a benevolent moral authority that says, I don't really care what you

think you know or want. Like, I know what's best for you. Trust me and do what I'm saying. You only kind of, you only like have to 50% understand, yeah, they probably know best. Dad knows best, the church knows best, my priest knows best. Yeah. Christ knows bad, I guess I'll just, you know, submit to that.

And then as you become holier, then like your intellect becomes less darkened and you go, oh yeah. I was thinking recently about how the, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this insight. But the Israelites in Exodus were under slave drivers appointed to them by Pharaoh.

And I feel like those, that Pharaoh is Satan and the slave drivers are our passions and they keep us exhausted. And yeah, passions for pleasure, passions for self-esteem, for power, for wealth, just my irascible, anger towards things that happen or my irritation at things or yeah my irrational irritation or my irrational impatience yeah that it's like i'm i'm under the the tyranny of these passions

that the lord jesus wants to heal me from when he says his his burden is easy yeah finally That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like choose the God you want.

Pharaoh or the God of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Because, I mean, that's what's interesting actually, hey? Because God sends Moses to confront a false God telling him that he wants to liberate the Israelites to worship a true God. which is interesting right because you might think well what's the difference they're serving a false god and you are inviting them to go serve another god what's the difference and the answer is like all the difference ever yeah yeah because one loves me and one wants right one is doesn't hate me and one that does reveal that there's i think there's work in both or there's works not the right where there's sacrifice in both, whichever one you serve.

And don't get me wrong, if you shift your phone, or I don't even care if you use this or any other service or you just throw your phone away, like relationships take effort, they're hard. This is something that my 15 seconds of marriages have been teaching me. It's like, oh, okay, so this is how I'm gonna be sanctified. is by relating to this person, doing close quarters combat with my own vices every single day,

getting immediate feedback about how much of a awesome person I am. And iterating on that until the day I die. So hopefully that when I die, Christ says, I recognize you. Yeah, you're familiar. And I just think that like the battle for our souls, the battlefield, I guess, is attention. and we have a finite amount of time

we have an even more finite amount of energy eight hours a day, five hours a day, three hours a day on the phone, probably, I think you're taking a big gamble about getting into heaven with that. Shift is the only thing that's worked for me. I've bought two dumb phones. three dumb phones, you know, I've tried to get rid of my phone. I've, I've tried using Apple Time, whatever that's called.

Yeah, screened. Apple Time. Apple Time. I've tried using all of it. This is the one thing that has worked for me, if people are interested. Why? Shiftyourphone.com, right? Yep. Well, because it gives me enough. That's the thing.

It's like unrealistic. Maybe it's not unrealistic. Maybe I'm just not as good as other people. And clearly that's true. But I mean, I remember, well, it gives me just enough. It gives me my Uber app so when I'm out of town I can get an Uber. It gives you my Delta app so that I can check in and get an alert when my plane is boarding. I remember one time I was going around with a dumb phone and I missed the flight.

No. And it'll, you know, I can't tell if you'd be. No, no, no, no. That was, I mean, it was a little emphatic. Well, you know what? I showed up. I thought the boarding time was the takeoff time. time or something. And then again, it's because it's going to, it has two-factor verification,

which I need running a YouTube channel. It has maps. It has my bank stuff. It has, like, so there's just enough that if I shift my phone, just to be clear, so everyone knows, there's no internet, no distracting apps, but I can actually do it. It's annoying because I want more dopamine. I don't know. I want more entertainment, but that's the only reason it's annoying. It's not annoying because, oh my gosh, I can't actually function in society now in the way it was. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I love dumb phones. I love that people get light phones and wise phones, good for them. But I just, this is the one thing that's worked. That's why. Gives me enough. Have you ever seen? Which is wild because I'm sure there are people pumping millions of

dollars into the latest, greatest dumb phone right now. But your thing is better, I think. I mean, I haven't seen the latest thing, but have I seen what? When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, have you watched that? Oh, yeah. I mean, just magnificent. I have so much respect for what he did and for him as a visionary as a tech founder. I think every tech founder wants to see a little bit of themselves in and a little bit of Henry Ford. You know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to listen to feedback, right?

I mean, we listen to feedback, but I'm going to tell you what's good for you and try to be a visionary and all this stuff. And when he comes out and he explains that, like, phones at that point in time were insufficient because they had fixed buttons, how do we solve that? Well, we do what we did with computers, and we have a display that changes according to need. Okay, so the whole phone now is going to be a screen. Well, then how are we going to interact with it? With a computer, we have a mouse. Maybe we should use a stylus.

No, we don't want stylists. What if we used our fingers? Like, wow, that's amazing. You know, and he just starts iterating through this vision. And I think that he made the most perfect technological companion to the human person this side of the 20th century. I don't think he made a mistake. I don't think he was wrong about his assumptions.

I think he saw 30 years into the future. And it's everything that was built on top of that that was exploitative. And so what Shift is doing is just bringing back to 2007, 2008, and it's pure assist. Let me serve you, let me be part of your life and make your life less difficult in all of the ways that you need.

Once you realize that your life will become better like this, maybe that's when you don't need shift anymore because that's what I'm learning. I mean, I've learned this for a long time, but I mean, I just, you know, like here's something I'm kind of proud of, I'm allowed to be proud of things. I wanted to read Plato's Phaedo.

And I woke up last week and just every morning had me coffee, said me prayers and read the Phaedo and just finished that. And it was great a few days. And then I knew that I wouldn't have done that though if my phone was there. And so now I'm like, well, that's really cool. So this week I'm reading Veritat Splendor

by John Paul II and it's not actually hard because I don't have my annoyance being friend who I, for whatever reason, I want to keep looking at, my phone. Yeah. So it's actually making my life better. And so this is just to your point about needing assistance versus no longer needing it. I think once you see, because your point is why would anyone stop scrolling, but if you can find a reason, then it becomes easier.

My second favorite book of all time is This Is How by Augustin Burroughs. Okay. Have you heard of it? No, never. Tell me about it if you want. Yeah, it's a self-help book that makes fun of self-help. self-help books. Okay. It's very pithy. And is it directed at the self, at the person? Yeah, basically. Oh, come on. It's chapters labeled how to, whatever. And how to take your

own life, how to smile, how to be courageous, how to lose weight, how to be fat. It's a great book. And one of the chapters in it is how to finish your drink. So Augustine Burroughs was, he found out years after reading the book, he's gay. And I think it was, he doesn't specify in this is how, but he specifies in a different book that his partner died. And I think of AIDS. And it just, like, destroyed him. And he spent the next several months in his apartment,

almost drinking himself to death every day. And the only reason he would leave the apartment is to go and get more alcohol, come back to the apartment and drink it. And he's a writer and one day just had an idea for a television script. And he sat down on his computer and seven days later he finished the script and forgot to drink and did not experience withdrawals. And it occurred to him that he just needed to find something

that he liked more than drinking. It was like the rap experiment. Precisely. And in this chapter, he says, we just need to be brutally honest with ourselves that we don't have something that we like more than intoxication, whatever your intoxication is. And he at a book signing, a woman comes up to him afterward

and says, you know, like, how dare you say this? It's a disease. Alcoholism is a disease. My son drank himself to death. And he said, ma'am. I hate to tell you this, your son died doing what he loved. I'm sure that made her happy. We want to want things, but we don't want the things.

A thousand percent. Preach. We want to want to be a person who prays. We don't want to pray. And we're too prideful to admit that we're just that type of person. I don't I actually guys everybody watching I don't want to pray I'm not a good enough man yet

I find it burdensome I find it boring I get distracted when I pray can I tell you something really beautiful I love praying I'm not saying that to shame you were to brag I'm saying that because I remember not wanting to pray

I remember what that was like but you didn't get there without creating the space to allow for that Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because would you agree that that progress from stage two to stage one of continents, do the good and it feels bad, do the good and it feels good,

that that was a process of drawing closer to Christ? Yes, of course. And how long did that take? I don't know. But I don't know. But I guess what I'm thinking of is like first few years in my conversion. Yeah. If you said to me, like, you should pray a rosary or pray 10 minutes.

I'd be like, oh, my God. Gosh, right. You know, whereas now I just want to sit in his presence and I love it. Yeah, and that'll fluctuate. I'm feeling tickles of that now. Like I don't want to, but then when I'm there, I'll go, wow, I really liked contemplating God. And not because I'm getting euphoria, but just because I got delight out of attending to things that were good and beautiful.

But even as I say that, I love to pray. to pray. It's still true that scrolling through, let's say Netflix, I don't know, don't use that, but would be more, like, more exciting. Yes. Obviously, in some way or what have you. There was a, what Rat Park showed, and this is pretty damning in my opinion, rat park showed that substances are not inherently addictive. I'd love to talk to you about that. I think it depends on what you mean by addictive, doesn't it? Yeah, and that's a big. Yeah, there's a psychological definition,

there's a neurological definition, there's a spiritual definition. But if it's the case that you can change environmental conditions, and by environmental, I also mean psychological, I mean interpersonal, it could be the weather, could be how much food you ate that day. If it's true that if you change those conditions, people spontaneously either use less of a substance,

categorically addictive substance, or cannot be held by that categorically addictive substance, then it must be the case that that substance does not produce a reliably addictive result. Must be the case. If it, otherwise, and this is something that Peter Hitchens was saying, if it's the case that the drug has the power,

we're screwed. Like one exposure, it's over. It has to be a both-a- there has to be a collaboration between the will, the body, and the environment, the environmental conditions. Otherwise, like, formation wouldn't matter, right? Let's form our people so they have good appetites and they do good things,

and they're repulsed by evil things. So I don't think it's as productive to say social media is addictive. I think that's limiting our progress. on the subject to say social media is inherently, don't even open it, don't even know, because if you had a screenplay, you would stop drinking. If you had just like a beautiful home life or a book,

you just like, I can't wait to get back to reading this book or researching this thing or playing with my kids or going on this trip, whatever it is, Instagram, who gives it crap? Yeah, yeah. You'd forget about it. Yeah. And so it's, I think it's a question of,

of juxtaposition more than anything. And for the... It sounds like you're saying, the only thing that can conquer a desire is a stronger one. Yes. So when, yeah, I remember I used to go surfing early in the morning

in San Diego and I'd wake up with my alarm sometimes. And if my desire to stay warm in my bed while I'm tired was greater than to get up and strap aboard to my roof and go into the cold water,

then I would stay in my bed. Right. But it was the opposite, which got me out. Well, and I don't want to make it seem like self-control or discipline or fortitude are superfluous or aren't virtues that we should have because we should have them.

And when the environmental conditions are not in our favor, we should no matter what, do the right thing. But the limiting reagent there is willpower, It's virtue. Stop thinking we're infinite creatures. We're not. We need grace. Without grace, we couldn't even keep the natural law.

So why do we think that we could just grit our teeth and do everything perfectly? And isn't it better, if we're assuming the knife analogy to be true, isn't it better to rig the game in our favor so that we always want and do the good? And eventually, I think, I mean, think about like a child who is uncorrupted, they can't conceive of the evils that you and I can. So should we corrupt them to challenge them to do what is right

in the face of that corruption or should we preserve that innocence? Should we rig the game in their favor so that they make it to the ends of their lives without even considering the evils that you and I are capable of? Yeah, that's right. I would argue for that.

I remember I was reading the Lord of the Rings to my son and daughter when they were much younger and I had thought about should I show them the movie and my wife's like don't don't show them that we did eventually because they're excellent obviously but my kids are quite young and my wife's point was he's got no conception of what those orcs look like on the lord of the rings when you talk about these scary monster he's got some

vague ominous understanding that's scary no doubt but he hasn't come into his mind something that ugly or grotesque and then of course you bring pornography into the equation yeah and i think those those changes are somewhat irrevocable. I think you can reclaim appetites, but I don't think you can unring the bell completely. No. This is great. Everyone should go to shift your phone.com.

Do a sales pitch for it real quick. Like, just sum it up. It's the only one, really. If you think that, and I don't know that anybody doesn't think, that the relationship with the phone has become one-sided, that boundaries, important boundaries have been breached. I guess if you feel that way,

and even if you haven't tried anything else, but you're skeptical about something that's going to work to give you back the attention so you can dedicate it to things that you wish you've been doing, for years, we will give you the opportunity to become the type of person to want those things. Okay. That's the most complicated sales pitch in the world.

Yeah. Well, yeah, so we have Shift and we have Escape. Escape gets rid of your, gets rid of porn on your phone or iPad forever. No going back. And then shift blocks distracting apps. And you can, as you say, set a timer. You'll have to show me how to set the timer.

Oh, we didn't plug you in my computer, did we? Oh, that's a bummer. I will have to do that. But yeah, thank you for the work that you've done on this. I really appreciate it. What a gift, hey, that you're going to get to be to so many folks. Yeah, praise me, God. It's been a heck of an adventure.

Yeah. What if, I mean, is there anything else you want to tell people about? Like, if people want to get in touch with you to invest, I don't know, if you're looking for that or if people want to reach out to you about other things, are there ways to do that? Yeah, just the customer support. The report line goes right to me. That might change up to this. And then the Instagram also goes to me

and our very small team. So yeah, we're definitely accessible. I think the thing that I find to be most apostolic or ministerial is escape. Shift is needed. something like it is needed. I think we did it. It can't be absorbed by Google or Apple. They can't do what we do. It would be a massive breach of security. Thankfully, it would be a massive breach of security for them to try to incorporate what we've done into the features of the iPhone. They can't adopt that, which is good. Another question about Escape, you said that it works on third-party apps. Yeah.

Like Instagram, people might be shocked to realize that, oh, wow, I thought that would just work with the browser. Yeah. Are there any other sort of shocking things that you learned that Escape was able to do? Like, shocking in the sense of, oh, it even does this. The third-party apps thing was pretty, pretty shocking. Oh, yeah, here's one. This is actually the very first thing that I invented with Escape was, and I think it'll be a companion service, again, free.

I don't know where it will fit into this, but people, so the reason why you have to curate third-party apps is because even though on something like Instagram, you cannot access pornography. You can on Reddit, you can on Twitter, you can't on Telegram, but Instagram, you know, they don't allow explicit pornography on there. It goes right up to the long.

and you have only fans models who have their personal presence on there. But it's obviously a source of starting the addiction cycle for somebody who's trying to exercise self-control and they go on Instagram and then they're bombarded with sexual content and then they fall into pornography again. So very early on I realized, well, we got to do something about that person's algorithm. So I actually developed a like sort of a cleansing script that you log in your Instagram to our service. And in about 10 hours, you have like a 95% reduction in sexual content on the, on your explore page.

So it basically goes through for you and, and identifies sexual content and then says, I don't want, I don't ever want to see this again. Yeah. And it, and it pivots your algorithm towards something else so that, and then this, this is a sustained effect because when you have escape on your phone, let's say you go to your explore page and you're like, hey, where's the stuff that I wanted to see? Where's the smut? It's not there anymore.

I'm going to search it. You search it and then it pings a 404. You're not actually getting that result back. So it stops both the temptation and then the actualization of that. And I think that's something that we're probably going to package in the near future as well. I mean, there are many ways to skin a cat. And so at the end of the day, no matter what help you're using,

you're going to have to make a decision, right? But I mean, what about things like sexualized stories, which is also pornography, you know, and things like that? I mean, there are a million different ways to access pornographic content. Well, so there's two ways to access pornographic content, accidentally and on purpose. Accidentally would be algorithmically.

And we're taking steps to help with that, categorize the internet well enough that those things don't show up on your algorithm accidentally. But if someone types in, like, porn stories, I don't know. But that's the on-purpose one. And that's no images, I mean. Yes, yeah.

So because everything is categorizable, by the mere input of the user into a search mechanism for that type of result, it's already been identified. Okay. It doesn't have to be images. It could be anything in that space. And it'll block that.

Yes, because in order to... Does Spotify have porn? I don't know if it... You know, somebody was just telling us that they were using Spotify as some mechanism of temptation. I don't know what they were referring to. So in that sense...

I guess my broad... Sorry, continue. I cut you off. Well, yeah, I know what you're asking. Is there like erotic content or something like that? Well, in those third party... apps, I guess more generally. Are there certain ones that you can't get into to block? Like, it sounds like on Instagram, you've got that covered. Yeah, I think Snapchat's going to be

gone completely. Snapchat's one of the worst offenders, actually. Is it? Snapchat's really, really bad. What is Snapchat? I'm an old man, dude. What is Snapchat? I don't know. Is that that yellow logo? Yeah, it's the yellow one. I didn't know that was the yellow social media. So it's still a thing. Yeah, that one's a pretty big offender, I guess, because it also opens a browser within Snapchat, but there's also like a lot, I guess a lot of porn stars on Snapchat itself. Yeah, please delete that. So that, but in order to filter you, we have to have what's called a progressive web app and they don't have one for it. So we are just going to, we're just going to block it. Good. And you'll be fine. You'll be fine. You'll be okay. If somebody's like

lifetime of porn addiction or like snap thing. I have to give up my Snapchat. I'm like, all right, easy for me to say. I still don't know what it is. It's the yellow one. Yeah, the yellow one. It's all I know. I couldn't tell you what it is. Is it, I don't know. Is it social media or is it how people talk? Yeah, it's a mess. It doesn't matter.

I don't want to matter. It was like my wife was here the other day. I love her so much. She didn't know who. Check this out. She didn't know what OnlyFans was. Amazing. And she didn't know who,

uh, oh, who's the, and she didn't know who Andrew Tate was. I mean, bless her heart. She didn't know those things. And I, and I'm like, who are they? I'm like, I will never tell you. No.

And I was like, what a beautiful person. Pure, you pure flower. I don't know who's that. Yeah, that's hilarious. So, yeah, I'm glad. In the, I mean, I don't know if you want to get into this. I don't even know if you have time to do it because I know you got a meeting.

But the question of modesty has been something that I've been thinking about for like seven years leading up to this because when you're creating a porn blocker, you have to ask the question, well, what's porn? Yeah, I've got all the, I'd like, I've written books on pornography. It doesn't mean I'm an expert, but I have thought about this as well.

Yeah, yeah. So I think, my definition, right? Is that what you're after? You weren't asking, but here we go. No, please, yeah. I think that pornography is, so the word pornography into the English language in the 19th century, mid-19th century,

isn't that interesting, first of all? It comes from two Greek words, as you probably know, porne-graph pain, the writing of the prostitutes, or the drawing of the prostitutes. was always meant to serve an erotic function. Yeah. It was meant to be an extension of prostitution to do what a prostitute did, as it were.

So I think you can think of pornography objectively, subjectively, of course. But of course, if it's subjectively, I don't think it's objective. But I think it's something like material which depicts erotic behavior and is intended to sexually arouse or it has that effect by and large.

It's a very difficult thing to nail down. I don't like the catechism's definition of pornography. I don't think that works. Yeah, they limit it to just the depiction of sex acts. I mean, here's why I don't like that. I think depictions of sex acts don't have to be pornographic. And think of this, I don't know, think about this. Suppose you're a missionary 200 years ago or something

and you're talking to these native people about their dignity and maybe encouraging them to engage in a sex act that's more befitting to two souls uniting, say. And so you might say, well, isn't this how they got the word missionary position? I don't know, but you might depict that. No, I'm not even joking.

I think that's why. Is that really what the idea was? Because, I mean, people mock that, and I'm not saying that you can't engage in the sexual act in different ways. That's not the point. the point is that like if you want to like treat your wife or your husband like a human being

like here's one way you might come together and you could imagine depicting that right well there are manuals in images or something there are there are moral manualists who have described licit and illicit sex acts okay yeah so that might be and you but my point is you could depict the sexual act in a way that's not pornographic because it's not material which depicts erroneic behavior intended to sexually arouse mm-hmm so I think it's pornography something like that

you did make a point to Andrew Claven that pornography is something that can't help but be consumed or at least by men it's sort of can't help but if a sex scene on Game of Thrones I think you guys are talking about appears on screen my yeah my point is it's more of a

like it's easier to engage in a sexual sin through fantasy or through imagination than murder yeah if I watch if I watch a movie and someone murders another person it's a lot more difficult to commit an interior sin. It doesn't that have to do with the difference between the irascible and the concupiscible appetites

of like one of them. Maybe concupiscible would be sins of the flesh whereas like irascible, you kind of have to be egged into a state of murderous rage to even desire that sort of thing. Whereas, yeah, maybe that's right. Like of the flesh, it's like, well, there it is and that's where, you know, greater risk might be.

Like one way to say this, like if you took a Jane Austen movie, and left it alone except you inserted a sex act that was pornographic in the middle of it. It wouldn't make that movie pornographic. It would make it a great movie with an awful unfortunate pornographic act within it. You know, and I think that was my point to Claven that I wouldn't call Game of Thrones pornographic.

I think it's apparently, I've never watched it or read it. I hear it's a decent story or what have you, but it clearly involves pornography in it. So what's the point? And so maybe the point is you could imagine, like think of the brothers Karamazov in which patricide exists. It's not a, it's not like patricidalography.

It's not the equivalent, but you could imagine someone who hates their father so much and thinks all fathers are the problems of all evil. Maybe the feminists, I don't know. And they write a book and the primary point of the book is the continual death of different fathers

and the reason you're reading those books or watching those movies is to see fathers be killed, that seems to me to be a different thing. I don't know what I'm saying anymore. Well, this started because of modesty because if you're going to claim to restrict porn or sexual content,

if you're going to claim to be an authority on that, it's good to know, well, what are we referring to here? And, like, I originally and still intend to develop this to the point that videos of women exercising in the gym in athletic wear are not present. Okay. And I think that that should be obvious to anybody who pays attention to, like, what has happened. Because I think there's two things that have, unfortunately, immodesty actually desexualizes. human body. Because you have two options. I'm speaking from a man's perspective, but I think the same thing's true in reference to somebody like Andrew Tate or men who wear immodest clothing,

which we can do, men can do. Any intentional dress that's designed to inspire lust from a woman would be considered immodest. And that's different man to man, just like clothing on women is different woman to woman. The same dress on two different women, one might be modest one might be immodest. It's just very contextual, which is why it's kind of a trad illusion to impose specific clothing on women and say, it's immodest for you to wear this or not wear this. It's very contextual, but modesty is objective. And if you, for example, going into a coffee shop or a restaurant or a Chipotle or something and like a woman ordering is in a sports bra and leggings, you have two options.

as a man over the course of time. You can either stop seeing her body as something that has sexuality and eroticism in it, or you can be publicly aroused by this woman. And because of the Coolidge effect and because of social decorum, the former happens. And now women are more and more asexual unless they are depicted in more and more gratuitously sexual

categories and situations, which is why we get like this insanity that is pornography. And so if you want to elevate female sexuality, you have modesty. 100%, yeah. And once again, if that's, I mean, that can be taken, at least at face value of some sort of patriarchal, tyrannical,

authoritative, you're trying to restraint, blah, blah, whatever. But it's like, do you want to be a valued sexual creature? I would highly recommend people check out Brian Holdsworth's video on modesty. Okay, I haven't seen it. Brian is so brilliant. He's like low-key brilliant. Like he doesn't let it out all the once. He started watching him be like, man, this guy is great.

Do you know who I'm talking about that? He's got a video on modesty. And he talked about like, what about my rights? Like, what if I just wanted to come and buy some guacamole without having to be assaulted with your, like, skin-tight leggings? And now what? Like, and one of his points was, you know it's immodest. because if I was to stare at that area, you'd be offended.

So now you're imposing upon me, and now I have to change how I walk through this checkout where my only options is to look ahead. Yeah. Well, and there will always be opportunities. This is, I guess, going back to the self-control point, there will always be opportunities to exercise self-control and custody of the eyes and chastity internally.

Like, it's not true that if porn didn't exist, men wouldn't cheat. If porn didn't exist, men wouldn't lust after other women. That's not true because novelty drives sexual appetite. There's always going to be a place for the virtue of chastity within marriage, without marriage, all these. But there is an inflation that happens with the currency of our sexual attention when every woman is sexualized.

I like how you put that, inflation, yeah. And I think it's really, really tragic what happens in marriage when you have a kid who from ages 8 to 20, or 17 to 30 or whatever his age range of exposure is. You know, in 1955, the population in the world was 2.2 billion people. So if you and I were alive then, we might encounter 75% fewer human persons

that we would see. It wasn't until 58 that the highway system was invented where we could commute into work and be around other people. Women didn't enter the workforce until the early 60s, late 70s. And then the internet happens. happens. You go back 75 years, you and I would have seen absorbed into our retinas, probably a millionth of the human forms that we have just encountered, not even sexually,

just seen. Think about the inflation, like the comparison to the data set that we have in our minds, that when we look at our wives, we've also seen millions of women. And again, non-sexual, just seen them. And whether they like it or not, we are ranked among all the men they've seen, they are ranked among all the women that we've seen, then throw porn on top of that and try to have a healthy sexuality in society.

Good luck. So with escape and with shift, I think it's like, if you want to have any semblance of healthy sexuality, even remotely approaching what was there 100 years ago, 50 years ago, honestly, 50 years ago,

you have to immediately reduce the data input and start forgetting as much as you possibly can everything you've seen so that like think about if we, you know, Ireland, I don't know why I pick Ireland when I think about this analogy. We're two 20-year-old guys in Ireland and it's 1850, whatever, and there's like 90 people in the town and there's like a couple of women who are our age we care first is she a good woman right she gonna well maybe not first second and more more importantly long term we would think we might be advised maybe we don't think this at 20 but we might be advised by our by our priest or by our parents or friends or whatever you should go with so-and-so she's she's a good woman and then if she had a phenotypic property that we liked I love her ears beautiful face

Love the hourglass figure, whatever it is. We would be like, we won the lottery. Good woman, and I'm attracted to like this thing about her. The idea of like preferences, hmm, like hair color preferences, body shape preferences, to even have the data set to compare, I think has done incalculable damage

and I don't know that that genie can ever be put back in the bottle but like no offense to St. Anthony, Desert Hermit it's a different game like we are called to a level of virtue

we require a level of virtue today that has been grossly inflated and I just think that you need nuclear weapons to fight back against it. That's very well put. Yeah, it's very insightful.

Shiftyourphone.com. Shiftyourphone.com. Is that where people get escape as well? Yeah. It's just in shift. You never have to pay for escape. You download shift and it's an option inside of there. What's the beta version like?

Because I might try it on my phone. Of escape? Yeah. If you'd let me or is it not available to? No, yeah. I totally let you try. Did you? I totally forgot that you told me that. Yeah.

Good. I think we put it on your phone. Oh. It is on your phone. Is it? Yeah. Cool. I mean, how would I figure that out unless I was looking at?

Let me try. Well, that's funny because I haven't noticed. You know, my question to you earlier was, well, what if I, what if it blocks things that it shouldn't block? Right. So that's funny. Okay. So what do I, what could I type in? I mean, if you go to Google, right, do you have, is your phone on shifted?

It's unshifted. Go to Chrome. Okay. Maybe playboy.com, that sounds. Is it a thing? I don't know. Just pornhub.com. Oh, yeah.

All right. Pornhub.com. Apologies if it's not actually on your phone right now. I'll turn everything away if it is. This is wild. You know it? Yep, this site can't be reached. So you did do it.

Want to show it up to the camera? Sure. I don't know if they can see it, but imagine if it just turned off. Yeah, so pornhub.com, it just like, it loads right away. That's wonderful. Yeah.

Hey, good job. Hey, thanks. What if I went to, I won't do this now because I'm afraid it'll be more likely the case, but Instagram say and try it. So you have the beta. So we don't have the, we don't have the progressive web app

versions on your phone yet for the third-party applications. Yeah. We would have to enroll you for that. Oh, that's fantastic, dude. But yeah, if you went to Instagram with that same thing, you go to the search bar,

you type in something and then. Wonderful. All right. God bless you. Thank you for coming on my show. Travel is awful. I hate it. And so thank you for making the sacrifice and let's hope.

And we ask you, you guys who are still watching at the end of this show, I don't know how many there are of you, but get this and tell everybody you know about it. Escape from porn.com, ESC, not the full word, ESC from porn.com, free, forever, in perpetuity, permanent porn blocking on your mobile devices coming to computers, early 2026.

Thank you. Shiftyourphone.com coming to computers, 2026, but your phone will be shifted today if you want. All right, thanks. Thank you, Matt.