Reply All - #8 Anxiety Box

Episode Date: January 8, 2015

Sometimes, on his way to work, a feeling of pressure begins thumping in Paul Ford’s chest. His breaths shorten. They speed up. And sometimes, in those moments of extreme anxiety, Paul’s phone talks to him. It tells him everything that’s wrong with him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How many websites are you at this point? So I'd say there's probably 10 that are my actual, like, sites and then a bunch of really dumb domains that I register when I've been drinking. I'm not really supposed to get any more URLs. From Gimlet, this is Reply All, and I'm PJ Boe. This is a show about the internet, and this week we're talking to a man who makes websites. A man named Paul Ford. Paul gets websites like some people get tattoos.

He pulled up the master list of all the domains he currently has registered. I have leave Kitty alone because it's the thing I say to my children all the time. So I was just like, well, I'll just register this. I have one for my novel that didn't sell very well. I have This Day in Anger.com, which I registered a while ago. That's about to expire if anybody out there wants it. Featureism.com. That was going to be a magazine about features.

Oh, I registered. Today Did You.com. I had no idea I own that. That's a good domain name. platisher.com, which is somebody wrote an article about how platforms and publishers were combining and then they wanted to call it a platisher. And I was like, I'm going to get that domain name. And if you go to it, it's just Snoop Dog shaking his head, no. Because the word's so bad? I just, because that's my world. I live in that world. I'm like, I can't have 10 years

of platisher. So I'm like, I got to just, because I made it, I had a nice website slash web journal slash magazine. And then it became called a blog. We've gotten used to that word. It's a terrible word. Blar. I mean, podcast isn't great either. Podcast is a garbage word. Yeah. Paul also uses the web

to solve his own personal problems. Like when he wanted to lose weight, he hand-coded his own website called one huge lesson in humility. It was a calorie-tracking website that he and his therapist had a log-in for. He wanted to make sure he wouldn't cheat.

Another thing he'll do is he'll set Google calendar reminders for himself, but way off in the future, sometimes decades. Well, because, you know, sometimes you'll see somebody make a weird career decision and they're like a little older than you. And you'll go, I never want to do that. That's really bad. And I'm like, well, I could schedule that. So it'll

like pop up, probably 30 years from now, it'll pop up and go, remember that it's important to end things. Like, that's all it says. It's a way for him to force future Paul to heed the wisdom of present Paul or past Paul or whatever. I don't know. It's time travel. It's confusing. Anyway, like with all things time travel, the past can affect the future in terrible and unanticipated ways. Oh, there was a bad one. My wife and I were having a lot of fertility issues. And a Google calendar alarm popped up because she subscribes to my calendar. And it said, think about having children. How old was that pop up?

Oh, like five years old. Before any of this. Yeah, it was a rough one. It was rugged. She came in. She's like, what the hell is this? And it's like, oh, sorry, sorry. Maybe it's not terribly surprising that somebody who loses sleep, trying to control the decisions they expect to make decades from now, is also in their current life, an anxious person. Paul has anxiety. It got so bad at one point that it was hard for him to take the train to work. That was a really big thing. I mean, to get on the train, and it's

really crowded, and you're just surrounded by bodies, and everything is, like, pulsing. And I'm just, like, the whole world would start to throb on the way into the city, and I would just go, okay, this must be it. I wonder if I'm going to die here, here on this train right now. It wasn't much better at home. Two little children screaming at home, and they were making me worried in just all the regular ways that kids make you worried. And I was not finishing a bunch of projects. I was feeling really at loose ends. And I was stressed, and I was anxious and overweight and terrified.

And I was just like, holy shit, I kind of like, I got to do better. And then the anxiety would be like, oh, hey, wow. I'm dying. No, I'm never going to get anything done. I'm a bad person. I'm a failure. I have a book deadline. Oh, my God. Destroy me. When will this end? I'm here. Okay, I better go upstairs. I mean, it's the same little voice all the time. It's literally like a bad 80s sci-fi movie where like basket case where like a guy has like a weird Siamese twin and he's in a basket in front of him.

It's just like a bad like gore-covered puppet that, you know, says evil thing. Take your time. It's plenty. finished already so this little monster that's how you think of I mean basket case is a great analogy because you're just like oh this is my little guy I've been with him everybody nobody wants to see him he's a disgusting horrible monster

but he's there in the basket with you after the break how does a man who solves his problems with websites solve the problem of crippling anxiety okay maybe you can guess but stick around because the specifics are really good welcome back to reply all when we left Paul he was dealing with

paralyzing anxiety. And Paul decided what he needed to do about that anxiety was to treat it like an IT problem that needed troubleshooting. What is this weird force that is now running a chunk of my life and making me feel weird and bad all the time, even though externally everybody is telling me that things are good and I'm doing okay. Was it a moment where you were like this, this is like hit a point where I need to do something about it? Or was that sort of like living in that general like anxiety ocean? Well, I mean, you know, all my projects are like that where I hit the wall and I'm like, I need to make a website. And so I went off and I made this thing called Anxiety Box. A website that would be built by Paul, but run by a robot. Paul had this idea that

we're always outsourcing the good things to robots, like our jobs, for instance. Why not give robots the crappy things to do too? Like, why not teach a robot to take over for the part of Paul's brain that was constantly telling him that nothing was going to be okay? So the way it works, if we look at the website, you go to the website and you put in your name and your email, and then you put in what your anxiety is. So it's like, I'm really anxious about finishing my book. I'm really anxious about losing weight, and you can keep adding anxieties. And it saves all that to a database and then like 12 times a day. But kind of random, it just sends you these emails from your anxiety.

Now Paul's anxiety had his email address, and it was using it. So like, let's imagine that I'm standing on the train. I'm about to go down into the train platform and like I look at my phone and I have an email and it's the fifth email I've received that day and it's from my anxiety. Here's an email from June 2nd in the afternoon. Subject. History will forget you because history forgets people who are unable to finish anything. Dear Paul, everyone's really curious to see if you can finish your book. Is there anything you can do to keep this from being a total disaster?

Being so sure you can finish your book in quotes, I don't want to doubt you, but inform me, are you just going to screw this up? I mean, the thing that matters is, are you actually ready? Sincerely, your anxiety. And you made this to make yourself feel less anxious and better. Well, that's the thing. So, do you deal with anxiety? I have a lot of it.

I don't deal with it well. Okay, so you know how it just, it overcomes you, right? And you're just kind of immobilized, sitting on the couch, going like, oh, I need to go do that thing. and then it goes, oh, man, you're never going to get that thing done. And then you're like, and you just sort of freeze. The thing I'm trying to do here is externalize the anxiety and actually simulate it by making this bot because it turns out that like your worst, crappiest parts of your personality

make great bots. It's like a little robot that just screams. And so this is my, what this let me do is look at the robot. The language of these emails was, really important. Paul had given the bot a list of his anxieties, but he also gave it little sentence fragments to construct the emails from. Stuff like the upshot is or keep me in the loop. He wanted to give the robot the perfect voice, the voice of a ruthlessly cheerful, underminer. All throughout the day, his phone would ping. Each time there'd be a new email waiting.

While he was at work on his book, ping. You, Colin, badly prepared. While he was watching his kids, ping. The simple reason you're not happy is that you're unworthy of saving. When he's outwring errands, pink. People on Facebook look at your picture and think, In possession of a weird nose. And then it includes a click here to delete your account button because I just figured you need a red button in case you're just like going out of your mind.

Seeing that voice in his head written out, it seemed crazy that he'd ever believed that what it was saying about him was true. It's sort of like spam, right? Like when you look at spam and it's just like, The Viagra spelled 90 million ways or the like you're going to make a billion dollars from this Nigerian prince. Like the minute you see that, you're like, no. That's just crazy, poisonous robots are telling me this and I don't want anything to do with it. And let's say you did, let's say you wanted a penis like the one described in the advertisement.

That would still be the wrong channel to like make that decision. Right. You wouldn't be like, oh my God, you know, I always wanted one of those. And this email is fantastic. I'm going to follow up. And there wasn't, was there ever one that? you got that did knock you down, like one where you were like, oh, but that's the thing. That's the, that's the fantastic, like, you got to acknowledge the good burn because it's

an effective burn. It's like, my anxiety is incredibly intelligent about, um, identifying ways to make me feel bad about things and using language to great effect. I don't know. I don't, I don't, I'm a word person. Like, nothing sounds less literate than saying, I'm a word person, but like, um, I'm, um, I'm a word person. But like, I just, I wonder if it's like if you're a musician, if your anxiety is musical. Right.

Because it has exactly your strengths. And it uses exactly your strengths against you. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I feel like something about having it in an email, like lets you fight back against it. You can actually reply, right? Like I would reply and be like, oh, fuck it off over and over again. So the ability to actually yell back at something, which I think is something that we usually associate

with being terrible on the internet. In this case, it's wonderful because you can yell at the robot and tell it to shut the fuck up. Did it work? Like, did anxiety bot work? Yes. It was immediately effective.

What it was was seeing it as a bot. It was really funny. It turns your entire emotional freakout into this relentless form of comedy. Yeah, it turns out that you're not as important as you think you are, nowhere near as terrible as you think you are, and actually fairly ridiculous.

Like, it's just so ridiculous to scream at yourself all day long, and yet there it was. There was evidence of it. And seeing it actually externalized as like 20 messages in a Gmail inbox, it was so much like what my brain was producing. It was like, oh, my God, I've been wasting a lot of time with this little son of a bitch. And did you feel like, did it physically feel better, like, when you would like get on a train, would you just feel calm? I calmed down a lot. And I actually ended up, like, I had a little trick where I'm like, all right, if I start to feel this way, I'm going to take 10 deep breaths,

and start to think about what my brain is saying to me and so on and so forth. So like, it's just this reminder that like when you hear that voice, you know who it is. And so instead of having those like those anxiety episodes on a regular basis, I stopped having them for the most part. If you told me I had to get on a Q train and going in the city right now, I don't I wouldn't be worried at all. It's crazy. It's crazy to think that anything ever gets solved. It is.

I think it doesn't necessarily get solved. You just get more aware of it. It's still there. It's still moving. It's still part of me. I'm sure it'll be there until I die. But it doesn't have as much control. Paul Ford is a kind of cyborg.

He's taken human parts of himself and replaced them with technology. But instead of Paul becoming less human, policy manity has just been slightly expanded. It still lives in him, but pieces of it live online, too. He's happier for it. Reply All is hosted by Alex Goldman and me, PJ Vote. Our producer is Alina Masitesis. This week's show was edited by Alex Bloomberg and Starly Kine.

Matt Lieber keeps this place running. Our theme song and scoring is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. Thanks again to MailChimp, who support creativity, chaos, and the mission of Reply All. we're on all the websites Replyo.coma.coma.com. You know this. And if you like us, please either review us in the iTunes store or recommend us to a friend. We'll see you next Wednesday.