Search Engine - How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

This week we ask a slightly absurd question – is there technology to stop you from using addictive technology – and get some surprising answers from The Verge's David Pierce. New developments in the anti-technology field, and a partial history of how our phones got so oppressive. Comment on this episode! Support the show, and get ad-free episodes! Listeners' favorite Search Engine episodes To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everybody. This is some pretty big news, which is why we're announcing it before the show. Friday, May 30th, search engine is hosting our very first falafel Friday, at 12 p.m. Eastern time, United States. What that means is that we are inviting you to join us on Zoom for lunch. That morning, I'm going to send out a Zoom link, and at noon, the search engine team is going to be there hanging out with a surprise guest, who I will have questions for, who you can send questions to in the chat, and bring food. It can be falafel. It can be something else that is similarly alliterative. I'm not the boss of you. But please join us for lunch, 12 p.m. Eastern on Friday, May 30th. We are going to send out a Zoom link that morning. This event is strictly for our incognito mode members. If you've not already joined, please consider signing up at search engine. Show. Falafel Friday, May 30th. Look for a link that morning in your inbox.

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This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Bombus. Okay, I don't know about you, but the second it starts feeling like spring, I just want to be outside. Walking more, making plans, just moving again. It's also when I start swapping in my warm weather staples, starting with Bombas. I've been getting into longer walks lately, and their sport socks have made such a difference. They're cushioned, moisture wicking, and they actually stay in place, so I'm not stopping every five minutes to fix them. And once the boots go away, bombus slides are back in rotation. They're made from this lightweight waterproof material that's really.

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I can't stop looking at my phone is unfortunately a terminal cliche, but our problems sometimes choose us. I worry sometimes that in some afterlife, I'll be forced to watch myself from my phone's perspective, some years-long montage of all the moments where my mouth was half open, where my finger gluttonously swiped, where carpal tunnel blossomed, while behind my head, life-wushed by. If the internet sometimes feels like a confusingly addictive drug,

confusing because it offers more lows than highs. Maybe it's useful to compare all this to drinking. For people who drink, they hope that they're social drinkers. They try not to become alcoholics. But there's something in between gray area drinking. In the gray area, alcohol might not be ruining your life. Nobody's worried. but your intuition tells you your consumption is off,

that these are not the choices you'd make if you were still entirely choosing. That's how I've been feeling about the way I use my phone lately. Gray area. And I've noticed people around me were just not in the gray. One friend of mine, I realized, had entirely stopped using his phone on the weekends. Another had begun using a mysterious gadget called The Brick

to take some functionality away from his phone. I found it thrilling to think that some people were finding their own solutions, and it made me want to look for my own. And I wondered, rather than meditation or some magical upgrade to myself control, was there technology that could maybe help solve my technology problem? So I called a tech journalist whose work I've followed for years. Can you just introduce yourself and say what you do? Sure. My name's David Pierce, and I'm the editor at large at The Verge,

which is a meaningless title that means I report and write about technology all the time. How long have you been professionally reporting on thinking about writing about technology? I think it's 15 years on the dot now. The answer is technically a little longer because I had a tech blog in college that no one ever read. But people have been giving me money to write about technology for almost exactly 15 years. David has covered pretty much anything tech-related you can imagine. But one thing he does that I particularly appreciate is he writes these very clear-eyed reviews of new technology,

which is super hard to do well. I should know. I read this kind of thing a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. David is special because he somehow has room for optimism about new gadgets and also healthy amounts of skepticism about the companies behind them. I'm curious, like, what happened in your life that made you think, like, oh, I think I want to use my phone last.

I don't know that I had a individual-specific moment so much as kind of a collection of things over time, right? I think the story you hear from people a lot is like my five-year-old kid came up to me and said, Dad, why do you love your phone more than me? And that was the moment I decided. And my kid is too, so he's like not aware enough to know to say that to me yet.

I'm sure that's coming. But I haven't really had moments like that. But I think one moment I think back to a lot was several years ago, my wife and I got asked on this, like, very last-minute vacation. My friend Jason was like, I'm going to the Sequoia National Forest for the weekend. Do you want to come? We were just like, cool, big house in the Sequoia National Forest sounds awesome.

Let's go. We had no idea what we were getting into. We just showed up. And it turned out we got to this place, and it had no connectivity of any kind. They had like a backup satellite internet thing, basically in case of horrific emergency. but there was a post-it note on the router that was like, if you use this, we'll charge you $50. Oh, wow.

So we just all decided, like, we're not going to be online at all. And the three days I spent not looking at my phone, not looking at screens, just like sitting around a fire with my friends, was the single most rejuvenating vacation I have ever had in my life. Like, that's not hyperbole. It was, I felt like a different person at the end of that weekend, which doesn't normally happen. at the end of a weekend.

So I'm like, okay, maybe there's something to screen-free stuff. Well, it's also funny because it's like, I feel like one of the changes that has happened in the 15 years that, you know, you have professionally been paying attention to technology, the internet, et cetera. And I think I've been doing it about the same amount of time

is that the computers, technology, phones, it used to be a thing you went to to have an experience instead of a thing that had completely infiltrated life. And at that point, you know, new technology would arrive and you'd be like, oh, how does this thing make me feel and do I like it? And how is it working and how can I have more of it? And now because technology is so pervasive, you're having this inverted experience where it's like you have three days, you have four hours away from the phone, you're like, oh, this gives me a feeling. Like I want to investigate this

feeling. I want to figure out how to have more of this feeling. So like you have that and then you return to normal life where, you know, you have to have the thing in your pocket. you have to, we assume, pay attention when it buzzes and asks for your attention. Like, how do you begin to think of this problem as a person who solves problems with technology? Like, what do you try? So many things. I think your point about the internet being a place, I think is exactly the right one. Like, I think you and I are about the same age. Do you remember having, like, a computer room growing up? Like, was there a place in your house where the computer was? I think about the computer room all the time. Like, there was, like, it was a double

as my dad's office, the computer was there. I loved the computer room. I spent as much time as I was allowed in the computer room. But I always think about how you had to go on the computer and log on, and that was the internet. And, like, it's funny, when you're a kid and, like, other people are regulating your relationship to the things you want, you're like, I can't wait until I'm an adult and I get candy all day.

And I spent all day in the computer room. Did you have a computer room? I'm assuming you had a computer room. Oh, we definitely had a computer room. It was also, it was the den where the candy. couch and the TV were because my parents were very deliberate about basically making sure that you couldn't use the computer in private, which, you know, fair. I was a 12-year-old boy who had just discovered how the internet worked. Like, I wouldn't trust me on the internet either.

And it was like, it was the family computer, right? And we, everybody had the stuff that they did. We all had to sort of fight for time. And there was like a schedule of who could use the computer and when. And it was a place. And I think people of a certain age have a real fondness for that thing because it became a thing you did on purpose, right? And that, that to me is the thing that has changed and the thing that I have spent a lot of time trying to get back. It's like, how do I make my phone, social media, Reddit, like whatever?

How do I make technology a thing that I do on purpose and not just a thing that is kind of happening to me all the time? Like, one of the things that really bums me out about my own technology use is I work in my basement. I just sit here all day and there's a bathroom in my basement. it's eight feet down the hall. Yeah. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I pick up my phone and I open TikTok, just instinctively, every single time.

That's awful. Like, it's insane. I can't spend the 12 seconds that it takes me to walk to my bathroom without looking at TikTok. And I don't notice that I'm doing it, and that feels bad. So this is why we were here. And David had strategies. In fact, this week, search engine is going to temporarily morph into a review podcast, except instead of reviewing technology that lets you do things,

we're going to review technology David has found that helps you not do something. It helps you not use your phone. Well, some technology, some techniques. David shared his first piece of anti-phone defense, which involves making your mobile phone less mobile. One thing I did a long time ago is I bought a really long USB cable, like a 10-foot-long USB cable,

and I said to myself, when I am home, my phone is going to be plugged into this USB cable no matter what. And it's going to sit next to a comfy chair. And if I want to use my phone, I have to go sit in the phone chair and use my phone. So wait, you made your phone a non-mobile phone. When you're at home, your phone is a cordial phone. I made my phone a landline. Yeah, I really did.

And it feels stupid. And there's a certain amount of discipline in it that is just like, I know I could unplug it if I want to. And I have many times. But there is something to just the fact that if I'm sitting here and my phone is over there, that little bit of change helps. Like there was this study a bunch of years ago that found basically that proximity to your phone gives you a relationship to your phone.

They did a test for basically, it turned out that if you were in a room taking a test and your phone was really far away, you did better than if you were sitting in the same room taking the same test and your phone was in a bag on the other side of the room. And you did even better still than if your phone was right next to you.

Not even looking at your phone. Just if it's nearby, there is this latent awareness that we have of these devices and this pull that they have on us that is like physical. No, totally. And it's not just the pull of not wanting to be bored, which is the one like we always think about. I think it's actually, usually there's this twin pull. It's like you have a curiosity.

And the curiosity asked, is it buzzing? And it's both, is it buzzing for the bad thing, which is like whatever, you know, like you're waiting for like the person who's going to send you a bill or the person who's going to email you back to give you the next part of the task you don't want to do. Like the bad buzz, and then there's also the good buzz. It's like the news you're waiting for about vacation or did you get the tickets or whatever. And it's like when the phone is close, you're like the good buzz or the bad buzz might be happening right now. The study makes complete sense to me.

It's not just if you're looking at the thing. It's the fact that it's connected to your nervous system. Totally. So David's first tip for dealing with ambient phone awareness. Get some physical distance. buy a real long cord and use that cord as a kind of leash for your phone. We moved on to David's second tip.

Charge your phone somewhere other than your bedroom, right? Like, just make it so that it's not the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning. And I found that actually mostly pretty easy to pull off. I now am upstairs and my phone charges downstairs. And do I instinctively reach for it every single morning when I wake up? Yeah, and is it like slightly disappointing that it's not there? Yeah, it is.

But it's also, it's nice. And instead, I'm like, if I have a few minutes to lie in bed, I, like, read a book. And I think that's better. At the risk of sounding, like, an addict who cannot imagine sobriety, do you own an alarm clock? Like, how do you know what time it is when you're? So, this is a terrific question. I am a slightly unusual case in that I have a two-year-old who... That is your alarm clock?

He is my alarm clock. He is not interested in allowing me to sleep past, like, six. 30 in the morning. So that solves that problem for me. But there is a certain amount of, like, I had to dig out a Kindle and put it next to my bed so that I have something to read. And you can buy alarm clocks. There are a lot of actually like really interesting alarm clocks that will do things like stream music. Like, I know a lot of folks who use the sort of smart speakers, like the echo speakers and stuff like that next to their bed. I don't love that because the microphone of it all kind of freaks me out. But yeah, you don't want Jeff Bezos's company

just recording whatever happens in your bedroom. all times. Yeah. And I've heard enough stories of the things like waking up in the middle of the night. And Alexa, all of a sudden is like, I didn't hear that. And I just, I don't need that. Like, I'm good. I don't need that in the middle of the night. If you do not want to sleep under the watchful ear of Father Bezos, you can buy a cheap alarm clock online for about $20. And a 10-foot USB cord will only set you back an additional $9. That's two cheap solutions. But David said, if you insist on spending more of your money to solve this problem, then we need to go to strategy three, which frankly is the strategy I've seen written about the most, actually replace your

iPhone or your other smartphone with a dumb phone. There are basically two approaches to the dumb phone. One is to give you a phone that does less stuff. So this question of how do I take all the things about my phone that are clearly problematic in my relationship with my phone? And that's social media, that's, you know, endless doom scrolling of news. It's all the kind of stuff that you spend a lot of time doing that feels bad. And there's a lot of that on a smartphone. So how do I get rid of that? And that's where you get to things like the light phone.

And the light phone will, it'll let you send text messages. It'll let you make phone calls. The new one has like a very basic mapping tool. So you can even kind of use it to get around. You can upload music to it, iPod style and listen to music. So it's trying to find this perfect middle ground of like, okay, what are the things you require on? on a phone and how do we get rid of the rest?

And how do we not even give you an option to do the rest? And that's an interesting strategy, but getting that line right of what are all the things that I need and none of the things that I don't, I have come to leave is essentially impossible, right? Because you go from phone calls and text messages, and you're like, okay, I need navigation. For sure. That's obvious, right? That is a core part of being alive.

And then you're like, well, maybe I need Uber. I don't need it all the time, but it's nice to have when they need it. So like, okay, now I'm going to put an Uber app on. And it's like, well, I talk to a lot of people over text, but I also use WhatsApp for a lot of things. And I use Signal for a lot of things. And I kind of want my Instagram DMs, because that's actually where a couple of my group chats are. So now I've put a bunch of messaging apps on. And you just go through piece by piece and all of a sudden you've just made a smartphone that doesn't let you download TikTok.

Like you get there so quickly. And at that point, I'm not actually sure what problem we solved. But that's one direction. the other direction is what if smartphone but bad? And I find this so fun. It's just imagine if your smartphone could do all the things it can still do. It just sucked at it. Wait, so what does it mean?

Like it just like operates very slowly. I can give you some examples. So there's this company called Books, B-O-O-X, that makes a bunch of e-readers and tablets and stuff. And it runs full Android. So you can download every Android app, but it's an e-ink screen. So it refreshes really slowly. The processor really sucks. It doesn't have a lot of memory.

And so it's like, can you run TikTok on this thing? Yes. Technically you can run TikTok. But it is so unpleasant and bad that you won't. So when you say E-ink, it's basically like you're running a smartphone whose display is very similar to like a Kindle display. It's like black and white, slowly refreshing. So you would be watching like Degera type TikTok. 100%.

The problem with that is people don't like. paying a lot of money for crappy things. When you boil it all the way down, it's like, do you want your phone to be good or do you want it to be shitty? Most people are going to say good. Right? And it's like TVs keep getting bigger for the same reason because it's like, well, would you like your TV to be bigger?

Would you like it to be smaller? And people like, well, I don't make the bigger one. Sure. Yeah. And then especially this stuff is more expensive because they don't make it in such large quantities. It's just, it's a really, really, really hard sales pitch to make to somebody to say, I'm going to make gadgets worse because they're better for you.

My suspicion is that these are. bought more than they're used. I think that's probably right. I think they're such good aspirational purchases. They make you feel so good about yourself to set up and work with, but then you just run into problems everywhere. The books, Poma 2, if you want

to try it out, can be found online. It does cost $299.99 which some people consider it to be $300. All right. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we're going to briefly detour from review mode to go into

history, how we got to where we are, and the story of Apple's surprising attempt to fix the problems it may have helped cause. And then some solutions that seem very promising. All that after these ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought you in part by Quince. I've realized that the best way to refresh my wardrobe is not buying more, it's buying better, which is why Quince has become such a staple. Their pieces are thoughtfully designed, comfortable, and actually make getting dressed simple. Their linen pants and shirts are lightweight, breathable and looks surprisingly polished without trying too hard. And their flow-knit active wear is soft, moisture-wicking, anti- odor. You can wear it all day without even thinking about it.

The best thing is value, though. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not a brand name. Everything lasts, everything feels good, and everything makes your wardrobe easier. Refresh your wardrobe with Quins. Go to quince.com slash search engine for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Go to Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash search engine for free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash search engine. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard.

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For plans starting at just $4.99 a month, go to homeserve.com. That's homeserve.com. Not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. Can I confess that this was an unusually strange episode to work on? I thought it'd be one of the easier ones to make, a conversation with a smart person supported by some writing. Here's what happened instead. I recorded the conversation with David from New York. The next week, while turning it into an episode, collaborating on some cuts, working on the writing that goes in between, I was remote at a conference in Scandinavia. And that week away, I was more tightly glued to my phone than usual, waiting to get some clarity on some possible bad news in my

personal life. Everybody has or will have one of these weeks where you just wait for the news, news about yourself, or worse, someone you love, and you wonder when it'll arrive. And if so, will this be one of those chapters of life that pulls you under the surface for a while, into grief world? So you wait for the bad news, knowing that when it arrives, it'll arrive, of course, on your phone as just one more buzz.

Another bid for your attention in the Daily Parade. Phones, of course, did not invent anxiety. We've gotten bad news from telegrams, from knocks on the door. phones have just tightened its leash. So for a week, even more than usual, my phone tortured me. It tortured me in a way that was both abject and a little bit hilarious. I found myself trying to take in the beauty of a field of wildflowers alongside a fjord, just willing my nervous system to flood with wonder instead of the anxiety about the buzz I just felt.

Was this spam from a retailer, a note from a friend, news, my news? How did we end up with these infernal chittering devices? I looked into it, and the push notification, it turns out, was not invented by the devil. It was invented by Canadian software developers, a team at a company called Research in Motion. Research in Motion invented a phone you might remember called the Blackberry, a phone with a little keyboard and the first push notifications. Meaning if someone sent you an email, you didn't have to go check for it. Your BlackBerry would just buzz. It would proactively tell you there was something new to see.

I never owned a BlackBerry, but I was an early adopter to the device that would replace it. This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along. That changes everything. I remember the Steve Jobs presentation. I remember him on stage in his black turtleneck. Three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

Any of these three new devices would have been exciting, but the punchline was that now they would all be contained in one. And we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone. I remember my first year with iPhone and how that early version actually actually was going to reinvent the phone. I remember my first year with iPhone and how that early version actually, did not yet have very many push notifications. Meaning, that year, if my phone buzzed in my pocket, it meant text message, phone call, email, or alarm clock. That was likely it. I'm an unreliable narrator of these things,

but I'm pretty sure that the first iPhone did not perforate my attention the way its kids and grandkids would. It did not clamor for furtive dinner table glances, like a profoundly insecure romantic partner. Even though 2008, was a very newsy year. I think the winds of change are blowing all across America.

I was tracking what I naively thought was the most interesting election America would ever have. George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas. They are out of touch. And if you stand with me in 70 days, they'll be out of time. I'd often read politics blogs in my downtime. But when I was done reading, the information left me alone. The internet, despite being in my pocket, was a place I was still choosing to visit, not something seeping under my front door.

That is where the push notification service comes in. But push notifications for iPhones arrived in 2009. No matter what application you're in, you won't miss them. And you can provide buttons on them where if they're selected by the user, will automatically launch your application. And after them, a competing ecosystem of apps, each trying to burrow more deeply into your nervous system than its competitors. Facebook started pushing notifications in early 2010, Twitter at the end of that year.

News apps like The New York Times and its competitors, they really only started barraging me and you with breaking news alerts in 2016. Like a lot of problems in modern society, things didn't get bad because one person wanted them to be a certain way. We just created a system of incentives where, if anyone behaved well, they'd be quickly overtaken by someone willing to behave worse. We try to make tools for people in the end. and tools to enjoy entertainment, tools to communicate, tools to create.

Sometimes I have this completely irrational question, which is, if Steve Jobs had lived, would any of this be any better? That's why I love what we do, because we make these tools, and they're constantly surprising us in new ways and what we can do with it. I know it's strange to, on some level, pray at the altar of the ghost of a tech CEO, but I just think about what the iPhone arrived as, a library you kept in your pocket, connected to all world knowledge, and what it's become. A digital vape you keep under your pillow, so you can always suck on it.

And I wonder if the person visionary enough to invent this device would have been visionary enough to fix it. Instead, in 2014, three years after Jobs' death, Apple unveiled a new device, the Apple Watch. A reporter named David Pierce wrote a story about its development that's pretty incredible to read now, 11 years later. it's called iPhone killer, the secret history of the Apple Watch. It's about how early on, the idea was that the Apple Watch was supposed to be the solution

to the iPhone's plague of notifications. David even quotes the man in charge of the Apple Watch team. Quote, people are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much. People want that level of engagement, but how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human, a little more in the moment when you're with somebody?

The idea, supposedly, was that you could quickly glance at a notification on your watch and decide if it was worth paying attention to. You wouldn't have to get sucked out of the present moment. David says this was the early thesis of the Apple Watch. I think Apple was serious that this was a real solution to a real problem. I think Apple is a company that is famous

for cannibalizing itself. It built the iPhone and totally destroyed a really great iPod business. It has done that with computers in the past. It has done that with all kinds of devices. It was a belief inside of that company that if you're not destroying your own products, somebody else will. And I think there was a real sense inside of Apple, maybe not among everybody, but among some people

and some important people, that the watch could do that to the phone. And if not do it permanently, then at least do it in spots, right? And so the theory is like, okay, well, how do we give you some of that stuff that you crave and are used to and will not go away from, but do it in a way that is quicker and saner and more understandable. Like, the team at Apple spent all this time on haptics, which is just basically what it feels like on your wrist when you get a notification. There's like that little buzz that's all from this engine inside of the watch.

And they spent all this time thinking about, okay, what should it feel like when someone you love sends you a text message versus what does a news alert feel like? And this stuff is like insane. These are objectively ridiculous conversations to be having. But I think they meant it. Like I think that is the idea that they were like, we understand that people are this connected and want to be this connected. And so the question is how do we insert something that intermediates it a little bit in a way that is healthier?

And I think knowing what we know now about the Apple Watch, it never really had a chance to do that. But I think the desire was real. Of course, we know how the story ends. The Apple Watch turned out to be another expensive gadget. Many people like it, but it certainly didn't solve the iPhone problem. That problem, for most people I know, has only gotten worse. I know that there are people who are rolling their eyes at me.

People who would say that asking the question, would Apple ever help us become less addicted to iPhones, is just heartbreakingly naive. But this is my thinking. Apple makes money by selling iPhones, not by selling iPhone addiction. I don't pay Apple per minute. I pay Apple every few years when I upgrade. So if people like me are desperate enough to spend money on alarm clocks

and black and white e-readers and absurdly long phone cords, why not take my money by selling me a version of an iPhone that does not give me the feeling I so often get, the anxiety of a tourist on vacation wandering through a noisy, grabby, bizarre. But David said what I'm missing here is how actually in the 17 years since the iPhone's launch, Apple's business model has subtly evolved. The short version of the story is that Apple, in addition to making a lot of money every time you buy an iPhone, increasingly makes money every time you use an iPhone. And when you do something like making in-app purchase on your phone, Apple gets 30% of that. When you use Apple Pay on your phone, Apple gets a couple.

Apple gets a cut. And it has gone from being almost entirely a hardware company to being very much a services company. And so for Apple, this is where all of the incentives get screwed up. And it's especially true with the in-app purchases, right? Because Candy Crush would like to make me spend as much money in Candy Crush as possible, right? In theory, Apple has no skin in that game at all. So my fight now is with Candy Crush and only Candy Crush. And only Candy Crush, But if Apple gets 30% of every single dollar I send to Candy Crush, now Apple has skin in the game. So it's actually now in Apple's best interest for me to spend as much time playing Candy Crush as possible. And once you do that, it's all broken and there's no going back.

And this is the subject of vast quantities of regulatory fights and there's a world in which it gets pulled back and all that stuff, but whatever. But we have gotten to the point where it is now like a meaningfully large piece of Apple's business for me to be playing Candy Crush. I see. And that's the root of all evil in this kind of stuff, as far as I'm concerned. I want to ask you one more question that is so dumb. I really did get so stuck on this.

I spent the weekend just reading the 600-page Walter Isaacs and Steve Jobs' biography, which is fascinating. I hadn't spent time in Jobs' biography in a while. And there's so much in there. He's such a complicated figure. But, like, do you think I'm naive, this weird religious hope I have that were Jobs alive, he might have seen this as a design problem to be fixed. Is that just silly? Like, what do you think? I've thought so much about this. And I think the reason it's impossible to know

is that Steve Jobs never got to say no to this stuff, right? Like, this whole world of software as a service and everything being so important just really came after he died. And so I think the counter future of Steve Jobs, like, reckoning with monthly subscriptions to everything, I think is so fascinating. But I think everything we know about Steve Jobs suggests that he really wanted to make a lot of money and was maybe not nice to a lot of the people in his life, but cared really, really, really, really deeply about the experience of people using his products. and I think it is just unassailably true

that being a user of tech products is worse now than it used to be. And there is this constant feeling like I am being milked for every second of my time and dollar that I have. And like, I can absolutely imagine a world in which Steve Jobs just rolled up one day

and was like, push notifications are bad for the world, turn them all off. Yeah. Like, do I think you would have done that? Probably not. Money is really fun. And when you have a lot of money, it's really hard to have less money. But I do think there was a sense with Steve Jobs, at least,

that there was, like, one person whose taste was the only thing that ultimately mattered, right? Like, all you had to do at Apple was make the thing that Steve Jobs wanted. And by and large, those were good things. The world has changed a lot since the last thing Steve Jobs made. But, like, he was right more than just about anybody. And so part of me is, like, I also hold on to this hope that, like, If Steve were still here, this would all be better. But I wonder that, too.

Of course, we'll never know. Steve Jobs died in 2011, which meant he lived long enough to see Apple begin to profit from in-app purchases, but not long enough to see how the iPhone experience would change. A decade and a half later, we're left with this problem. And the hope is someone else will come along and fix it. And people are trying. human beings continue to invent new technology, not just to make money, although there's that,

but also to make little arguments for how we should or could live. We're going to take a break and then go back to our temporary gadget review show where David will talk about one more thing, a newish gadget that gives your iPhone a feature that I constantly wish it had. 2008 mode.

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So to recap, we learned earlier in this episode that there were some crude solutions that were helping David Pierce, a long cord sleeping with the phone outside his bedroom. And there were some tech solutions that seemed promising on paper, but in my opinion, did not actually work so well. Dumb phones, Apple Watches. But the good news, it turned out at the time we were talking, technology has actually started to turn a corner. There were solutions David was actually excited about. He told me about this strange device invented by two frustrated Gen Z college students. It was the one I'd noticed at a friend's house, the Brick. So Brick was created by these two friends who were college friends at the University of

Wisconsin, Madison. Their names are T.J. and Zach, they have grown up in the iPhone world in a way that, like, I'm 36, and I think I'm about the last person who remembers the world before smartphones. For them, like, if you're in your 20s now, everyone has had it the whole time. And They had essentially the same problem that I did with screen time limits, which is that they're too easy to get past and you can just ignore them. So they pretty quickly came to this idea that what they needed was some kind of separate physical blocker. And there are things out there. Have you ever seen the yonder case?

This is the thing you get at like concerts. Yeah, or honestly, comedy. If they want to make sure that the audience can't film, they'll make you put your phone in this yonder case that can only be unlocked by the venue. Yeah, that's right. So the yonder case is one of the things out there, but that's mostly, like you said, used it events and stuff. They wanted something that you can just like have in your house. The brick is not some like hugely complicated piece of technology. It's this like two inch by two inch cube. It's gray. It's super boring. And then it's a magnet underneath. And it is basically designed to be stuck somewhere like on the side of your fridge or, you know, on your desk or something like that. And you tap it. and it quote unquote bricks your phone. In case you're not yet picturing this, you have a little plastic square in your house,

probably where you leave your house keys. When you tap your phone against the square, it turns off every single app on your phone you've labeled as distracting. Your iPhone becomes as dumb a phone as you want it to be until you tap the square again. So if you were going to the park, you could tap your phone against the brick

and kill Instagram and email and everything but your map and text messages, And when you get home, you could tap again and turn your phone all the way back on. There's just enough friction there, and it also makes it a thing I have to stand up and go do. Like now, if I'm sitting here and looking at my phone and I want to use Instagram, I have to go upstairs, tap my phone on the thing, and then come back downstairs and look at Instagram. And there's something really powerful in just that moment of I have to have said out loud that I want to do this, that really works.

And if we're thinking of this as, um, I'm forcing you to help me turn search engine for one episode into a product review podcast. Like, if this was a product review, what doesn't work about the brick that you wish you could change? So one is it's very expensive. Each of those little tiny readers that don't really do anything is $59. Oh, wow. And so the idea of having a few of these adds up fast. The other thing is it's really sort of a blunt instrument, right?

It doesn't have sort of a schedule that understands, like, what you're doing and the idea that, like, oh, I actually need to check this one thing, but only for two minutes and then I don't want to be able to look at it again. It's also, I should say, a really easy habit to break. The reason that it works is that it is really straightforward to do. Their idea is that you'll, like, put one brick, I don't know, on your desk at work and another one by your front door at home where you leave your... keys, right? And so you like, brick it when you get home, unbreak it when you get to work, like whatever. You sort of have, you build that into kind of the routine of your life. I forgot to do it once and completely fell out of the habit of doing it for like two weeks. So the brick. Not perfect. Can certainly become one more piece of unused fitness equipment in

your home. And it's pricey. But it's an option. David mentioned there's also separately this much cheaper app you can download that tries to do a cruder version of this. It's called one sec. With one sec, you can pay for this feature that forces you when you try to open a distracting app to justify why you're doing it. To type, for instance, I have proactively decided I want to see a photo of my former bully from high school. So that's two products you could try, the brick or one sec. To me, what's exciting about these products, and the reason I wanted them amplified by search engine, is there evidence there could be a market here. A market I selfishly hope more companies try to serve. I say all this imagining some

younger version of myself, sitting at my beige gateway PC in the computer room of my parents' house, patiently waiting for the dial-up to load. If you told that kid that one day he'd have wireless internet via a computer that fit in his pocket, but that the most exciting gadget would just be an off-switch for that device, that kid would have been very confused. But David and I, We found ourselves as we signed off just talking about the funny role that millennials play in all this. A generation who loved the Internet before we got bit by it, who were still trying to process the relationship we ought to have to these miraculous little demons we've let into our homes and minds.

The way I have come to think about it is that our responsibility is definitely to remember what was good about not being on our phones all the time. But the problem that we have is we think phones are awesome. Like we also grew up in the time when all of this stuff was just cool. Yeah. It was just exciting and didn't feel problematic. And taking 100 pictures of my drunk college friends and posting all of them on Facebook felt exciting and not horrifying. And I think we have the full space. of that experience in a way that almost no one else does. And I think our responsibility is to

sort of hold all of that in our head at the same time, which is really challenging. That, to me, feels like the job. And that's a really hard job. And does it feel for you just funny that, like, all of this is part of your job as a person who are like, David, there's a new gadget. Like, does it feel strange that you have to bring out that to very? I mean, I know you do a lot more technology coverage than that. But does it, do you find it funny that generational bird and it's part of your CV now. Oh, yeah. David, there's a new gadget.

It's not an unreasonable explanation of my job. So that's fine. I'm not mad about that at all. Yeah, I think it's definitely shifted a little bit. We talk about gadgets as gadgets so much less than we used to. They're like cultural objects in a much more real way. And I think that's been a sort of natural shift of my career. But like, do I look back on like my great enthusiasm for the first iPad and wonder if maybe I should have thought more about,

what it means that I'm just going to spend way more time sitting on my couch looking at this thing. Probably, yeah, I think we should have asked the, like, what if this takes over the world question, a lot more often about technology over the years. But that said, like, new gadgets are awesome. Especially if we're going to get into this phase of how do we make these things not just attention sucks, but actually start to do useful things for us again, I think that's cool. Like, I think we might be at the end of a particular phase of the internet where the whole idea of a social network is just dying. Like, YouTube and TikTok and Instagram are just, they're just streaming services now.

Like, we should talk about them more like Netflix and less like text messaging. And I think we're coming to that. And so the next question is going to be, okay, it turns out people just want to hang out with each other in group chats all the time. And so how do we make that stuff more useful instead of trying to disrupt, that and put ads next to it. And maybe there is a next turn that is like, okay, we spent 20 years pushing everything into our phones. Can I build better stuff if I build outside of it again? And if all that starts to happen, we're going to get this really weird boom and weird gadgets and we're going to like figure out how to make things work again instead of just shoving everything

into my pocket so that it can notify me a hundred times a day. And that I'm very excited about. David Pierce. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can find him over at his home. podcast, The Vergecast, where he and his co-host, Nilai Patel, approached the technology industry with both curiosity and critical thinking. I really recommend it. David, thank you. It's really helpful to talk to you about this. Anytime. This is all I do. Search engine is a presentation of Odyssey.

It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinnaminani. Our senior producer is Garrett Graham. This episode was produced by Hazel May Brian and fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bizarrian. Additional production support on this episode from Sean Merchant. Special thanks this week to Martin Bosse. If you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and occasional strange experiments,

please consider signing up for incognito mode. You learn more at search engine. show. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis, and thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey. Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moore Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hillary Schaup. Our agent is Orrin Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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