The Joe Rogan Experience - #1564 - Adam Alter

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of two books, Drunk Tank Pink, and Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. 

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day hello adam hey joe how are you what's going on yeah not too bad thanks not much happening just the pandemic uh i really enjoyed your book man it's uh terrifying and accurate and uh irresistible thank you i appreciate that um when you write a book like that i mean first of all the irony is not lost on me that we're doing uh an electronic show about avoiding electronics like it's so much of a part of our life the our addiction to all these devices and games and applications and all these different things but yet we use them constantly it's it's such a weird balancing act isn't it yeah it is a weird balancing act i think a lot of people who write about this stuff and think about it really just focus on all the negatives. There are obviously massive positives,

right? This is a time when we're being forced to physically distance ourselves from other people. And yet we are incredibly lucky to be able to carry on conversations like this, to be able to connect to other people through screens. And so screens are in many ways great, but obviously there are downsides as well. Yeah. The good thing is that people can work remotely, and I think there's a lot of people that are recognizing that. It's not really necessary to be in a cooped-up office all the time, and many people are finding that they're even more productive from home. But then you've got distractions while you're at home that you could just look at whatever you want on your computer if no one's looking over your shoulder. And therein lies the problem with being connected to the internet, really, right? Yeah, I think that's a really big part of it. It's that the good stuff,

the stuff that brings us value, that makes it possible to connect to people. You know, there are huge values that come from being on the screen. There's a lot of, a lot of great stuff there, but it's, it's so close in proximity to all the stuff that takes us away from what we should be doing and so you're constantly trying to balance these two issues yeah um i know several uh comics who write uh on a computer that doesn't have wi-fi they've disabled the wi-fi on their computer just so specifically they they can never get on the internet while they're writing because it's such a pull. It's so difficult to imagine that people lived without it. And now that we have it, it's so difficult to ignore.

It's so difficult to get away. Yeah, it's true. There's this big push in the last few decades, especially in the last decade, called Retromania, which is this kind of falling in love with things that are past, that are from the past, things that people didn't really like at the time that much. And so now we've got all these capacities and capabilities on screens that make them phenomenal, and they can do so many more things than they used to be able to do.

But like a writer who's trying to get work done, the only way to really do it sometimes is to roll back time 10 or 20 years. And so there are a lot of people who do that. They'll disable the most kind of advanced features on the screens they're using because it's the only way to get past that hurdle of trying to do the right thing but have the wrong thing be right there at your fingertips. When you're writing a book like yours, which is warning people about technology, what was your motivation for doing this? Is this something that you've struggled with personally? Is this something that you've just seen other people struggle with?

What was the reason? Yeah, it's definitely something I've struggled with a lot. And I think a lot of us in academia who end up writing about topics like this focus on the things that are most prominent for us. I remember being on a flight once between New York and L.A., so a good six-hour flight. And a friend had texted me and said, you should check out a game. It was this game that he told me to check out, a game called Flappy Bird. I downloaded this game on the runway, and I remember as we took off, I started playing. And I had grand designs of doing work, having a good nap, having some food,

and I spent six hours playing this game so that by the time we landed, I had done absolutely none of the stuff I was planning to do. And I remember landing, and the guy next to me actually turned to me and said, are you okay? Because I kind of sat there just tapping the screen like a maniac for six hours. I remember thinking, this is not good. I'm a reasonably high-functioning individual and six hours just melted away. Now you blow that up to a lifetime. We're spending like 15 or 20 years behind these screens. And so the question is, are we doing it in a way that's good for us or is it not good for us? And so that's what inspired me to research this and to write about

it, to try to get a sense of what I know, what I think of as the biggest, the single biggest change in the way we live as a planet in the last 20 years and trying to get a sense of whether that's been mostly good, mostly bad, somewhere in the middle of at least, you know, pushing people to think more about this thing that's occupying so much of their time, because that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to understand better. It's fine if you're going to spend one flight doing the wrong thing for six hours if you have other plans, but expand that to the lifespan, talking about 80 years or so. I think it's going to have a huge effect on the way we live. And so I wanted to understand it

more deeply. Which was the game that you wrote about where the, the maker of the game, even though it was hugely successful, decided to delete it. Yeah. That's the one that I started playing. That was Flappy Bird. Yeah. Flappy. Yeah. Flappy Bird. It's, it's a, he, he removed it from the market. It was an incredible thing. This guy was making an absolute killing, you know, at its peak, he was making, I think it was something like tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in ad revenue, which, you know, for an indie game developer, you create this game, it's kind of a move of passion more than anything. You just enjoy pouring your artistic talents into making this game. You don't expect to make tons of money,

but the guy was making and killing. And, killing. And rare in this industry, and I think rare in any commercial industry, he had a conscience and he basically said, I feel terrible about this and removed it from the market. And people reached out. It was almost like he'd taken a drug away from drug users because he removed it from the market. And a lot of them responded and said, can you just give me a copy on the side? And he was pretty firm about it. He said no. copy on the side and he was pretty firm about it he said no wow wow so what is so uniquely addictive about that one game i know there's games like candy crush that you are uniquely addictive and um subway surfers my wife's addicted to that game like what what is it about flappy bird that's uniquely addictive i'd say the thing for me that was addictive. It was

incredibly simple to play. Everything about it was incredibly straightforward. There was a clear objective and you could see the little points tick upwards. So what you have to do for anyone who hasn't played the game, it's so simple. It's just a bird who has to fly through obstacles. It's just mindless. But one of the things that I think made it so hard for me to stop playing was that, you know, if you think about games in the 80s, the 90s, you'd end a game and you'd get this little game over screen. And then you'd have to push a button to keep playing. And so each time that happened, that was a little prompt that maybe you want to get on with your life, go do something else.

The thing about Flappy Bird is the bird, when he crashes, he just automatically reanimates and he starts flying again. And it almost feels rude to the bird at that point to say, I'm not going to keep playing. So I felt like, you know, look, we're two hours into the flight, three hours into the flight, but that bird just never stops flying. And I don't want to be the guy who just says it's game over, bird. And that's how, you know, I mean, it's an exaggeration, it's a bit silly, but it's really how it felt in the moment. And I think this is something that a lot of the screen experiences we have as a feature now, that the companies that have produced the products that we're using have systematically gone through their products to remove those little cues that would have said to us, it's time to move on. So the maker of video games now doesn't have a big game over screen. The game just kind of keeps rolling on. And if you do that,

you short circuit one of the things that pushes people away from what they're doing onto the next thing. And we call these stopping cues. And if you think about the bottomlessness of social media feeds, they were not bottomless when they were first designed and released. So when Facebook first came out, you had to click a little button at the bottom of the page that said load more. And that's not true anymore. Things just spool and spool and spool. And so there's no bottom to them. And as a result of that, we've short circuited that little nudge that used to say, okay, move on. And that was true of Flappy Bird. And that's what made it so hard for me to resist it at the time. The stopping cues or starting cues,

that's one of the features that people find uniquely addictive about TikTok because TikTok videos play immediately. I've never used TikTok, but when I was talking to Tristan Harris, he was saying that that's one of the things about it that really hooks people right away. You open up the app and it just starts playing. You don't have to click on anything. You don't have to touch it. It just immediately starts playing videos for you.

Yeah, it's true on most of the video playing platforms now. TikTok is certainly true. It's true about Netflix. They're all just designed to autoplay. And so that's removing one of the decision points that might have stopped people from engaging. And as a result, we're just kind of automatically right in there. You know, you basically want to take people from not being in an experience

to being deeply immersed in it as quickly as possible. And the more quickly you can do that, the more likely they are to just find themselves kind of entranced by that process. So a lot like playing a slot machine. If you gamble and you sit in front of that machine, I mean, it takes only a couple of minutes for the well-designed ones to hook you. And suddenly you're in a trance and you're losing, generally losing a lot of money. And suddenly an hour's gone by, two hours, there are no clocks. They

don't tell you that it's time to move on. There's no sense of daylight. You know, it could be the third sunrise. You wouldn't have any idea that's happening. And that's all by design. Jamie just pulled up a statistic about Flappy Bird and the phones that still have it now are on sale on eBay. Flappy Bird equipped iPhones are listed for $1,000 to $10,000 on eBay with a few priced above 50 000 an iphone 5s with the app sold for 10 100 an ipad air listed at over 80 000 has received multiple bids ebay nicks the auction the auction of a flappy bird equipped iphone as it neared $100,000, the LA Times reports. $100,000. $100,000 for a regular phone or a regular iPad that has this stupid game on it.

That's how addicted people are. Yeah, you should read it. Check out some of the reviews of it. It's really, it's pretty entertaining, actually, because these people, they have such a love-hate relationship with it. These are reviews written around the time it was released in 2014 and you'll see these these reviews that give it a five-star rating and then they say next to it this this game will be the death of me but they have this perfect kind of addictive relationship

with it and they they talk about um you know this one guy was like i've lost all my friends and it's so dumb because it's this bird who's flying around. I mean, it's the most trivial, silly thing. And yet the experience is compelling enough that it has that effect on people. Until you've played it, it also sounds silly. That's the thing. When I was playing it, when I landed, after six hours of playing it straight, I remember just being like, what just happened?

That makes no sense at all. It's a very powerful experience. I had a serious addiction to a game called Quake for years. The first-person shooter. I had a real problem, like eight to ten hours every day. I had a T1 line installed in my house so that I could play it. I was gone. And one day, I just shut it off. I just stopped it. I wasn't, I mean, I was gone.

And one day I just shut it off. I just stopped playing. I couldn't do it. I realized what was going on. I was tired all the time. I was playing until like 4 or 5 o'clock in the morning and then sleeping until like noon and then playing it again. It was really bad. And it's a game that is uniquely addictive because it's so immersive.

It's a 3D experience. The sound is 3D. And it's a game that is uniquely addictive because it's so immersive. It's a 3D experience. The sound is 3D. And it's very competitive, too. So you could hop online and you're constantly playing with these other people all over the world, really, in these servers. And there's a lot of people that lose their life to these games. And that's not as addictive as apparently World of Warcraft. Is that one of the things that you were saying is the most addictive game? Yeah, I mean, it's been labeled the most addictive experience we can have or we have had that doesn't involve a substance.

And based on the numbers, yeah, based on just the numbers of players, it's not at its peak anymore. It's been eclipsed by some other experiences. But at its peak, I mean, it had tens of millions of users and they were playing for hours and hours and hours a day. People just foregoing sleep to play in the middle of the night all day. Sometimes, you know, there are stories of people who played so much that they would sit in diapers because they didn't want to have to go to the bathroom. Oh, my God. Just incredibly powerful stuff. Yeah. And what has eclipsed it? I think there are just newer experiences like Fortnite. Fortnite's the really big one. I don't know if it surpassed World of Warcraft. I think World of Warcraft was a more kind of colossal experience, disrupted the world of video game playing more profoundly.

But there's also been a big shift in the way we play and who plays video games. You know, historically, video games were, you know, I was like you, for me, it was Doom. I would play Doom for hours and hours and hours a day. Same developer. Same developer. Yeah, just preceded Quake. And, you know, that was typical of gamers. You know, they were often kind of young males, teenage or adolescentaged or in their early 20s. And that's really shifted with the advent of the iPhone in particular. So because most games now are being played on iPhone screens or on smartphone screens, the biggest demographic of gamers from I think it was about 2014 or 15 on became middle-aged women. So it's a big shift in who plays games and spends the most time.

It's a big change. Those are the ones that were yelling at their sons just a couple of decades ago. It was middle-aged women. Get something going with your life. What are you doing? And now they're doing it. When you see these games and you see this massive addiction that human beings have to them and then you see the

technology increasing rapidly does i mean do you anticipate us being in the matrix in your lifetime uh yeah some version of that i think um you know what's what's really smart about the devices we use now at least from the developer's perspective is is most of us resist the idea of having an implanted tech device. We don't want something implanted in our brains yet. We're still pretty queasy about that idea. But if you ask people, 80% of adults will say that they can reach their phones 24 hours a day without moving their feet. So they're not physically implanted devices, but they're already basically there. And then down the road, if you speak to people who work in virtual and augmented reality industries,

they'll tell you, you know, we're only a couple of years away from this being a huge commercial success where just as we now almost all universally from quite a young age walk around with our own personal iPhones and smartphones, we're going to be doing the same, but they're going to be virtual reality glasses. And so you'll be going somewhere. And at any moment in time, instead of deciding whether to live in the moment or pick up your phone, it'll be, do I want to live in this moment or live in an alternate reality where, you know, I can go exactly where I want to go, do the thing I want to do, spend time in a virtual space with exactly who I want to spend time with, I think it's going to be incredibly hard for us to resist the temptation to do that. And that's going to create a literal physical barrier between human beings. I think we're all going to be

living in our own little universes eventually if things go the way they've been going. Well, if I was conspiratorially minded, and I kind of am, but only for fun, I would think that someone has probably set that ball in motion with COVID. With COVID and the lockdown, it's almost like if you wanted to make a movie where artificial intelligence wanted to figure out a way to hook us deeper, artificial intelligence would release a virus. And it would force us to stay inside it doesn't kill everybody but it makes people scared so you stay inside and it connects you even deeper to computers and maybe more

importantly separates you even more from the human experience of touching and being around each other in social cues and social gathering and it makes it even more compelling to do things virtually, more compelling to be on your computer all the time and messing with applications. And then while this is all going on, something far more immersive is released when you're already accustomed to it. Yeah, I've got to say, I mean,

life in the last decade in particular has got way stranger than fiction. The real world right now, there is so much about it that just seems like it can't be real. Life in the last decade in particular has got way stranger than fiction. Yeah. The real world right now, there is so much about it that just seems like it can't be real. You know, if anyone wrote a movie with the script of the last five to ten years. How about the last four here? Oh, the last four. Let's pick the last four.

Just that. People would say this is, yeah, it's nonsense. It's kind of B-grade Hollywood stuff that we're looking at here. But, you know, the interesting thing about this pandemic period for me is I think it might have a weird backlash effect where we've all been forced to spend time on screens. Instead of going to the screen because we love it and we're attracted to social media and whatever other things we're doing on screens, a lot of us are being forced to use them. And one thing that's changed is sentiment towards screens. I think a lot of people are just over it. And so when we are past all of this, I think there's a chance that's going to be the catalyst to push people away from screens a bit. Because if you, you know, before this, if you speak to especially younger people, they'll say, and then this is true for me too,

I would rather just use the most remote form of communication possible. Whatever's easiest. I don't want to have to speak on the phone. I don't want to have to see people. Let me just send a quick text or an email or WhatsApp or whatever. And I think there's a shift now where people are like craving that true face-to-face time where you're actually sitting in front of a person having a real conversation. And that's been, I think, a shift in the last roughly eight or nine months. I think there's people like you that are craving the experience of being around other folks, because I think you're aware of the repercussions of this virtual experience that we're all engaging in and the addiction to screens and screen time and phones and games and applications. But I think

there's plenty of folks that are happy to just get lulled to sleep and sucked into it. And I think that's my real concern. My real concern is mindful, thoughtful people like yourself that are, you know, that are saying, listen, we need, you know, just a real experience with human beings and we're revolting and leaving the, but if you look at the numbers in terms of human beings, like what the average screen time, all that stuff's going up. The use of these things is all going up. And I think there's folks like you that would like to think that we're rejecting it, but I think it's a, it's a minority that's rejecting it.

I think the minority, the majority are embracing it. Yeah. I think, I think minority that's rejecting it. I think the majority are embracing it. Yeah, I think that may be true. I mean, I think one of the big drivers of screen time is, you know, if you take psychological needs away from people, the things that are really important to them to function psychologically, that's when they turn to screens. That's when they turn to drugs. That's when they turn to alcohol. That's when they turn to all the things that soothe us. And screens do that. They are a kind of a non-substance way to be soothed. That's what happened with me on that flight for six hours. That's what happens when you're on social media scrolling mindlessly, when you're watching tons and tons of videos online. All that sort of stuff is a way of soothing you. And I think people need to be soothed more than

ever right now because this is a hard time for a lot of people. It's hard financially. It's hard because you're socially distant from people. It just creates this kind of pool of uncertainty that sits above everything we do. And humans hate that. We don't like uncertainty. We don't like not knowing what's coming around the corner. And not just about the pandemic. I mean, politically, in a lot of different ways, there's a lot of uncertainty right now and for the last while. And when you put people in that state, they're going to turn to screens. I don't know if that's an enduring thing, but anytime you rob people of well-being, of some sort of psychological need, they're going to try to find it elsewhere. And one of the ways they do that is now the easiest way to do it is to turn to a screen. Have you spent any time at all playing virtual reality games?

It's funny. When I was doing the research for this book, I spoke to a game designer, brilliant guy at NYU. He's in the NYU Game Center named Bennett Foddy. And he teaches game design. He's designed a number of phenomenal games himself. And he told me something that I found fascinating and I took it on board. He said to me, I asked him about World of Warcraft and I said, you know, do you enjoy it? What do you think about it? And he said to me, I know that if I start playing that game, I either don't play it at all or I'm going to basically be giving up years of my life. And I don't have the time to do that. So I just have never even opened the game to play it.

It's just not something I want to do. And that's how I have felt about most of those experiences. I did play one virtual reality game. It was with a haptic suit. So it basically fits over you. It was this Ghostbusters game. And I grew up watching Ghostbusters and loved it. So the ghosts fly through you and you can feel the suit compresses. And so it feels like they're actually kind of butting into you, which maybe doesn't make much

sense because they're ghosts. But you fly around with one of the little Ghostbusters guns and you're in New York City and you're running around. This was a 10 minute experience. But if you had told me that I could give up the next 48 hours of my life, put on the suit, run around, no food, just do this for 48 hours, it was so incredibly immersive and engaging and interesting. I would have done it. It was amazing. And it wasn't even like, that's not even where we're going with this stuff. This was, you know, step one out of step ten in terms of sophistication. This is the early days. It's only going to get more compelling.

Are you aware of Sandbox? Have you ever heard of the company Sandbox? No. Sandbox is a virtual reality game destination. So you go to this place, and it's essentially a warehouse. And inside of it, they have these arenas set up for games and a series of games that you play and i play with my whole family we put the haptic feedback suits on virtual reality helmets and you kill zombies you fight off skeletons on a pirate ship there's a bunch of games and it is wild and

you you see it and you go i see where this is going like this is right now pretty immersive pretty immersive, really, really fun, very engaging, exciting to do. But you know, for a fact that it's just going to keep getting better and keep getting better. And right now it's insanely addictive. Like I get so pumped up to do it when we do like, well, I'll go with my family, like every couple of weeks or so. And we get so excited when we're on our way over there. Luckily, it's got a set time. It's, it's a one hour experience. And when it's over, it's over. But my God, you're in it.

There's one of them where you're in a haunted house, and you're fighting off zombies, and they're just running at you like hundreds of them, and you're gunning them down. It's so exciting. When they get a hold of you, you feel their touch in the haptic feedback suit, and you see red in front of your face

like you're getting torn apart. It's wild. And you know that this is essentially like doom right if you play doom today it's the pixels are enormous it's just like it looks clunky and squarish and blockish and i mean it's fun still but it's so it it's so crude in comparison to a modern game. You know, where the modern games have, like there's a new Unreal Engine and we were playing a video of it the other day because it's so hard to believe that this is just a video game.

And in this video game, the lighting and the textures and the shadows are so exact. It's so incredible. And you just have this feeling of inevitability. Like there's just going to come a time where you're going to be in this virtual reality thing and you're going to have a whole haptic feedback outfit from your fingers to your toes, all over your face. And it's going to be better than real life. And that's what everyone's terrified of. it's going to be better than real life.

And that's what everyone's terrified of. Yeah. And I mean, it's hard to avoid that, right? That feeling, that excitement that you have as you're about to play. Imagine if that were always available to you at any moment of the day. It'd be hard to resist it. Yeah, I felt the same way about that very brief experience with Ghostbusters, that Ghostbusters game.

It was just, there was a level of excitement. And, and you know you used to have to kind of suspend disbelief like you as you say with doom you'd have the pixels and you'd be like yeah it's not quite real but it's real enough and then there was this point where everything just the processing speed the sophistication of the development the design you could make it seem basically real and it's only going to become more so and so you don't have to suspend disbelief at all the minute you could make it seem basically real and it's only going to become more so and so you don't have to suspend disbelief at all the minute you're in that experience it's there it's real it may as well be real what bothers me is people way smarter than me that aren't worried about it you know i had john carmack on the podcast who i'm a gigantic fan of you know he's the guy who created doom and quake and engineered those engines he's his take on phones was basically well people enjoy them and they make life better and he just doesn't

seem to be worried at all and you know obviously he makes games and he's working with oculus he was at the time at least working with oculus making all these games. And he's also a very disciplined person, so he'll code for 16 hours a day. And he's also – he plays that – there's the one game where you have the drumsticks and the things are coming at you, and you're swinging at the air and knocking these things down. What is that game called? Do you know?

I can't remember. I know the game. Yeah, I can't remember what it's called. Beat Saber. Beat Saber. Beat Saber. Jamie says Beat Saber. But he does it at an insanely high level where he's basically getting this wild cardio workout in. Like he's doing some sort of stick fighting martial art.

You know, he's like swinging his arms back and forth through the air. And he actually gets a cardio workout like you can do that and there's there is some benefits to like there's a boxing game that you can play on oculus um or no htc vive i played it on and when you play this boxing game you're you're squaring off against an opponent and when you get hit your screen lights up like you got hit in sparring and you can maneuver around. So it's actually a workout. You actually move around this person coming at you and they turn with you to try to meet you. They know where you're standing and they, they swing at you and you can, you can do certain things where it's actually beneficial. You can get some exercise. I've seen some of them,

uh, they're in engineering now with omnidirectional treadmills. So you have a harness around your waist. You're connected in position on this omnidirectional treadmill so you can go any way you want. And you're running and you're shooting at things. And you get this great workout while you're having fun. So it's not all doom and gloom. No, I totally agree. I think there's a temptation to fall on one end of the spectrum or the other.

And I don't think that makes sense. As with most issues in life, you know, there's some nuance that's got to come in. So there are people who will just talk about, you know, screens are going to be the end of the world. And there are people who will say there's absolutely no problem and everything we're doing is good for us and healthy and making the world better. And, you know, the truth is somewhere in the middle. And I think it also varies by the person and what kind of experiences you're having. If you're someone who is sedentary, you weren't working out, you weren't moving, and suddenly you find this game that encourages you to run and move around,

that's got to have some beneficial effects. If you're someone who's unnaturally disciplined, like John Carmack, then great. You're able to say, I'm going to take the best from screens and I'm going to resist the worst and I'm just going to move on with my life. But the data don't lie. And the data suggests that the amount of time we're spending in front of screens has gone up dramatically. And when you speak to people about it, they don't say, I'm happy about that. They say, what is going on? Where is all that time going? So that to me is the most compelling thing that we want to try to work out. How do we extract the best and leave behind the worst? With screens, with any kind of technology, with any kind of shift in the world, you always

want to try to do that across the population. Find the stuff that's damaging, weed it out, and find the stuff that's damaging weed it out and find the stuff that's useful and try to capitalize on it and emphasize that i think that's what um that's what this project is all about is it's it's about certainly not throwing out the baby with the bath water and not not trying to roll back to the 1950s here we want to retain the screens but work out the best way to use them and the best way for us to resist them when we need to do that. Yeah, these Dance Dance Revolution people, they figured out a way how to get something positive out of a video game, right? There's a lot of people that played that game that lost a ton of weight. So there are some things that you could say would be beneficial because the game is addictive,

but while it's addictive, you're also getting in shape yeah absolutely i mean there's a there's a good example so that there's the physical side of it and then of course like the mental experience of being on on screens can be very very positive for us too um you know you're learning languages that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to learn you're being exposed to people and experiences that you couldn't either experience because you live far away from them. I moved to the US in 2004 from Australia. And, you know, it's hard to believe it's only 16 years ago, but this is before YouTube. This is the same year that Facebook came about. I couldn't really find a good enough internet connection to be able to speak with video to my family in Australia. And that only came a couple of years later. So that's a miracle that during this time of lockdown, when we're all so far

apart from each other, we are able to actually communicate through these screens in a way that's basically seamless. Do you worry when you're researching this and you're spending all this time working on this subject and you accumulate all this data and you look at the big picture and you look at where this is going. Do you think that we are on our way to being obsolete, that human beings are going to be either replaced or we're going to have some sort of a very bizarre symbiotic relationship with electronics where we're not what we think of as people right now? I don't worry about humans being replaced as much as I worry about humans becoming just isolated entities. I think humans for all of evolutionary history have always been in groups,

in tribes. They've had to come together. They've relied on each other. They've formed coalitions. tribes, they've had to come together, they've relied on each other, they've formed coalitions. I worry that the way we get most of the psychological needs met, the psychological nourishment, it used to require getting together as a species, coming together in certain ways. And I think when you can get so much of what you need from a device that you strap onto your face that basically separates you from everyone else around you. I do worry about that. And I also think there are certain critical periods in maturation and development for kids when they learn how to interact with other people. They learn how to, you know, work out the difference between someone being angry and someone being afraid. They work out, you know, if you take

another kid's toy, the kid's going to bop you on the head and say, that's not okay. You've got to learn that stuff through trial and error. And I think because kids are placed in front of screens at such a young age, many of them, and because these devices are going to remove us from the contact with other people, I just think we're becoming a much more isolated species. We used to call humans the social animal. That's still true for sure, but it's kind of an impoverished, stripped down version of what it means to be social if you compare it to even 20 years ago. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about us being almost obsolete is that I worry about the advent of AI and I worry about things like Neuralink, where you're increasing the bandwidth that human beings have

to access information. And I'm not exactly sure what kind of effect that's going to have on human beings, but I'm positive that whatever effect it initially has is going to exponentially increase over the next few decades. And then I'm worried that, like you said, most people's phone is never more than a hand like arms reach away you wake up in the morning it's right there by your bedside people are always constantly checking their pockets when they get up from the dinner table they always want to have their phone how long before we let them stick that thing in us how long before you have a chip that that sits in your arm or something

real simple that just you know goes under your skin in a very easy way and doesn't it's not very painful but you have some access to everything that you want and then slowly but surely we start replacing body parts i mean i'm yeah i'm genuinely genuine i know it sounds science fictiony and ridiculous but i'm genuinely worried that what we think of as human beings now, this is like a legacy version of human beings and that 20, 30 years from now, it's going to be obsolete. I mean, just go back 20 years. Imagine you could go back to the year 2000 and speak to people and say, hey, you're going to go to the restaurant and everyone's going to be sitting isolated looking at a small device. And then they're going to go home and they're going to spend four hours looking at that device. And then they're going to wake up in the morning and look at that device.

I've been asking this question of thousands of people. I basically ask them from age 13 up to people in their 90s, would you rather now have your phone broken so you can have your phone shattered in front of you or would you rather have a broken bone in your finger? And older adults say, I would rather have a broken phone. But if you ask teens and adolescents, about half of them say, well, they want to bargain with you first. They're like, when I've broken my hand, can I still swipe my phone? But a lot of them will say, I would rather have a broken bone in my hand than a broken phone. Now, imagine going back 20 years and saying to

people, there's going to be this little device device and people are going to be willing to have body parts broken to preserve the integrity of that device. And it's going to be worth only a few hundred bucks. People are going to say that, people would say that's crazy. And I think this has been like a long 20-year process of desensitization. You know, the stuff that we're willing to do now, we're willing to give up four, five, six, ten hours of our days to screen experiences that at the end of the day we look back and say, man, I didn't really want some of those experiences. That wasn't good for me. I don't feel happier or better off. So you extrapolate.

You look forward. I mean, this is the beginning of an incredibly long road or a tall mountain. We're just at the very base and we're moving upward. long road or a tall mountain. We're just at the very base and we're moving upward. And that's why talking about VR and AR and Neuralink and all of the kind of augmented reality, artificial intelligence that's around the corner, all of that stuff, we're going to look back at this and this is going to look quaint in the same way that looking at people watching TVs in the 50s, looking at that little square wooden box, looks quaint. We're there. It feels like we're at some destination, but we're on the road and it's still very early on that road.

And this is one of the really important reasons, I think, for thinking so carefully about this stuff. Because if we don't think about it now, if we don't think about how to manage it in our own lives, it's going to affect us as individuals and in our small communities. But I think it's going to affect the whole planet on some level. So it's really important to at least be mindful about the choices we're making. I agree with you every step of the way, but my concern is that it doesn't matter what we're saying here. That this is like we are holding a thousand bison as they run towards the cliff. holding a thousand bison as they run towards the cliff we're like guys this is a cliff guys behind me and they're just pushing us back and we can't stop it that's what it seems like to me i i i

agree with everything you're saying and i bet this is going to resonate well all the people that are listening and watching this right now they're going to go yeah it makes a good point and then they're going to grab their phone and go huh who's calling's calling me? Who's texting me? What's this? What's that? And they're going to get sucked right back into it. Yeah, they will. And this is the kind of eternal problem with this, that we are up against – I'm sure Tristan Harris said this to you the other day, that we're up against very powerful, impressive foes. And they know all the right buttons to push,

and if they don't know, they'll collect data to be able to answer that question, and then they'll institute those practices in their products, and they'll put those features into their products that seem most capable of bypassing our resistance. Yeah. But I do think I'm a little bit hopeful. I'm hopeful because a lot of this is

going to depend on, on, uh, I think two things, you know, there are kind of top down influences and bottom up influences. The bottom up is grassroots. The fact that we're talking about this is a big step forward from where we were just three or four years ago. So in 2014, I was preparing to write this book and some of the people I spoke to about it said, this is a storm in a teacup. No one cares about screens. They're all good. There's nothing to worry about. They were already doing a lot of the same things they're doing now. We just weren't really sensitive to those issues. Now, between 2014 and 2017, when the book actually came out, sentiment swung dramatically. Suddenly, just I'd say millions and millions of people started to

care about this issue. And now it's many, many millions, maybe even billions of people who are really paying attention to it. So it's good that at least awareness is there. That's something. That's the first step. And then the top-down influence is, can you shape how companies use email? You know, like if you can get a lot of the biggest companies to start saying, hey, you know what, email is kind of destroying the lives of our workers. Maybe we're going to try to institute a policy where when they go on vacation, they absolutely don't have to check email. There are these companies in Germany in particular and other parts of Europe that have this vacation policy where when you go on vacation, every email that comes into your inbox is automatically deleted.

So your inbox, the way it looked the day you went on vacation, does not change until you get back from your vacation. So you don't need to check it while you're away. And so that's the top-down influence. And then, you know, the question about whether, you know, it's a really, really hot-button issue. Should governments intervene? Should they start changing the way tech companies operate? Should they legislate how we use these products? For very understandable reasons, I think a lot of people bristle at the idea that government should get involved. But these are questions, they're open questions. And some of the countries around the world have said, yeah, government should probably get involved. It's not going to fix itself. And it's not going to be fixed by grassroots pressure, by consumer pressure.

So we're going to have to do something from the top down, which is how a lot of governments deal with drug issues. They go to the source. I think it's a real problem if you let the government intervene in something just because you think it's addictive. I think if you're dealing with issues of censorship on social media and things along those lines, I think yes. I think the government should probably figure out some sort of revision to the First Amendment because it seems like these platforms, it's not as simple as this is a private company. Because this is a private company that has immense influence over the way the world communicates. It's just too big of a pipeline to say this is just a private company and we can decide who's on our platform and who isn't. Because you're seeing things censored by ideology, and you're seeing this polarizing effect that that has between Democrats and Republicans in the United States and the right and the

left. But that's one subject. That's just about free expression and free speech, which is a cornerstone of our democracy, a cornerstone of our culture. But addiction? Here's the thing. If you want to be competitive, there's no way you're going to allow emails that come into your inbox to be deleted when you go on vacation. If you're one of those people that's all about kicking ass and taking names and our

company's going to the top, you're not going to allow that. Because what if that email gets deleted and that email could have a critical information that could help your company and that could be the next level and you can get that promotion you've been working towards and people are not going to go for that in America. They might go for it in Germany and good luck to you.

But in America, in competitive business practices, I can't imagine that people are going to agree to something like that. And the idea that, I don't think that you're suggesting this necessarily, but that the government should step in and say, hey, you know, when you're on vacation, you get two weeks of vacation every year. And when you're on vacation, all your emails get deleted. People are going to go, fuck you. I need those emails. What are you crazy?

Yeah, I don't believe they should do that. I think that's absolutely absurd. What do you, crazy? Yeah, I don't believe they should do that. I think that's absolutely absurd. What do you think they should do? When you say the government, like interview? One thing they could do is they could intervene with protected classes like kids, right? So kids are incredibly vulnerable on screens. A friend of mine who writes about these issues near AL talks a lot about protected classes and that we have we have to have separate laws for for people who like if they want to sign up if an adult wants to sign

up and say look I need help I'm addicted to screens I'm spending 12 hours a day on them I want some help can you help me or or for kids who are also a protected class perhaps the government could intervene and say we need ways to ensure that we're protecting these classes of people who basically, either they've identified as needing help or they are kids and by definition need some help. So the government might intervene there. I mean, this is the thing about this issue.

I've been thinking about it for six years. There is no magic silver bullet. It is an incredibly difficult thing to solve because as you say, if you are telling people, especially in the US, we have found a way to make you happier and healthier, but it's going to make you much less competitive. And there's a chance you're going to miss out on opportunities. No one's going to bite on that. They're not going to say that's fine. And different countries and cultures will have a different balance that they strike. But that's what makes

this so difficult, is that in the moment, a lot of us want to be doing these things. We don't want to be deprived. We don't want our immediate liberties to be deprived, our ability to scroll mindlessly. If a government intervened and said, you're not allowed to scroll on your screen, I'd bristle at that, and I think most people would. Even if we know that maybe that'll make us more productive and happier in the long run, It's just not what we're looking for from governments. So you asked what I think we should do. I think it's incredibly difficult. It's a really difficult problem. I don't know that there's a very obvious set of solutions. Although I think we should be very, very mindful, especially with respect to kids, because I think they are unbelievably vulnerable. And sometimes their parents don't really know what to do.

It's a difficult problem. And so there I think we should be open to more, I don't know if extreme is the right word, but more intense interventions. So when you're writing a book like yours, do you get this, because we both have the sort of same conclusions, that it's really difficult. It's an enormously difficult problem, and there's no clear-cut solution do you have a feeling a sense of almost just just futility just like what is the point of all this this is this is moving in a direction that i can't i mean maybe you can give out advice that a scant few individuals will act upon that a small percentage of the people who

read your book are going to go you know what adam makes a good point i am uh i'm gonna cut back i'm gonna delete all my apps i'm gonna i'm gonna get to get a flip phone i'm gonna i'm gonna do something but how many what percentage are gonna do that it's a weird thing when you write a book like this because the book for me was it was it supposed to be not an expose, but it was supposed to be a, hey, there's this thing that you haven't been thinking enough about. And it's an issue, and we should probably focus on it more than we have been. That was my intention. So it's not written as a self-help manual. It's written as a, let me uncover what's going on here. And so you can understand the psychological hooks that are embedded. But as I've been speaking about this to audiences for the last

three or four years, everyone wants a solution. And you're right. There are going to be a lot of people who are just like, I don't care about this. I'm fine. I'm happy. Just leave me alone. And that's fine. But when I'm in front of audiences and they can be anything from, you know, people who work in the tech industry to the parents of kids, to school districts, to big companies. I mean, it just, it varies pretty dramatically. But one of the things I always say is tell me all of you from one to 10, how big an issue is this for you and how much do you want it to change? And most people fall at the top half of the scale. They're at like a six or a seven or an eight. Now, they're in front of me, right? So it's possible that that's just what they're saying in that moment. And in fact, when push comes to shove, they're not going to do that much about it.

But the solutions that I'll share or the suggestions that I'll share, they're incredibly straightforward. They're things like cultivate a habit where you don't have your phone at dinnertime. This is not a high tech solution to a high tech problem. It works. I've managed to do this. A lot of the people I know have managed to do it. And even these small interventions, they're very analog. They're just like put your phone in a drawer for a couple of hours a day. Don't put your phone in the bedroom. draw for a couple of hours a day. Don't put your phone in the bedroom. That stuff matters. And I think the best we can do, the best I feel that I can do right now is to talk to the end consumers of tech. And if they want to hear the message, they want to hear that this is a concern and what you could possibly do about it, that's great. If they don't, I'm not a proselytizer. I'm not trying to convert anyone to my view. I just wanted to put this out there and to have people say, oh, yeah, this is a thing. And it seems like people are on board with at least that part of it. But like you and I, they're not sure what to do about it. One of the things that's helped me immensely is doing this

podcast. Because while I'm talking to people like you for hours, there's no phone. There's no distractions. And it's one of the things that I love about wearing the headphones and just sitting across from someone, in this case virtually, but most of the time in person, talking to someone. It's just a conversation. That's all it is. There's no checking the phone. And that is so rare. It's such a strange time where checking a phone becomes, like,

one of the most common activities that a person does throughout the day if you if you just looked at how many times a person checks their phone throughout the day versus all the other things they do have a glass of water go to the bathroom all the various things people do every day that's at the top of the list and again like you're saying, 10 years ago, no one would have ever imagined that was the case. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine there are too many people on the planet who spend more time in conversation than you do. And, you know, there's incredible benefit to that. And most people, when they have those deep conversations with other people, they recognize that benefit,

they enjoy it. And so, you know, one of the pieces of hope is that, you know, if with other people, they recognize that benefit, they enjoy it. And so, you know, one of the pieces of hope is that, you know, if you tell people, try this for a while, try this for a week, don't have your phone at the table when you're having dinner. It's hard at first for people who are always used to just kind of mindlessly scrolling through dinner, but most people end up finding that there's quite a lot of benefit to it, and they enjoy it. So part of this is to get people to have the experience of what the other side could be. But yeah, you're right. These conversations are rare for most people. And picking up the phone is one of the most common things we do.

We spend on average, the average American adult spends four or more hours a day on a cell phone screen. It's a huge amount of time. And most people can't believe it. Yeah, it's hard to imagine when you look down at that number and you go, what? Because you just think of it in these little tiny chunks, like a few minutes here or there. But those few minutes, you know, there's 60 minutes in an hour, they add up quick. And what was the most disturbing thing when you were researching this and you're looking at all these trends? What was the most disturbing aspect of it for you, if there was a most?

There were two. The one was, you know, there are people who play video games more than they would like. But then there are people at the very top end of that spectrum who are just absolutely helplessly addicted. They'll play games for five weeks straight, put on 50 pounds, lose their hair, sit in diapers, pay someone to bring pizza boxes to their room until there are just piles and piles of pizza boxes. I met some of these people and spoke to some of them. And those stories I just found completely shocking. You know, I was sitting. Tell the story about the football player, if you would.

Yeah, I mean, he's the one I'm thinking about now. This guy who just, he basically told me he was a very strong student. He was in college. He was a straight-A student. And he was on the football team, so he was a student athlete, very bright, very capable, and slightly lonely, felt a little bit distant from other people, and started playing World of Warcraft, formed a guild,

played with some other players, and just found that experience just incredibly immersive and rewarding. He loved the social aspect of it more than anything. And he felt a sense of obligation, I guess, that, you know, there were people playing at different parts of the world. He was playing with people around the world. And so when it was nighttime where he was, other people would be playing because it was daytime where they were. And so he started to stay up later and later and later. His sleeping hours

shrank and he ended up flunking out of college this happened twice actually because he relapsed after he got treatment but he flunked out of college um he put on he told me i think he said he put on 40 pounds of fat in a period of five weeks spent five weeks straight sitting at the screen, playing the game, 23 hours a day, he said, between 23 and 24 hours a day. He told me he didn't use a diaper, and that accounts for the hour a day, but he didn't bathe. And he paid this doorman to bring up boxes of pizza. So that's what he was eating. He was eating basically pizza three times a day.

And he was unrecognizable by the end of it. Looked different, bailed out of school. That to me was, that was one of the two most shocking things was hearing these stories from people face to face explaining what they'd gone through. It's just, and there's no substance involved. You know, you hear these kinds of stories from substance abuse, but the idea that an experience can be compelling enough to have the same effect on some people, I found that really shocking. Yeah, and the fact that he relapsed too.

He got over it, recognized that there was a giant issue, and then the lure of it drew him right back to the computer. Yeah, he went for treatment. He went for a dose of treatment. It was expensive. He was lucky that his family could afford it. He went to this facility just outside of Seattle called Restart. And they take in mostly young males and they teach them how to cook and clean and all these things that seem to kind of pass by a lot of

people and being self-sufficient and not just being stuck in front of the game. They expose them to nature. They get them outdoors. They teach them how to play sports. They get them to exercise a little bit. They feed them healthy meals, all this sort of stuff. So he went and he did this for a few weeks. And at the end of it, he thought, okay, I'm going to go back to the life I had before and I'm not going to play this game.

I'm not going to play World of Warcraft. And for a while, it worked. But one of the things, one of the mistakes he made is that he basically went back to the exact context he had been in when he had that addiction in the first place and so soon enough you know a period of loneliness he was inspired to just fire up the game and he said you know I was just going to play one more time suddenly it happens all over again which is what you hear from people who have have drug abuse issues as well you can't you obviously can't just do it one more time. And so he had to go back to the facility. Now, this time when he finished his

treatment, instead of going back to college, he actually stayed out there. He lives and stayed out in Washington state. So he's clean now? Are you still in touch with this guy? He is. He's clean. He's a tremendously successful guy. He's a businessman. He's doing very well. He's doing well, and I think a big part of what helped him was just completely removing himself from the context that was problematic for him. That seemed to be a huge part of what allowed him to get past it. lot of what allowed him to get past it. There's a certain aspect of people when they get addicted to things that I've heard people try to figure out what that is or why people get obsessed to certain activities. And they think that you're hijacking or the games are hijacking some positive evolutionary trait

where you get obsessed at trying to get good at things that will help your survival, like be a better hunter, learning how to fish, learning how to fight off your enemies, and becoming obsessed with these things has allowed people to thrive and survive and procreate and that somehow or another these games hijacked is that accurate am i i find that explanation really compelling i mean if you think about it if you had driven towards mastery towards completing goals rather than leaving them incomplete that's going to predispose you for a lot of the right kind of traits to succeed especially going back thousands of years. You know, if you were on a hunt and you decided, oh, no, I'm good.

I'm done. It's not going to work out today. You know, if you were that person, you didn't succeed and your ancestors don't, your progeny don't exist. There's no one here to speak for you. But if we exist today, that's because our ancestors were the ones who said, actually, no, I'm tired. I'm done. But I can't be done because I need to complete the goal. The mission's got to be complete. And so there's this overhang of this now, which is, as you say, the unproductive part of that is that we are really bad at letting things go as a species.

You open up a loop for me and you don't tie the loop off. I hate it. Don't tell me half a story. Don't teach me half a skill. Don't tell me to read half a book or watch half a movie. Humans hate that. We all hate that. And it's productive in some contexts when it's good for us to finish what we start. But we're not in prehistoric times anymore. We're not hunter gatherers in the same way. And so you get these experiences on a screen. Suddenly you're playing Candy Crush and the old hunter-gatherer in you who says,

I can't give up on this experience till it's done because otherwise I'm not going to survive, kicks in. And suddenly you're playing 14 hours of Candy Crush or six hours of Flappy Bird. So I think it is a hijacking of some of the traits that were incredibly adaptive and beneficial in those evolutionary contexts, but don't make a lot of sense in the modern world in some contexts. It's so strange that these traits would translate to flappy bird. I mean, it's really weird. It's really weird that these things that would have helped our ancestors survive, they can be hijacked. survive, they can be hijacked. Yeah. I mean, look at, uh, so I'm a runner. Um, I don't run,

I'm not extremely fast. Um, I don't run insane distances, but, but I find ultra running absolutely fascinating. And I find, um, elite marathon running fascinating. There's, there's no good reason to do an ultra. There's, I mean, there are a lot of good reasons that are kind of intrinsic, like the reward. I would love to do one one day. But that is a hijacking in the same way. I mean, this is just kind of, it's a chip that is in there and it works for us and it worked for us in prehistoric times. But it doesn't distinguish between the occasions when it's going to work well for us and when it's going to work badly. I mean, it's the same with food, right? That desire for sugar, that craving for sugar, for salt, for fat. If you were roaming the savannah and you were looking for something that was calorie rich, calorie dense, that was going to be good for you, that was going to sustain you,

high sugar, high salt, high fat, great mix. But give people the situation they're in today, they're still operating on those same principles. Their brains are still operating the same way. They're just as attracted to those things. But they have an endless font of foods that are going to give them those things in massive surplus. And that's hugely problematic. It's exactly the same with the brain responding to rewards, to mastery, why we do crosswords, why we play games that get progressively more difficult, that suck up more and more of our time. It's a huge part of it.

The ultra marathon running thing is particularly interesting to me because one of my very good friends does it. His name is Cameron Haynes, and he runs these three-day races where they run 240 miles. He did the Moab 240. He's done the Bigfoot race, which is 200 miles. You're he did the moab 240 he's done the bigfoot race which is 200 miles you're going through the mountain and i think there's and he interestingly enough he got involved in that because he is a hunter and he wanted to be have better endurance to hunt in the mountains and so

he started getting obsessed with running marathons then ultra ultra marathons, then these crazy multiple-day endurance races. But it's literally, for him, that thing that we're talking about, these ancient traits that allowed persistence, allow you to be a successful hunter through that persistence and through that dedication and focus and discipline. He's sort of got stuck in this where he's just insane with it. He'll run a marathon a day multiple days in a row to prepare for these things where they used to tell you you have to have six months off when you run a marathon right that was ancient wisdom like your body's so broken down after running 26

miles no he runs a marathon every day have you seen the sri chinmoy challenge this is this is a i wrote a piece about what is it called it's sri chinmoy s-r-i and then chinmoy c-h-i-n-m-o-y i've heard that i've heard that it's it's this insane so what you do is you go to brooklyn i think it starts in may or june you go to brook Brooklyn and there's this little block around a school. It's a nondescript block. There's nothing special about it. And you run 3,100 miles over about 60 days. There's no scenery.

I can understand running the Moab. I would love to do the Moab, the Western States, bad water. I'm very attracted to the idea of doing that, and I can totally understand why that could be a life-changing experience but running around a half mile block thousands of times six thousand times i think it is i just i struggle to understand that but again for people who do that it's it's all about just pushing yourself and and uh it's about the challenge and stripping it of its of its beauty like making it in a place that's not beautiful. It's a city block, makes no sense.

That then just kind of exaggerates that it's all about completing the quest. The only reason people will do that is because there is that part of us, that's an extreme expression of that tendency. But we all have some of that in us. And especially people who are high on conscientiousness, who are kind of

tenacious that there's something about that that's really compelling and it's hard to ignore yeah there's something about completing tasks that gives you this little spark of dopamine right this little something gets you excited and the more difficult the task the better the feeling is when you've completed it. I've never run an ultra marathon, but I got a map. What is the longest you've ran? Um, I absolutely punished myself running the New York city marathon 10 years ago. It was hell. I remember I crossed the finish line completely depleted. And, uh, I know this, this sounds, sounds a bit silly after we've been talking about this reach in my 3,100-mile challenge.

But after 26 miles, I was just done. And I hadn't eaten enough food. I remember crossing the line and this woman put a medal around my neck. And she said, how did that feel? And I said, that was hell. I'm never going to run another marathon. And she said to me, that's what everyone says, but I'll see you next year. And I've got to say, I have stuck to that.

I am never running another marathon. It nearly killed me. Did you just not prepare enough for it? No, I prepared really quite well for it. But what I didn't prepare for was the ordeal of trying to get to the starting line in Staten Island. I mean, it's hell. So I ate my breakfast at what, 3am? And then the race begins at something like nine or 10 in the morning, depending on which wave you're in. And so I had some food with me, but I just didn't budget for that six or seven hour period.

So I remember being at the starting line and being absolutely famished. I was starving, which is a terrible place to begin. So I was the guy running along the course just like asking spectators if they had food, like mashing bananas in my face. I was just eating constantly throughout that whole race because I was so hungry so that was my biggest problem I mean I think I should probably do another one where I I uh get get the right nutrition because I'd probably be able to do a lot better and enjoy it a lot more and I do run a lot I still run uh pretty regularly around where I live, like between eight and 12 miles. But the idea of training for another marathon, I also have two young kids.

It's just not something I have that much time for right now. Why did you eat breakfast so early? Because that's when I left home. The bus you had to take. So the way it worked was you had to go uptown. I live downtown in Manhattan. You had to go and get a bus at 3 a.m. That took, I don't know why it took so long, but it took forever to get to Staten Island. It's cold because it's November in New York.

It was just unpleasant. I think the key is to run a marathon that you just show up, you drive your car to the marathon starting line, you get out and you start running. That's what I need to do next time. Because the New York City Marathon is an incredible spectacle. Millions of people watching. It was one of the most fun experiences I had for the first eight of the 26 miles um but then it went downhill how long did it take you to complete it I it's funny I trained and I wanted to run a sub 330 um and all my training runs had been consistent with that and then the day of the race i could tell by halfway through it just wasn't going to happen and so i was approaching the four i started running with the guy who's holding the sign that's at 3 30 and um you know this is a pacer he said to me i'm going

to run this in 329 and i said how can you guarantee that he was like well i can run at 216 i should be okay so so i started running with him and then he he just receded into the distance because I couldn't keep up by about mile nine or mile 10 and then the 340 went by and the 350 went by I realized I was staring at four hours and right at near the end of the race a friend of mine ran on and said to me you're looking at a 401 and I was I was pissed I was not happy because I wanted to run a sub four. I basically said to myself, if you don't run sub four, you have to do another one.

So I ended up just finding some hidden store of energy and ended up running a 357. Wow. One of the things you talk about in your book is the addiction that people have to fitness devices, to these watches and iPhones. I wear a whoop strap and you know a lot of people that wear these things they start counting steps and they they start looking at how many calories they've burned I was in a sober October contest a couple years back with my friends we were using uh the my zone uh chest strap app and it

calculates points based on how many minutes you're at 80 or above max heart rate and and we were killing ourselves just putting in six seven hours of cardio a day like just madness um your your your take on them was mostly negative right you were you were do is that a fair sense yeah that that's fair i've revised my position on this i think the bigger issue in the u.s is and and in the world in general and the developed world the bigger issue is that we're sedentary as a species we don't't exercise enough. So if these devices are pushing us to do more exercise, that's good. But then there are people like you, like me, I am an absolute slave to my Garmin watch. And if I take it with me on a run, it's game over. I could be at the beginning of a run. I'll be standing at the end of my driveway about to go.

And I'll say to myself, you are going to run slowly. You're going to do a slow, long run. And 30 seconds later, I'm tearing down the street because I'm looking at my watch, which is saying to me, oh, you're running just over seven minute pace. You should probably dial it down to 650 or something like that. And I cannot resist it. So if I want to run and enjoy it, I just can't take the watch with me. So my take is negative just because I think, in the book at least, I have a positive feeling about them in general, but they're just really, really hard to resist. And even if you give yourself a bit of self-talk,

you're like, I'm not going to pay attention to it. It ends up being the case that you fall in line. I never last more than 10 minutes without looking at my watch and saying, all right, it's time for me to really pick things up a bit. That seems – I get what you're saying. But I feel like the addiction to fitness is probably one of the best addictions you could ever have in terms of the overall quality of life improvement, the actual benefit to it. But you are still dealing with this weirdness, right? You're compelled. You feel helpless and drawn in to the siren song of your watch or your

strap or whatever's pulling you in that's making you do all these extra miles and extra rounds and extra this. But ultimately, you're getting a benefit out of it as opposed to like World of Warcraft or something like that where you're just sitting in front of a screen. For sure, yeah. I totally agree. Sorry, carry on.

No, no, I was just saying, so you've revised your position you think that sedentary lifestyle is more dangerous so the the benefit of being addicted to this is at least you're moving and you're exercising and you're doing something healthy with your body i think it's it's more nuanced than that it's that there is for someone who's going from zero to exercising that's great. That's a great thing. And there are more people in that position than there are people who are working too hard.

So I think on balance, these devices, if they're getting people off the couch and inspiring more activity, they're great. But I think for people like me, people like you, people who do exercise a bit, the danger is that you stop relying on your internal cues and you end up just going by the device. So there are people who'll be out like 4am because they didn't get to their 10,000 steps, you know, that kind of thing. There's nothing inherently wrong with being out at 4am, but it just signals to you. It says something about these devices. It says that what's fueling your drive to exercise is an obsession that's pretty either unhealthy or not driven by, you know, your body telling you you want to run some more. Like there are days when I'll run in the morning and then by the afternoon, I'm just itching to run again. That

doesn't happen very often. But that's my body saying, hey, you've got a lot of energy pent up, why don't you go out and have another run? But there are also people who will walk in the morning and then they'll look at their watches and say, oh, it's the afternoon and I'm only at 5,000 steps. I better go out. You're driven entirely by these external cues that are not about well-being. They don't reward you in a way that's like truly deeply rewarding in the way that exercise I think should be when you're doing it right. But still, better to be doing some with the artificial reward that comes from the chirp on the watch or the Fitbit or the whoop or whatever it is that tells you you've hit some threshold, that's definitely better than not working out at all. And again, these things, these devices are hijacking these

traits that have been positive for us, evolutionarily speaking, in terms of our ability to survive and thrive and work through uncomfortable moments and achieve desired results. So it hijacks these systems. It's the same hijacking. Yeah, it's that idea that there's a binary. If you think about what it is to be a hunter-gatherer, it's binary. If you're chasing some big animal, there is no gray area. You catch the animal and you get food and your group, your tribe gets food or you don't catch the animal. And so there is a kind of bright line between success and failing to achieve the goal.

And there's no way around that. And so we are predisposed to focus on those goals and to make them these big, bright issues. Like for me, that four-hour mark with the marathon, if i didn't get under four i mean there should be no difference between a 401 and a 400 or a 359 they're tiny differences in the scheme of it it's like a half a percent or quarter of a percent difference in time but it felt to me like this really important milestone and i think that's what these devices do is they carve out the difference between success and failure and make it really bright in a way that it was historically.

But don't you think some people need that though? Because otherwise, oh, the good enough. Oh, it's fine. Oh, you're getting out. You're moving. You're fine. some people need that number like they need a very clear hard line in the sand in order to push themselves in order to show what they're actually physically capable of yeah i think most of us do i mean that's that's uh you know self-control doing the thing that's hard right now because it's good in the long run it's it's one of the like age-old human problems it's something that i think we're all going to struggle with forever on some dimension, whether it's about screens or about getting out and actually exercising and doing meaningful exercise. It's easier to sit on the sofa and watch the TV or use your phone or whatever. We're all going to have that feeling forever.

Some of us have enough intrinsic joy for exercising and working out. We develop, we kind of cultivate that over time that it pulls us off the couch. But for a lot of people, the only way they're going to do it is with this sort of tricking, this hijacking of the brain systems. And that's probably okay. I mean, one of the things I write about at the end of the book is we know all this stuff makes it hard for us to resist social media. It makes it hard for us to resist social media. It makes it hard for us to resist email, texting, checking the news, all that sort of stuff. We go back to it over and over again.

But you could use those same hooks for the good. You could use them or apply them in situations like fitness where they are mostly things that are good. And fitness is one, eating healthy foods, things like education. Like you could kind of trick kids into learning stuff, trick even my students. Like if you could in some way make education more compelling by creating goals and gamifying and all that sort of stuff, there are worse things, right right if you can use those

tools for the good that's one good thing about my the the books app on the iphone it'll give you uh like oh you've achieved your goal of reading x amount of pages per day um so that there's one good aspect of being addicted to achieving those goals is the ultimate irony being addicted to a meditation app? Yeah, this idea that the solution to tech is tech is more tech is, this is the important thing for me is that we talk about screens, we say you're addicted to screens, or you're addicted to tech. And that's obviously just the massive gloss on what's going on, right? It's not about being addicted to a screen or tech, And that's obviously just the massive gloss on what's going on, right? It's not about being addicted to a screen or tech.

No one's going to walk around with a blank iPhone screen and just say, I can't get enough of this device. It's a vehicle and it's delivering something to you. And if it's delivering an experience that you find compelling, that's bad for you, then that's bad. If it's delivering an experience that you find compelling, but that ultimately teaches you a new language

or helps you connect with a loved one who's far away or whatever. If it's helping you meditate, find wellness, psychological calm, all of that sort of stuff, more power to you. If you're reading on your phone, people always say, oh, I shouldn't be reading your book on Kindle. I'm like, it's totally fine. It's a screen. Whether you're looking at a page or a screen with writing on it, that's fine. It's not a big difference. The issue is not the screen. It's what you're doing on it. So if you're using a screen to administer meditation or like to lead you in yoga or something that's important to you for your wellness, for your psychological well-being, I think that's fine. We don't need to demonize tech to the point where we say, you only should do mindfulness activities that involve another human being in your presence or being alone, and you can't use screens. I think that's, again, another example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And it seems silly to me. Do you think that it's possible to develop some sort of a program or a structured discipline on how to correctly

incorporate these technologies into your life. So you can give people a framework. This is what you should do. This is what you shouldn't do. This is the way to avoid the traps. Because a lot of what people are doing, it's not even compelling. I see what you're saying about as long as you're doing something, it's compelling and getting something good out of it, like an education or you're learning something

new. But God, a lot of what I look at is nonsense. I just, I'll just like, and I was thinking this one day, I was looking at all these people that were just staring at their phone and scrolling through things. I'm like, imagine if there was no phone, but there was a drug that made you stare at your hands and just like mindlessly just stare at your hands like a lot of people are doing with their phones. You know, you might be watching some video on nothing. Like to me, I watch a lot of muscle car videos. I'm not getting anything out of that.

I'm not getting anything out of that, but I'm watching these, look how pretty, look how shiny, listen to the sound, yeah. I'm not getting anything out of it. but I'm watching these, look how pretty, look how shiny, listen to the sound. Yeah, I'm not getting anything out of it. I might as well be staring at my hand. If there was a drug that made people just look down and stare at their hand, we would be like, oh, my God, these people are under a trance. Look how horrible this is. Yeah, there are people who are kind of puritanical about it. They're like, you know, they would say you shouldn't be looking at those muscle cars

or you shouldn't be doing whatever it is that you're doing that's not enriching your life. I think that's nonsense. I think we take too seriously this idea that, you know, every minute of our lives needs to be spent in the service of efficiency and maximization and all that crap. You should spend time looking at the cars if they make you happy in the moment. And not every decision needs to be made for long-term wellbeing. I do stuff, you know,

I find myself on YouTube for hours at a time. And actually at the end of it, I'm like, you know, was that okay? Probably not the best use of my time. Is it going to make me a, you know, an impoverished human being who hasn't reached his goals? No, it's fine. I mean, you don't want to do that all the time. Your question about a framework, I think,

is really an excellent one. And it's one that I've thought about a lot. You know, one of the things I've started to do is to work with some school districts and thinking about education and curricula. You know, could you, you know, we teach kids good manners. We teach them math. We teach them a lot of things that are actually not at all practical, that they're not going to need when they leave school. But one thing that's incredibly practical today is teach kids about screens, digital hygiene or whatever you want to call it. How do you interact with a screen for the best outcomes? I don't know exactly what that course would look like, but it's something that I think

smart people should get together on and figure out. I think it's a very valuable use of kids' time. It doesn't have to be like years of education, but just have a conversation with them about this thing. You know, there's this thing that's probably going to try to eat up hours of your life and amounting to 20 years. Let's talk about what the benefits are, what the costs are. Here are the questions to ask yourself. And for me, that framework, that question, I could never tell someone, don't look at videos, don't use social media. I would never want to do that. It's not my sensibility. It's not the way I think about these things. But what I do think is we should all just

ask the question, just kind of audit or interrogate your use of these devices. And if you come away from it, you're like, this is fine. Like, I waste a bit of time, but I live a fulfilled, healthy, happy life. I have good social connections. I'm not spending tons of money on experiences that I can't afford online. You know, if you answer all those questions, you come out with it, you say, things make sense for me, and I'm okay spending a bit of time on these devices, then you're fine. But if like a lot of people, you say, this is not great. Like this feels problematic. Then that's when you know something needs to change.

I think you're nailing it in terms of getting children to be aware of the problems of these devices now and to get ahead of it with education and to just get it into their mind and maybe have them reinforce it with each other that there's there's real issues here and we weren't even aware of these real issues a decade ago this is why it's not in the curriculum um i've always been frustrated at the fact that we spend so little time educating children how to think about things, how to think about the way you react to things, why you react to them this way, the way you live your life, the way you treat each other, just communication issues and observation issues and just cognitive issues, just the way we view things and problems and i think we could solve a lot of

these issues by educating children just simply on how to think and the the positive aspects of looking at things objectively and honestly and then this would fall right into place with that because if you're being honest about yourself you're being honest about addictions you're being honest about the positive and negative aspects of technology we could at least give children the framework to use that sort of discipline and understanding to not just approach it to electronics but all this future shit that's coming down the line not the current electronics but things that we but things that we haven't even conceived yet, things that we're not aware of that are going to probably be far more immersive than all these current problems we're handling. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think the education system

we use today is an overhang from, I don't know how many hundreds, or certainly decades, but I'd say hundreds of years of a legacy of just bad education choices. I mean, I think a lot of what kids are taught is just not useful for them. It's not practical. It doesn't help them think. At least if you're going to teach something that's not practical, teach it in the service of some bigger aim that's really important. You know, it's got to have some value to it. You only have kids in the classroom for a certain amount of time. And I think you're right, like the most basic skill is critically assessing yourself and the information in the world around you. And it's a really hard one to learn. And there are a lot of psychological biases built into us that mean that we are fundamentally incapable of doing that unless we're taught how to try to at least

begin to overcome those biases. And then you put us in a world of echo chambers of whether they're political or whether they're just the cultures we happen to be immersed in. It's impossible to think about anything objectively and in a kind of canonical true sense anymore. If you could teach kids how to do that, it would be a different world. It would be a different planet. I think it's an incredibly valuable enterprise. And I think it's something that is worth spending time on and thinking about. And I would like, since we're taking up a quarter of our waking hours by staring at these little devices, I think that should be part of that education, for sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it would apply to every aspect of a kid's life. It's just such a strange thing. You have to learn that on your own. Out of all the things that we teach children, which are important, you know, history

and mathematics and all the other things we teach them, how do we not teach them that? Critical thinking skills and how to look at yourself accurately and the benefit of it, even when it's painful and uncomfortable, but that you can actually learn and grow through that and to learn to accept those painful, uncomfortable truths because there's great benefit in that. Yeah. Some of the research I've done has looked at this idea of the benefit of hardship, basically, that grappling with difficult things, practicing where the practice set that you're doing is harder rather than easier. These are all, you know, that kind of go against our natural tendencies. We like to do things that

are a little bit easier. We, as a species, like not to expend effort that we don't have to expend in general. But there are tremendous benefits that come from doing that with grappling with complexity, with difficulty, actually being really honest about who we are. And it all goes against the grain. So the only way you're ever going to get kids to be self-aware and to think about these things is by inculcating that when they're pretty young, by teaching them that when they're the younger, the better, really, because as you get older, the gloss of culture and society and all the kind of stuff that's around us that makes it hard for us to engage in that way starts to take over. How long did it take you to write this book?

It took about 15 months. I spent six months doing a lot of the research. I interviewed about 50 or 60 people for it. And then about nine months on and off of writing. And then there was an editing phase back and forth with the editor. Now that it's done and you go back and you look at it and you think about the time that's passed since you released it, is there anything that you would have revised? Is there anything that you wish you had added? Yeah. You know, a lot of it, I think, stands. A lot of the stuff is still true. It holds the same sway with me. I still endorse it. I really, really struggled to get behind the curtain of the big tech companies. And I wanted to write about the business side of what these companies were doing and tried really hard, but didn't get that far

in delving with these companies. I couldn't get past a lot of the kind of, there are some barriers and I knew what I was writing about because I wanted to be honest about it. And I couldn't get a lot of the information that I wish I had been able to get. Now when I speak about it, I have a lot of that information. I would have folded it into the book. A lot of it's not in there. I mean, I still talk about what these companies are doing, but I would like to have known more about the business side, and a lot of that was hidden from me.

So that's a big part of it. There's not much else, really. I have a PhD in psychology, and so I'm interested in what makes people tick and how they think and so the middle big chunk of the book is these different hooks that are embedded in these platforms that make it hard for us to resist them

and that hasn't changed that's as true as ever and so I don't feel that I would change anything about that part of the book What about the business practices of these companies was interesting to you? That they're aware of how addictive all these things are?

Yeah, one of the practices I found fascinating was the extent to which these companies use massive data sets to make their decisions and huge amounts of data. So, you know, there are two ways to make smart decisions when you're designing a product. The one way is you speak to smart people who know a lot about humans and what makes them tick, their motivations, and then you take that information and you embed it in the platform that you're designing. But that's really hit and miss.

That's how a lot of video game development worked. And again, speaking to these video game experts who've designed games that have made tons of money, who have been very successful, a lot of them will say, look, I created a lot of games, but a lot of them missed the mark. I had a couple that were great successes, but for every two that were successful, there were 10 that weren't. So there's a lot of kind of trial and error. What the big tech companies do in large part is they avoid the trial and error by being completely agnostic about the theory of what's going to drive us.

They don't need to know about that. All they need to do is run this series of kind of trials by combat. So if you're playing, again, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, what I do is I throw two different versions of a particular mission up and half the players will play one version, the other half will play the other version. Let's say one of them is through a forest. The other one's identical. You have to do the same thing, but you're going by the ocean. The question is, what effect does that have? And you might discover people will play the mission 10 minutes longer if they're by the ocean.

So then you say, okay, we're going to privilege ocean missions. So now we have two versions of the ocean mission. This is round two of the trial. You can either rescue an artifact or you can rescue a person. And people, it turns out, are more interested in rescuing a person. So they'll play for an extra 10 minutes. If you do this, this kind of trial by combat round after round after round, you're evolving a weaponized version of the platform. So you keep selecting the version that's hardest for us to resist. And if you do that en masse, it ends up shaping the

user experience. You end up having features on the platform that are designed to be hard for us to escape from. If you're creating a game, you release the version that's most difficult for us to resist. Now, of course, forever, people who are writing movies or books or any form of entertainment were trying to do this. They just were much less good at it. What the tech companies do is they make this kind of a sure thing by having access to billions and billions of data points and getting real-time, very rapid feedback from us. Isn't it also, to compare it to books and movies, it's not a fair comparison because those things end. Yes. That's really where the problem lies, right? Is that a book or a movie is not going to make you eat pizza three times a day

and gain 40 pounds over five weeks because you're trapped in your house doing nothing but enjoying this book or movie constantly because there is no end to it. Like, there's something like i i completely understand why they would do that i mean it makes sense you're engineering a game you would want to make this game the most compelling the most entertaining the the the most uh engaging possible but do you think that these companies have a social responsibility for recognizing the fact that they are massively addictive do they have an ethical or social

responsibility yeah absolutely absolutely i think they do i think i think that the biggest problem the most broken part of all of this is is the model. So all of these platforms pretty much rely on, I'm thinking about Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, these platforms require your eyeballs for as many minutes of the day as possible. And every minute that you're not spending on that device, you're spending minutes doing other things, that is a loss. They conceive of that as a loss. And it is because it means they're less capable of attracting advertising dollars. And that drives the whole model. That is a broken model. It's a terrible model because it privileges extracting minutes of time over delivering well-being. Now, historically, products were

largely, if I made a great product, like when you played, I think you said it was Quake, right? Quake, yeah. Was it Quake? Quake, yeah. When you played Quake, when I played Doom, when I played Super Mario as a younger kid than that, when Nintendo came out, that was just an incredible product. I think that was just, you know, that was designed to deliver a phenomenal A-plus, top-class experience. And when you speak to the video game developers, there's a purity to it. The creator of Mario and the creator of Tetris and all of these games,

they all talk about the kind of love that went into creating these games. That's gone. This is not about making us happier, giving us a good experience, an experience that we're willing to part with our money for. It's all one big kind of heist. They're trying to trick us. They're trying to basically get us to part with our time and therefore with our money. And yes, there's an ethical responsibility. I mean, if you see there's an industrial company and this company is making billions of dollars, but there are major externalities, so negatives that come with that. Let's say they're spewing crap into the waterways and into the air. That's something that, you know, for the last 25, 30 years or so, the government has said, you know, that's not OK.

We're going to penalize you for that. I'm not suggesting they do exactly the same thing with tech companies, but there is an externality. These companies are making billions of dollars. The externality is not that they're poisoning their waterways and the air, but they're changing how we live our lives. And I'd argue in many ways for the worse. Do you think a warning label would have the same sort of effect that a warning label has on cigarettes? Like it doesn't really matter. Like when they put those cancer labels on cigarettes, people that smoke cigarettes already know it causes cancer. I don't think it stops anything or helps them at all. Warning labels are toothless. They only work if you don't know, you know, if they're educating you. And everyone knows. Everyone knows

about cigarettes. I mean, fighting tobacco addiction is really difficult, both with smokers and with young people who are thinking about smoking. It's going to be the same with these devices. I think no one needs, well, maybe there's slightly more room to educate people about these things with respect to screen time and what we're doing on screens. But most of us know this stuff, and warning labels don't do much. I agree. So what could they do? You're not going to have them hamstring themselves and make a game that's less addictive. Let's propose they

reverse engineer what they've done and do it the opposite way like it going towards the ocean makes people play more so we're going to go to the woods rescuing a person makes you play more so you're going to you will rescue a gem you know like and you're going to choose the least addictive out of all of these paths then you're going to be non-competitive with the people that are engineering games that are going to choose the most addictive. So then it's almost like everyone's agreeing to make the shittiest game possible because that's the only way people can not be addicted. It's true. I mean, there's no way in the arms race for our attention and our dollars and all that sort of stuff. No one's going to buy into this idea

we should make a shittier version of the product. I think, as I said, the model is broken. If the model is about attention and about picking the version of the game that's going to extract the most time, that's problematic to begin. It would be better if there were a way to basically create a model that prizes consumer welfare, which then translates into people wanting to part with their dollars. That's obviously difficult to do in practice. But,

you know, a lot of industries work that way. It just so happens that the model we chose for, in particular, social media, this is not as true for games, but for social media, for sure, we are the product and our eyeballs are the product. And the consumer is the big industry of companies that are buying ads on those platforms. So, you know, the reason they're free is because they need our eyeballs. But you could imagine an alternate universe where you had to pay a small annual fee to use these products, but there was no advertising. And so the money came from revenue, from the billions of dollars of revenue that you got from individual users who were paying to use the platform. And that's a universe that I think leads to better outcomes for everyone. And designing features based on people enjoying them, getting value from them, rather

than features designed to hook us. But I mean, I've been thinking about this for, it's now six or seven years, and I'm just as exasperated. And that's why I think a lot of the focus now has to be on the individual consumer. If you're a consumer who needs help with this, you're spending too much time, you feel bad about it, then let's talk about ways to deal with it. But working at the level of the tech companies is really, really difficult. I like how honest you're being about it because you can be exacerbated. There's no way you're going to say, oh, I found the solution. The thing is too big.

you're going to say, oh, I found the solution. The thing is too big. So when you're a guy who's studied this for so long, you're spending so much time and you're writing this book about it and you're constantly immersed in these ideas, if you're not finding a solution, like if you're not saying this is what the tech companies have to do, this is what we have to do as a society, this is the path forward as a healthy culture,

no one is going to be able to figure it out. If it's someone like you who's spending so much time looking at it, when you're looking at the future and you're, if you just take away what you hope people do and what you would like people to do to be healthier and less addicted to these devices and these games and these social media platforms, what do you think is going to happen? Take away what you want. And what do you, if you've got to be really honest, what do you think is happening with us? I think we're making inroads in that we're chipping away at the problem in little ways. Like I can tell you a thousand small ways that

we're fixing the problem or making it better, but none of them is what you're, what you and everyone else is looking for, which is what is the magic solution here? Like what is the one big thing we can do that would reverse this whole thing? That I don't see happening. I'm pretty pessimistic about it. I think the big changes, I can't predict what the government's ultimately going to do around the world. There may be more government intervention. I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing ultimately.

Depends on the nature of it. But I do think consumers are getting more savvy. So one of the really interesting developments in the last decade or so is that when I first started thinking about this, parents would come to me and say, this is a disaster. I can't get my kids off devices. But there's been this weird shift where now kids are coming to me and saying, my parents won't get off their devices. And it's starting to affect older people. And the younger people seem to have worked out ways of managing their lives more effectively than older adults can. So I'm kind of hopeful that there's this generation, maybe with the help of a

curriculum that's more thoughtful about this, which I know a lot of private schools are starting to teach this stuff, that there will be the generation now of kids who have grown up around these devices, give them 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years, they're going to be the leaders of, you know, everything, basically, industry, the leaders in a political sense. They will be savvy about this in a way that we are not. We were caught in this kind of no man's land. This thing was visited upon us. You and I are part of a generation that straddled these two worlds. People who are much older than us are still kind of coming to terms with the situation. But, you know, there's a group of kids now who are probably 12, 13, 14, 15, who have

never known anything different. And they're going to get older and older and older. Having learned ways to cope, it'll be the kind of native world in which they grew up. I am hopeful that they will be more mindful about this stuff. They will, I don't know, maybe develop a kind of soft spot for the way we used to do things, if we can teach them that. And they'll be more mindful about it in a way that I think the generations that have this visited upon them later on in life have struggled to be. God, I hope you're right. You too.

I don't think you are, though. I'm a romantic about this stuff. You know, I try. Well, I appreciate that. I love optimists. I subscribe to the Elon Musk notion. There's a great quote that he said, human beings are the biological bootloaders for AI. He said human beings are the biological bootloaders for AI.

And when I said that I think that one day we're going to be obsolete, that's my real concern. My real concern is that what we are is some sort of an electronic butterfly that's building a cocoon. We're a caterpillar. We're building a cocoon, and we don't even know what we're doing. We're just immersed in consumerism and buying the latest, greatest laptop and iPhone and all these different things. But what we don't recognize is that what we're doing is contributing to this pattern of technological innovation that will ultimately make us obsolete or at least make us become one with it so that we avoid becoming obsolete? Yeah. I mean, you know, the ultimate problem for us is that we prize ease, comfort, well-being, happiness over all else. And so give us something that'll help us do that. And we will be like mindless animals that don't actually have a brain and we'll keep moving in that direction. And there are certain drives that will keep pushing us in that direction and if you can meet them with screens then we'll say you know that's fine i'll sell my soul i'll sell the species and sell the

long-term you know the long-term survival of humanity for that and that's that's where we are i mean what you said i thought was really interesting about the the idea that maybe we're all just quite not you didn't say, but I was thinking maybe we are all staring. There's no phone. There's a drug that we've all taken. It's in the water. And we're actually just staring at our hands for four to five or six hours a day. I basically believe it.

I mean, it's as absurd as what's actually going on in the world right now. It's not much different in terms of the actual impact that it has. Well, staring at your hand might actually be better because if you stared at your hand, you wouldn't have all the social anxiety that particularly kids have. Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling of the American Mind,

paints a particularly disturbing portrait of young girls and the pressure that young girls deal with because of social media and online bullying and then comparison comparison comparison to each other and then the use of filters and all these different things that that paint this very unrealistic depiction of what a person looks like and that's what everyone aspires to and how many girls are self-harming, how many girls are committing suicide, and that this massive uptick in depression and medication and all these different things

that show this psychologically damaging aspect of these devices and social media. Yeah, so I know John well. He's also at NYU where I teach, and I know his work. We've talked quite a lot about these issues. I think that people always say, what's the biggest problem with these screens? And I think for me, it is this experience for teenage girls in particular of spending colossal amounts of time looking at, as you say, Instagram filters, influencers being bullied online, the effect it's having on

depression rates, anxiety, and even rising suicide. I know you, I think you have a daughter, is that right? I have three daughters. You have three daughters. Yeah. So I have one daughter and a son. They're very young still. But I think a lot about these issues and how I, you know, what do I want to do to try to encourage them not to be in this position as they grow up. And that to me is the biggest concern. I think John is right to focus on those issues. I think getting them involved in physical activities that don't involve cell phones is important too. One of my daughters is really into gymnastics and the other one is into basketball.

And to get them into things that are physical that they they have to do like you have to you have to do a tat there's a thing that you have to do physically and then you get yeah yeah yeah i think i think physical activity is huge you know just exposing them to the things that are so hard to be exposed to naturally today so they'll all end up finding, but what they won't end up finding is, you know, hikes, team sports, all that sort of stuff. I think I agree with you. That's, that's, it doesn't have to be a team sport, but just using your body physically. I take my kids, as I said, they're really young, but I take them to this, there's a little park. Well, it's quite a big park. It's like a national park around by the water. And so

they see the ocean and they see a little beach and they see trees and they climb on logs and all that stuff. The stuff that I used to do as a kid that was very natural in the 80s, that's just not available in the same way that they're now. And that's very purposeful. I mean, I think you've got to be a bit retro in the kinds of things you expose people to when they're young. Well, that's what's weird about raising kids today is that there's not a bunch of past generations that can tell you how to train your kids in a world of immersive technology. You're really kind of on your own. Like I grew up without the Internet. The Internet came around when I was an adult.

I grew up without the Internet. The Internet came around when I was an adult, and I sort of have learned to cope with it, but I at least had the foundation of growing and getting through high school and all the formative years without it. And kids don't have that today, and parents don't have the experience of having their parents tell them,

well, this is where I made mistakes, and this is where you've got to be careful with these devices. That doesn't really, there's no precedent that's been set. There isn't. We're the first generation of parents to have to deal with this. And that makes it especially tricky. You know, there's no common wisdom. Older adults certainly have no idea how to counsel us on this. And I think that does make it extremely tricky. We're all flying by the seat of our pants, which is why I think focusing on this issue is really important. So, you know, there are areas of this, as we've said, that you can't really touch. Like, I think tech companies are going to keep making billions of dollars. There's a continued arms race. That's not going to change. They're all going to push as hard as possible to extract every spare minute.

But the other side of this is, I think, the much more human side, which is how do you help your kids stay out of trouble on screens? How do you prevent bullying? How do you prevent them from being overwhelmed by the kinds of anxieties that are much more common on screens than they were in the pre-screen era? And that stuff, I think, is where we, people who write about this and think about it, can make real inroads. And that seems really important. I think there's no more important enterprise around this subject than

learning how to be parents and learning how to help kids grow up in this world that's become really full of this kind of new minefield that didn't exist before what has changed for you from studying this and writing this book what has changed with the way you interface with technology? And what steps have you gone through to alleviate some of these problems in your own life? The biggest thing for me is really just very basic analog interventions. So what I mean by that is physical distance and time are the biggest things. So I track my time and how much I use my screen. And I make sure that I have certain parts of the day where I religiously and consistently don't have a phone nearby. If I have a phone within reach,

I'm going to be thinking about it all the time. There's no way around that. And I'll probably reach for it. So I did that experiment where you try to sort of get a sense of how much time during the day can you reach your phone without having to move your feet? The answer for me was pretty much the whole day. I was by my bedside. It was wherever I was, it was there. So one of the things I've done is we have a little box near our kitchen where we have our dining table. We put our phones there when we're having dinner. So there are never phones around physically when we're having dinner. That's true at any kind of meals where possible. I try to keep my phone out of the bedroom. So I have an alarm. I have this little watch that I wear that has a vibrating alarm on it. It doesn't

really have much of a screen on it. It just vibrates when it's time for me to wake up. So when I'm in bed, I have absolutely no screens around. And that's been really helpful. Because I think the worst thing is when you wake up in the night, you roll over, you pick up your phone, and it's like instant jet lag. You're basically signaling to your brain that it's daytime. And that's incredibly damaging. So those are the two biggest things. I also have done a number of things that defang the device itself. So if you remove all the notifications except the absolutely most critical urgent ones, there are a few of those

that are important to some people. That's been very helpful for me. So I've done that. The other thing I do is periodically, you know how you have that script, like you'll go on your phone and you'll be like, it's email, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, email, and you keep going round and round in this kind of loop. One way to disrupt that is every, say, month,

have a reminder go off in a calendar that says it's time to switch my apps around, my icons around. And I just screw the whole thing up. Like I'll put them in different places, make it hard to find them. And so what that does is it short-circuits this tendency to fall into that loop because every month or so I'm changing the way my phone looks, which most people hate. But if what you're trying to do is short-circuit the process of getting into that loop, it's actually very effective. One other thing that a lot of people talk about is there's a black and white mode on your screen at your your phone it's called grayscale i think grayscale mode

and the whole experience it's still a utility like the best things about these phones are you know the maps all the stuff that you get from them that are utilities you still have that but the the experiences that rely on like gusts of color and all that, they are defamed. And that tends to lead people to spend less time on their screens as well. Do you use that? I have, I am, I'm colorblind.

Really? Yeah, I am. I'm not, not profoundly like I can see some color, but my first book was called drunk tank pink, which was about this color pink that they used to paint inside jail cells to calm prisoners down. And that was one of the anecdotes in the book. So I called the

book Drunk Tank Pink. And people always used to say to me, does that affect work on you? And I mean, I really, I don't know, because I can't really see these colors. So I don't have the same response. Like I confuse a lot of the colors. And so the color feedback that would be really intense for you on a phone, it's mostly lost on me. I can't tell the difference between reds, browns, greens, oranges. They all look basically like fall for me is confusing. Everything's just gray. Really? Yeah, it's weird. But that's funny because you're saying gray, like you recognize gray as a color. How old were you when you realized you were colorblind uh so i had this i had the sense so when you're very young you know the picture books the kids look out where there are colors on the picture books and then you talk

about the colors like there's a bright red you'll see a cherry and it's red and you'll see grass and it's green and you'll see trees with brown bark on them and you know the blue sky I learned very quickly what colors things were supposed to be and so for the first few years of my life I wasn't seeing those colors but I knew what colors I was supposed to be seeing and so it looked like I was learning my colors so what do you say what do you say so well so later on once colors became more subtle when I I was about 8, 9, or 10, it started to look like something was wrong because I'd get colors wrong. And I was old enough to know.

And so they took me to an optometrist. And he administered this test. I'm sure you've seen these before. They're called the Ishihara dot tests. And you see all these dots. And you're supposed to see a number if you can see normal color. But they're very clever tests because a lot of people say they're colorblind when they aren't. Like if you want to get out of military service or something like that, or you don't want to be a fighter pilot,

you can say, I don't want to do these things, I'm colorblind. These tests are brilliant because if you are colorblind, you will see a number that people who have proper vision cannot see. And so you can't just say, I can't see anything. You can't fool the test taker, the test administrator. So what happened was I did this test. There it is. I can't see anything. That actually just looks like dots to me.

Really? But yeah, some of them I can see a number. But hold on a second. If that's the case, wouldn't that be that it would be easy to fake? Because I can see the number. So the problem is they have to be the exact right colors. So they're in these booklets. You can do it on screens.

If you pull one up that the contrast and the colors are correct, I will see a number that you won't see. Okay, so we're looking at one here. This, to us, looks just like oh it's 12 oh so you can see that and i can't wait a minute let me see that again that looks like a three to me do you see three yeah i do see a three i see an eight i see an eight on that one there you go there you go so you see an eight i see a three I said to you, I can't see a number there, they would say to me, you're faking. But what happened when I did the test and I saw all these numbers, I was like, I guess I'm not colorblind.

And I got to the end of it and the guy was like, you've seen all the numbers that colorblind people see. Like where you would have seen a 12, I'll see an 18. And I'll be confident that I'm getting the right answer. So it's a pretty clever test. Is this an inherited trait? Yeah, my grandfather on my mum's side was. And what happens is he passes it down to his daughter who carries this trait, but most women don't actually express it.

But then 50% of her sons, if she has sons, will be colourblind. My brother is not colorblind and i i am colorblind so now i have a daughter if she has sons 50 they have a 50 chance of wow so do you let your wife dress you yeah but i probably do that anyway because you you wouldn't match things correctly right wouldn? Wouldn't that be the idea? Or you would do it by shade? Yeah, I would. I'm just, for colors, I mean, I've made some horrific color decisions. Actually, when I started teaching, when I first started teaching at NYU, this is about just over a decade ago,

I was a grad student for years. I had no money, and I wanted to get some cheap business shirts. So I went to this store, and I had this bargain bin of shirts and there was just this huge array of white shirts. So I was like, it was like 10 for 100 bucks or something. So I got 10 of them, like had a full wardrobe of white shirts, thought that that's all I needed. Turns out they were pink and I had no idea.

So I'd show up at class every day, every single day in a pink shirt, thinking it was this like kind of basic nondescript white shirt. And at the end of the semester, the comments were like, was this an experiment? Why did the professor come in pink every time? It's the only thing they focused on after a semester of teaching was what's going on with the pink. So, yes, it's important that I let my wife dress me. That's hilarious. It's also such a strange statement.

Like we have a weird thing with pink. I don't understand why pink is such a polarizing color with men. I've never had it explained to me correctly that there's this one color that represents girls. There's no one color that represents maybe blue, but girls wear blue all the time. And no one thinks anything of it. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I did some research on it just to try to work out what the deal was between this, you know, with this, you know, the blue versus pink idea and the fact that these colors are associated with different genders. And until about 50 years ago, pink was associated with youth, with with young people with being a teenager or a young

person it had no gender association yeah what happened i mean there's i don't know no one seems to know what what the original point where that that split happened where it became really a color that was marked as being for girls but it's true though that it is the only color that has that strong a gender association it's really and it's very strong very. It is the only color that has that strong a gender association. And it's very strong. Very strong. Very strange. What is it like for you when you looked at – did you see that internet meme where it was a dress and people couldn't figure out whether it was – what was it like?

Gold and black or blue and – like what were the colors? Do you remember what they were supposed to be? It was blue. I think it was blue and black and gold and white something like that maybe what did you see um that worked for me i did see one of them and i was very firm about it and angry with people who disagreed which i think was it's just another way to polarize us um i i think i saw i saw the the darker, whatever the darker one was. I didn't see white. I couldn't see that.

I just saw, I think it was black and maybe gold. There are a few of these that have come through now. They do work on me because that's really about tone. That's not as much about hue, the specific color. So I'm good with tone. I'm very good at distinguishing tone. But when you give me a color, so everything I wear is pretty much either blue, black, white, or gray because the only color I can see very well is blue. The way I see blue is pretty similar to how you see it.

The way I see most other colors is kind of washed out, and I don't have a good sense of it. Oh, so some people, there's varying degrees of color blindness it's not as simple as you're color blind like you just color blurry yeah it's basically like that so there are different kinds of color blindness that that uh it's basically there's a problem with the cones in your eye which pick up color and there are three cones there's a one that's sensitive to red one that's sensitive to green and one that's sensitive to green and one that's sensitive to blue. And depending on which ones are malfunctioning, and for me, I think it's the green ones,

you get a different kind of colorblindness. There are different forms of it. So some people really struggle with blue and yellow. I can see those two and distinguish between them pretty perfectly. My big issue is much more common. The most common kind of colorblindness is red-green. I have red-green, which also means browns and oranges and some

other similar colors. And somehow blue kind of escaped for me. So my ability to see blue is untouched mostly. And that's why I like to wear blue because I can see it. Also, it's my favorite color. It's the only one that's bright for me. So for you, the allure of screens must be at least slightly lessened than the average person who concentrates on the latest, greatest OLED screen with the massive amounts of pixels and beautiful clarity and high definition. Yeah, sure. My first job was I worked at Sony in a retail store that sold Sony equipment. And I struggled to sell TVs when they were kind of the best, most expensive. I could tell people stuff, but I couldn't see it myself. It was kind of wasted on me. I could see the definition, but I could never get the sense of the color. And they started to, this is in the early 2000s,

they were really pushing this idea of like realistic, rich, bright, vibrant colors. Totally lost on me. So when you watch a movie like Avatar, you just see this sort of gray mess? Avatar, it's a little bit like those picture books when you're a kid where the colors are so bright and obvious that I got a good sense of it. Maybe it's still washed out compared to what you see. But take anything subtle. Like look at a real-world landscape. You probably, you'll see trees in the fall and you'll see this wash of colours.

You'll get some oranges and reds and greens and browns. People describe it to me as like the most incredible experience to see that if you're in the right part of the country. I've never experienced that i just i've been taught that leaves are green and then at some point they fall off the tree so i i know that but i i really do struggle to see that that very the variations the one color i can usually see is yellow because it's lighter but if the intensity of the hue is the same i just's lost on me. Is there a treatment for that or some sort of proposed treatment? There are these incredible glasses. You can check them out.

I think they're called Enchroma, E-N-C-H-R-O-M-A. And they help some people but not everyone. But there are videos online of people who are colorblind getting Enchroma glasses as a gift. They're expensive. They're a few hundred bucks. And you put them on and it's supposed to make it so that you're seeing the world through the eyes of someone who isn't colorblind. So you get these videos online now of people getting their glasses for the first time. Like a dad will get the gift from his son or daughter and he'll put them on and he will break down in tears because he's

seeing the world right now i'm seeing it right now a guy doing it there you go i mean it's it's emotional like it's it's like being having this faculty suddenly visited upon you later very late on in life um so i bought i bought one of these i actually got in touch with one of the companies and i asked them if they would send me a trial pair. It didn't have any effect for me. It doesn't structure, the anatomy, the physiology. I don't know the exact terms, but the cones themselves are just malfunctioning. So there's no surgery. There's nothing. It's a really kind of fundamental deficiency in the way you see things. And this is 10% of men. It's not a tiny part of the population. 10%? Really? I had no idea. It's 1% of women and 10% of men. It's not a tiny part of the population. 10%? Really? I had no idea. It's 1% of women and 10% of men. Wow. So if there is any benefit, it would be that you're not as compelled to look at screens.

That's right. That is one of the upsides. And I really do feel that. I mean, I don't enjoy the experience of looking at screens the way I think a lot of people do. I just don't get much from it. I get much more from the experience, but not as much from the screen itself. So I ask about the colorblind mode in video games. Is that something that's helpful to you? Do you see what we see, or are you seeing blood that would appear red here then? Yeah, so what happens when I see a colorblind mode,

when there's an attempt to sort of improve or fix something for me, it makes two colors that I would see as the same appear different. And then what I do is a big part of color perception is top down, which means that if you know stuff about what you're supposed to be seeing, your brain will see that thing. So if I see what is supposed to be blood, I'll see it as red, even if to you, you can say, hey, that's green or that's to be blood i'll see it as red even if to you you can say hey that's green or that's brown i'll just assume it's red so that's that helps people like me like i don't walk around constantly saying i don't know what color that is i don't know what color that is i don't know what color that is i may not be seeing it the way it actually is

but my brain thinks i am we're looking at this screen right now uh of this video game is this doom yeah i just picked doom because you guys were talking about it earlier and it's the new the new version of doom and it's a colorblind version of it so do you looks the same to me it looks basically looks and yeah it doesn't look weird okay so this is just how you see everything this is sort of like a yellowish hue yeah so they usually to make something more, more clear for a person who's colorblind, you, you either make it more yellow or you really make it more red.

Red's usually the best way to do it. So if I, if I look through red cellophane, like I took transparent red, not like from those, those old 3d glasses. When I look through the red, what that does is it eliminates any green light. And so it means that I'm seeing the world the way a person with proper color vision would see the world through that same piece of red. So if you and I look through red cellophane, we see the world the same way. And actually, if you look through green cellophane, you will see the whole world is green. It's not that different from how I see the world. It's got a green wash over it basically.

Wow. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, man. Thanks. I've never known anything else. I'm good. Well,

you seem very happy. Um, but, uh, listen, thank you for being here. Thanks for, uh,

thanks for writing the book. I really, really enjoyed it. Although it's very sobering. And, and again, it seems like at the end of it, it seems like there's no real solution. But I think that taking personal steps to mitigate some of the issues that we talked about today is what

really everyone needs to do. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Well, thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Thanks, man. Take care. Bye.