How Your Smartphone Is Short Circuiting Your Brain - A Hacker In Your Pocket - #009

Jonny and Yusef from PropaneFitness.com join me as we discuss the topic of phone addiction. The problem of excessive tech use is almost universally acknowledged by pretty much anyone with a smartphone, but very few of us are aware of the teams of software engineers, warehouses of supercomputers and decades of research goes into manipulating you to click that link, watch that video or download that app. An argument is often made that technology is neutral and that it is our decision of how we use it, but our phone's intrusion into our lives is so calculated and manipulative that the deck is stacked firmly against us making a choice we're fully in control of. I genuinely believe that Humane Technology and Ethical Persuasion will be a huge topic over the coming years, hopefully we can kickstart your interest into the subject here... On this episode, learn the tactics used by social media websites to manipulate you to stay on site, discover our favourite strategies for taking back control of your phone use and find out why you definitely shouldn't buy a dildo on Facebook Marketplace. Extra Reading: Distraction Is Destruction Podcast (YouTube) www. HumaneTech.com Newsfeed Hider For Chrome Moment App Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberma Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends. So it's been a couple of weeks since the last episode. I know that I promised I was going to do one every single week and I've fallen within the first month of that. However, I have a good excuse. I was away in Palmer on a yacht and then in Dubai with my dad. It's a hard life, I know.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  This week, I'm sitting down with Yusuf and Johnny from Propane Fitness. And this is probably my most anticipated episode to date. And I say mine, I mean by myself, not by anybody else. We're going to be discussing the ethical use of technology and how social networks, social media manipulates our cognitive biases and uses unseen persuasion techniques to keep you on site. Now, all of this might sound a little tinfoil haty, but I promise you it's not. It is, as far as I'm concerned, probably one of the biggest and most important issues that we've got going on at the moment.

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  If you think about how ubiquitous phone use is amongst everybody on the planet. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which recently came out where it turned out that some users on Facebook's data had been illegally acquired and manipulated, caused absolute uproar. And all that was happening there was people were being targeted with ads and some of their data had been stolen. Your phone is stealing your time and that's the one resource that we can't get any of it back. That to me is a much bigger scandal that needs to be spoken about.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  Our phones are with us more than any partner, any friend, any family member, any pet, probably any other item that we own. They're with us every single step of the way and they're possessions that we cherish to a degree and that we live our lives through. They're a window between us and the world. They mediate our experience of the external world and they manipulate our experience and our judgment of other people, both celebrity and friend. It's something that we put an awful lot of faith into.

• 2:15Chris Williamson?

  And yet, our brains are being hacked by billion dollar companies. And behind every press of every button on your phone, there is a team of software engineers who have manipulated you into pressing that particular button in order to keep you on site because they need your attention, because that is how the money is made on that particular platform. So hopefully you will come out of this, understanding the tactics that are being used to keep you on your phone. You'll be more aware of why and how this is happening. And also, we will give you some tips and some strategies that you can implement to

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  mitigate the amount of time that you get trapped within your phone. So without further ado, here we go.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  Someone was selling a dildo on Facebook Marketplace yesterday. Rapin' Rabbit.

• 3:14Jonny?

  That, is that the thing where you said?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I might have sent it to you, but.

• 3:16Jonny?

  Yeah. You said, I don't believe when you say it's not being used.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, why, why else are you selling it? Like, who buys?

• 3:23Jonny?

  It hasn't been used.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Maybe it was a gift and they thought.

• 3:27Jonny?

  Yeah, they have two of them.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Hmm, still, I wouldn't trust it.

• 3:30Chris Williamson?

  Someone could have been purchased too, thinking that they wanted that.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  They bought it online.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  And they didn't. They overestimated their sexual appetite.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I see. So either.

• 3:43Jonny?

  I was just doing it.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  They double tapped the add to cart button, or they tried it, didn't like it.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Either way, I'm not putting it in my vagina. I think it's a.

• 3:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's not just the vagina, is it? Potentially.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Or, or bum, yeah, you're right.

• 3:56Jonny?

  I think you put it anywhere, that's what's, that's what's so great about them.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, we shouldn't discriminate. I think that's very judgmental of us to assume vagina.

• 4:05Chris Williamson?

  Judgmental on who? People that prefer anal?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08Jonny?

  People with or without vaginas.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  We need to be nice to.

• 4:10Chris Williamson?

  Docking. Could use it for docking.

• 4:12Jonny?

  Docking.

• 4:13Chris Williamson?

  Second one for docking.

• 4:15Jonny?

  Can you explain in the clearest possible way what docking is?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  When a man interpenetrates another man with his.

• 4:25Jonny?

  With a tool?

• 4:26Speaker 01

  A tool.

• 4:27Chris Williamson?

  Urinary tract.

• 4:28Jonny?

  With a device.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, essentially.

• 4:32Jonny?

  Interpenetrates.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  So.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  He places his appendage.

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  Into another man's appendage. So.

• 4:47Jonny?

  Is that right?

• 4:49Chris Williamson?

  I I mean, you'd think it wouldn't be possible. I thought, but I thought can tell you. You're a motherfucker bastard.

• 4:57Jonny?

  So when you say appendage, you don't mean, I see what you're saying.

• 4:59Chris Williamson?

  Not not entire package, just, yeah.

• 5:02Jonny?

  Right. Lip on lip. Or not?

• 5:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure if it's, I thought, I thought.

• 5:09Jonny?

  Is it penis on penis? Is that what you're saying?

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, penis in penis.

• 5:12Jonny?

  Yeah, so lip on lip on lip.

• 5:13Chris Williamson?

  What's lip on lip?

• 5:14Jonny?

  The little lip entrance at the top of the penis.

• 5:19Jonny?

  Have you not, you maybe don't know.

• 5:21Chris Williamson?

  Is that the politically correct?

• 5:24Chris Williamson?

  The non racialist. Don't be racialist.

• 5:26Jonny?

  Suppose if it if it looks like a, sort of like an old, a toothless old man. From all of the characterization.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  Looks like.

• 5:38Jonny?

  Do you have to start again?

• 5:39Chris Williamson?

  No, it's fine. We can just go from now. Hi.

• 5:42Jonny?

  Bye then.

• 5:42Chris Williamson?

  Bye.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  Um, so this is a podcast I've wanted to do for ages, but we keep on having to put it off for different reasons. Um, we did a podcast called Distraction is Destruction. Excellent podcast. Excellent podcast, propebals.com forward slash. Ah, forward slash distraction. We'll change the link for you guys. I can't, I can't remember.

• 6:18Jonny?

  Was that the one with the?

• 6:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. With the arm, with the arm and things. So basically, we, we all are trying to reduce our phone time. Well, this was, what, about a year ago, maybe? Trying to reduce our phone time and um, decided to do a podcast on how it felt when we use our phone too much and tactics that you can do to reduce that. That to me felt like my first Christmas. And over the last six months, all of the stuff that I've learned feels like finding out that Santa Claus isn't real. That's.

• 6:51Jonny?

  As in, it's all a lie to keep you inside and you can't get out.

• 6:55Chris Williamson?

  Just the.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  The odds are stacked against you.

• 6:57Chris Williamson?

  I've just entered into this world like a year ago of. Phone use is maybe something that I need to consider a little bit more deeply than I have done. And then now it's just opened up this entire world of cognitive bias, manipulation and persuasive techniques and a whole load of other stuff. Um, so.

• 7:14Jonny?

  It's interesting because I used to really care about it and I've just resigned to the fact that I don't care.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  I've, uh, without exaggeration, this is probably one of the top five passionate topics I've got in my life at the moment.

• 7:24Jonny?

  Really?

• 7:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Jonny?

  I just.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  Using your phone less.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  Um, I guess creating a.

• 7:30Jonny?

  You deliver things like that in such a way that I can't work out.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Sounds like a mockery.

• 7:34Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 7:39Jonny?

  So. Turn the game down.

• 7:42Chris Williamson?

  Just a little less game.

• 7:43Jonny?

  We once did a, a podcast where I've, I've had my microphone set up just as I want it for ages. Yusuf came in, changed my game and it ruined the entire fucking thing. It was like a half an hour video, it was just.

• 7:58Jonny?

  Sorry.

• 7:59Chris Williamson?

  It's fine.

• 7:59Jonny?

  Yusuf was in the middle of mocking you for being passionate about phone use.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  But I, I, it's not about the passionate about phone use thing. It's just. I think that it's something that everybody, it's so ubiquitous, the problem of using your phone too much. And the, the argument is that technology is neutral. It's how you use it that determines what the, the outcome, so to speak. And that couldn't be further from the truth. That behind every click of a button, there's a thousand software engineers who have designed the particular route that you have taken through that app or through that website to get you to click on that thing. And it's a.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I think what's more insidious, it's not even just them sitting and designing it a priori in a room on their own. It's like data driven every time it, every time there's iterations of thousands of people, it optimizes more and more to make you stay on the page more and more or click the button or.

• 8:53Jonny?

  Well, I'm there, split testing thousands of variations to.

• 8:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So it's, it's a combination of the best.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Computers on the planet, the biggest supercomputers running all of the data that they can. And some of the cleverest software designers in the world who are setting them off on the right path.

• 9:11Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  And then you add into it the stuff like disinformation, this Cambridge Analytica thing that just won't go away at the moment.

• 9:17Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 9:17Chris Williamson?

  Um, all of the fake news and stuff like that. And that's like, to me personally, the fake news and delivering advertising that's curated heavily towards what someone thinks. That's like a drop in the ocean. That's, yeah, it's manipulating what someone thinks. But time is the one resource that we can't get any, any of it back, right? And manipulating someone to be addicted to using an app or compulsively checking their phone is a, like a fucking war crime.

• 9:47Jonny?

  And we are in comparison. That thing you sent about dark patterns.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 9:53Jonny?

  Really interesting. Did you watch that?

• 9:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Jonny?

  Really interesting.

• 9:56Chris Williamson?

  We're defenseless.

• 9:57Jonny?

  I think.

• 9:58Chris Williamson?

  Against a lot of it.

• 9:59Jonny?

  On the Amazon website. So I know it's not an app, but like to cancel your account, you've got to go through like forty steps.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  And it's a really small print thing. I remember you saying as well that Amazon comes across as so innocent because it looks like it's been designed in nineteen ninety nine GeoCities, like really.

• 10:13Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  Simple. So you think, oh, well, they're such a benign company. Like it's just a, a website where you buy things and, but actually.

• 10:20Jonny?

  It's a death star. I remember watching that video thinking, like, you know, when you, you know, when you use something a lot, I'm trying to think of another example. So Facebook's another example where like, you think the design's like pretty fucking like play school basic, isn't it?

• 10:35Chris Williamson?

  Think it is, yeah.

• 10:36Jonny?

  It's like, guys, put a bit more effort in than a blue banner and a F in the middle, like.

• 10:40Chris Williamson?

  They open that blue now as well, don't they?

• 10:41Jonny?

  Do they?

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  You can't use that. No one can use that.

• 10:43Jonny?

  It is a very recognizable blue.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Wow. Fair point.

• 10:46Jonny?

  But you look at it and think, so Amazon looks so basic, the website.

• 10:50Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 10:50Jonny?

  You know, like everything's in really small font at the bottom and then.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  Black and white, not my color, there's no movie adverts.

• 10:55Jonny?

  Exactly. There's not much going on. And then you watch the video that it walks you through what's actually going on and you're like.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  We'll put, we'll put links to the description in this. But basically, so.

• 11:03Jonny?

  It's all on purpose.

• 11:05Chris Williamson?

  For, for me, all of this got kicked off by a podcast between Tristan Harris and Sam Harris.

• 11:09Jonny?

  Tristan.

• 11:09Chris Williamson?

  Tristan. Um, and he is the founder of, um, Time Well Spent and the Centre for Humane Technology, um, Humane Tech dot com. I think it is that you can have a look at some of the more stuff about that. And basically, he. He used to be the design ethicist or design philosopher at Google and he started asking questions about whether or not people are being manipulated ethically on their phone. So this feels honestly feels like I'm like opening the floodgates to a world of shit. But really like I genuinely don't think that there's a topic which can be more ubiquitous for people to need to know about. Like at the moment, it's for me, it's really, really important and hopefully people find a little bit of value in this. Um, so basically I think

• 11:54Chris Williamson?

  it's like common, I'd say it's commonly accepted amongst almost everybody, even like my mum and my dad know that they probably use their phones a little bit too much. And a perfect example of this, I couldn't believe it. So I've just been away to Dubai. I was at the top of the Burj Khalifa with my dad who hasn't been on holiday for seventeen years.

• 12:13Jonny?

  Wow.

• 12:14Chris Williamson?

  So I'm nearly a kilometer up in the air, lion's share of a kilometer, one hundred and forty eighth floor, largest tallest building in the world, la- um tallest observatory platform in the world. And we'd got up there, dad hasn't been on holiday in nearly two decades, right? And we've flown seven and a half hours and paid however much money and all the rest of it. And I went to the bathroom and I came back out to see that he was sat down on the couch on his phone. And I was like, dad, what are you doing on your phone? And he was like, uh, oh, just, just answering some work emails. You do remember that this was your retirement trip, dad. Your holiday was for your retirement, you're retiring and you're answering work emails. And I was just like, I mean, what a perfect example.

• 12:56Jonny?

  It was a vodle of buzz, didn't it?

• 12:58Chris Williamson?

  And the thing is, so the argument is that. That little red circle on the app. The thi- the thing is, do- does he want to check his phone when he's at a hundred and forty eighth floor of the Burj Khalifa? No, he doesn't want to check his phone. However, he has checked his phone. Does that mean that that's something he wants to do?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  It's wizardry, isn't it? Someone's made you do something that you wouldn't have, if someone said, do you want to check your phone and check and respond to a work email? The answer would always be, no, I don't want to check my phone and respond to my work email. But they've managed to still make you do that.

• 13:31Jonny?

  You see, that, that's the part where I don't know where I lie on that, because I, I think I do want to check my phone. So I think a lot of the time, like I, we, I was in Budapest, at Becker, and the whole time I've got my phone in my pocket. If anyone had ever said, had said to me,

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Do you want to check your phone?

• 13:51Jonny?

  Johnny, mate, have five minutes to yourself.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  But yes.

• 13:53Jonny?

  I'm like, woo! So I think, I think I'd be okay with it.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  I see what you're saying.

• 13:57Jonny?

  I just know what you're getting at.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  But I, so I think what Tristan was getting at was the, the present self versus future self. And it's like, you sit on your phone and scroll the newsfeed for half an hour in the morning.

• 14:08Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  But then if you were to ask yourself, was that time well spent?

• 14:12Jonny?

  Got it.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Would you have wanted to spend today half an hour scrolling the newsfeed?

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  Especially when you've got to consider, as we say, time's the one resource that you're not going to get any of it back. And you specifically, as a person who likes to be as efficient as he can with his day, like, the time that you spend on your phone, which isn't contributing directly to the objectives that you've got to complete that day, who's made you choose? Is it leisure time? Does it count as leisure time? So the question is, and the main, the main question of this is, does it net a positive for you? Because if it nets a positive for you overall, then sweet. But the problem is that it's a zero sum game where all different platforms online are competing for our attention. So if YouTube ads autoplay, which they've only done within the last 18 months,

• 14:59Chris Williamson?

  or the last two years, YouTube ads autoplay on the next video, that upped their, um, time on site by between five and 10%.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  YouTube ads or YouTube videos?

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  YouTube added.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Added. Oh, okay.

• 15:13Chris Williamson?

  Autoplay of the next.

• 15:16Jonny?

  I'm still.

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  That's just an advertiser's, that's a marketer's mind there, isn't it?

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  So YouTube, YouTube added in, oh my God, I need to, I need to go and do this. Um, YouTube, YouTube added in autoplay the next video that increased their time on site by five to 10%. There's only so many hours in the day, so that five or 10% has come from somewhere. It's either come from someone's spare time or it's been taken from Facebook or Twitter or Google or whatever it is. And what that means is that Facebook now needs to do autoplay videos as you scroll down. They need to up their armoury. It's like an arms race. It's an arms race to see who can use the most number of manipulative cognitive bias affecting techniques to get you to stay on site. And the fact of the matter is that the economy reflects the more time that someone spends on a site, the more value that company has.

• 16:07Chris Williamson?

  Because the revenue is generated through advertising and advertising is mostly based on how much exposure are people going to get? How much exposure is directly equal to how much time on site? If you can get people to stay on site, irrelevant of whether or not they want to, you make more money.

• 16:25Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 16:28Jonny?

  A bit shit when you're looking at it like that.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  An example that I think, I think he mentioned in this and it definitely catches me every single time. And this is, this really hurts my pride because I, I see, I like to see myself as somebody who is.

• 16:42Jonny?

  Is it a gay porn?

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Able to, it's the gay porn. I always find myself on the gay porn. It's, I, I like to pride myself in somebody who can maintain cognitive effort on a single task. Having meditated for so long, or at least tried to train for this thing.

• 16:57Jonny?

  You're easily the best person I know at that single thing.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  The best meditator.

• 17:01Jonny?

  The best like single focus, like he's going to do something.

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  Calm you for deep work.

• 17:05Jonny?

  Sit and do it.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And yet I am still defenceless against like, okay, I need to quickly check when that person's birthday is on Facebook.

• 17:11Jonny?

  Go on.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  And then 10 minutes later, you've closed the tab, you've done loads of other things and you're like, hang on.

• 17:17Chris Williamson?

  I didn't even do the thing I went on there for.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  And again, this is, this is not, the, the, the, one of the main points I want to get across to you in this podcast is that if this is happening to you, not only is it not just you that it's happening to, but it's not your fault. And I think that realising, one of the main steps that I think needs to happen is that firstly, people need to realise that there is a problem. That if they were to look back at their day and portion out how much time they spend on their phone, that it is a regrettable action. Like, and this isn't me saying that people shouldn't use Facebook and shouldn't use Twitter and shouldn't use Instagram because it does add good. A net positive for sure. And there is a

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Use it consciously.

• 17:54Chris Williamson?

  There is, there is, there is a, um, a Goldilocks zone of how much time you should be spending on there and what you're doing with your time on there as well. But the problem is that these sites are designed in a way to manipulate your cognitive biases. So that you do not leave and so that you don't do the thing that you went on there to do, so that you look at the ads, so that you watch the videos, so that you do whatever. So I mean, there's a couple of examples that are really, really good. Variable schedule rewards are the dopamine release technique that slot machines work on. So you press the button, you wait, something's gonna happen. It's either something good or something that's neutral usually. Twitter, if you open up Twitter on your phone now, press the button, I'll wait.

• 18:38Chris Williamson?

  And then you wait for the notifications to load. You'll see that the app loads, then your newsfeed loads. And then your mentions load with a number sometimes.

• 18:48Jonny?

  If, if you've got, because I don't have Twitter on my phone, so I've never seen this.

• 18:51Chris Williamson?

  I, basically, basically, all that happens is there's, there's a, there's a wait, there's a pause between you loading up. Yeah, they could program it so that it occurred immediately, but they don't. And the reason is the amount of time it takes for that to load. So you've got a loading screen there, loading.

• 19:07Jonny?

  God, that is painful, isn't it?

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, then that'll open, then that'll go, then that'll happen. And then you'll see how many men, mentions you've got that come up. And the reason for that is it is the exact same amount of time wait that a slot machine takes.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And you go, ooh.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  Ooh, I've got that. I've, I've, I've, I've got, I've got this. Exactly the same on Instagram.

• 19:25Jonny?

  So that's, so the, the, you know, the alarm bell came up last.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Why you wait? Because it, it's that variable schedule reward.

• 19:33Jonny?

  What you, so Facebook has started doing the same thing.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  Makes you hold your breath. Look at Instagram, load up Instagram and your newsfeed will load and there will be a half a second wait between that. And you know, and your mentions and your, um, the red little tab coming up.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  So it's the same tactics that make casinos so compulsive and So addictive that um.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  You can see them so profitable.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we we are addicted to random rewards, more so than predictable rewards, which I find absolutely insane. That you, there was a study where they took a bunch of monkeys in a room. Gave them, made them do a bunch of tasks and when they discovered one button to press, it would give them a banana. And they would repeat it and uh and when they stopped that from happening, they stopped the, they disconnected the button from the reward. The monkeys kept doing it for a bit and then they stopped. Whereas. On another iteration of the study, they gave the monkeys random rewards. And the monkeys started to develop weird rituals that they thought were creating the reward, but in fact it was just random. And they thought that if I, if I didn't get a reward, then maybe I'm just not doing it right and they'd keep.

• 20:36Chris Williamson?

  I've got to walk this way around the tree. I have to do this with the button. It's this many times.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  All develop these weird rituals, but then when they stopped giving that random reward, the monkeys carried on for like a year afterwards or so, or something really.

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  There's a, there's one, there's one with rats. They gave rats, they pressed a button and it gave them a tiny, tiny amount of cocaine. One of them was, I think I've used this example before. One of them was a fixed number of times. One of them was press the button and it came out once and never again. And one of them was random and the random rat iteration, they snapped their spines.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  Pressing the button, trying to get, trying to get cocaine. And it's because this random, this uh variable scheduled reward is so powerful at dopamine, dopamine release. Snap their spines. Do you know why, so do you know why um Candy Crush was so successful? Wasn't because of the game, wasn't because of anything else, it's because of how it manipulated people's dopamine levels. It's the ability, it's, it's the lights, it's the sounds, it's the numbers, it's the colors. So why is it, why is it that our notifications on our phones are red?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so, so that's what.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Red fruit.

• 21:35Chris Williamson?

  Just occurred, occurred to me there was that Twitter's aunt. But on the home screen they are.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And Twitter's uncle.

• 21:44Chris Williamson?

  That is terrible. I've just spent, I've just spent, I've just spent a week with my dad and that would be too daddish even for him.

• 21:52Jonny?

  Because I would normally say aunt, because you're so well spoken.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  Aunt.

• 21:55Jonny?

  But immediately. Tooters aunt. Tooters aunt. And the uncle, and the nephew.

• 22:02Jonny?

  Mother, father.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  So I think what's.

• 22:04Jonny?

  Great grandparents.

• 22:06Chris Williamson?

  One of the interesting things that you said there was about going onto your phone and trying to stick to the task in hand. Like the, the rabbit hole that you tumbled down, like before, you know, we, we always, everyone makes the joke. Oh, absolutely. Everyone, everyone makes the joke about, you know, like you start watching videos on YouTube and then three hours later, you're watching cats like climb up a tree. And that, well, is that time, is that time well spent? No, of course it's not. Like, how, how is this, it's literally stealing people's lives, taking people's lives.

• 22:33Jonny?

  Fuck.

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm aware that I'm being sort of fairly, fairly virulent about this, but.

• 22:41Jonny?

  He did it again. I don't know when he's taking the piss out.

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  With the fuck?

• 22:46Jonny?

  Yeah. Whether it's like, well, fuck.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  No, that, that was in earnest. So.

• 22:53Chris Williamson?

  Um, so.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  It, it's the, it, it's, I think it's when you put it like that.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  This is gonna just devolve into dad jokes.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  I'm ready for, I'm ready for that.

• 23:02Jonny?

  Have you ever done the thing where, uh, Mark Manson first mentioned this, where you're on your laptop, you're on Facebook and you have this moment of like, no, I'm fucking wasting my time, close a tab, open a new tab, W W W dot F A C E.

• 23:18Jonny?

  And it literally, it's literally happened. It happens to me all the time. I just default to our Facebook.

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  The number of times, the number of times, I think that, I think the phone is even worse than laptop. You do a lot of work. I know that you two both try and get yourselves off your phones as much as possible, but the phone is, it's so idiosyncratic and I think that's a big part of it. Like I know friends who have got a cycle that they move through and the listeners might do as well. They know, right, okay, I'll go top left first because that's Instagram and I'll clear off everything on there. Then I'll go into Facebook, I'll clear off everything on there. But in between all of these, you're answering and replying anyway. So by the time that you've gone through Snapchat and WhatsApp and everything else, Messenger and all the rest of the things.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  You've actually got responses.

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  Number ones pop back up again and you're like, right, okay, this is just a fucking, this is just an endless loop.

• 24:01Jonny?

  And it probably gets worse. It probably, you're just fanning the flames of a fire that will.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Because it, it, what it's created, what social media has created is a sense of missing out.

• 24:12Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  That there is stuff happening all around you all the time, like, but until you open up Instagram and see that your friends are away on holiday, or see that all of your buddies have gone out to the pub, or whatever it is, you don't have that desperate sense of I'm not part of it.

• 24:28Jonny?

  Firma.

• 24:28Chris Williamson?

  And by logging in, logging, checking your newsfeed, you almost begin to start to mitigate that sense of missing out a little bit.

• 24:38Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  Um. So like I say, I don't want to, I know, I want it, I want it to be very, very serious, because I do think that it is, but I don't want people to feel like they're culpable for it, because the techniques that are being used that manipulate your cognitive biases are not, it's not things that are part of your control. A good quote from the Tristan Harris and Sam Harris, there are many things that are bugs, not features about the human mind. And those are the things that are being manipulated. You're not being encouraged to do things, your mind's being hacked. And that's the reason that you're staying on site. That's the reason that you're not doing the things that you're supposed to do.

• 25:13Jonny?

  I think the trouble is, if you think there's a way to stop.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  You, you start, you probably then have to start defensively using your phone with equal force and thought as the people who are trying to.

• 25:28Chris Williamson?

  So you need to recruit a team of a thousand software engineers, get a supercomputer.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  To split test you to use your phone.

• 25:34Jonny?

  It's me versus billion dollar valuation companies in Silicon Valley.

• 25:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  So we, we talked a little bit.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  I back, I back, I back myself.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, in, well, in the last episode of Distraction is Destruction, we covered a few of the tactics that we use ourselves to try and battle it slightly. So Chris was talking about Moment, the app that you set the timer limit on your phone and when you go over it, it gives you a really annoying bell.

• 26:00Jonny?

  I just ignore it.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  You just ignore it.

• 26:02Chris Williamson?

  I've stopped using, I've stopped using that. So the, I would, I would advise everyone who's listening to download Moment, it's free. It's on iOS and on Android.

• 26:09Jonny?

  Unless you want the proper one.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  Unless you want the pro version, which we've got.

• 26:14Chris Williamson?

  Which all of us have got because we're pros at not using our phone.

• 26:16Jonny?

  No.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  Of course.

• 26:17Jonny?

  If you ever get a pro, you'll get it because you'll email them and ask for it for free.

• 26:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's fine. And they'll, and they'll do it as well.

• 26:22Jonny?

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:24Chris Williamson?

  They will do it as well. Oh, and you use it from Pro Pines. You were on our mailing list.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  The, the, the other tactics I think were, so for me, WhatsApp is on the sixth page of my apps under a folder called C U N T times 10, uh, in capitals. So that when you go to it, you're like, oh.

• 26:43Chris Williamson?

  Such a dingus.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  You just, yeah, it makes it, just so that you feel the pain of.

• 26:48Chris Williamson?

  I think, I think that, I think that we can probably run through some of the, the best, um, the best tactics that you can use to use your phone less. I do want to try and slot in, um, the most insidious tactic I think that any of the, any of these social networking sites have added in, which is Snapchat Snap, Snap streaks. Do you know what this is?

• 27:06Jonny?

  Is that where you get scores based on how many times you've sent a person a snap?

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  Back and, back and forth between someone, but it only, it resets if you miss a day.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I find it interesting that you, you find this the most insidious one because I, because I know they said that they thought Snapchat was the biggest exploiter of these tactics.

• 27:22Jonny?

  I see it's shit.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  But you don't understand, you don't understand. It's, it's like 75% of communication online between people under the age of 15 is done through Snapchat.

• 27:31Jonny?

  Yeah, yeah. I bet it causes arguments, isn't it? The Snap, the Snap streaks.

• 27:34Chris Williamson?

  The Snap streak thing. So I heard this story, right? People go, these kids will go away on holiday with their parents and they'll give their logins to a friend who's back in the UK so that they can continue to message their friends backwards and forwards, their other friends, just to keep the snap streaks going. And like, there's people with like thousand, thousand day snap streaks of having to message. So that's forcing someone to go back and forth. And I remember, uh, one of my ma, one of my mates had an argument with his missus because he broke the, the snap streak between them. And you're like, is there anything more inane?

• 28:06Jonny?

  Than that. So like having all the things that you could have an argument over, like.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  The magic is lost as well.

• 28:12Jonny?

  Because if you're forcing someone to have contact that they wouldn't necessarily have.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 28:16Jonny?

  Oh, you, you, do you know what you did today, Yusuf? You ruined our forced communication number? That judged how many times we had to send a message to each other when we didn't want to.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it cheapens it in the first place. But when you break the streak, can you just? Get your head above the water for a second. It's like, so like when, when I, I broke my MyFitnessPal.

• 28:36Jonny?

  I was just about to mention that.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Days or something. And then when I did, I was like, you know what? Like, nothing's burnt down. Like, I'm, it's fine.

• 28:41Jonny?

  See, I felt like everything had been done.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Really?

• 28:44Jonny?

  So I was on, I was knocking on the door of a thousand, did, did a powerlifting competition in the Hurst Welfare Centre in Ashington.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  There was no.

• 28:52Jonny?

  It's a total dead spot for all communication. Looked, tracked everything on the day of the powerlifting. Got home, realised that it hadn't synced before midnight.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 29:02Jonny?

  Lost.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  What a killer.

• 29:03Jonny?

  Never get back.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Because of the Hurst Welfare Centre.

• 29:06Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  In Ashington. So, Ashington, if you're listening, just get some wifi.

• 29:09Jonny?

  For fuck's sake.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Bloody hell.

• 29:12Jonny?

  It's like what Yusuf said about when you spend five hundred pounds, you'll never, you'll always be five hundred pounds worth of, worse off the rest of your life.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the most Yusuf analogy for any of this, isn't it? So if you never spend any money, you will always have the money.

• 29:25Jonny?

  Always better off, yeah.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  You're always better off.

• 29:27Jonny?

  He was so shaken by it. He was like, that nine hundred pounds, I'll always be nine hundred pounds worse off forever. For the rest of my life. That's how I feel about my MyFitnessPal streak. Think of what I'd be on now.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  I was annoyed at that.

• 29:40Jonny?

  Whatever it is, whatever it is now, plus a thousand.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  It's because you, you drive with, you drive with a functional car into an MOT centre. And it's fine, like you drove there and then you, and then you drive away.

• 29:51Jonny?

  You need to tell, you need to tell.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And you're nine hundred pounds worse off, but there's no difference to you. Like, you're still driving a car that's, so.

• 29:57Jonny?

  But yeah, but it was, it was a danger to other motorists. It was a nine hundred pound danger to other motorists.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Supposedly.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  That's like saying you go.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  But who needs brakes, do you know?

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  But you know, you should have gone, you should have gone, I warned you, you should have gone to our guy.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  I should.

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  We've got a guy.

• 30:10Jonny?

  Uh, this is surprising.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Brakes are for pansies.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  We have a guy, he looks it up and down, he kicks the tyres a bit, he goes, aye, sound that.

• 30:15Jonny?

  That's fine.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  Fucking guy.

• 30:17Jonny?

  Turn off, turn my volume down.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  We, we, we have a saying in Egypt that brakes are for pansies, so.

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  Do you?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  No, but the, the driving test in Egypt is drive 10 metres forwards, drive 10 metres backwards.

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  Easiest place on the world to, to pass your driving test, right?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you.

• 30:33Jonny?

  I imagine it's a cottage.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  It is. Like people, reversing up a slip road is a common maneuver.

• 30:42Jonny?

  That's why you've got a dash cam.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:44Jonny?

  Isn't it?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It is, you have got a dash cam.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  I thought it was so you could capture all of your dogging experiences on the front of your phone.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Kyra has just been imprinted onto me, and dogging of course, but.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Um, you know how many, uh, hours of video is watched on YouTube every month?

• 30:59Jonny?

  I'd love to know, but I don't know.

• 31:01Chris Williamson?

  Guess.

• 31:01Jonny?

  Okay. All right, come on, Sco, between us, we can put together a really.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Hundreds, hundreds of hours.

• 31:07Jonny?

  At least, at least an hour, I reckon.

• 31:09Chris Williamson?

  That's just you, isn't it?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Like between us, we would watch an hour.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  Tom Martin, just of Tom Martin.

• 31:14Jonny?

  Just of Tom Martin. Probably the same video.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Jonny?

  So what, what's the unit time, a day?

• 31:20Chris Williamson?

  No, no, a month, in a month.

• 31:21Jonny?

  I'm like, fuck me.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's figure it out in a day, so let's say.

• 31:25Chris Williamson?

  I'll just, I'll just.

• 31:26Jonny?

  No, no, god damn.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  You've asked us to guess, and now we're gonna follow through on it.

• 31:30Jonny?

  Don't ask us to do something that you don't actually want us to do.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:35Jonny?

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Five hundred million users daily, or more? Might, probably more. No, okay, so.

• 31:41Jonny?

  Well, there's probably a billion users, isn't it?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  One billion users daily, each one, uh.

• 31:46Chris Williamson?

  Ten minutes.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Ten minutes, okay, so.

• 31:48Chris Williamson?

  Cause there'll be some people, there'll be some people who use it hardly at all, and some mega users.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  So hun- hundred and fifty million hours per day.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Times thirty. That's fast maths, isn't it?

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Bloody hell.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Ah, he's Egyptian.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Egyptian doctor. So let's say four point five trillion hours. Sorry, no, it's not. Four, four point five billion hours.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  One billion, one, they recently celebrated one billion hours.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that's really disappointing. Well, I can't see.

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you got your maths wrong. Um, but yeah, they sell, they recently celebrated a billion hours a month, which is like mental.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  It's, it's that they're celebrating wasting a billion hours of human. They could be educating.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  The, the argument is, and here's, here's the, here's the.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  So we need to see the ratios.

• 32:31Chris Williamson?

  Here's, here's the sort of the, the main thing. Pornhub stats.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Well, let's get on to that.

• 32:35Chris Williamson?

  We'll get Pornhub stats up shortly. The, the main thing is that inherently using your phone isn't a bad thing. It's only a bad thing if in retrospect, you wouldn't have wanted to use it.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  This is the same analogy and the best analogy that I can come up with is.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  How do you know that though?

• 32:51Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. So the best analogy that I can come up with is eating sweets. Because what you want, what you want is not necessarily what's always good for you.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  I want to eat the sweets. In retrospect, am I glad that I ate the sweets? No, I'm in a fucking deficit at the moment. Why would I have eaten those sweets?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  In fact, I, I would argue that from the mo, maybe, okay, let's say from half an hour after you've eaten the sweets. Forever in the future, you wished that you hadn't eaten sweets.

• 33:18Chris Williamson?

  For half an hour after spending, immediately after spending nine hundred pounds on an M O T. So like. But you actually probably didn't want to spend nine hundred pounds in advance.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, you never did. No. Yeah. So.

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  Never a time.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Never a time. So let, let's get back to the sweets. So fucking ring your dad, Chris. It's really painful.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  Developing your Twitch.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So, so like if, if someone said, would you have wanted to eat those sweets from last year? Or a month ago, or three hours ago, you'd always say, I wish I hadn't. Unless, unless you fit your macros. If they fit your macros, yeah.

• 33:52Chris Williamson?

  Again, that's it. That's the, there's a Goldilocks zone for how much you can use your phone.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  I got it.

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  Um, and here's, here's one of the big.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  People need phone macros.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, pretty much. Here's one of the big things and it's that outrage online always travels further than positivity. And because of the way that the newsfeed optimization works, this is specific to Facebook. Outrage is more attractive than positivity. That means that you are more likely to click on outrage. All that the computer is then going to start feeding you is more of what you want.

• 34:21Jonny?

  More outrage.

• 34:22Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, but what about the sweet analogy? I I I ate the sweets, but I kind of didn't want to eat the sweets, but I did kind of want to eat the sweets. I don't want to click on the outrage. I don't want to be delivered more outrage. But all that the computer is doing is delivering more of what its job is, which is to maximize time on site and to maximize click throughs.

• 34:40Jonny?

  Plus, when you have a sweet, I think it creates the immediate desire for another sweet. As soon as you've had the sweet, you don't think, that was lovely. Enough's enough. You think, that was nice. I'll have another one.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  In fact, that's a really good analogy because we know that you're the bacteria that develop in your gut as a result of certain foods will cause, they'll interact with your brain and cause you to crave more of the same food. And so that's a double edged sword, as with outrage, that if you consume lots of outrage, that's going to then change your mental environment over time and change the general tone and emotion that you're experiencing, the mood that you're experiencing throughout the day.

• 35:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the

• 35:22Speaker 01

  The same way people do gratitude journals because they want to fill themselves with positivity.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  And one of the main things is that because because of how Facebook works and because it delivers news to people who they know want to see it. There was a time online where if the word Trump was in an article, it would be top of your newsfeed, irrelevant of what you'd clicked on. There was a brief period where that happened.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  What's it? So Trump, just

• 35:48Chris Williamson?

  Trump.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Literally Trump.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  To the top.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 35:50Chris Williamson?

  To the top, literally it trumped it, top Trumps.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  Um, and yeah, Facebook, the thing with Facebook is that because

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  it will get you to click on things that you have a particular cognitive bias towards. It segregates you into these echo chambers online with other like minded people that share the shit that you want to click on, but that you potentially don't want to click on.

• 36:13Jonny?

  And you don't even know you're in it.

• 36:14Chris Williamson?

  No. And the outrage.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Not good for you.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  It's not, it's not good for you at all. Um, so.

• 36:20Jonny?

  Unless you're right, in which case it's fine.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Then you just confirm.

• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  Then you're right, yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I am right.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  I am right.

• 36:25Chris Williamson?

  Take that. Um, I think that talking about some solutions for this is probably a big deal. The first, the first part of it, the first thing that I wanted to try and achieve was to let everyone know that it, that it is a little bit of a problem. It's a massive problem and that you do need to be conscious of how much you use your phone. And I don't want it to be, I would actually argue now that it has come for me a, a real vice when, that I'm self referential about when I use my phone. I like regret. I regret being so silly as to have used it, which previously up until learning that you were potentially being manipulated and then it is not time well spent. That's something that you might not have done. Um, but the end goal is more worthwhile.

• 37:09Chris Williamson?

  It's the same thing as knowing like up until the, the point in which you knew that smoking might cause cancer. You were fine smoking a cigarette. Now that you know that it might do, you feel guilty about smoking a cigarette. This is something I used to enjoy. Now it's something that I feel is.

• 37:22Jonny?

  I've heard a similar thing about porn, which is that your face lit up as soon to porn.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  I had an idea, just never mind.

• 37:31Jonny?

  So there's a, there, there was a count, you know how like, so the amount of porn on the internet's increased rapidly over time.

• 37:38Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:39Jonny?

  Then there was a point in time where no one watched any porn.

• 37:41Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:41Jonny?

  Now porn's, I mean, you'll tell us the stats in a second.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  We'll give you some stats.

• 37:44Jonny?

  There's a lot of porn.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Jonny?

  And then there's an argument to say, actually, worrying about how much porn you watch is more, can be more damaging than just watching a bit of porn.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  That, that's what I was gonna say was that Chris said that you have to,

• 38:00Speaker 01

  that you use your phone if you get a net benefit from

• 38:03Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  using it. And what you've done by creating a cycle of guilt with using your phone is that you've reduced the net benefit that you get from using your phone.

• 38:11Jonny?

  Or potentially remove the chance of getting a net benefit completely.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Which could be.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  Because porn, you just see.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Could have pulled it under.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So maybe you've actually tricked yourself into using your phone less in a very convoluted way.

• 38:24Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. Which is good.

• 38:25Jonny?

  You know what I would love to see, and I don't know whether this.

• 38:28Chris Williamson?

  Is it some stats on Pornhub? Cause I've got some mint stats.

• 38:30Jonny?

  I, I would love to see them, but separately. So the, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, like before I left the house, there was a news story about, something about Facebook leaking data to third party apps and things like that. I would love to know whether Facebook time on screen has decreased since all this came out. And I would, I would imagine.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I'd love to know that as well.

• 38:48Jonny?

  I imagine it hasn't.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I bet it took a very marginal dip and then it's gone.

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  But look at what's, look at what's the number one news source for most people.

• 38:56Jonny?

  Is it Facebook?

• 38:56Chris Williamson?

  Facebook. It's actually Twitter.

• 38:58Jonny?

  People are finding out about Facebook news, news leaks.

• 39:01Chris Williamson?

  On Facebook.

• 39:02Jonny?

  Data leaks on, on Facebook.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  And, and surely Facebook can just remove anything that was news feeds.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Mentioned.

• 39:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, do you remember when, do you remember when Google got pulled for putting their own, um, shopping?

• 39:13Jonny?

  Yeah, at the top.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  Things at the top of, of particular lists. There's like this fair use policy thing, isn't it? Like where, well, this is my platform. I can do with it what I want. Well, no, actually you're supposed to be. Um, neutral in a way. But okay, you're neutral at, at the content that you deliver, but not neutral at delivering the content.

• 39:33Jonny?

  Hmm. It's a tough one though, isn't it?

• 39:36Chris Williamson?

  It is really.

• 39:37Jonny?

  In one way, like they're not a charity, they, you know, they're a business.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 39:40Jonny?

  Profit driven, like coursering and advertising and services on their own platform.

• 39:44Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. But I think, I think the other thing to consider is as well that everyone believes that, uh, if you were to, if you were to look at this from a, um, a very. Critical perspective, you would think that all of the guys in Silicon Valley are wearing black hoods and long noses.

• 40:00Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 40:00Chris Williamson?

  Sat around a wooden table chanting and like doing like the, just this nefarious company that's maliciously trying to steal your time. But they're not, they're just trying to maximize profit.

• 40:10Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Profit is, the attention economy means that profit is directly or revenue is directly related to time on site. That means that maximizing time on site is all that matters.

• 40:19Jonny?

  And then.

• 40:19Chris Williamson?

  And if outrage and cognitive bias manipulation and snap streaks and autoplay videos.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  That's kind of worse in a way that, that there's no conscious or moral consideration at all.

• 40:29Chris Williamson?

  Would it be worse than if they were saying, we actually want to go out of our way to destroy people's lives?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  They, I mean, that, that would be worse, but I think, but, but there wouldn't be much like benefit.

• 40:37Jonny?

  Well, at least, at least it's then very linear what's happening.

• 40:40Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Cause if you can.

• 40:41Jonny?

  Cause if they're pure intention, they're achieving it.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  If you can change, if you could, if you could, Tristan Harris's argument is if you could change the economy. To reward businesses somehow based on how much value they add to someone's life.

• 40:53Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 40:53Chris Williamson?

  Rather than their time on site. They would change in a heartbeat.

• 40:57Jonny?

  But is that not what Zuckzuck's trying to do? Because you know Time Well Spent is a snippet from his, that his big post that he did.

• 41:05Chris Williamson?

  It's the other way around.

• 41:07Jonny?

  Oh, is it?

• 41:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jonny?

  So it's, so Zuckzuck copied Tristan. Is it really?

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 41:13Jonny?

  Okay, so is that not why he's saying like all of the fake news is going to be removed? And like, we're going to penalize like business pages and.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. But again, all of that is what we're talking about there is the content that's being delivered. Not how, uh, you deliver the content.

• 41:34Jonny?

  Not right.

• 41:35Chris Williamson?

  And, you know, because he's not going to say, oh, we're actually want to encourage you to spend less time on Facebook. What he wants you to do is the time on Facebook that you spend to be more meaningful, which is fine. But there is always like, no one's attacking BuzzFeed, but I've never once read a BuzzFeed article that afterwards I haven't regretted. And that is, that is a factual statement.

• 41:54Jonny?

  That's because they're misbranded.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  It's just clickbait shit, isn't it? Should we have a look at some stats on Pornhub?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  So the, I, I want to take, I take my hat off to the an- analyst, the analyst.

• 42:08Chris Williamson?

  Who, nice.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Who does the Pornhub annual stats.

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  They are.

• 42:14Jonny?

  I imagine it's a, it's a data team, I would have thought.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Like, it is.

• 42:18Jonny?

  It's not, it's not a bloke with a spreadsheet, like.

• 42:21Chris Williamson?

  Bloody hell, mate, you know how much porn we've watched this year? Um, go on, you know. What, what has? Was mostly? Twenty eight, twenty eight point five billion annual visits to Pornhub. This is the most interesting stat, right? Twenty eight point five.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  There's only four per year per person.

• 42:39Jonny?

  Four what?

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Four visits per year per person.

• 42:42Chris Williamson?

  That's presuming that all seven million, seven billion people on the planet is accessing Pornhub.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Including newborns and.

• 42:48Jonny?

  Yeah, people on their deathbed.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Jonny?

  People in third world countries.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Just once every three months.

• 42:52Jonny?

  They're struggling to get running water.

• 42:54Chris Williamson?

  There's some abadig, there's some abadiginals somewhere.

• 42:56Jonny?

  Fucking got Pornhub.

• 42:58Chris Williamson?

  Um, so twenty eight point five billion annual visits to Pornhub, but only twenty five billion searches performed? And what that means is that.

• 43:08Jonny?

  That means they've nailed the home screen.

• 43:09Chris Williamson?

  Three point five billion people have clicked on something that's appeared on their suggested, uh, videos at the start. Now, I don't mean, I don't mean.

• 43:19Jonny?

  That's mental.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  I don't mean to sound like an aficionado.

• 43:26Chris Williamson?

  But I've got higher standards for my porn than just clicking on the first thing that comes through. I mean, the lowest common denominator here, you've chosen, you've chosen to watch something that's taken no investment from you to watch. The very least that you could do is fucking refine it.

• 43:40Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  Just click, someone's just gone on and gone, there we go, first one.

• 43:44Jonny?

  One, I found it's one.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Indiscriminate. So I, I'd like to play devil's advocate and say that we don't know that those 3.5 billion that were hits but didn't search necessarily clicked on a video. They may have gone on it and been like, oh no, not today. I'm not gonna porn today.

• 44:02Chris Williamson?

  They had, they had a really difficult discussion with themselves about their no fa.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  They opened it and they were like, oh no.

• 44:07Jonny?

  There's probably is, there'll be, there'll be a chunk of people in there who go on there and do leave.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  So I wonder what the split is, people who just click on the first video they see.

• 44:17Jonny?

  I think the, the number of people who type Pornhub in, visit Pornhub and then decide not to use Pornhub is probably in the minority.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Really? This is not, because with Facebook, I often will open Facebook and then be like, no, hang on, what am I doing?

• 44:29Jonny?

  So I think that the, the emotional, psychological, hormonal drivers behind looking at Pornhub versus looking at Facebook are quite different.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  Now, I don't, I don't know what you do on Facebook.

• 44:44Chris Williamson?

  Or what you do on Pornhub for that matter. Can you believe this? This is, this is the best stat. Over the course of 2017, there were 120 million video votes on Pornhub, which is a million votes more than was cast in the last US presidential election.

• 44:59Jonny?

  That is mental, isn't it?

• 45:02Chris Williamson?

  So what you, foot Cambridge Analytica.

• 45:04Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Chris Williamson?

  Harness, harness Pornhub.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  We need to know how many uniques there are because otherwise.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Because that, that could be one guy voting 120 million times.

• 45:18Jonny?

  Yeah, that bloke's got a lot of time, isn't he?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  He's got, yeah.

• 45:20Jonny?

  That, that's a guy really focusing on time well spent, isn't he?

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Jonny?

  You know what I want to know? And I have a burning desire to know this, is how many people?

• 45:30Jonny?

  Paid for Pornhub Premium.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:32Chris Williamson?

  They're not, they're, they're definitely not going to reveal that, are they? Because it would be terrifyingly low. Because the

• 45:37Jonny?

  I'd, so I bet you it isn't.

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  The variety of content that you get already on Pornhub, just

• 45:42Jonny?

  Well, so, so they're operating the free me model, so they, they over deliver on the front end. And, and what that makes everybody think is, holy fuck, what must the paid model look like?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Are they

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  Jab, jab, jab, right hook.

• 45:54Jonny?

  Ja- exactly, yeah.

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  Gary.

• 45:55Jonny?

  It's just Gary Vaynerchuk behind the whole

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  Gary Vaynerchuk?

• 45:58Jonny?

  Are they public? I wouldn't have thought so.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Cause seeing their financials would be

• 46:02Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what they did? Um, Joe Rogan did an interview with the guy who was involved in the startup of Pornhub. And they just bought up everything. They bought, it's so X and XX, Xhamster, like they bought every video streaming service as it came up. Bought it in, used like, we're still running it as a separate No, no, no, still, it's, it's still run as like a separate site or whatever, but they own it. They own like, I, the Um, stat of how much they own, I want to say like, someone might call me out on this, but I want to say it's like more than 80% of like porn streaming. Worldwide

• 46:34Jonny?

  They command it.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  Is under there.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  It's a bit like Unilever, where they, they just buy out all the different soap companies and it look, you get the illusion of choice. You go into the shop and oh, it's all just the same one.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  I mean, if, if there was, if there was some, if there was some real like, um, market fair, like a, a governing body here.

• 46:52Jonny?

  Regulators.

• 46:52Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely being a, like a monopoly claim going in, but the fact of the matter is it's porn. So everyone's like, oh, no, no. Come on, oh, god, no.

• 47:00Jonny?

  God, speak to the porn people.

• 47:01Chris Williamson?

  So wet, like

• 47:03Jonny?

  Someone write them a letter, no, I'm not writing it.

• 47:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they'll come back all soppy. Um, so, uh, right, let's do some reductions of phone use strategies. Cause mine have developed since last year, since we last did that. My, my main one, my, my, my main one is that when you are in, in an inertial frame of reference. The likelihood of you staying on your phone is higher. So if you're lying down, it's more likely than if you're sitting. And if you're sitting, it's more likely than if you're standing. And if you're standing, it's more likely than if you're walking. So the fact is.

• 47:36Jonny?

  Jumping.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  Jumping, yeah, yeah, flying, flying, flapping.

• 47:40Speaker 01

  Snatching.

• 47:41Chris Williamson?

  Flapping, snatching. Do not try and snatch with.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Chin ups.

• 47:44Chris Williamson?

  Unless you're Dimitri Klockov.

• 47:45Jonny?

  It's impossible, isn't it? Use your phone while you're doing a chin up.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  It depends how strong you are.

• 47:49Chris Williamson?

  One-handed chin up, fine. Basically.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  Did lift.

• 47:53Jonny?

  Did lift.

• 47:54Chris Williamson?

  Did lift.

• 47:54Jonny?

  Impossible.

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  Basically, don't use your phone, don't use your phone when you're in inertial frame of reference. So if you are, Jesus just trapped his between his chin and his, between his beard, his Arab beard.

• 48:06Jonny?

  What's he trapped?

• 48:08Chris Williamson?

  His phone.

• 48:08Jonny?

  Oh.

• 48:09Chris Williamson?

  His penis.

• 48:10Jonny?

  You just said, you just trapped his.

• 48:13Chris Williamson?

  Trapped his.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Speaking of which, Robby trapped his glans penis doing lateral raises.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Glansomeglineigrem.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  It's possible.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  What's a bruised clitoris? Clitoromeglineigrem?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you are an Olympic weightlifter, potentially one who's coming back from the Commonwealth Games, which is recently in Australia, and you are suffering with clitoromeglineigrem.

• 48:40Jonny?

  We had someone.

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  Get in contact.

• 48:41Jonny?

  We had someone opt into our email list called Zoe Smith, right? Who, there's a, there's a weightlifter who's just come back from the Commonwealth Games called Zoe Smith. Used to have made a cake with her once.

• 48:55Jonny?

  So.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  Just presumed.

• 48:57Jonny?

  Emailed her and went, is this the same Zoe Smith that I made a cake with?

• 49:01Speaker 01

  She emailed us.

• 49:02Jonny?

  Look at him deleting the.

• 49:05Chris Williamson?

  I'm not deleting anything, I'm just.

• 49:07Jonny?

  Is this the same Zoe Smith? No reply. Or she replied to you.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  She replied to me saying, sadly not.

• 49:12Jonny?

  Oh.

• 49:13Chris Williamson?

  Gutted. That's a shame. So time, time, time reduction on your phone.

• 49:18Jonny?

  Say quick.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  Best, best thing, best few things to do. Do not sleep with your phone by your bed. So put your phone over the, put your phone over the far side of the room. Put the charger over the far side of the room is the first step. That means that if you want the phone to be charged the next day, you've got to go over there, stacking the deck in your favour against having it near your bed. It means that when you wake up on a morning, like, I can't believe, I cannot believe that these like doormat alarm clocks that you have to stand on for 10 seconds.

• 49:48Jonny?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 49:48Chris Williamson?

  Have been a, well, I mean, that's just you all over, isn't it?

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Were you about to criticize it? Yes, just put your phone, put the alarm on your phone and put the phone over your. I'm looking for my phone to order one on Amazon. Yeah, I know you are. And then try and cancel my account and I can't. You can't do it. Um, yeah, put your phone over the far side of the room, uh, ideally next to the window. So it means that when you wake up in the morning, you do that. My advice would be do not look at your phone for anything other than turning off your alarm clock. Unless you desperately need to do it, i.e. waiting for someone to come and pick you up. Police. P- police. Do not, do not pick your phone up until after you've done everything that you need to do in the morning. That includes making breakfast, having coffee, setting yourself up for the day, ideally until you get in the car. If you're doing meditation, if you're doing Ramad, if you're doing anything else, look at the phone. Like when you open up the phone, direct yourself immediately to the app that you need to use.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  Um, second one from me is to remove all social media websites from the homepage of your phone. I think that for many people, almost everybody uses their phone in some way or another. That's related to work or contacting friends. And I think that an outright deletion of social media off your phone can be a little bit extreme for some people, although that's the goal. Take it off your home screen and move it into a folder somewhere that you need to swipe through for quite a while to get to. Also, remove the number notifications from everything except for things that are generated by other humans. So for me, I've kept mine on for Messenger, for Facebook, I've kept mine on for WhatsApp, but not for group chats.

• 51:22Chris Williamson?

  The reason is that if someone has messaged me specifically, that's probably actually worthy of my time. I know that it sucks you into using the phone, but that for me, it's probably not far off time. So that's not, you wouldn't count Facebook as human generated? Uh, for the most part, because there is an, uh, there is a unfair weight towards computer generated. That right. Um, or. So it's messages basically, but emails, messages. Direct.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  How do you eliminate group chat notifications on WhatsApp?

• 51:52Chris Williamson?

  One button, notifications, group chat off. Yeah.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Really?

• 51:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And you can leave like normal ones on.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do that now.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  And then turn off also direct. Well, group chats, the problem with group chats.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  They're alive.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they just, they can rack up like really, really quick.

• 52:08Jonny?

  And if you have them on notification, it's a nightmare.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Jonny?

  But if you're on your home screen, you look at your home screen.

• 52:14Chris Williamson?

  Kills you.

• 52:15Jonny?

  Can't do anything.

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  Um, next one, Johnny, have you got? Oh, you've already got enough. I've already, I've already ignored you.

• 52:21Jonny?

  But it's still bothering you.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Just the idea of them.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Johnny, what have you got? Have you got any tactics that you use for phone reduction?

• 52:29Jonny?

  Um, so the one, I mean, you both experienced when I went through my phase with my shit phone.

• 52:36Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:37Jonny?

  I think for me, that is the one that I would aspire to, to be.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  Briefly explain that.

• 52:44Jonny?

  So I bought a twenty pound phone on Amazon, which is the most basic phone you can imagine. It has a torch.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  What does he call it again?

• 52:54Jonny?

  Shit phone.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  The, the bastard.

• 52:55Jonny?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  The bastard.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Your motherfucking bastard.

• 53:00Jonny?

  Yeah, the bastard. Um, so.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  B H A R S T A.

• 53:06Jonny?

  So which is a reference to a YouTube video, because we all spend too much time on YouTube.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  On YouTube that we can actually reference something like.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Hundred and fifty million.

• 53:13Jonny?

  I, if anyone would like access to the funniest collection of YouTube videos, I, I, that is no exaggeration. You sefs, how many, seven hundred?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah.

• 53:24Jonny?

  Like, it is curated content, like it is really high quality.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  That's time well spent.

• 53:29Jonny?

  That is time excellently spent.

• 53:31Chris Williamson?

  Excellently well spent.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Fine.

• 53:34Jonny?

  So, yeah, um, and for a twenty four hour period, once a week, take your SIM card out of your iPhone or, or your Android and put it into the shit phone. And then you wake up the next day and it is weird.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  What were the barriers that you found for that strategy?

• 53:52Jonny?

  So you, so the hard, the hardest thing is, or was, day, like, I would go with my girlfriend somewhere. So like, she'd be shopping or it'd be like, we'd go to Tesco and you find yourself in these periods of dead time where.

• 54:09Jonny?

  You you go to check it anyway. So I find myself getting it out of my pocket and looking at it and then thinking. What the fuck am I doing?

• 54:16Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that's the that's the.

• 54:16Jonny?

  What am I going to realistically, what am I going to do? Turn the torch on.

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  I've done that. I've done that fifty times today already. The batteries fuck.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  That's so interesting that.

• 54:25Jonny?

  It's the it's the.

• 54:27Chris Williamson?

  It's compulsive.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Phantom compulsion is.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's such a it's that's the idiosyncrasy side of it. There's this really good um a meme that I saw online. It's about a guy sitting on the subway and this person's speaking in the third person. They're saying, I saw this guy sitting across from me. They sat across from me on rush hour on the on the train as everyone else was sat looking at their phones. And he was just sat there staring out of the window like a psychopath.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Like sitting, having a coffee, just.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Not not texting. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like the the the compulsion to check. And this is the thing, because the introspection occurs.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Such a new thing as well. Ten years ago.

• 55:05Chris Williamson?

  That wouldn't be normal. Yeah. Introspection occurs during periods of boredom. Like, periods of boredom allow you to ask yourself questions throughout the day.

• 55:13Jonny?

  Sit you sit and think.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like, when do you have, like, if you were told to go and sit in a room now for thirty minutes, you couldn't meditate. So you couldn't actually do what we would do when we had a little bit of silence. And you were told to go and sit in a room for thirty minutes. The number of people that would give up.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  It's considered the greatest punishment to put someone in solitary in solitary confinement.

• 55:35Jonny?

  There's no stimulus.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that that is the worst, highest level.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  People would prefer to be in prison with rapists and criminals.

• 55:43Jonny?

  Than by themselves.

• 55:44Chris Williamson?

  Than on their own.

• 55:45Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 55:46Chris Williamson?

  And there's been.

• 55:47Jonny?

  My first thought for that is I would just thousands of hours of meditation.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  Nail it.

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, that's fine.

• 55:52Jonny?

  Like, I want to be the man.

• 55:56Chris Williamson?

  Maybe twenty.

• 55:59Jonny?

  Like, I'd come out of prison, everyone else had a terrible time.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  My mindful as fuck, yeah. Just glowing blue light. Okay, so you had your.

• 56:07Jonny?

  But yeah, so there is there is the ultimate fear of you go to you take the SIM card out of your phone. And there's this fear sets in of like, what is gonna happen over the next twenty four hours?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I message, what about?

• 56:17Jonny?

  Yeah. So I think a lot of that for me is business related. But I know that. There's a scone.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  I just call you if there's, yeah.

• 56:25Jonny?

  So you did sometimes call me, but the, the thing about that is that when you called me on my shit phone days, there is this utter fear that sets in because you're like, I know that he will have hesitated before ringing me.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  This is fucking serious, yeah.

• 56:41Jonny?

  And, and so you, you, you sat there and it goes like.

• 56:46Jonny?

  Yeah, what the fuck is that?

• 56:49Jonny?

  Oh God, it's my phone ringing. Look, I must change the ringtone.

• 56:53Jonny?

  Beep, hello?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  And you can barely hear him.

• 56:56Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna break, I'm gonna break the fourth wall of podcast recording and say that I'm next week. There is going to be a conversation with Kai Wei, who is CEO of the lightphone.com. However, I've already had the discussion with him.

• 57:15Chris Williamson?

  Um, but that's, that's really interesting and you'll find out what is potentially a more palatable uh solution to Johnny's shit phone problem. The shite phone.

• 57:24Jonny?

  The shit phone problem. There are so many shit phone problems that mainly it takes a lot of discipline to say, I'm gonna have a shit phone day tomorrow. And there's always a reason not to have a shit phone day.

• 57:34Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Yusuf, some strategies.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Very similar to yourselves. I think the, the general principle with everything we've said so far is make the good decision as easy as possible and make the bad decision as hard as possible. So we have the.

• 57:47Chris Williamson?

  Low hanging fruit, right?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. So we have the, the apps on the final page and call it something like you're a dick. Um, there's grayscale on your phone, which I tried for a while.

• 57:59Jonny?

  I've tried that too. It doesn't really do much.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  It, it just annoyed me. I don't think it made me use it less. It just meant that when I took photos, I had to double check that the.

• 58:09Jonny?

  I'm trying to make the background black and I think that does a bit.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:13Jonny?

  Which makes it slightly less visually stimulating.

• 58:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 58:15Jonny?

  But grayscale is irritating.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  I think that, that probably sacrifices some of the experience of what you are going to use it for. Whilst actually not making much of a difference to the things that you want it to change.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Um, the only other things for me is I always have it on silent. Um, unless it, uh, and I have, everything's on do not disturb mode, except for a select few people that when they call me.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Am I, am I one of those people?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 58:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Um.

• 58:44Chris Williamson?

  Is Johnny? If Johnny isn't, it's gonna be really awkward.

• 58:46Jonny?

  Yeah. Your tick.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  It's just my business partner. I'm sure it's fine.

• 58:51Jonny?

  He's not got anything for it to say. You you were the one who influenced me to turn off all notifications.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  That has been the biggest liberator.

• 58:58Chris Williamson?

  It's such a such a big change. And the thing is, like, you can you can keep a select few. I've got personal messages on WhatsApp, I've got iMessage, Facebook's gone, Twitter's gone. All Facebook pages, if you run Facebook pages, you'll know what we mean from the app. That's gone. I bet you've got, have you got Ads Manager notifications on?

• 59:15Jonny?

  No, just Stripe.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  Um, just Stripe, just wanna make money.

• 59:19Jonny?

  Yeah, so the only the only time my phone makes a noise is either when Youssef changes the time that he's going to purchase Kabuki movement systems.

• 59:30Jonny?

  Or, so calendar, calendar reminders, or when we make a sale.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I think calendar reminders, although I don't have notifications for that, I make an exception for it, I think, because

• 59:40Jonny?

  It's important, isn't it?

• 59:40Speaker 01

  You made that notification to remind you.

• 59:42Jonny?

  Or it's someone else putting something in my schedule for me, which is also important.

• 59:46Chris Williamson?

  I mean, isn't it, isn't it, isn't it crazy that we were sat discussing ways to

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Stop the things that we voluntarily bought from

• 59:54Chris Williamson?

  This thousand pound, this thousand pound a year investment, this thousand pound a year investment that is with us twenty four hours a day, the most ubiquitous piece of technology that's ever existed. And we're having to come up with strategies to try and fight back against billion dollar companies.

• 1:00:09Jonny?

  But it it's it's really powerful, which makes it fantastic in many ways. Like, the things you can do with it are brilliant.

• 1:00:16Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:00:17Jonny?

  But that it's it, everything has a side effect, isn't it?

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  How much, how much, how much of what we're talking about is time well spent? Like, because for me, like, Tristan came up with some good, some good, um, stats on it, and he says that number one, two and three, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, the three most regretted uses of apps. And I think that, um, one, two and three of the, on the opposite end of the scale was MyFitnessPal, actually. Weirdly enough, as one of the ones

• 1:00:46Jonny?

  That's not regretted.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, as highly, um, podcasts and mindfulness apps.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, you never like sit and think, oh, I wish I hadn't wasted so much time on MyFitnessPal today. Like, it's

• 1:00:55Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of It's been productive, like, you don't, you don't go in and scroll through and, like, spend too much time looking at, like, whether whether Daz Charles hit his macro.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  Macro.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Even though they try to, but the other thing for me is I've never had Facebook on my phone. And Facebook for me, out of those apps is the most, used to be the most compulsive. But now on the Mac as well, I've got a mod that stops the newsfeed from showing up. And so now.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  It's just Chrome Newsfeed Blocker, I think it's called.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  It may be, yeah. So I only use it for.

• 1:01:29Jonny?

  I got that as well. Purity.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Facebook purity. So.

• 1:01:33Jonny?

  Really good.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Facebook for me is only used for work or marketplace, selling tea towels for two pounds.

• 1:01:39Jonny?

  So what what that's like, and I don't know whether you were about to say this, but it's you, when you go on to use Facebook and the newsfeed's blocked. It's like you have to use the menu items to navigate what you want to do. You don't just get dragged into like the first thing that appears.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Because I'm such a sucker for that and I know that I am. And so there's no point in me saying, oh, you know what, I'll just exert more willpower and just not get sucked into the news.

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  I mean, one of one of the the most crazy ones, and this will happen to absolutely everybody, I'm going to touch on two two things here. One of the most crazy ones, you've had a long day at work, you've been out, you've maybe been to the gym, you haven't been in the house for like twelve hours, something like that. You get back, you park the car up on the drive, you take your phone out and then you sit in the car.

• 1:02:19Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  For twenty minutes.

• 1:02:20Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Chris Williamson?

  There is no more shameful use.

• 1:02:24Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Chris Williamson?

  Of your phone than that.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Sitting in the car outside your house.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Outside your own house.

• 1:02:30Jonny?

  I've done that before as well.

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  It happens.

• 1:02:32Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  All the time.

• 1:02:33Jonny?

  So it's when you're, it's when your, your willpower and discipline is at its absolute lowest and you're like, I'm tired. I just, I can't be bothered. Like, oh, that's a nice red shiny thing to look at.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  The same as like when you're too tired to go to bed.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  And you.

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  A little bit, but it's just. Yeah, I suppose so, or that you know that you've got to, but even with this, it's like you could do the phone thing while you move. Do you know what I mean? Like you could stand up, but it's the inertial frame of reference again, right?

• 1:03:02Jonny?

  You're comfortable, it's warm.

• 1:03:04Chris Williamson?

  It's sat, you're sat in the car, you've been there for a while, you've probably been thinking about using your phone. And here's, here's another thing, like, and I don't know why this isn't a bigger deal. Like, how many Instagram stories do you see of people? And we've all been like, well, maybe not all of us, I don't want to make you culpable as well. But a lot of us have been a culprit of doing this. How many Instagram stories do you see of people while they're fucking driving? Like the driving down the street. Doing Instagram, no, I'd like this, the vast majority of Instagram users that drive will be able to attest to it. And you're like.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  It's a really fiddly thing to do.

• 1:03:33Chris Williamson?

  How fucking, like, I mean, I, you know, I don't wanna put myself in the firing line, but how are the police not going, mate?

• 1:03:40Jonny?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  That's a video of you doing something illegal in your car.

• 1:03:45Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Apparently, police are now riding buses to look down.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  They look down, yeah, look above to see people.

• 1:03:50Jonny?

  They have special lorries that they take on motorways to look down on people.

• 1:03:54Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:03:54Jonny?

  Look across at lorry drivers.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  Look down, to just, just judge people.

• 1:03:57Jonny?

  To just go like, look how small and shit your car is compared to my big lorry.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Just looking down on you.

• 1:04:01Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Jonny?

  There's that clip of that guy, you see the guy on his phone, he killed.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  He sent like, what was it, like twenty messages in a space of like ten miles or something like that?

• 1:04:11Jonny?

  And then just drove straight in the back of the car, killed the entire family.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  And I don't know, like, it's, but here's, here's the thing, right, that, that, that there, like, do people want to be on their phone? Like, is your, is using your phone while you're in the car time well spent for you? Or is it just, are you News Feed scrolling? And we, we all, we all, uh, uh, someone who I know has a problem with doing it.

• 1:04:36Jonny?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:04:39Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult problem that many people face.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  It's one of those things that it's fine until it's not, and then you're like, that was not worth the text message that I sent or the.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  Of course it's not.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  Course it's not.

• 1:04:49Jonny?

  And it's all, it's the, so for me, I think the thing you said about not, not looking at it when. Um, so something that, that Dan Gibson.

• 1:04:58Chris Williamson?

  DAB.

• 1:04:59Jonny?

  D A B.

• 1:04:59Chris Williamson?

  Digital Audio Broadcasting.

• 1:05:01Jonny?

  Gibson. Has just mentioned to me, which really interests me because he, he always strikes me as, he's, he's a busy guy. Like, from the moment he wakes up to the, to about seven o'clock at night, he's like, he's up rushing.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  At five, trains.

• 1:05:15Jonny?

  Like, pinching every second out of his morning, then he's at work, he's, oh, my god, finishes, and he's like, I often, I'll allow myself thirty minutes in the evening to check social media. He seems, he seemed really on top of it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  And the other day he told me that he's experimenting with not allowing himself to look at social media in the morning.

• 1:05:33Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  I was like, oh, okay. So it's eroding away at you as well. Like, it's obviously what used to be very controlled in the evening thirty minutes is now creeping into the morning.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Now he's like, it's got to the point where I feel like I need to put a boundary on this.

• 1:05:47Chris Williamson?

  I think the easiest way to do it for me, and this is the, this harks back, I'm sure that if there's anyone who understands habit setting better than I do or we do, that they, this will be a common tactic. But I made the rule about when I was going out for drinks. If I was on a stint of sobriety and it was my birthday and I knew that I wanted to have some drinks, but not too many, I had to set myself a hard line rule.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:06:09Chris Williamson?

  And it's the same with the phone. When you're trying to stop yourself from doing something your mind wants to do, but in retrospect, you don't.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:19Chris Williamson?

  The, what was it? The current self versus the remembered self.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Chris Williamson?

  Um, you need to set very, very hard lines. And one of the easiest ones to do is to say, right, up until a particular point, I'm not going to look at my phone in the morning. After a particular point, I'm not going to look at my phone on a night.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the, the most productive time I've ever had in my life, and I, I don't know why I don't go back.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  I know what you're gonna say.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Is when I was, I was no wifi until three P M.

• 1:06:46Chris Williamson?

  How did you do? Did you not automate that? You literally just went over and flicked the switch?

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so just um go to bed, turn everything off, turn wifi and connection off on everything. And the next day, wake up purely offline, work until three P M.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  Is, uh.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  And then have.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  If you're a knowledge worker who has to communicate with other people, that's probably going to be difficult, isn't it?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Then I would, I would manually turn it on for that one task and then turn it back off again.

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my god. That is serious.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  And I had a thirty minute allocation for social media, WhatsApp messages at six P M, and it was beautiful.

• 1:07:13Chris Williamson?

  I mean, that is, that is the absolute extreme.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  And then I slipped out of the habit and now my life's a mess.

• 1:07:19Jonny?

  So the, the thing is, so I, I, what, what I found, I asked, I said to Dan, what are you doing?

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Digital audio.

• 1:07:25Jonny?

  Digital audio broadcast, just for any one of these communities.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Jonny?

  How what are you doing to ensure that you don't check your phone before midday? Cause for me saying like, oh, just not do that. So you know, people set it go like tomorrow I'm gonna.

• 1:07:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Jonny?

  Go on a diet. It's like, it's something that requires willpower. It's something that is probably currently your norm.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:07:43Jonny?

  To just click your fingers and change.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Jonny?

  Especially in the morning, you wake up, your phone's by your bed, you reach over, turn off your.

• 1:07:48Chris Williamson?

  Not if it's on the other side of the.

• 1:07:50Jonny?

  No, of course. And there's loads of red things to check. You're like, well, that looks exciting. Check that. Before you know it.

• 1:07:55Chris Williamson?

  You're in.

• 1:07:56Jonny?

  Thirty minutes down, down the line and you've been.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Well, you you got a physical alarm clock, didn't you?

• 1:08:00Jonny?

  Um.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Just to.

• 1:08:02Jonny?

  Just to avoid it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Eliminate that. And I think it's such a good idea.

• 1:08:04Jonny?

  I think you need, it it, yeah.

• 1:08:07Chris Williamson?

  But the what what we're talking about here is is harking back to it, you said, Yusuf, which is making the the choice you want to make. Either in retrospect or in advance, as easy as possible. And the choice that you don't want to make, as difficult as possible.

• 1:08:19Jonny?

  Um.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, you're right that on a morning, it's difficult not to check your phone, but it's a piece of piss if it's not in your hand.

• 1:08:25Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  You cannot check your phone if it's not there. So put it, put it somewhere. You know what I started doing that was to break the um idiosyncratic habit? At the start of this year, I put my phone in my other pocket.

• 1:08:36Jonny?

  Um.

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  The number of times that I've taken my wallet out recently. And obviously, I will.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Spend ten minutes pressing the pressing your wallet.

• 1:08:43Jonny?

  Yeah. I don't think I have a consistent pocket.

• 1:08:45Chris Williamson?

  I do. I have it. It always goes right pocket. So, um, but yeah, I think you you just need to try and do things that are going to stack the deck in your favor. And for the most part, that involves just putting your phone away.

• 1:08:58Jonny?

  So so I think that starts with trying to spot your own patterns, doesn't it?

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Jonny?

  Right now, like, when when is it that you look at your phone? Like, when are you?

• 1:09:05Chris Williamson?

  When do you get really chewed up with time?

• 1:09:07Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And again, you know, you um sat down with a a doctor and an accountant. They were fairly figures based. You cannot um derive much from the research without having figures.

• 1:09:20Jonny?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Chris Williamson?

  And you need to have some figures, so.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Rescue time and moment.

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Rescue time is, rescue time is moment for MacBook, right?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Um.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  And it's depressing when you look at the annual report or the monthly reports.

• 1:09:31Jonny?

  Send you an email on a Sunday. Sends me an email every Sunday.

• 1:09:35Chris Williamson?

  And you know, do you know what?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  Naturally, I unsubscribed from any of them.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  I wouldn't know about that, but uh.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  You know my, so I did my, my all time.

• 1:09:44Jonny?

  That's the most valuable part of it.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  I, I just checked it on the website.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  He goes in and does it by choice. Um, you know, my total phone time since we started using Moment, which was after Distraction is Destruction, about eighteen months ago.

• 1:09:58Jonny?

  That much.

• 1:09:59Chris Williamson?

  My, my total phone time is just under four thousand hours in eighteen months. I spend um, what, over a third of my waking life on my phone.

• 1:10:15Chris Williamson?

  And this is someone who's trying to do everything in his power. It, it'll take, it'll take you.

• 1:10:22Jonny?

  I'm not gonna get the full stats, I'm just gonna get the.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Dailies.

• 1:10:25Jonny?

  Yeah, um, cause you can see it gives you a percent, as you just listed, it gives you a percentage of uh.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Waking time on the phone.

• 1:10:32Jonny?

  A third sounds about right.

• 1:10:36Jonny?

  The tip that I was gonna say, that you told me about, was put your apps into a few folders or off the home screen and then use the search function.

• 1:10:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Jonny?

  To get to where, which is, it, it feels the same to me as the um, the news feed blocker. Because you go on Facebook and you're like, what am I, what am I here to do?

• 1:10:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you have to be mindful to choose it. So that's, that's an option. If you go into Siri uh, on your, on your phone, if you use an Android, then I have no idea. Um, but if you go into Settings and then Siri and turn off Siri app suggestions, then take all of your apps off the home screen and put them into folders. To get to the apps, the most convenient way or the quickest way to do it is to swipe down from the top and to type into a search bar what it is that you want. But to do that, you need to make a conscious choice to type the letter of the app that you want and to begin the process, which just gives you a little bit of.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Automatic, gives you a moment, just.

• 1:11:32Chris Williamson?

  Little bit of a moment, just.

• 1:11:33Jonny?

  Just to think, why am I here?

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  What am I doing?

• 1:11:35Jonny?

  What am I doing?

• 1:11:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's less of a compulsion, uh, because I found that having, the same way that a river cuts through a bend to find the quickest way, I managed to find a shortcut to my own shit folder routine.

• 1:11:48Jonny?

  Yeah, oh, me too.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  Like, within, within three days, I'd found a quicker way. That was quicker than when it used to be on my home screen.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Oh no, that's even worse then.

• 1:11:55Jonny?

  That's my home screen.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Jonny?

  I have to go one, two, to find my folder, folder called Time Wasting. That's where I spend most of my time.

• 1:12:04Chris Williamson?

  Time spending.

• 1:12:05Jonny?

  You you just realise that you are such a fickle bastard who will just overcome everything you put in your own way. Which is why shit's on.

• 1:12:15Chris Williamson?

  It's not your it's not your choice. Uh, thank you very much. Check out the Distraction is Destruction podcast. I'll make sure that that is in the links. Links to the, what was it? The choice architecture? What was the one that you sent us on YouTube?

• 1:12:28Jonny?

  Dark, what was it called? Dark patterns.

• 1:12:31Chris Williamson?

  Dark patterns um on YouTube. Links to Tristan Harris with Sam Harris and a couple of other websites that you may be interested in. If you want to find out any more or if you've got any questions, feel free to tweet me or the guys online. And we will catch you next time. We've got more life hacks coming up. We've got Kai Way coming up, Daniel Head from Romward and Quinn Hennick of Juggernaut Training Systems. Thank you, bye.

• 1:12:57Jonny?

  Bye. Bye.