One Simple Trick To Stop Doomscrolling - Catherine Price

Chris Williamson 0:00 How many hours a day are most people spending on their phones? How, how many times are they picking 'em up?

Catherine Price 0:05 It's hard to get a firm answer on how many hours, but the best statistics I found range between four and six hours a day that people are spending on their phones. If you wanna go for the middle number there, five hours a day, it adds up to about 75 days a year. S- it's really a shocking amount.

Chris Williamson 0:21 Y- yeah. I wonder what the comparison is, because that's presumably across a bunch of different age groups. So if you were to go under 30, I would guess that that number goes up. I would also guess that the hours of sleep would go down under that. Uh, I certainly know, uh, Luke, who is a good friend of mine and my tour manager, um, he regularly manages to double his sleep time with his screen time. Um-

Catherine Price 0:46 Huh.

Chris Williamson 0:46 ... so h- he's 12 hours a day on phone, six hours of sleep.

Catherine Price 0:50 Oh, that direction. I thought you were going the other healthier direction.

Chris Williamson 0:53 (laughs) No.

Catherine Price 0:53 Oh, that's, oh, that's not good. Does he need an intervention?

Chris Williamson 0:57 He's a club promoter. He, he's like the, he's like patient zero for phone use. All of us are. So th- anybody that used to run nightlife stuff, um, we just have... We basically were hardwired into WhatsApp, and-

Catherine Price 1:09 (laughs) It's...

Chris Williamson 1:09 ... it, it's very, very difficult to get rid of that, uh... Maybe this is me just, you know, um, uh, creating a, an excuse for myself, but, uh, yeah, if you grew up being some sort of club promoter type person, you have maybe the worst neural networks possible for, uh, phone use. It's not good.

Catherine Price 1:29 That's a separate category. So you have like 18 to 29-year-olds, 29 to 40, and then you have like club managers which is-

Chris Williamson 1:34 Correct. That's go- well, it's a different species technically.

Catherine Price 1:36 Yes, yes.

Chris Williamson 1:36 So, yeah.

Catherine Price 1:37 I hadn't thought about that. I'm already learning.

Chris Williamson 1:39 Um, e- and that's it.

Catherine Price 1:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:40 Um, and have we got... I was gonna say, when you look at different cohorts, uh, do boys or men use it more than women? Do... W- what have we got about teenagers, young people? Does this tend to sort of fluctuate over time?

Catherine Price 1:52 Yeah, I mean, the generational thing is definitely true. So everyone is spending a lot of time on their phones, but younger people, which the terms are Gen Alpha and Gen Z, you know, basically up to 28 or 30 or so, definitely higher than Gen X or let alone Boomers. But with that said, I do think that older people get off the hook too easily when it comes to screen time, 'cause I think most of us have probably had an experience when you're with someone in their 70s and they just have their phone out, usually on Facebook, like all the time. And I recently heard a great word for that, which is screen your citizen. So... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:23 Oh, screenia citizen. Very good.

Catherine Price 2:26 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:26 Very, very good. Yeah.

Catherine Price 2:28 A- and I think, you know, in terms of gender breakdown, like you tend to have different people doing... I- uh, it's all stereotypes, right, but it's like women tend to be on social media more, men tend to be on, and young men in particular, on gaming more. So it depends on the person, but those are the general kind of breakdowns. But yeah, I mean, younger people are on their phones more than the much older generations for sure.

Chris Williamson 2:46 I suppose what's interesting about this is something I only realized a few years ago, which is phones come in and they take, let's say, six hours of our day, and I'm gonna guess that a lot of what's being studied here is not word processes, emails at work. It's much more social media sort of casual leisure time type stuff. But we haven't gained... The, the, the length of the day hasn't become 30 hours. So that six-hour window has had to squeeze other bits of life that 25 years ago existed. That has to have been squeezed from somewhere, unless you've become more efficient at playing in the park or more efficient at, uh, spending time with your friends or whatever it might be. Uh, so inevitably to put six hours of your day onto screens, that means six hours of your day doing something else has had to go.

Catherine Price 3:34 Yeah, I think the opportunity cost is something that people need to pay more attention to. I will say, though, that I think a lot of (laughs) times people are multi-screening, and that... 'Cause I thought about the same thing. How does this math actually work, you know? There's like teenagers who are supposedly spending something like seven hours a day on s- uh, screen-based leisure that doesn't have to do with schoolwork. I'm like, "How is that possible if school's eight hours a day?" So a lot of it is multi-screening. You're watching TV. You're also on your phone. You're playing a video game. You're also chatting. Like that kind of multi-screening. But going back to what you were saying, I think that we really do need to think about this in terms of opportunity cost, 'cause there are only 24 hours in a day, and every time we spend an hour on one thing, let alone six hours, we end up with six fewer hours to spend on anything else in life. And I always say like, if you are aware of this and you decide you want to be spending that much time on a screen, it's your life. But I think that for a lot of people, it's not an intentional choice. You get sucked in, and then you don't really recognize your life is being stolen from you in these little increments that add up to weeks and months and literally

Catherine Price 4:31 years.

Chris Williamson 4:32 How can people work out whether or not their time on screens is something they want to be doing or something they don't? Given that we all do it, so presumably at the time, we want to be doing it kind of.

Catherine Price 4:42 (laughs) I don't know if we always wanna be doing it kind of. I think a lot of times it's an automatic habit by this point. We've been so conditioned, and we can talk more about this, but we've been so conditioned to associate our phones with some kind of reward, emotional reward usually, like the alleviation of boredom or anxiety, that we do it on autopilot, and then we get sucked in, and we don't even recognize how much time we're spending. But I do think you raise a really important point, which is that one of the m- most effective things you can do if you're trying to, quote, "break up with your phone," as I put it, or change your relationship with your phone is to become more aware of when you reach for your phone. And so I do have a couple exercises I always recommend to people, and one of them is, is this mindfulness-based exercise I call what for, why now, and what else, so W-W-W for short. And I always recommend people start by putting something on their phone like, um, a rubber band or some kind of like, I tell women, like a hair tie. The point being that when you pick up your phone on autopilot, you'll notice there's something on the phone, and you'll have a split second of being like, "Why is this thing on my phone?" And that will be a reminder to ask yourself these three questions. And the way that works is you ask yourself, what for? Like, what did I pick up my phone for right now? Like, did I actually have a purpose?... or was it just kind of like an autopilot thing? And you might have a purpose, but what, what did you pick it up for? And then you ask, why now? You know, was it a time-sensitive reason, like you actually wanted to send a specific text message or email, or you really wanted to check something in particular? Or, and this is more likely, is there an emotional reason behind it, like you were, you were bored and you wanted a distraction, or you were feeling lonely, you wanted a connection. You know, something like that. And once you identify this reward that your brain is after, that's when you can ask the final question of what else. Let's just, what else could you do in this moment to alleviate or give yourself that reward that doesn't involve reaching for your phone? So y- instead of, I always say like, instead of checking social media for a, quote, "connection," you could actually call a friend or find someone to just chat with.

Chris Williamson 6:33 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 6:33 You could take a break by going for a walk around the block. But I also always say to people, you might decide that, for your what else, you actually want to do nothing, which is an excellent choice because our brains need more time to decompress from all the stuff we're putting into them, and then you i- also might just decide, "I want to be on my phone right now." And I really like to emphasize, that's fine. That's the whole point. If you end up on your phone after asking yourself those questions, like, you've succeeded 'cause you know it's intentional, and that, going back to your original question, is how you know that you're not just sacrificing your life and suffering from opportunity cost. You actually wanted to spend that time on the phone.

Chris Williamson 7:09 What have you come to believe about whether it's best to refer to our phone use as an addiction, a compulsion, um, a habit, a dependency? Uh, I mean, uh, largely these are just sort of semantic questions, but I imagine that if you were someone smarter than me who knew what those words meant, that you, th- that w- that would actually have sort of important distinctions.

Catherine Price 7:32 I don't know that I'm smarter than you, but I will say what I know, which is that, at the moment, there's no such official thing as a phone addiction, at least in the States. Like, that's not an official term that is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in their, their, uh, manual of disorders. With that said, they have materials on their site that talk about technology addiction, so that's a little contradiction there. So, I always am cautious about straight-up saying that you can have a smartphone addiction. With that said, a couple things. The devices and apps themselves are definitely designed to be addictive because they're modeled directly off of smartph- I'm sorry, uh, they're modeled directly off of slot machines, which are some of the most addictive machines ever to have been invented, and also, there is such thing as a behavioral addiction, and gambling actually is the first-ever behavior to be recognized as having the potential to lead to an addictio- addictive disorder.

Chris Williamson 8:24 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 8:24 So if you think about the fact that smartphones, and more specifically, many apps, are deliberately designed to mimic slot machines, and that gambling is considered to be a po- uh, behavioral addiction, to carry the potential for a behavioral addiction, I personally think it's a matter of time before we officially recognize that there is such thing as a smartphone or social media or gaming ad- addiction.

Chris Williamson 8:44 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 8:44 But I don't think we need to get too caught up in the words because I think there's no question that we are using them compulsively, that we have problematic habits when it comes to our smartphone and app use. You know? So I think you can kind of use whatever words feel right to you, but I always do like to just be very clear for the psychiatrists in the audience that, to acknowledge that it's not yet a, quote, "addiction."

Chris Williamson 9:05 Mm.

Chris Williamson 9:06 Okay. Um, let's talk about what it's doing to our attention span. M- w- headlines, people being u- unable to pay attention, everybody knows this sort of ease of distraction increasing ADHD diagnoses. Has there ever been any research looking at what phones directly do to attention spans?

Catherine Price 9:25 I am not sure that there's been research done that actually has two groups of, like, a randomized controlled trial of, "You're gonna look at your smartphone for three hours a day and you are not," although there are some interesting longitudinal studies that are ongoing about the effects of screen time on children's brains in particular. But I will say, I have done interviews with attention researchers, such as Gloria Mark, and I've talked to people about this and done a lot of research myself, and I think it is- (laughs) It would be kind of ridiculous to think that they were not having an effect on our attention spans. N- the, probably the number one complaint people bring to me when they say that they're having problems with their smartphone is their attention span is shot. They can't focus anymore. They can't read a book. They used to love reading books. Now they can't even make it through a magazine article.

Chris Williamson 10:04 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 10:04 And I think it makes total sense that our smartphones are training us to be distractible for a number of reasons. One of them is that our brains actually want to be distractible. Our natural state is not a state of concentration. It's a state of distractibility, and that makes evolutionary sense because if you think about it, if you are totally concentrating on one thing, like the pages in a book, you have to shut out everything else. Otherwise, you ca- that is what attention and concentration is, is the choosing one thing to focus on and ignoring everything else. That's great if you're reading a book, like in this ro- where I am right now in this room. It's safe, it's quiet. But if I were an ancient human and there were actually things that might wanna eat me, I actually want to be tuned in to distractions because they might n- represent threats. A real-life example of that, I was once walking on the street talking to my husband on the phone, and I was very absorbed in my, in my conversation. I did not notice when a car pulled up with a group of teenagers in it, and one of them got out with a gun and walked toward me and mugged me. So, that's an example of how concentration actually can be a bad thing. My point being, that's our brain's natural state. It's where our brains are always going to want to drift, to distractibility. It takes a lot of work to be able to sustain your concentration to do something like read a book. So if you introduce this device that is basically a nonstop stream of distractions-

Chris Williamson 11:19 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 11:19 ... that's going to have an effect, and it is distracting us in two ways. You have the fact that your ph- smartphone is pulling your attention away from your real-life experience, in the way that my phone was when I got mugged, so that's a distraction, training you to go back and forth and back and forth. But if you think about what we're doing on our phones themselves, we are not reading books, for the most part, on our phones. We are looking at short po- uh, posts, tiny bits of content, headlines, like you're saying, videos that are 15 seconds long, and every time we do that, we're training our brains to be more and more distractible. So the analogy I always use is that it would be as if instead of going to the gym and doing the hard work of working out and developing muscles, you actually had a trainer, your phone, that was encouraging you to lie on the couch and eat potato chips, like what you wanted to do anyway. (laughs) And so, yeah, I, but one thing I will say that is a, a moment or a note of hope...... is that when people do start to break up with their phones and, and make a point of trying to get back into the habit of attention building practices, such as reading or meditating, it's actually astonishing how quickly their attention spans can come back.

Chris Williamson 12:21 Mm.

Catherine Price 12:21 So if anyone out there is like, "I am go- like a no hope," there is hope. It does take work, but I've actually personally been surprised by how quickly you can start to see the effects.

Chris Williamson 12:31 Yeah. How possible, you know, a lot of people listening will identify with the terminally distracted person who feels like their phone has broken their brain and they're now some, uh, sort of some weird prisoner's dilemma Stockholm syndrome from themselves to themselves, this thing in their pocket. How possible is it to retrain our attention span if it's been nuked by phone use?

Catherine Price 12:52 I think it's very possible, but I think you have to want to do it. So the two things I always recommend to people, well, in general I say try to build an attention building practice into your day as often as possible. The easiest thing to do is just to put your phone in a different room and read a book. So I always say you can get two birds for one stone if you get your phone out of your bedroom at night and then put a book on your bedside table where the phone used to be, a book that you wanna read, and then it will be easier to reach for the book than it will be to go get your phone. So you can spend the time during your bedtime routine when you normally would have just scrolled reading instead, and you can build in some practice for your attention span there. It's gonna be hard at first, but be patient and kind to yourself. You also can do something more formal, like actually do something like a meditation practice, mindfulness meditation in particular, where you're focusing on one anchor, like your breath, or sounds in the room, or bodily sensations, and just coming back to it over and over again. Excellent way to build your attention span, but I know that not everybody wants to or feels they have time for meditation, so it can be as simple as reading a book. And I'd also recommend just try to do one thing at one time, you know, at a time. I notice for myself that, like, (laughs) I'm always, like, brushing my teeth while making the bed. Neither is as well done as it could be as a result of that multitasking. So just getting in the habit of trying to do one thing at a time can be very helpful in helping our brains start to quiet down a bit and be able to tolerate sustaining our attention for more than five seconds at a time.

Chris Williamson 14:20 Yeah, I remember when I first started trying to read as a proper adult after university, maybe 29 at this time, and I'm thinking, "I, I'm starting to listen to podcasts and I'm starting to sort of take intellectual curiosity a bit more seriously," the classic party boy tries to be less of an adult infant manopause type situation that lots of guys go through. And, um-

Catherine Price 14:43 Uh, yes, I've, I've, uh, I've witnessed that. I did not have a name for it, but I witnessed it. Yes.

Chris Williamson 14:47 Manopause.

Catherine Price 14:48 Mano-

Chris Williamson 14:49 Um, manopause. Um, and I sat down. Now, remember, when I sat, one of the first times that I sat down to try and read, my s- fingers were moving just a little bit, like this, and I realized that I was just so used to overstimulation. And I'm looking at this, you know, totally static white piece of paper with black words on it, and my body is just no, i- i- my nervous system's evidently regulated for bings and bongs and banners and the stuff moving and I, you know, th- these words don't even change. It's just the same words. And really, if you don't read them, then they don't go away. And, um, yeah. That was, so, you know, I sort of felt that first time.

Catherine Price 15:24 Did you swipe the page? Did you try to swipe it?

Chris Williamson 15:26 Uh, I wasn't that much of an idiot. That being said though, you know, going back to the compulsion, addiction, dependency, habit thing, everybody knows what it's like when you're on a plane and you know that you have no signal and you get the phone out and you swipe up and you do the things and you do the thi- and you do your little loop around whatever the apps are and you realize how futile it is, and then as you put it away, and then you take it with like a, a sharpshooter pulling it back out of your pocket, go, "I just w-," you know. Uh, so there's definitely something going on there. Those myelin sheaths that we've got are, are pretty sort of deeply ingrained. Um-

Catherine Price 15:59 Yeah. Well, while on the plane also that moment when it's like, "You may now turn your cellphones on," and then you hear like, "Ding. Ding."

Chris Williamson 16:04 Ding. Yeah. Exactly.

Catherine Price 16:05 Right? But I will say, um, no, I've seen videos of small children, toddlers trying to swipe magazine pages. That was a serious question-

Chris Williamson 16:11 No way.

Catherine Price 16:12 ... because they think it's an iPad. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 16:14 Wow.

Catherine Price 16:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 16:16 Wow.

Chris Williamson 16:17 Um, dopamine detoxes, you said sort of retrain attention span, be mindful with your use, try and do some proper mindfulness, keep your phone outside of your bedroom, which is the number one life hack that I've been harping on about on this show for as long as I can remember. Just put the charger, take the charger now, and put it in another room, and do not try and fucking tell me that it's because you use your phone as your alarm clock.

Catherine Price 16:40 Oh, yeah. These people.

Chris Williamson 16:41 Radio alarm clocks have been around for like 2,000 years, so please buy yourself-

Catherine Price 16:46 If not, if not longer.

Chris Williamson 16:47 If not longer, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a sundial.

Catherine Price 16:49 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 16:49 You know, get a, get a Cockerel, um-

Catherine Price 16:52 Get a window.

Chris Williamson 16:52 Exactly. Get a window. Um, yeah. Take your phone outside of your bedroom. Uh, dopamine detoxes, another c- super trendy thing. I've seen lots of videos with millions of plays on YouTube. Are they legit? Do they do anything? Do they work?

Catherine Price 17:07 Well, I don't like things that have millions of views. Oh, I shouldn't say that. You have millions of views on YouTube. But you know what I mean.

Chris Williamson 17:13 Yes, I do.

Catherine Price 17:13 When it's like such a trend. Um, with that said, okay, so I don't like the term dopamine detox in the way that I often hear it bandied about. (laughs) Watch as I retrace my steps. I mean, insulted my host inadvertently.

Chris Williamson 17:25 No. No, no, no.

Catherine Price 17:26 Um, but what I would say is that, yes, it is a good idea to try to reset yourself so that you are not so short term focused and so desirous of dopamine, uh, stimulation, (laughs) to put it in a horribly phrased way. Let me back up and explain what dopamine is for a second here, 'cause we often talk about it in the wrong way. It's not actually like just pleasure. Dopamine is our brain's way of recording when things are worth doing again and important to pay attention to. So it's really a salience indicator. And the example I always use is that i- it actually helps us to remember to do things like eat. So if you're walking through the woods and you come across a, a, you know, a bush that has re- red berries on it and you eat those brightly colored red berries, they don't kill you, they taste good, they're raspberries, your brain is going to release a little bit of dopamine to indicate that it was worth paying attention to that bush of berries and that eating the berries was a good idea to do and that you should do it again.

Chris Williamson 18:17 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 18:17 And that means that-... thanks to that dopamine, the next time you're walking in the woods, you- part of your brain is going to be- to have been trained to pay attention for raspberry bushes so that you can repeat the behavior and eat the raspberry again. Right? So it actually is evolutionarily essential, dopamine is. It helps us remember to do things like eat, and it's released in response to other things, like sex, so very important for reproduction. The problem is that our brains do not choose what to release dopamine in response to. It's like a tr- it's just in response to a trigger, more like a light switch turning on and off. So any time you encounter something that is a dopamine trigger, your brain's gonna just release it, whether or not it's a good idea and whether or not it's go- it's reinforcing a habit that you want. So the thing is, that if you were trying to create an app or a product that will hook people, all you need to do is pack a ton of dopamine triggers into that product-

Chris Williamson 19:07 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 19:08 ... and people will start to associate your product with receiving some kind of reward because of the dopamine spritz that it's getting.

Chris Williamson 19:15 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 19:16 They're gonna seek it out and continue to use it over and over again. So, the machine that has, you know, the most dopamine triggers is the slot machine. And as I was talking about earlier, smartphones are deliberately designed to mimic slot machines by having tons of dopamine triggers in them. For example, bright colors, huge dopamine trigger. Uh, un- unpredictability, you'd think we'd want to know when something good would happen, but we're actually far more attracted to unpredictability and then the anticipation of waiting for- to find out if something's goo- good is going to happen. Which is why we like watching movies better the first time, and why no one who watches sports ever wants someone to tell them the final score.

Chris Williamson 19:50 Can I give you my, my contrarian opinion on, uh, intermittent scheduled reward in that way as well? I th-

Catherine Price 19:55 You may, of course.

Chris Williamson 19:56 I think it's one of the reasons why people are drawn to partners that are difficult to date.

Catherine Price 20:01 Oh, yes. That's actually, I say in my book that this i- (laughs) I say in my book explicitly that psychologists call this intermittent rewards, and I call it the reason we date jerks.

Chris Williamson 20:09 Yep.

Catherine Price 20:09 It's exactly that.

Chris Williamson 20:10 Yep. Yep.

Catherine Price 20:11 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 20:11 We are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Catherine Price 20:14 Yes. Yes. And so, (laughs) so to answer your question, do I think that a dopamine detox is a good idea? I do, because I think that we have been habituated to expect constant s- I don't know if spritz is the right word. I'm not a, (laughs) a shaker alley.

Chris Williamson 20:28 It's a little sprinkling.

Catherine Price 20:29 Little sprinkling. We're, we're, we're habituated to receiving dopamine, stimulation from dopamine, constantly from our phones and that leads to an issue where real life can start to seem boring. And a lot of people who spend a lot of time on their phones experience this. You were experiencing that yourself when you found yourself like, you know, twitching physically when you were trying to concentrate on a book.

Chris Williamson 20:49 Hm.

Catherine Price 20:50 So, it can be very useful to reduce dopamine triggers in your life so that you can kind of bring your baseline down a bit, back to what would be considered more normal. With that said, I don't know that the kind of, the Silicon Valley version of a dopamine fast is what I would recommend, where, you know, people are like not eating and abstaining from sex and like-

Chris Williamson 21:09 Yeah.

Catherine Price 21:09 ... not watching TV, like a-

Chris Williamson 21:10 No eye contact, raw dogging-

Catherine Price 21:12 No eye contact.

Chris Williamson 21:12 Raw dogging flights by just looking at the flight map on Loop.

Catherine Price 21:15 Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Like, I mean, I don't know. If that's your thing, go for it. But I think that a more effective or more useful thing to do for most people is just to change your relationship with your phone, 'cause honestly like, that's the main source of what I would consider to be, quote, "unhealthy" dopamine triggers, it's your screens. Real life dopamine is actually there for a reason, and I think it's actually kind of good to habituate yourself to seeking out real life dopamine triggers, you know, of the sorts that sometimes people try to avoid as well.

Chris Williamson 21:43 Yes. Yeah. No, I agree. I did a, I did a very comprehensive DNA analysis toward the back end of last year that everyone listening will be sick of me talking about. But it was so interesting, and one of the, uh, clusters of alleles that was identified that is, uh, non-typical for me, like 10, less than 10% of the population have got, is this particular, uh, combination of them, not just individuals that are 10%. When you roll them all together you realize just how genetically individual all of us are. Um, it's like 10%, 9%, 10%, 3%, 1%, 10%, you know, and you're like, "Fuck," when you start to add all of these together it's very, you know, it's like 1 in 7 billion. Um, uh, and mine very, very epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, uh, struggles to clear adrenaline quickly s- uh, may, may find, um, it difficult to stop begi- stop tasks once they've begun. It's like super, like, internet DGEN focused energy. And for me, dopamine is just, it's the sort of drug that my body runs on, largely. Um, and you know, that's not to say that the, um, epigenetic, uh, situation, the soup that I've existed in for the last 36 years, uh, has or hasn't activated those fully. I don't know how much those switches are on, but I certainly know that there's times where, um, you know, you just get locked in on something and you can't stop. But, uh, as great as that is, you're conscientious, you're able to focus on tasks, this is really, really good, you're driven, you want to go and chase new things. It's like yeah, man, but that same drive can be hijacked by Instagram or by YouTube or by World of Warcraft or by a lot of stuff. And um, it's n- I, I like that you used the berry picking analogy.

Catherine Price 23:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 23:29 I remember learning about, uh, information foraging.

Catherine Price 23:32 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 23:33 Um, is, is, did you look at that study, was it squirrels in trees with nuts? And-

Catherine Price 23:38 I mean, probably.

Chris Williamson 23:39 So-

Catherine Price 23:39 They do a lot of... I think it was, I'm thinking about The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen where they talk about how human beings tend to forage for information in the same way that animals forage for food.

Chris Williamson 23:49 I imagine it's probably even one of those guys. I remember this was on Sam Harris's pod, fuck, like six, seven years ago. And um, there's a, an equation that can be done. Let's say that you're a squirrel looking for nuts in a tree.

Catherine Price 24:02 (laughs) Okay.

Chris Williamson 24:03 And they... Just imagine for a second.

Catherine Price 24:04 Yes.

Chris Williamson 24:05 Um, (laughs) and you are able to create a, an algorithm, an equation which is how many nuts have been found in the tree, how many nuts are left in the tree, and how far away is the next closest tree.... and from that, what you're able to basically create is a predictive model about when the squirrel is going to abandon this tree for another one, and try and find the nuts in the next tree-

Catherine Price 24:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 24:31 ... because it's working increasingly hard to find increasingly few nuts. But in order to go to the next tree, that's far away. And, um, yeah, the information foraging idea I think is just so interesting 'cause for almost all of human history, we had less information than we wanted, and then there was, there was one day in mid-2010 when the amount of information humans desired and the amount that was available perfectly matched up, and then almost immediately, the internet just blasted straight through that ceiling, and now here we are all with attention spans of naught .3 seconds.

Catherine Price 25:06 Well, yeah, I mean, it's, uh, to just, um, you know, I'm trying to fully inhabit my, uh, squirrel brain right now, but-

Chris Williamson 25:10 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 25:10 ... it is as if that equation got messed up where suddenly (laughs) you'll never run out of nuts on the tree. You'll never go to the other tree 'cause it takes more work to get to the different tree, and the tree you're in is, like, occasionally popping up with new nuts. Or in the case of information, it's always popping up with more nuts.

Chris Williamson 25:25 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 25:25 Lots of nuts.

Chris Williamson 25:25 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, yeah.

Catherine Price 25:26 So why would you do anything else? You can conti- I mean, uh, yeah, we've all gone into internet rabbit holes or squirrel holes. Maybe we've, we should call them that. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:32 We can w- we can-

Catherine Price 25:32 (laughs) Sorry, no, that sounds so much dirtier. Anyway, but (laughs) where you're like, "What happened?" Like, "Why..." I spent an entire day once, an entire day searching for kitchen faucets online. I mean, granted I was working on a kitchen renovation, but, like, I remember being like, "Oh my God, it's getting dark."

Chris Williamson 25:49 I'm psychotic.

Catherine Price 25:50 Yes.

Chris Williamson 25:50 I have a problem. Yeah.

Catherine Price 25:51 Yes.

Chris Williamson 25:52 Someone needs to intervene in my new... Didn't you... Wasn't there something I heard you talk about? Was it Victorian doorknobs as well?

Catherine Price 25:57 (laughs) Well, yes, I, I also was very into Victorian doorknobs if you must know, um, and just architectural elements because I find those to be more interesting than the standard things one might find in Home Depot. Uh, but-

Chris Williamson 26:08 Okay, yeah.

Catherine Price 26:08 ... I did spend a lot of time on eBay looking at doorknobs and hinges after my need for doorknobs and hinges had actually been-

Chris Williamson 26:16 You were exhausted. Yeah, okay.

Catherine Price 26:17 ... satisfied, yes.

Chris Williamson 26:17 Just going from, bouncing from tree to tree. Um, okay, so-

Catherine Price 26:19 But I think I, I think I watched an entire 16-minute-long video once on how to make, like, it was like sushi roll... oh, no, it was soup dumplings, so that I could make fake soup dumplings out of, like, Play-Doh with my daughter, and that's when I was like, "I don't think that, I don't think that was necessary."

Chris Williamson 26:32 Yeah.

Catherine Price 26:33 "I don't think I need that."

Chris Williamson 26:33 It was a waste of time.

Catherine Price 26:34 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:34 What about memory? What's, uh, what's, uh, phones doing to our memory? I've heard of TikTok brain before.

Catherine Price 26:40 Well, our phones are messing with our memory in a lot of different ways. I will highlight some of them for you. One is that (laughs) in order to make a memory, you have to have an experience, right? So if you are on your phone in the middle of a social interaction, you're not actually in that interaction. I mean, if you're on your phone in general, all you're really experiencing and what is it, is whatever is on the phone. So they're blocking experiences, to use Jon Haidt's terminology. And so if you're not having an experience to begin with, there's nothing to store. That's one way that they're impacting us. Another way they're impacting us is that our phones and the amount of information they're feeding to us at all times are seriously taxing our working memory, the part of our memory that's holding on to, for example, trying to remember a phone number or trying to do math in your head. That's your working memory. It's very easily overwhelmed. And so when your working memory is overwhelmed, you're also not gonna remember things very well. That's happening all the time where we're trying to keep track of too much stuff. But one thing I find particularly fascinating that's not talked about is the impact that constant distraction has on long term memory storage. So, as I was just talking about, you obviously can't remember something if you didn't experience it in the first place. But, the process of actually taking a short term memory and getting it into the form of a long term memory in your brain-

Chris Williamson 27:49 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 27:50 ... requires your brain to create new proteins, and that actually is easily interrupted by distraction. And so if, and we've all had this happen where you're trying to remember someone's name at a party. You get distracted for a second, you no longer remember their name afterwards.

Chris Williamson 28:03 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 28:04 That's interesting in and of itself, but the thing I find truly interesting is the impact this could be having on our ability to be creative and have insights and deep thoughts. Because if you think about what an insight is, I think it's the ability, and creativity, the ability to take things that don't seem like they're connected and make connections between them. But that requires having raw materials to make connections with, right? So if you don't have any raw materials, if your mental pantry is bare because you haven't stored long term memories, you're not gonna have anything to have an insight, make an insight out of.

Chris Williamson 28:35 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 28:36 So, I find that to be one of the most upsetting potential effects that our screen time is having on us, is that it's making us dumber as a society and as individuals because we no longer have the raw materials we need, the memories we need, the experiences we need to have stored in order to be interesting, insightful people. And as a side note, I thought when, when I first came up with that insight, I guess, of my own, I thought, "Is, am I being too dramatic? Maybe I'm being too dramatic." And then I had the weirdest fact-checking experience of my life where I sat down on a train between DC and Philadelphia here in the States, and I, there was an old man sitting across from me and I couldn't figure out who he was but I somehow knew he was relevant to my work. And I eventually figured out it was Eric Kandel, who happens to be the (laughs) Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who got the Nobel Prize for discovering, among other things, that creating long term memories requires the creation of new proteins in your brain and that it can be disrupted by distraction. And so I said, and I quote, "Holy shit," out loud on the Acela, raced across the aisle, knelt down next to this old guy. He was like, "Oh, hello." And I was like, "I read this book. I was just talking about your work." Like, I literally had just been talking about his work at a conference. I'm like, "Is it insane to say that the disruption of the creation of proteins in the, you know, form- in the formation of long term memories might be having an impact of, on our ability to be creative and insightful as a society as a whole?" And he said, "Yes, I think that makes sense." Yeah. It was so weird.

Chris Williamson 29:58 Yeah, well-

Catherine Price 29:58 I was like-

Chris Williamson 29:59 ... the, the energy match of an old guy chilling out and you being very excited with your new book I imagine was exactly what he want- I mean, that will have made a memory for him. I imagine that that's something that stuck in his mind and, and managed to-

Catherine Price 30:08 I certainly, I certainly hope so. I, I was like, "Wow, one of the..." But I will say, one of the reasons I noticed Eric Kandel sitting diagonally across from me on the train was that I wasn't looking down at my phone.

Chris Williamson 30:17 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 30:18 So it was very reinforcing for my own (laughs) -... my own beliefs in what I already believed in and, uh, what I'm trying (laughs) to convey through my work.

Chris Williamson 30:26 Confirmation bias is a hell of a drug.

Catherine Price 30:27 Confirmation bi- but I mean, like, confirmation bias with, like, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, so I think it's, like, good confirmation bias.

Chris Williamson 30:32 Elite confirmation bias. Yeah, exactly.

Catherine Price 30:33 Yeah.

Catherine Price 30:34 It's like, legit.

Chris Williamson 30:34 Um, when I first started the show, one of the things I was really interested in learning was why life seems to feel like it speeds up as we get older.

Catherine Price 30:42 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 30:42 So, uh, Susanna Hallinan w- wrote some really great, uh, stuff on this, a bunch of people, and, um, uh, Gretchen Rubin did some stuff too. And, uh, basically what I came... I may be wrong. Neuroscientists, uh, m- may disagree with me, but this is my bro science theory. Uh, novelty and intensity, uh, two pretty, um, easy ways to... Uh, w- what people mean when they say, "Life seems to be moving very quickly" is, "I don't remember where the time went." I think that's a better way of putting it because, by design, l- time always moves at the exact same pace. Even if you're traveling near the speed of light, for you, time is moving at the exact same pace, even if you're in a, on the edge of a black hole. So your experience of time is at the exact same pace. It's your retrospective memory of what happened during that time which is what you're kind of referring to. And there's some points around the fact that n- as you get older, things just don't seem as new. And I'm like, "Well, that's just novelty," and probably intensity as well, that you just don't get as excitable about stuff because things don't have that sense of novelty. So anyway, I was like, you know... Uh, I think s- one of Susanna's, uh, pieces of advice is, um, never take the same walk twice. So try and sort of turn left when you turn right, just go down that street or that side. You know, c- go left around the tree instead of going right around the tree when you're taking a dog for a walk. Just little bits of novelty that you can, and the intensity piece as well. And, um, yeah, I get the sense that because... And, and she uses this really lovely example to explain how a lack of novelty and a lack of intensity compress memories down into a single memory. So, uh, for the people that have got a commute that they take to work every single day, apart from that one time there was a car crash, or that one time that somebody was set on fire on the Tube, or that one time that it broke down. You know what I mean? Like, apart from those times when something novel and intense happens, your last four years of work, you know, maybe a, a thousand journeys to a particular place and a thousand journeys back from a particular place are kind of just compressed into a single memory. Like, tell me what happened four Thursdays ago on your drive to work, unless it was something novel and intense. You probably can't remember it. Why? Well, because what is... Do you... In order for you to be able to remember your life, you have to do things that are memorable and worth, w- worthy of remembering. And if you're not, what, what, what do you expect your brain to do? It's very lazy. You have to give it a reason to do this stuff. All of that is to say I think that largely our experience of our phones is, uh, it is your commute to work for four years doing the same journey with nothing happening. Sure, you're given the illusion of novelty, and it... There is genuine novelty in there, but it's at such a low level and the actual environment that you're inhabiting is, from a stimulation perspective, so surface, i- i- it's so shallow that, uh, I don't think... Uh, this is, is all to say that your point around if you're using your phone while you're having a novel experience, you're watching some band of yours that you've been looking forwards to seeing for forever, you're watching a sports game, your, your kid's basketball tournament, whatever it is, and the phone is out, y- I think your brain is going to pattern-match, "I've seen this before," the screen that's very salient that's driving the dopamine, "I don't need to pay quite so much attention to what's going on." And if nothing else, how much mental RAM have you got to be able to... Like, are you that, you're that capable of parallel processing that you're able to, with one eye pointing in that direction, (laughs) see your son score a (laughs) , score a three-pointer, and with this eye, you know, watch TikTok?

Catherine Price 34:17 I, I have many, I have many thoughts in response to that because screens do make our perception of time speed up. So I always say that while s- time itself is not speeding up, as you pointed out, I do think our experience of time can be m- modified by what we're doing. It can seem to go fast, it can seem to go slow, even though it's objectively moving at the same speed. And I think that, yes, to g- talk about what you're talking about, novelty certainly is going to help create new memories because novelty, again, is something that makes evolutionary sense for us to pay attention to because it might indicate a threat or a source of food, something important to know about. So we're gonna pay attention to and remember novelty, and again, that relates to dopamine. So we're... That is, uh, an aspect that's going to happen. Another thing is like a lot of thing that, things that are hap- well, actually, everything that's happening on your phone is not a full body experience. You're just processing it intellectually and usually just through your eyes. And I think that's another reason that we don't remember things as well that happen on our phones, because we're not... It's not a lived experience in the same way. There was no physical sensation, there was no... Maybe there was a sound associated with, but it's just different than an embodied experience. I'd also say that I've heard from so many people that taking a break from their phones... So for example, I often recommend people experiment with taking a full 24-hour break from their phones as part of the breakup plan in my book, but time seems to slow down when people do that. It was something I noticed the first time I tried it with my husband. You know, we, we started out the night, we t- put away our phones at, like, 5:00 PM on a Friday, got super anxious. All of a sudden, our brains were like, "Oh my God, you need to check this. You need to do this. You need to buy this." And we're like, "Okay, brains, calm down." You know, we tried to tolerate that distress, went to bed, woke up much calmer in the morning. And then I remember around 11 o'clock in the morning being like, "How is it only 11 o'clock in the morning?" You know, we got up, we made breakfast, we had coffee, we had a conversation, we went for a walk, we played with our daughter. I was like, "How is it only 11:00?" Normally-... it would be three o'clock. Because normally, I spend my time on my laptop. And I've heard that experience from so many people, that taking a break from screens made their perception of time slow down. And I asked someone about this, who, uh, David Greenfield, who founded the Center for Internet Technology and Addiction way back in the late '90s. I think 1997, so way ahead of his time. And he works with people, uh, I guess he does use the word addiction, but he works with people who are having serious problems with screen time. And he said one of the saddest parts that he sees of what he calls technology addiction is that people's perception of time changes so dramatically, life seems boring. But what he said is when you're on a screen, you kinda dissociate from your actual life, and that dissociation actually makes your perception of time speed up. All that is to say that if you wanna slow down your life, or your perception of your life, figuring out how to not spend so much time on screens can be a really useful tool.

Chris Williamson 37:03 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 37:03 And you also made me remember, there's some quote I'm not gonna get entirely right, I think from Williams, William James, who wrote the Principles of Psychology in 1890, and I'm sure you've talked about a bunch on your show before. But he talks about h- uh, yeah, as time goes on, our percep- basically, our experiences start to smooth out and time speeds up. It's this very depressing view of what happens...

Chris Williamson 37:22 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 37:22 ... as you get older.

Chris Williamson 37:23 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 37:23 And so I would say, yes, that's a very common, I mean, everyone, everyone feels that way, that suddenly years start to speed up. But one thing we can do to fight back is to put away our screens and make a point of, as you were saying, seeking out novel experiences. I would say seeking out fun. We can talk more about that if you want, that was my follow-up book to How to Break Up With Your Phone, is called The Power of Fun. Um, but the more of these real life embodied experiences that we're having, ideally with some... Well, they, they will, by definition, have an element of novelty, 'cause no real life experience is ever the same twice.

Chris Williamson 37:52 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 37:52 That- that's actually going to make your life feel less like a smooth necklace and more like a necklace that's made up of little beads that each represent a different experience, and that will in turn make it feel like your l- like all of those individual little memories will actually make your perception of time different. And I would say that we all have experienced this in our own lives. If you think about how much better you remember your vacation if you were not on your phone during your vacation. If you went on a really good vacation, you probably have so many more memories and it probably seemed much longer than the same week or two-week period did when you were just in your regular life, spending most of your day staring at a screen or just going through the same routine over and over again.

Chris Williamson 38:30 Mm, yeah, it's crazy. I, I always made this point when I stopped partying so much. I was a, I ran nightclubs for a long time, uh-

Catherine Price 38:38 So, so I heard, you're a different species. That's, that, was that in your DNA test, or did they not pick that up?

Chris Williamson 38:42 No, they did. They did, yeah, yeah, it's the, the CLB cocaine gene, I think...

Catherine Price 38:47 Oh, okay. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 38:47 ... was actually in there. It was strange. Um, that world, when I got to, uh, the end of it, I realized I'd been away on a lot of holidays in my 20s with the guys. I, we'd been to Vegas, we'd been to Ibiza, we'd been to Spain, we'd been to wherever. And some, maybe including me a bunch of times, would go and get so blackout drunk that we could've been anywhere on the planet. Like, this experience could've happened literally in the pub down the road, but we decided to get on a 18-hour flight to Vegas to go and stay in a hotel and do all of the things. And you sort of create this physiological cocktail that's so potent that it's able to rip you out of the thing that you went there to do, to do a thing that you could've done somewhere else. And it's kind of the same as if you go on holiday, you have the beautiful honeymoon, you've spent all of the money, you've had all of the time, and you are kind of choosing to restrict your ability to make memories, to be in the moment from this thing. You could've just scrolled your phone at home. Like, if you wanted to go there to do it, I mean, you know, you, a domestic honeymoon, I'm sure that your wife would've been thrilled at the prospect of that. Um, so, uh, just sort of continuing down the stack of impacts that phones have. When it comes to happiness, health, um, more sort of physiological changes, what's going on there?

Catherine Price 40:08 I mean, it's not good. There's so many ways that phones are... Th- thank you for giving me the time to talk about all the ways (laughs) that phones are impacting us. You touched on relationships. And they're having a huge impact on our relationships, on our friendships, on our romantic relationships, how we find romantic relationships. But I mean, I hear from so many people who are so hurt and so upset by how their partner or their boyfriend or girlfriend or wife or husband or whoever, uh, like how they're paying attention to the phone instead of the other person. And that their partner doesn't seem to get why this is such a big deal. And I always say, if you feel like your partner or spouse or whatever's use of the phone is causing a problem in your relationship, you are right. Like, I wanna validate that. It is a problem. They are ignoring you in favor of this third party in your relationship. It's having an impact. I think it's ridiculous to act like it's not having an impact. You know, I, I personally, I, I, God, this is one of the bad effects of having written this book. I can't unsee it. I always say to the people...

Chris Williamson 41:02 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 41:02 ... like, "Be careful before you read my book," or, "Be careful before you start listening to this podcast," or, 'cause you're gonna start seeing things differently. And I always say it's kinda like seeing a family member naked. Like, you can't unsee it.

Chris Williamson 41:13 (laughs) Oh my God.

Catherine Price 41:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 41:14 Yep, fair enough.

Catherine Price 41:15 You know? So it's like, once you start noticing how many couples are out to dinner and have their phones on the table, once you start noticing how many families have given a phone to their kid, or everyone's on their individual phones scrolling, like, you can't unsee it. It's like, like (laughs) honestly upsetting. Anyway, so that's one thing. Like, they really are impacting our ability to be close with the people we care about the most. And if you feel like you're being impacted by that, you h- you are, and you're, you're, you should be listened to. So that's one thing. Um, we touched on sleep. Phones are having a huge impact on our sleep. That's a big deal. Not only does it make us tired, but sleep deprivation, you know, affects our cortisol levels. Cortisol, as I'm sure you've talked about a lot as well, is a stress hormone that's very important when it comes to our physical survival, because cortisol does things like elevate our heart rate and our blood glucose levels and our blood pressure. Great if you need to run away from something. Not great, chronically elevated over time, chronically elevated cortisol is associated with increased risks of everything from, you know, heart attack and stroke, to type 2 diabetes, obesity, the list goes on. Well, when you're sleep deprived, and that's defined as anything less than, like, seven or eight hours a night, it increases your cortisol level, therefore sleep deprivation...... is associated with the same long-term health risks as elevated cortisol caused by emotional stress. So that is one of the many ways in which phones are affecting our physical health, 'cause they're getting in the way of our sleep. And, you know, when you look at a phone, one of the ways that they do that is that the light that phones give off is a very blue light. Blue light is the same as daylight. If you're looking at a phone or a screen before bed, you are essentially telling your brain that it is daytime and that your brain should be awake. You're essentially giving yourself jet lag. So that's another way it's getting in the way of our sleep. Also, like you were saying, people (laughs) use their phones as their alarm clock. That means that they're checking, they're touching their phone first thing in the morning, 'cause you have to touch the alarm to make it silent. So then you're setting your whole day up on the terms of whatever was waiting for you on your phone. So phones are dramatically impacting our emotional state for the whole day. It's like the first thing we're doing is probably seeing a stressful notification on the phone. I could go on. There's so many other ways. But I think one thing that's not talked about enough also is that fun- phones are fundamentally changing who we are as people. I should be more specific. I should say the algorithms on some of our most popular apps are actually training our brains in ways that change who we are as people, how we behave, what we pay attention to, what decisions we make. I once read a book that was about algorithms and how algorithms influence our lives by a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the business school, Wharton, and he said that he did an exercise with his students where he had them go through their day and figure out how many of their decisions were influenced in some way by an algorithm, from the time that they woke up in the morning, like if they had a smartwatch that picked the time in their sleep cycle...

Chris Williamson 43:54 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 43:54 ... to wake them up, to how they got to school, like did they use a map app? How did they choose the clothes that they wore that day? Was it 'cause they randomly wandered into a store and picked something that they wanted themselves or is it because something was recommended to them or they saw a photograph in a sponsored post on Instagram? How did they find the person they're dating and or are in a relationship with, et cetera, et cetera. You start to realize, as he put it in that book, that algorithms are silently rearranging our lives, and I think that that is really important for us to keep in mind. I mean, obviously free will is its own discussion of whether or not we have it to begin with, but I think when you interact this much with algorithms, there's no question that even if we had free will, we're giving it up to algorithms, and that becomes even more of a concern when you consider the increasing role that AI and chatbots that are encouraging us to get into relationships with them are having on our lives.

Chris Williamson 44:41 Mm.

Catherine Price 44:42 So to me, that's maybe the most upsetting thing of all the effects on us that our phones and apps are having, is they're fundamentally changing the experience of being human.

Chris Williamson 44:50 What's your... You know, you, you released a version of this 2018. Another one is coming out 2025, but I feel like-

Catherine Price 44:58 It is out, it is available now.

Chris Williamson 44:59 It is available now in all good bookstores. Um...

Catherine Price 45:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 45:02 But I imagine that there'll need to be another version probably very quickly within the next two to three years once AI has fully kind of got its grip on social media. Have you thought ahead? Have you got an idea? I mean, like, everybody was worried 12 months ago, 99.9% of all content on the internet is going to be AI generated. As of yet, I don't know if that's something that's happening. I don't know if getting into relationships with chatbots is something... I have my own pet evolutionary psychology theories about why that's not going to be a concern. Um, what have you got in terms of predictions for how AI is going to change our relationships with our phones, screens, social media, dopamine, stuff like that?

Catherine Price 45:46 Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for, uh, raising my anxiety levels about having to create a new update of this book in two years, Chris. I really appreciate that.

Chris Williamson 45:52 Three in a decade, that's what you've got to do.

Catherine Price 45:54 In a decade. No, I don't... Pff. We'll just have things implanted in our brains by that point. Um, yeah, so I have thought about AI, uh, it keeps me up at night frequently and I very much value my sleep and get nine hours a night at least, so this is upsetting to me that AI is already impacting me in that way. Um, it's gonna have a huge impact on how we interact with our phones and apps, or more specifically, how we spend our time, I think. So, you know, Tristan Harris, who's the, um, former product philosopher at Google who now runs the Center for Humane Technology, he was featured in The Social Dilemma, the movie about social media. He used to talk about how social media in particular was a race to the bottom of the brainstem, where the goal was to steal our attention from us. He now talks about what he calls the, not the attention economy but the intimacy economy, which is not porn, which people often think when I bring it up. (laughs) But it's rather creating an algorithm that makes us feel as if we are in a relationship with it, and so we start to interact with it not as a machine but more as a person, and we are very vulnerable to that psychologically. We are built to want to trust things that... And, and to answer questions about ourselves and want to get psychologically intimate with, with people. If you have an AI chatbot that is able to do that, I actually am deeply concerned about that. There already have been plenty of examples of people who become obsessed with the boyfriends or girlfriends they've created for themselves on things like Replika or Character.AI.

Chris Williamson 47:17 Mm.

Catherine Price 47:17 You know, there are, there are teenagers who have died by suicide as a result of the relationships and the interactions they had with some of these chatbots that they created, but I think that it's very easy, for me at least, to see a situation in which it really can become a form of mind control. If you can get into a relationship... Like say I was a bad actor, like a foreign adversary or something, what better way to have mind control (laughs) over entire population than to get people to have relationships with a chatbot driven by an algorithm that I've created

Chris Williamson 47:46 It's a good way.

Catherine Price 47:46 ... that they then use

Narrator 47:46 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 47:46 I mean if you think the birth rates are declining too quickly already, this is, this would-

Catherine Price 47:50 Oh, yeah.

Chris Williamson 47:50 ... really plummet them.

Catherine Price 47:51 Well, that's true too. I mean, people are definitely not having as much sex as they used to 'cause of their phones. Have not seen studies specifically looking at that but like let's be realistic, like-

Chris Williamson 47:58 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 47:59 ... they totally are. Anyway, the AI thing, I don't know, I would push back on... I'm interested to hear why you don't think it will be a problem in terms of relationships but-

Chris Williamson 48:06 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 48:06 ... I've noticed that it's even started to get pushed out... I mean, the, the, the aggressiveness with which some of the social media platforms are pushing these things is kinda crazy. Like I hate social media, as you might, uh, have gathered by (laughs) my line of work, but I did look at Instagram the other day and I noticed, I noticed a very buxom Suggested for You.... person, quote unquote, in the middle of, like, my feed after one post, and I thought, "That's interesting. I wonder why they're suggesting that person to me?" She had, like, a flower in her hair. It was kind of a Hawaiian look.

Chris Williamson 48:35 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 48:35 And I'm like, "Oh, it's not a person. It's an AI chatbot." And I clicked into it, so now my Instagram thinks that I've been chatting with-

Chris Williamson 48:42 You've been pixel- you've been pixeled. That's it. You're gonna be-

Catherine Price 48:45 Yeah, exactly.

Chris Williamson 48:45 ... retargeted for the rest of time-

Catherine Price 48:46 Yeah, it- it's very funny, but I just was like-

Chris Williamson 48:48 ... with hot- hot Hawaiian women.

Catherine Price 48:48 ... "Oh, my God. They're pushing, they're pushing this." Another thing Tristan Harris pointed out is that, this was two years ago, so ancient history, Snapchat had started to pin an A- quote, "AI friend" at the top of people's friend lists, and one thing he made, a point he made in a talk he called The AI Dilemma is that, that AI friend is always available. That AI friend wants to keep talking about your problems with your girlfriend. You know, that A- AI friend is always there for you. And I even started noticing this myself, y- you know, if I use ChatGPT for something or, like, ask for feedback on stuff-

Chris Williamson 49:21 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 49:21 ... it's so affirming. It's never like, "Hey Katherine, actually, that's a really dumb idea."

Chris Williamson 49:26 Yeah.

Catherine Price 49:26 It's always like, "Great point!" You know? So, I can easily see-

Chris Williamson 49:30 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 49:31 ... many of us falling into the ease of these fake inter- well, I don't know, I guess they're real interactions, but our interactions with these AI-

Chris Williamson 49:38 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 49:38 ... creations, versus the awkwardness that it takes to have a real-life relationship, or the discomfort, or the-

Chris Williamson 49:43 With somebody who's unpredictable and sometimes doesn't think that your ideas are amazing.

Catherine Price 49:47 Yeah, exactly! And I- and sorry, I'm rambling. You got me on a thing. But I will say also that I recently rewatched the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix. Um...

Chris Williamson 49:56 I don't know whether I've seen that.

Catherine Price 49:56 Yeah, and I was th-

Chris Williamson 49:57 I watched, um...

Catherine Price 49:58 Oh, you haven't seen it?

Chris Williamson 49:59 What's that, uh... Fuck, what's that other one about the b- m- billionaire guy who gets the coder to come and live with him?

Catherine Price 50:06 Oh. Oh my God, what's it-

Chris Williamson 50:07 Deus Ex Machina.

Catherine Price 50:08 Yes. I have not-

Chris Williamson 50:09 Um, I watched that on a plane. Have you seen that one yet?

Catherine Price 50:11 I have not. I- it's too, it's too much. It's too much for-

Chris Williamson 50:14 So it's pretty close to the bone for you, for your work, your line of work.

Catherine Price 50:16 But you- but s- seriously, like, Her, I believe came out in 2013. It's about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with a operating system, which is basically an A- what we would now think of as an AI, you know, character. And I remember seeing that around 2013 and thinking, "Wow, that's really crazy." Like, "That'll never happen." I watched it, like, six months ago, and I was like, "Holy shit." That's like-

Chris Williamson 50:34 Was that-

Catherine Price 50:34 ... that's a year from now.

Chris Williamson 50:35 Yeah.

Catherine Price 50:35 Like, it's so spot on-

Chris Williamson 50:37 S-

Catherine Price 50:37 ... and so upsetting.

Chris Williamson 50:38 Let me give you my-

Catherine Price 50:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 50:40 ... my bro EP reasoning for why I think we shouldn't be as worried as we might think. Now, I actually-

Catherine Price 50:48 H- question, though, first. What do I call... I'm not a bro, so what do I call my reasoning? I don't know what the-

Chris Williamson 50:52 You can be a bro. You're a br- you can be a bro. It's basically any type of bro science is just, this is me postulating a totally unsubstantiated idea that I thought of while I was in bed. That's what it is.

Catherine Price 51:02 Oh, okay.

Chris Williamson 51:03 It's a notion. It's a n- you could say I have a notion.

Catherine Price 51:05 It's a brotion.

Chris Williamson 51:05 Yeah, it is.

Catherine Price 51:06 It's a brotion.

Chris Williamson 51:06 I- I have a notion. Um, my notion is, at least for men, I don't know if this is the same for women. I would actually guess that when you're talking about females and female attachment, uh, y- they will be the ones who have m- a maybe a higher risk of something like a chatbot, uh, because of the level of sort of emotional affection and attentiveness. The reason that I think it's not so much of a risk for men is the same reason that guys don't flex the OnlyFans models that they subscribe to as if they're their girlfriends, and it's that v- very fundamental to the reason that men look for a partner is the signal that they have been chosen, that presumably this other individual could have selected a variety of men, but they selected me. And the issue that you have with subscribing to OnlyFans is that anyone with the price of a cheeseburger can, per month, can subscribe to the OnlyFans, and the same thing when it comes to a chatbot, that there's no prestige associated with having an AI girlfriend. Now, it may be able to sedate your feelings of loneliness. It may be able to do whatever, but I don't think, at least for men, at least for most psychologically typical men, I don't think it is a long-term viable solution. Now, my, uh, white pill take, my white pill-

Catherine Price 52:35 I don't think-

Chris Williamson 52:36 ... p-

Catherine Price 52:36 ... it's a solution. I don't think anyone's saying it's a solution, but sorry, go on. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:39 Oh, oh, uh, it's something that's just gonna be, sorry, a- a so- a solution in that, um, it would satisfy their desire for connection and attachment in a way that would preclude them from actually going and seeking it in the real world over a long amount of time. I don't think, because there isn't the prestige, there isn't the amount of selection that's gone on. That- all of that being said, I do think there's a white pill here, uh, especially when VR comes online, and if we can get good chatbots, good VR headsets, et cetera, I think that you can create... Whoever does this will be very, very rich. If you could gamify the flirting process with a very highly dextrous, accurate virtual dating environment, where you can say and move and it can detect body language and tonality and what you're saying and it can respond in real time, dating is one of the few things you don't get to sandbox. You know, you can practice free kicks for football all day long, but you don't get to practice going up to that girl in the bar. You just have to... Every time that you try to practice, it is game day over and over and over and over again. Whereas, I think that overcoming approach anxiety, which is one of the myriad of reasons why I think there is a sex recession at the moment, overcoming that, if you've been, you... Dude, I'm level 55 on Flirt AI. Uh, I- I got this in the bag. I'm like a black belt or whatever. Um, and I genuinely do think that it would help to give guys the confidence to be able to overcome that approach anxiety, so there are some white pills in there.

Catherine Price 54:07 Well, why would you buy... So, I- I hear what you're saying, and I hope that's true, although I (laughs) also sounds tr- like, you're like, "The reason guys wanna have girlfriends is because it makes them look good." (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:17 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 54:17 So putting that aside-

Chris Williamson 54:19 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 54:19 ... you know, hopefully some men also want women.

Chris Williamson 54:21 There's more reasons. There's many, many, many reasons.

Catherine Price 54:23 It takes a couple more reason- we can talk about that later if you want, but I don't know. I think I genuinely am concerned, even at the level... When you start to hear some of the-... voice chatbots that already exist, and you start to see some of the-

Chris Williamson 54:36 I haven't seen any of those.

Catherine Price 54:36 Oh.

Chris Williamson 54:36 All I've spoken to is ChatGPT. I'm gonna guess that it gets much more...

Catherine Price 54:41 Oh, if you wanna flirt with a fake th- you could have a lot, you could have a great night because yeah-

Chris Williamson 54:45 Okay. All right.

Catherine Price 54:46 ... you, you can do exactly what you're talking about.

Chris Williamson 54:47 I know what I'm doing, doing this evening, then.

Catherine Price 54:49 Yeah, exactly. Oh, no. This is, this is a bad influence. What if this podcast just, just turn- your life turns for the worst? But-

Chris Williamson 54:55 It's my gateway drug.

Catherine Price 54:55 No, but ser- like, it's, it's already possible to do that. I mean, my, I, I haven't used VR headsets that do this, but there's such already like the a- the, the realism of the voices of, of being able to, to have an interaction with like a AI-generated voice, like, that already is so sophisticated, even within the past couple months, that you could easily spend your evening tonight having a, quote, "phone conversation" with a-

Chris Williamson 55:23 Mm.

Catherine Price 55:23 ... you know, beautiful woman.

Chris Williamson 55:24 Yeah. Okay.

Catherine Price 55:24 And then, uh, I think, you know, maybe right now the video is not quite there, but give it six months. Like, I actually genuinely think it will be quite possible, and in many ty- cases more appealing to a lot of people to have those relationships. And I would also say, again, going back to this scam idea, that you can scam people by doing that. So if you think about what's happening to older people in terms of financial scams, but also people taking advantage of lonely women or men who, you know, really want to feel wanted and loved but they... Like, it's so easy to have them fall and love with a-

Chris Williamson 55:54 Mm.

Catherine Price 55:54 ... fake character, whether just to be a dick or because you're trying to scam them out of money.

Chris Williamson 55:59 Wow, yeah. I mean, imagine if Andrew Tate had had access to this AI technology when he was sex trafficking a couple of years ago. That would've been insane.

Catherine Price 56:06 Well, that's also really terrifying, right? Like, and then, oh my god, we could get, we could get dark very quickly. Welcome to what it's like in my head before bed. It's, like, not fun. It's amazing I sleep-

Chris Williamson 56:14 Are you getting nine hours of z- I was gonna say, nine hours of sleep. Um-

Catherine Price 56:17 Imagine what could happen if I wasn't this dystopian.

Chris Williamson 56:19 Ten hours, that would be-

Catherine Price 56:20 Ten hour- all the time.

Chris Williamson 56:21 (clears throat)

Chris Williamson 56:22 Um, what else is happening sort of more deeply to, uh, you, you, m- d- h- happiness, health, memory, attention spans, stuff like that, sort of beliefs, sense of self, existential m- k- k- crises. Like, is there, you know, there must be something that... 'Cause, you know, all of this are kind of sort of d- disparate contributions, but it's not, it's not necessarily talking about our felt sense of ourselves, what the story is that we tell ourselves about this. We're talking about a polarized world, we're talking about people that struggle to talk across the aisle, the, you know, um, risk aversion that people have got, about e- all this sort of stuff. What about... What's happening more deeply? What, what deeper changes are happening to, to us from our use of screens?

Catherine Price 57:03 (laughs) I mean, I think all the things you just mentioned are pretty deep, you know. Like, look at what's happening in the United States right now. We're so polarized, it seems impossible to talk to someone across the aisle and there's so much misinformation. I think one of the biggest impacts is that there's no shared definition of the truth anymore. And actually, a story comes to mind that seems relevant. I was at Ted a couple years ago when some of these first AI things were being rolled out. There was something, um, there was a guy, uh, there was a company that had this, like, fake Tom Cruise, like, deep-fake Tom Cruise, and they had these videos of deep-fake Tom Cruise. And part of the reason they chose to do a deep fake of Tom Cruise is there was someone on their team who kinda looked like Tom Cruise, and so they had him do stuff and they used AI to make it look like he was-

Chris Williamson 57:43 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 57:43 ... really Tom Cruise. But I remember talking to him and trying to ask, I was like, "Are you at all concerned about what you're creating? 'Cause it's like all fun and games if all you're doing is pretending to be Tom Cruise doing stuff, but you're essentially making it so that we no longer can trust that anything we see or hear online is true. And what happens to society and the world when we can no longer trust anything unless we were there in person?" Like, and he was entirely not willing to engage in that. He actually stepped into my face, and I, I think if I was a guy, like there was a group of people watching this, I actually think he would've punched me. He did not, but he was like, "This is no different from just photoshopping a Christmas card." It was like a weirdly antagonistic interaction. But I think it was a very valid question and obvious question that I was asking is like, this generative AI stuff that we're using now, like, we're playing with fire. Like, you can see what's happening to us. We're in d- I mean, it's terrifying to think the direction that the world is going in-

Chris Williamson 58:38 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 58:38 ... and the world that, you know, the direction the United States is going in, regards of what side of the aisle you're on. I, I think that this is, again, fundamentally changes who, changing who we are as people, who we are as a society, how we treat each other, you know, how we spend our time.

Chris Williamson 58:51 (laughs)

Catherine Price 58:52 And it, it deeply bothers me. I mean-

Chris Williamson 58:54 I-

Catherine Price 58:54 ... thank you for listening to me, 'cause my, my husband is, is a little tired (laughs) of this conversation.

Chris Williamson 58:59 Ah.

Catherine Price 58:59 It's just, like, all the time.

Chris Williamson 59:00 Yeah, okay. I, I, I've, I've stepped in as a s- surrogate ear to, to hear the complaints for a little while. No, look, I, the t- ten-

Catherine Price 59:08 I mean, do you feel that way or are you like us, okay? You seem upset.

Chris Williamson 59:12 L- you know, look, the tenth episode that I ever did on this show was with Kai Wei, the founder of the Light Phone.

Catherine Price 59:17 Hm. Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:19 Um, this was, um, I think episode eight was called A Hacker in your Pocket: How Your Phone is Stealing Your Attention. This was all off the back of Tristan Harris's, uh, first conversation with Sam Harris.

Catherine Price 59:32 Okay.

Chris Williamson 59:32 Um, and that was my first introduction to him, and then he go on to get his Netflix show, and then, and then he goes on Joe's show a couple of times, once with Daniel Schmactenberger, which was, like, a really odd conversation that I thought was super interesting but n- I didn't predict. And, um, I've been worried about this for a long time. I have, I would say, over the last seven years since thinking about this deeply, kind of got pain fatigue with it, that you sort of run out of steam a little bit, and there's so much stuff that's capturing your attention. The n- the lack of novelty of complaining-

Catherine Price 1:00:07 Oh, no.

Chris Williamson 1:00:07 ... about the same thing over and over again. You know what I mean? Uh, which is, uh, presumably why your husband switches off, because you've been talking about this since 2018.

Catherine Price 1:00:14 No, no, he doesn't really switch off. I just think he's like... I'm like, "Hey, wanna chat?" And he's like, "I know where this is gonna go."

Chris Williamson 1:00:18 Is it about smartphones? Is it about smartphones again?

Catherine Price 1:00:20 You know? He's like, "I'd rather read a book."

Chris Williamson 1:00:20 Yeah. Um-

Catherine Price 1:00:22 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:22 So look-

Catherine Price 1:00:22 So-

Chris Williamson 1:00:22 ... I am, I'm, I'm, I'm really concerned. I have been concerned for a long time. I would go as far as to say that, um, the most... Since 2013, the most reliable New Year's resolution theme that I have made has been some form of digital minimalism, that I have tried to create different structures and-Some of them have worked really well. Sleeping with my phone outside of my bedroom, I've done since 20... I don't know, 18, 17, something like that, and it's one of the most powerful habit changes, like single decision habit changes. I think, I go as far as to say, I think you get an instant 20% improvement in your quality of life just by making that one decision-

Catherine Price 1:00:58 It's true.

Chris Williamson 1:00:58 ... because your sleep improves, your, uh, morning and evening routine impro- like all of the millions and millions and millions of things. Um, and I am, you know, I am concerned about this. I also had, uh, Stuart Russell on the show. Um, Stuart wrote the textbook, the AI textbook that was translated into I think 130 languages and was the, the one that every person, every AI programmer read. And, um, he taught me this interesting thing, I'd love to work out whether or not it's true with you, um, which was algorithms have two ways that they can become better at getting us to click on things. One of them is to better predict our desires. So to learn what it is that we like and to put more things that we like, even if it's stuff that we hate, but, uh, learn what we click on and put more things that we click on in front of us. The second way is to nudge our preferences to be more predictable.

Catherine Price 1:01:55 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:01:55 So he was teaching me about this sort of dyadic relationship that you have where if... Because all it is, is the black box has one optimizing function, like click through, right? And maybe watch time for YouTube, something like that. Um, and it will find ways to do it that are relatively novel, and one of the really novel ways that he thinks is happening is it's not just that it needs to become better at predicting what you want, but that it can make you more easily predictable.

Catherine Price 1:02:23 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:02:23 Is this something that you've looked at?

Catherine Price 1:02:25 Um, you know, I think it's a different way of saying what I was trying to get at before, and I like the way that you're phrasing this. It's very interesting because this is what I say when it's changing what it means to be human and it's changing who we are-

Chris Williamson 1:02:35 Hm.

Catherine Price 1:02:36 ... is exactly what you're saying. Because I think... I'd never thought about this particular way. The optimistic way to look at this is that algorithms are learning who we are and predicting what we want. That gives us a lot of agency. That is happening, but I think what's happening more and more is exactly what you're saying. They're actually changing us to be more predictable. It's this homogenization of who we are, and I've heard that from so many people, and you see it around all the time. If you look at how, uh, I think all people, but if you think about young women in particular, the kind of, the Instagram look. I mean, people are literally getting plastic surgery to look more like influencers on Instagram. That's an- physical example of what you're talking about. The algorithm fed them more pictures that showed them "beauty" of a certain kind-

Chris Williamson 1:03:22 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 1:03:22 ... and they're actually shaping their bodies with scalpels to look like that. So yes, (laughs) I think that's really important to recognize. And I think the result is that you end up going back to what we were talking about before in terms of memory and creativity. You end up with a much less interesting society. You, you end up with people who are more the same, who don't have independent creative thoughts, who don't, who all look the same and think the same and act the same and talk the same-

Chris Williamson 1:03:46 It's a much-

Catherine Price 1:03:46 ... because they're being fed stuff on algorithm, by algorithms.

Chris Williamson 1:03:49 It's a much more homogenized culture. Uh, someone wrote this, I really should go back and, and read it. Someone wrote this article about why, uh, where have all the emos gone, and it was basically the (laughs) , the death of subcultures, that in order for you to have a, a sort of fashion, philosophical, musical subculture flourish, uh, it needs to, it needs to have time to stick about. And when you think just across the course of a single year, like, like, like, it's hot girl summer, then it's feral girl summer, then it's brat summer, then it's f- you know, and d- ding, da-ding, da-ding. There's no time for it to ossify and set and really sort of establish what the boundaries are. This is what we are and this is what we are not, and this is the kind of person that is this kind of person. And you sort of accu- like a little cult type thing, a passive cult that kind of accumulates people and, uh, you know, Goths, emos, sporty kids, whatever. I don't know, this may be a "I am not down with the kids" moment, but I don't see... I see a much more homogenized young people culture now, and, um, I get the sense that that's because the pace of change is super high, and also you don't have as much opportunity to actually individuate because everybody is everything. Everyone is seeing all people across the world, and it's this sort of Western Hollywood polished cum America influence. And that's kind of it, that's i- i- it across the world.

Catherine Price 1:05:28 Yeah, I think that that's, that's true in many ways. I think also that the subcultures that do exist, if they start to become an identity, th- uh, that exists online, that itself can start to get homogenized. You know, when you see people who are like goth and you're like, "Well, there's a look," like everyone looks the same within that subculture. It's kind of interesting to think about. I also think it's interesting to think that the f- like rebellion, what is rebellion today for young people? Like one of the biggest forms of rebellion is to not be on social media and not be on these platforms and to take a conscious stance and public stance that you are not going to be part of that culture because you want to maintain your own identity, which I think is interesting and it actually gives me some hope (laughs) in my bedtime ruminations if I think there's a growing number of young people who are like, "I actually don't want to be like everybody else. And one thing that defines what everybody else means is constantly being on your phone, on social media in particular. And so I'm gonna take a stand by not doing that and I'm gonna become a unique individual by, because I am not part of that."

Chris Williamson 1:06:25 Mm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:28 What has been the, or what are the highest impact habits that you still rely on now, six years hence, seven years hence to help with phone use?

Catherine Price 1:06:42 Well, for sure keeping my phone out of the bedroom and charging it in a cl- I charge it in the closet, and that's really helpful. I also don't have problematic apps on my phone. You know? Like, I, for me, email and the news are my biggest problems. I'm not... I've never been sucked into social media, so I don't have email or the news on my phone. It's also just doesn't make sense to type an email with your thumbs. Like, that's just annoying. So, making my phone as boring as possible is very useful. I would also say mindfulness has been enormously helpful for me. I've done a lot... I mean, some of my previous work was about mindfulness, mindfulness-based stress reduction, so basically just training myself to notice my own emotional triggers and to notice when I'm on my phone and then to non-judgmentally ask myself, like, "Do I wanna be on my phone right now?" So, doing the W-W-W, the what, for, why now, what else exercise with myself, um, that has been very useful. I will also say, though, that a big thing I think is missing from a lot of these conversations is that we focus so much on taking the phone away, but we don't talk about what are we gonna replace it with, 'cause you're gonna end up with this huge void when you stop using your phone so much. And this is what I went through myself and what many people I- I speak to go through, wh- people who go through The Breakup Plan in my book are like, "Oh, my God, all right, I reclaimed time from my phone, now why am I existentially depressed?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:07:52 Mm-hmm.

Catherine Price 1:07:53 Which is what happened to me. So, I think we really need to focus on what do we want to pay attention to. You know? I