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The Psychology Of Phone & Tech Addiction - Adam Alter | Modern Wisdom Podcast 293

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business and an author. Most adults report that they are within an arm's reach of their phone for 24 hours a day. Our devices have slotted themselves into our lives seamlessly, but controlling our screentime is becoming increasingly difficult. Expect to learn the psychological tricks tech companies are using to keep you hooked, what Adam thinks the best strategies are to control screentime, what our concerns should be with VR technology, why cliffhangers are so powerful and much more... Sponsors: Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Get 50% discount on your FitBook Membership at https://fitbook.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Buy Irresistible - https://amzn.to/3bVRRrq Follow Adam on Twitter - https://twitter.com/adamleealter Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #phoneaddiction #screentime #psychology - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: modernwisdompodcast@gmail.com

Adam AlterguestChris Williamsonhost
Mar 11, 20211h 6mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:20

    Intro

    1. AA

      There are ways to curate your life so you get the best from these forms of tech without having to just accept the bad stuff that comes along with them, and I think that's the key goal here. That's certainly my goal. I don't want to turn my back on tech, I want to embrace it fully. But in embracing it, recognize what it's doing that's negative.

    2. CW

      Do you know anyone

  2. 0:20 – 2:00

    The Spectrum

    1. CW

      who doesn't wish that they spent less time on their phone?

    2. AA

      Not many people. Um, I, you know, it's funny, when I, when I speak about this, um, it's been a while, but when I'm in a room with people and I ask them a question, I go- I often begin the, the, the event by saying, "All right, I want to get a, a sense, from one to ten, from all of you, how do you feel about your phone use?" Where one is, "I'm completely happy, I wouldn't change a thing, it's only brought joy into my life, makes my life better, it's enriching my experiences," blah, blah, blah, to ten, "It's destroying my life." So that's the spectrum. And I ask them to close their eyes, so they're all doing it individually, and they put their hands up at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And the vast majority of people give a score between a six and a nine, out of ten, which says that they feel that the phone has done a lot of harm, it's brought a lot of damage. So there, there are some people though, you watch them, you say, "One," you start at the number one, they'll be like ... Now, if you've got 200 people in a room, there'll be a couple of hands that go up at one. And I'll often ask them afterwards, not usually on the spot, but I'll say to them, like, "Tell me about your use, your phone use." And they'll say things like, "I'm in tech, I know I'm unusual this way, but I've got a lot of systems in place, I'm very careful." It's never people who are like, "I just happened to stumble on a perfect way of using my phone." These are people who are serious about what they're doing. So there are a few people, but not many.

    3. CW

      So you need the weaponry to be able to fight back?

    4. AA

      You need the systems in place. I think the, the word systems is so critical with phones because they, they do everything they can to dismantle whatever self-control resources you have, and the only way you can fight back is by having habits and systems that, that mitigate. That, that, uh, help you overcome those many, many attempts from, from tech companies to, to circumvent those systems.

  3. 2:00 – 3:13

    The Most Common Systems

    1. AA

    2. CW

      What are the most common systems that you see people come up with? Is there a common thread between them?

    3. AA

      Um, yeah, I ... People sometimes talk about having kind of wishy-washy rules, like, "I will try to do this or try to do that." That never works. It's really hard to go by those rules. It's like dieting, that if you, if you say, "I'm gonna try to eat less of, you know, less chocolate, I'll only have three of these little kind of pieces of chocolate instead of five or ten," that's really difficult. But if you say, "I'm not gonna have chocolate," that's often doable. So I find that people who do the best are, um, they're pretty firm. Like they'll say things like, "Um, dinnertime is completely phone-free for me. Uh, there's no way I'm gonna change that rule, I'm never gonna have any flexibility on that rule. I could be home alone, I could be out with friends, I could be ... No matter what context, when it's, when I'm eating dinner, there is no phone involved, there is no TV involved." And those people seem to succeed, um, and I, I know it's hardline, and some of them do have flexibility and they'll say, "You know, I'm gonna make an exception," but generally speaking, I think having those really firm hard and fast rules works well. And that, that's just one example, but, but generally, having a very firm rule and est- and establishing a habit I think is really important in this domain.

    4. CW

      I would agree.

  4. 3:13 – 4:34

    The Best Strategy

    1. CW

      The best strategy that I've ever had has been keeping my phone out of my bedroom. I know that you've mentioned-

    2. AA

      Mm-hmm.

    3. CW

      ... uh, previously that you try and do that. Um, but it is such a ... It's like a multifaceted way to wreck your day.

    4. AA

      (laughs)

    5. CW

      Like, you can wreck tomorrow before tomorrow's even begun.

    6. AA

      That's true (laughs) . Yeah, it's true, and I do that frequently, unfortunately. I mean, I try very hard with my phone. I live in, in the US, my family's in Australia, so it's, you know, it's 10,000 miles apart, and, um, I'd say once a year there's a phone call that comes in at the middle- in the middle of the night, and I feel like, that I want to be able to answer that call when it comes in. Uh, you know, maybe once a year is an exaggeration, maybe once every two or three years. But it's enough that it weighs on me, and so I've decided that a bit of flexibility on this rule is justified, so I'll go for six months with the phone out of the bedroom, and then I'll get one of those calls in the night, and then for three months I'll keep the phone in the room and then I'll go back to being willing to pick ... You know, I think the thing that you realize when you study this stuff is, um, i- in theory everything's really easy. You can deal with all these things with, with, with solid ideas and you can say, "You know, I'm gonna be hard and fast about this," um, and then o- in practice it's often much more complicated. Like I, I want to know when my family's calling me from Australia, whether it's at 3:00 AM or 7:00 AM or 10:00 PM or whatever it is, and so that makes that rule more difficult to follow. But I try.

  5. 4:34 – 5:47

    Thephenomenological experience

    1. CW

      That's the, sort of the crux to probably what a lot of today's conversation is going to be about, that there are particular things which occur objectively on one side of the phone, there are particular goals, objectively, which you want to achieve on the other side of the phone, uh, but then there's like the phenomenological experience of being a user of a device, and that's where everything kind of goes out the window.

    2. AA

      Yeah. Uh, I, I think that's right. I think, um, you know, if you describe what a phone is to people in, say, the year 2005, two years before the iPhone was introduced, it's not that long ago, it's like 16 years, you know, it's a, it's a decent amount of time but it's not a huge amount of time, I think the idea that the phone would change everything for everyone, it would be something that you'd be getting notifications in the year 2020 or 2021 saying, "You've been on your phone on average for six hours a day," and that that's not unusual, people would have said, "That's crazy." I mean, wh- that, there's no way that's gonna happen. And, and then when you actually use the device, you realize how compelling it is and how hard it is to resist. Um, so y- you're right, I, I don't think it ... It is the kind of thing that until you're actually in the midst of using it, you don't get the full sense of just how, how much time just ebbs away. It's, it's incredible.

  6. 5:47 – 9:54

    Psychological hooks

    1. AA

    2. CW

      What are some of the psychological hooks and techniques that you looked at? What are some of the tools that are being used?

    3. AA

      There, there are many of them. Um, the, the, there are a few really big ones. So one of the big ones is variable reward. Um, so it's basically getting rewards from the device that ...... makes it a lot like a slot machine. A lot of people have used that metaphor to describe it. Um, that the, the phone is a slot machine that delivers jackpots every now and again. And it might be in the form of, uh, an email that you get. It might be in the form of, you know, you post something on social media, you get this great flood of positive feedback. People are reposting, retweeting, regramming. Um, you know, some famous person picks up a tweet and suddenly it goes viral and thousands of people are commenting on the thing you said. And you know, that's a big flush of positive feedback. But it's unpredictable. And it's gotta be unpredictable because if it were predictable and you knew when the rewards were coming, they were the same size every time, the same intensity, we'd lose interest. Humans, and basically every other animal as well, are very sensitive to variable rewards. So, those are baked in. Goals are another one. Um, humans are very goal oriented and, and other animals are too to an extent, but we focus a lot on round numbers, the idea of having 1,000 likes, 1,000 follows, all that sort of stuff. Those metrics matter in ways that are a little bit silly. Um, I remember ... I think I talked about this in the book. Um, I remember running a marathon, my first marathon, which was a decade ago. And I remember how focused I was on those round numbers, you know, like the idea that a, that a 3:29 was materially different from a 3:31, but that a 3:27 was about the same as a 3:29 makes very little sense. But it's- it was so compelling to me. Like, if I didn't get under 3:30 or if I didn't get under 4:00, as it- as it happened, the marathon went worse than planned.

    4. CW

      (laughs)

    5. AA

      If I didn't get under 4:00, I was gonna be in a lot of trouble. So, so these goals are another big part of, of what the devices do and they'll, they'll reward you. They'll turn experiences into games. You know, like even Inbox Zero, this idea of getting to the end of- uh, conquering the game of email every day. That's a problem as well. So goals, variable feedback, and then there's a big part- uh, a big part of it is social. Um, so, you know, like there- there's, there's a sense of ... I know in a lot of communities when people are, say, in, in a community on Instagram for example, and you all, whether it's a sporting community or like an athletics community or whether it's, you know, you're all entrepreneurs or you're all academics or whatever it might be, um, there's a sense that you should support other people and they should support you. And once that becomes a- a part of the kind of norms, the etiquette of, of behaving that way online, you feel bad if you don't like people's posts. They feel bad if they don't like yours. And that really gets its hooks into you. The same way I think a lot of the big, um, massive role playing games like World of Warcraft, you play in guilds with other people. You're on teams. And so there's this huge social element. It's like going to war, virtual war, and if you, if you suddenly decide one day you're not gonna show up, that- that doesn't really fly. So, I think that's a big part of it. The fourth one that I'll just mention briefly that I think is, is perhaps the most powerful is, um, the eradication of stopping cues, which I- I sp- really researched pretty deeply. And it's this idea that-

    6. CW

      (throat clears)

    7. AA

      ... you know, there are two things to getting people to use your product. One is getting them in the door, so interesting them, saying to them, "Hey, you should try this thing." But the second thing that I think we often overlook is once they're there, how do you keep them there? And one way you do that is if you prevent the, the mechanism that says to them, "You should probably move on to something else," from, from activating, you short circuit that, they'll just keep doing what they're doing. So, the endless scroll of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, emails just keep coming. There's this idea that they're like zombies, you kill them all at the end of the night and you wake up in the morning and they've all resurrected (laughs) . You've got more of them in your inbox. The endlessness of, of all of these different, um, different platforms I think makes it very hard for us to resist them. And so once we're into them, there's no bottom to the news, to what people are sharing with you, to what, what you can learn online. Um, and that's why I think that's a big part of it too.

  7. 9:54 – 11:39

    The like button

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Wasn't there something, the guy who created infinite scroll ... Am I misquoting this? Did the guy who created infinite scroll say it was the biggest regret of his career?

    3. AA

      Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, I've heard that too. Yeah. (laughs) I think, I- you know, it's- it's, as a business move, it's genius. It's one of the s- one of the smartest, most powerful ... That and the like button. Turning it asymmetric-

    4. CW

      Why the- why the like button?

    5. AA

      Well, because you've turned something that's asymmetric, that's just a way of sharing things that I'm feeling, into something that becomes a bilateral conversation. So, the like button, when Facebook introduced it, before the like button you would go onto Facebook to learn about what your friends were up to. So, if I- if I've moved to a new town or I have a new job or I- I've got a new girlfriend or whatever, that's something I'm gonna post online and I'll tell you that. And then you on the other side of the screen say, "That's interesting," and then you move on with your day. But I as the person who posted that don't get any feedback. Soon as you have the like button, everything's bilateral. It's a conversation. So, I say, "I have this new job," and then you say, "Congratulations on your new job. I like that." You know, you give a thumbs up. And, and that engine for feedback, that's where the whole thing gets social. That's where the social requirements start to come in and that's where the variable feedback comes in. If you can get a like, why not get 10 likes or 100 likes or 1,000 likes? And then you've suddenly got a new form of currency. And, and there's a- you know, people talk a lot about these studies showing that when, when teens see likes accruing on their Instagram posts, their brains look a lot like the brains of drug users who are injecting drugs. And I- I think that's blown out of proportion, but I think what's true there is that it's a reward. It's a genuine reward. It may not be real currency like money, but- but the- the sense that other people appreciate what you're doing online is- it's powerful. It really- it drives us on.

  8. 11:39 – 15:16

    Variable schedule rewards

    1. AA

      A lot of us.

    2. CW

      Well, what are some of the bases for why these are so effective on us? Like, w- what is it about variable schedule rewards that actually make them so compelling? Like what- why is there a chink in our source code, our genetic source code, that allows that to be slotted in?

    3. AA

      I think you can tell a lot of stories about these kinds of mechanisms. Like es- especially for variable rewards. Um, if you, if you imagine being a human, you know, tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago in, you know, the evolutionary past and you're going out and roaming the savanna and let's, let's be really, um...... cliché about it. You're roaming the savanna looking for, whether it's food or whatever it is. If you were the, if, if your ancestors were the ones who went out and said, "You know, every 100 days, I'm going to catch a bison and it's gonna feed me for days and days and it's gonna feed my whole tribe. I'm gonna be a hero. Everyone's gonna applaud and whatever." Um, if, if your ancestors were the ones who said, "I'm gonna do that. I know it's only gonna happen infrequently, but when the jackpot comes, it's worthwhile and it's gonna sustain me," you keep going despite not winning over time. You keep going, you keep going out there and you keep showing up. There's value to that. There's evolutionary value. If you, if, if there are, no one has these ancestors because we're the ones, we're the products of the ones who kept going, but there were some who probably went out there and said, "It's been 50 days. I'm just gonna eat some berries." And it didn't work out for them so well over time. So, I, I think, um, over, over time, the traits that were embedded in those people, the way they responded to these kinds of cues, are now expressed in us because they survived and we're the, we're the result of that. I think that's one story you could tell. Um, but, but in general, just persevering. I think a lot of this is about persevering, that, that if the reward is totally predictable, you know what size it is, um, there's certainly some value if the reward is significant enough they're coming back over time. But if it's a, it's a potentially huge reward that's a long-tail reward, it happens very infrequently but when it does happen, it changes your life, you wanna be around for that. Um, and so that has a different kind of quality to it. It's like the jackpot quality in a casino. That's really what drives people on. They're all kind of imagining this barely attainable but possi- slightly possible, slimly possible, really big reward. I think that's what drives them on.

    4. CW

      Have we mapped what would have been our, um, (clears throat) evolutionary status hierarchy of wanting to have reciprocal altruism, wanting to have this sort of sense of belonging in that we're moving up the ladder? Is that what's now being quantified in terms of the objective metrics that we see? Is that where the hack comes in from the social side?

    5. AA

      Yes, I think so. I think you can now say, I can tell you within one like how I feel about a post. I'm, I, I'm saying I, but in general, a person can. You know, if you're... I'm not really, I don't use these platforms much, um, espe- I don't use Instagram at all, uh, but, you know, if you're someone who generally gets 10 likes and then you get 20 likes on a post, that has an effect. We know that has an effect. It does feel like a reward. It feels like you're slightly higher up the hierarchy. If you're someone who for a while is being followed by 100 people, you post something, it goes viral, and suddenly 1,000 new people follow you, that also feels like a jump up the hierarchy. Whether that's illusory or not doesn't actually matter. What, what it means is that it feels like a genuine currency. Your brain and your, your psychology responds as though it's real, and as a result, you keep coming back for more. That's what these platforms care about, what the, the creators of the platforms care about. And so, it's not the same as actually being at a particular point in a hierarchy, in a tribe, or in a group, but it feels like it is, and so we w- we keep behaving as though it, it's real.

  9. 15:16 – 18:23

    Example of social media clout

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Think about it now, though. Think about the way that people interpret social media clout and following. I always use this example. So, imagine that you're going out for dinner and you sit down at a table and it's you and the missus and there's a bunch of new couples there and you've never met them before. And you sit next to someone and you get talking to them, you're talking to the husband or the wife, and you're just chatting away and they seem nice. And they go to the bathroom and you think, "I'll just, I'll just have a look on Instagram and see, see what they're up to, see, see what they're like." And you go on and that person's got a million followers. Immediately, your impression of them changes dramatically because that one million followers is a signal of a bunch of different things. You're gonna go, "They've got a mil- a fucking million. Like, what, what, what-"

    3. AA

      Yeah. (laughs)

    4. CW

      "... what does she do?" Like, that immediately, and you think, okay, it's, signaling is anything, any sort of output. We're constantly looking for different cues of what is this person, how can I find out more information. Information foragers, as, um, Sam Harris' guest from the other week said, that that is another cue. But we have socioculturally now created an entire, uh, ecosystem around that, right? We understand what it means-

    5. AA

      Yeah.

    6. CW

      ... to be a person who has a million followers. So, you said before, whe- whether it's real or not, whether it puts you up the hierarchy or not, but our interpretations of that and our, uh, own subjective rating and value of that has made it real. Whether it was-

    7. AA

      Yeah.

    8. CW

      ... or not, it now is.

    9. AA

      It's true, and, and it, there's a separate, uh, a separate trend that I think explains that as well. It's the metrication of absolutely everything. So, for a long time, you could measure people if you knew how much money they had. That was a, that was one objective thing you could use to rank them in a sense, if that's the way you were oriented. Um, and so, you know, like discussions of net worth, that was one kind of, of discussion you could have. But socially, that's more difficult to do. Like, does this person have 27 real-life friends or 30? We didn't ever measure people that way. But this metrication movement means that beyond things like net worth, you can measure a whole lot of new things objectively. Like social currency now is measured, is measurable in an objective way. So yes, I'm sitting at a table with someone that in my head I'm valuing as a person with 500 followers and it turns out they have a million, well, there must be something incredibly interesting or eccentric or worth, worth knowing about them that I perhaps don't know. Is it... And some of those things might be observable, right? I, if this person's a model, I probably got some sense of that from sitting at the table with the person. But if this person's just incredibly bright and interesting and I haven't yet got that sense, and people follow him or her because of that, just that content that kind of, you know, unspools, that's a fascinating thing, right? And that makes me way more interested in, in actually getting to know the person. So, I think some of it's real, some of it's not real. Um, and I'll, what's interesting about the example you gave is, is, um, the ambiguity in a lot of cases. Like why, why? What is it about you that makes you that person? You would have gone under the radar before the social media era began. And, and we'd have met at a party and there would have been no way to quantify how interesting you are. But now I, now I can know that you're a million, you're worth a million followers, which tells me something.

  10. 18:23 – 20:00

    Why do you think we are on this move

    1. CW

      Why do you think we're on this move toward metric-ing, objectifying, ob- making objective, uh, all of these different sort of quantifiable values? Why do you think that is in the modern era?

    2. AA

      Well, I think it's driven by, you know, we're always going to be curious about ourselves, and we're ju- we're curiou- curious about ourselves relative to other people. Um, and there's a, there's a also really strong drive towards self-improvement and betterment. And I think with, with access to huge amounts of data, with the hardware and the software that we need to be able to, to, to measure things that we couldn't before cheaply, I think we're doing that. So, you know, the good example of this is measuring sleep or exercise patterns. The idea that when I'm asleep I can see whether I'm in deep sleep, whether I'm in REM sleep, whether I'm in shallow sleep, how much deep, good sleep I'm getting each night, you can do that fairly cheaply now. You couldn't do that cheaply, except if you were in a sleep lab for, for decades. And so that's ... I, I, I mean, I think that's a really big, big part of this, right? That, um, we are now able to measure more things that I think we've always been curious about, but it was beyond us to measure them. That's part of it. I also think, um, a lot of th- a lot of this is comparative. Like, you have social networks. Like, Strava will measure your running and you can then see, "How much do I run relative to all the other people I follow on Strava?" Um, y- you can, you know, y- y- you, if you're curious about it, you can find out where you lie on pretty much any spectrum. You can work out your percentile ranking for (laughs) whatever you're interested in and you can metricate it. And so I, I think it's just this drive to understand ourselves better which is eternal, but we're able to do that in a now sharper, hard-edged way that we weren't able to do before.

  11. 20:00 – 23:23

    The Metricization of Everything

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Isn't it interesting that we've found this metricization of everything movement just after we've kind of moved into a very secular society, a lot of the old traditions have been lost, uh, the sort of more esoteric side of religion is also gone, the scientific res- r- revolutions occurred where utilitarian rational beings were sort of praying at the altar of science? And it feels to me like this is just another step along the way, that people's meaning perhaps might have previously been due to their faith or due to their community, and now that that's been pulled apart a little bit ... L- I don't, I don't know the name of the people that live next door to me. Um-

    3. AA

      Right.

    4. CW

      ... but that wouldn't have been the case not very many years ago. So, I think that perhaps in that people are trying to fill that hole. I also have this theory around personal development that, uh, the removal of God and faith from people's lives means that they've got broader death anxiety and that self-development and personal growth, and especially the longevity movement and biohacking, are all scientifically compatible ways of denying death where, "Yeah, but I'm gonna get more life in before it happens," or, "I'm gonna delay the time that it does happen," or, "I'm gonna stop it from happening at all," or, "I'm gonna upload myself into the mainframe." Um, yeah, it all seems to kind of be a perfect storm coalescing.

    5. AA

      Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's, that's probably true. Um, a- and you do get pushback, right? That, um, because we've become all about objective measurement and about scientism, I, I think you do see a lot of people who, who are pushing in the opposite direction. Whenever the pendulum swings a long way in one direction, it's gonna swing back, and so there's a, there's a movement known as retromania, and it's this, this kind of love for things that are inferior from the past but that we crave because they are part of a past that we, we idealize. Um, and, and there are some really interesting examples of this. In, in Germany, there's a, there's a small movement, it's called Ostalgia, like nostalgia without the N, Ost being East. It's this nostalgia for, for, for aspects of East German life that were inferior, like the toothpaste didn't taste as good or the products weren't as good. But there are people who used to live under that regime and they've become kind of nostalgic for the way things used to be. And there are small pockets of this all around the world, this kind of weird backward-focused ... Not weird, but this backward-focused view that idealizes a past that was often inferior in many respects, and I think it's partly because of what you're suggesting. We've leeched a lot of the meaning out of life. Whether it's, whether it's about secularization or ... I, I think the arts and, and, uh, music and, and the woolly stuff, the subjective stuff that I think is, has, was historically a bigger part of the human experience, for a lot of people plays almost no role in their lives, and I think they, they miss something really critical. And, uh, I totally agree with you. And, and I do s- I do think, um, whether it's religion or other systems of meaning, if you don't have that, we know there's, there's a ... Certainly there's death anxiety, there's terror management theories, this idea that you, you reach out for a God or for some sort of system of meaning to explain your life, especially as death becomes more prominent. We've been living through a pandemic. It's been a big part of our experience for a year. So, um, yeah, I, I totally agree. I think it's, it's a, it's a really interesting trend.

  12. 23:23 – 26:07

    The Happiness Hypothesis

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Uh, talking about the target thing and how we're so sort of teleological as beings, I was reading The Happiness Hypothesis by John Haidt, and I know it's not very new, but it was the first time I read it and it's awesome. Um, he talked about one of the reasons why we have a shocking thought and we can't get it out of our head. So, you know, you see the old lady by the side of the road and you just think, like, "I wonder what it would be like if I pushed her in." Obviously you never do, but you have this thought, and then you think, like, "Oh my God, that's just, like, how could you ... How dare you think like that? There, there must be something wrong with me." And then you can't stop thinking about it. And he was talking about the fact that as soon as you set that objective out there, what your brain does is it constantly measures how far you are away from reaching that objective. Even if your goal is to be away from the objective, like not eat more food, a lot of the time when you're trying to diet, you're actually obsessing about food, when the next piece of food is coming, even if it's on a restricted-

    3. AA

      Right.

    4. CW

      ... a restricted calorie diet. And, um, yeah, it makes a lot of sense that ...... as soon as a target is set, even if the target is to decrease rather than increase what you're doing, it causes you to actually obsess about what is going on a lot more. And, um, I- w- with this channel, you know, I made a big deal about hitting 100,000 subs on YouTube. Like, there is, as you said, objectively no diff- apart from the silver play button that YouTube sends you. That's pretty cool. Um, but-

    5. AA

      (laughs)

    6. CW

      ... (laughs) there is objectively no difference. But, like, I'd built it up and then sure enough, the morning that I woke up between 99 and 101 or whatever it was, uh, life was still the same. Po- still put the same socks on, still had to brush my teeth.

    7. AA

      (laughs)

    8. CW

      You know what I mean?

    9. AA

      Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. There's, uh, so this idea, um, it's a pretty old idea, but it's a really interesting one in psychology. The ironic monitoring model is wha- what it's broadly known as, and it's this idea that ... It's especially for things like dieting. Cases or taboos where there, there's something you're s- you're supposed to not do. You're not meant to push the lady in the road. You're, you're not meant to eat chocolate cake if you're dieting. All of that sort of stuff. But you're right. The only way to know that you're not doing that thing is to keep comparing what you're doing to that thing. That's the irony. That's the ironic monitoring part. So, you know, if I say to you now, "For the rest of our discussion, don't think about a white polar bear wearing, uh, a Liverpool sweat- a Liverpool jersey," or something like that, y- you know, it's a pretty random thought. You weren't gonna think about it before. But now that I've put it there as a kind of a thing against which you're supposed to distance yourself, you'll think about it certainly more than you would have otherwise because you'll be saying to yourself, "Am I thinking about this?" Um, so there's quite a lot of work about intrusive thoughts, and, and I think John's theory ... Jon Haidt's actually at NYU, which is where I am as well, so we know each other pretty well. Um, it's, it's very, it's very interesting. And I, I think that's right. I think it's largely about just making sure that you're not doing the wrong thing.

    10. CW

      (laughs) What was

  13. 26:07 – 28:45

    Most Addictive Apps

    1. CW

      the, what were some of the most addictive apps or experiences that you found?

    2. AA

      Um, I, I think a lot of them are games. You've got to think about which, which experiences have the most hooks embedded in them. And so social media and games are the two that, that stand out for almost everyone. Games by, by design, humans have loved games forever. We found games really interesting. Games and stories are things that kind of drive humans on. Once you start hearing a story that's compelling, you want to know what the outcome is. Once you start playing a game, you want to complete the game. And so if you're designing a game and it's a game that you can keep updating with new levels and new features, you can basically string people along indefinitely. It's like, imagine reading an incredibly good book that never ends. Like, every time you're at the last chapter, the author just tacks on another chapter on the back, and it just keeps on spooling forever. That's, that's what the, the best games now that keep having new mods and, and features added onto them are like. There's no way to kind of conquer them in the way that you could in the '80s and '90s and 2000s, early 2000s. Um, so I think games are a big one. And then, certainly, um, social media for, for obvious reasons. It's got the, the variable feedback hook. It's got the goal hook, the social, um, I guess, etiquette hook that you've got to kind of be on there to, to show your face. Um, the absence of stopping cues, removing the feeds, the bottom of the feed. All of that sort of stuff all, all embedded there. Um, I know that World of Warcraft is often described as the single most addictive experience. Non-ingestion based. You know, you're not ingesting a substance. It's not a drug, but it's an experience. And as an experience, it's been described as the most addictive experience, the hardest for people to resist. There have been something like 100 million players across time, um, and by some measure half of them say that they are sort of obsessive about playing the game. It's v- ... And, you know, I, I have a friend who, um, he's a game designer himself, um, and he's a professor of game design. If anyone knows about game design and the, the mechanics of design, it's this guy. And, um, I, I asked him about World of Warcraft when I, when I was researching for the book. I said, you know, "How do you feel about it? W- when you play it, how does it ... D- do you find it works on you?" And he said to me, "Look, I'm supposed to know about everything that's out there. I teach this stuff. I have not for a minute of my life played that game because I know it's binary. Either I'm not a World of Warcraft player or I've lost everything. (laughs) And, and I will be playing for years 'cause I know all of, all of the, the kind of tricks that are embedded in it." So he's, he's been very careful about it. That's why I think that's probably one of the most, uh, one, one of the most difficult to resist.

  14. 28:45 – 31:49

    Psychological Tricks

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Look at what you said at the very beginning. The people in the tech world are the ones that have the bright lines, and they're the ones who are able to control their cold turkey, would appear, is the only way to avoid World of Warcraft. Are there any psychological tricks that you think technology hasn't been able to utilize yet? Is there, uh, something that's next on the laundry list, um, for a new piece of technology to tap into?

    3. AA

      I ... You know, I think we often ... We think about phones in particular as kind of a destination point. Like, tech has been moving in this direction for, for many hundreds of years, and now the, the outcome of that move is that we now have phones that are incredible. Look what we can do in the palm of our hands. We have access to all the information in the world, et cetera. All the people in the world. I, I think really, w- we're at the very beginning of this movement that maybe began 20 or so years ago, um, with the rise of social media, with the rise of smartphones, the rise of then tablets. Um, and I think where we go from here is that VR and AR, virtual and augmented reality tech, is still ... it's not that mainstream. You know, there are some people who have Oculus glasses, but it still hasn't become mainstream in the way that phones are. There aren't billions of these devices floating around. I think part of that is there's ... the things you can do with that hardware are, are still quite limited. But if you speak to people in these industries, they'll tell you give it some time. Y- you know, some of them say two years, some of them say 10 years, and they say the, you know, the industry is gonna grow dramatically. And then, it won't just be, you know, you and I have a con- having a conversation. My phone's here, and it comes between us, not in a physical sense, but it comes between us because I'm distracted by it. But you're actually gonna be sitting here. You and I could sit with goggles, physical goggles between us, where we're completely immersed in a, uh, uh, full world. We could wear haptic suits, so if we're in fights we actually feel like we're being hit.Um, if we're, if we're running or, e- you know, you could even have devices that pipe smells in eventually if this gets sophisticated enough. All five senses, maybe even taste, so I don't know how it's going to be. But once the experience becomes that immersive, all five senses are activated. We have primitive versions of it now, but imagine if at any moment in time, you could be exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to be doing. You know, it's, it's snowy here in Connecticut, I want to be on a beach in Greece right now. I can have the very next best thing to actually being there. Why would I sit here and do my work when I could do that? Why would I sit here having conversations with, say, a group of people if I'm not that interested in that conversation? And instead, I could talk to AI versions of, you know, the five most interesting people in history. You know, the 4D people you mentioned.

    4. CW

      Using that, what is it? L- LPT-3 or whatever it's called.

    5. AA

      Yeah, right, exactly. Um, so th- th- in, that's, that's where I think we're going. That's the difference of extent rather than a qualitative difference. I don't think that's something completely different from what we have now, it's just a much more effective way of, of, again, siloing us, making us, you know, unique individuals. It's a little bit like, like the- the- the book and the- the film Ready Player One and now Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline. It's just taking that and making parts of it real.

  15. 31:49 – 34:43

    Phone vs VR

    1. AA

    2. CW

      It's the delivery mechanism, right? Was it-

    3. AA

      Yeah.

    4. CW

      Was it your book or someone else's where I read about the upper bound on being able to change people's opinions through a phone versus through VR, and there was something to do with, um, people's paper usage meant that they had a long term different view of, um, tree felling. Did you see this? Have you seen this?

    5. AA

      No, wa- it wasn't, it definitely wasn't in my book. It's interesting.

    6. CW

      S- cool, yeah, so, so basically it was just, uh, as you said there, um, as you make the experience more immersive, the degree to which you can influence behavior, uh, both in the experience and then after the experience. Like, think about the levels of extremism and, um, partisanship that we're seeing from a seven inch by two inch black square that basically can only do sound and light that's in our hand. Like, let's switch that around-

    7. AA

      Right.

    8. CW

      ... to a fully immersive experience where you can't tell the difference between... Like, that's going to be, th- there's going to be some really big changes that need to be made. And I g- I get what you mean, that there's a maximum number of psychological hooks, but the depth with which you can get the hooks into it changes-

    9. AA

      Yeah. T-

    10. CW

      ... as the platform, as the platform increases.

    11. AA

      That, that's a really good way of expressing it. I think that's exactly right. I, I can tell you, I, I gave a, a talk about this at a, a conference, uh, about three years ago, and at the conference, they had this VR demonstration. So I'm there speaking about the ills of tech, and then there's a VR demonstration. I was like, "I should probably check out the competition here." (laughs) So I went and did this experience. It was eight minutes long. It involved a haptic suit, so I could feel, like, pressure. Um, and it was a Ghostbusters experience. I was never a huge Ghostbusters fan. I didn't... I, I've watched the movie just maybe once. Um, but it was like the most incredible eight minutes. You're, you're in New York City, you're on the top of a building, you're chasing a ghost, you have this thing that acts as like a, whatever the, the ray is that you're shooting. Uh, the ghosts go through you and the haptic suit compresses, so it feels like they're actually... I, I didn't know that ghosts could actually inf- influence you. It shouldn't feel them, but in this little world, you could. And I remember thinking, "That was so much fun." Like, I like video games, I play some. I've never had that much fun. That eight minutes was just like so rich. And if you'd said to me, "You can forgo eating and sleeping and for 24 hours, we will, we'll expand this eight minute experience to 24 hours," 100% I would say yes. But imagine if that's available for the rest of your life. That's, uh, it really scared me a little bit, because I realized just how deep those hooks were. Um, and I'm a guy who's really thoughtful about this, right? If anyone's gonna push back, it's me, and I was like, "Yep, sign me up. I'm

  16. 34:43 – 46:33

    War of the Worlds Experience

    1. AA

      done. I'm good."

    2. CW

      That's exactly what we said at the beginning. The difference between what's happening behind, what we can see objectively within the programming, objectively what your goals are, but then the experience, what the phenomenal, phenomenology of that's like.

    3. AA

      Right.

    4. CW

      I went to dot dot dot in London, which was the world's first AR, VR, and holographics Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds experience. Um-

    5. AA

      Oh, wow.

    6. CW

      So I had, uh, the world's first PhD in immersive storytelling on the show, uh, about a year ago, Sarah, Dr. Sarah Jones, and, um, she said, "You need to go to this thing. It's the most advanced technology for augmented reality and everything." And, um, if you've ever been to Edinburgh Dungeons or, or a sort of a tour-

    7. AA

      I have.

    8. CW

      ... where there's actors and they're interacting with you, so dude, you arrive at this place that they've created, and for two hours, from the moment that you step in there, actors are interacting with you and walking you through, um, the streets of London and the, uh, posters are up and it's you and a small little group in there, and then they'll pass you on to another person and then you're in a boat, and at each different stage, this one was augmented reality and you're seeing all of these things moving around, then, right, get into this huge big hall and put the headset on and the haptic feedback thing, and you're moving around, and it was for two hours, including a break in a bar, a virtual reality bar in the middle of it, and-

    9. AA

      (laughs)

    10. CW

      ... then you kept on going. I, it was, the, the date that I went with was awful, um, but the experience was fantastic.

    11. AA

      (laughs)

    12. CW

      So (laughs) I kind of didn't really care that I'd paid for her, because I was like, "Well, it was at least worth double the money, so it kind of doesn't matter."

    13. AA

      (laughs)

    14. CW

      Um, but dude, it was outrageous.

    15. AA

      Sounds amazing.

    16. CW

      Oh man, you would-

    17. AA

      Yeah.

    18. CW

      It's such a shame because they'd extended it. Um, I would have gone again, but they extended it and then COVID happened, so I haven't had the chance.

    19. AA

      Right.

    20. CW

      But yeah, it was, um... And that like,This- the sad part about it is, and I wish that this wasn't the case, I often get criticized for kind of being, from some of my friends that are big into tech and crypto and stuff like that, for kind of being a bit of a doomsayer around this. I've been a massive fan of your work. I've been a massive fan of Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology and stuff like that. Tristan was on Sam's show like four years ago or something, and I went fully down the rabbit hole as soon as that happened. I get criticized-

    21. AA

      Mm-hmm.

    22. CW

      ... for being this doomsayer about it. Uh, and I wish, I wish that I could have this untarnished hope for the future because this stuff's like sick. Like it- it was-

    23. AA

      Yeah.

    24. CW

      ... so much fun. And imagine, here's my thing that I really want to have happen, so Clubhouse is big at the moment. Imagine-

    25. AA

      Yeah.

    26. CW

      ... VR Clubhouse where all of the audience can sit in a room and they can be front and center watching Naval Ravikant talk to Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and, and Brett Weinstein or something like that. And you can sit there and you can have a beer or you can have a some popcorn in the comfort of your own house watching them go. Like that's just-

    27. AA

      Yeah.

    28. CW

      ... front row seat to the best stuff on the internet. But I can't, because of my fears around it and because of the challenges that I've come up against with regards to my tech use, I- I can't have this like unburnished hope for it. I just, I have fear.

    29. AA

      Yeah. I- I wrestle with that all the time. Um, what you're saying makes, makes a lot of sense and, and resonates with my sense too. I- I think people often assume that I'm going to be a complete doomsayer, that I'm going to come on and say, "You've got to go hard line, kids shouldn't be around screens. You know, we should go back to the 1950s." And I'm not like that. I think I'm a little bit more pragmatic than that because I think the, the reason we're even having these conversations is because there is so much that is great about screens and tech. If they- if they weren't, we would have just said, "Hey, this is crap. Let's just toss it out before it becomes anything." But it's become successful and it's changed our lives because there is so much, it has so much to offer. I think the path we've taken is broken. The ad-based model where you say you'll make more money as a business, and you'll not just make more money, you'll be one of the biggest businesses that's ever been, you know, that- that we've ever known, by selling more ads. Obviously, the only way you sell ads is by having people to view those ads and buy stuff. So that's- that model is broken. So there are certainly things we could fix about the- the way the world is now, the- the screen-based world. Um, but I think for- for individual consumers like you, like me, like lots of other people, we can take a lot of the good. Like if that happens, if what you've just described, this kind of VR version of Clubhouse happens, you could go once a week, choose the best show. The way you might... Uh, I, when I was in New York City, maybe 10 years ago, there was a time where once a week I would go and see a live band. It was amazing. I could have done it every night, but I said to myself, "Do it once a week." I could have developed a kind of unhealthy obsession and I would have been out every night and lost all my money and, uh, it wasn't cheap. Um, but it was a lot of fun. Uh, you could do that here, right? You could take the best of that. You could pick one conversation a week. I know it's- it's hard sometimes to plan this stuff because it happens on the spur of the moment. But, you know, I'm gonna go watch one of these a week and have a beer while I'm watching that. There are ways to curate your life so you get the best from these forms of tech without having to just accept the bad stuff that comes along with them. And I think that's the key goal here. That's certainly my goal. I don't want to turn my back on tech. I want to embrace it fully. But in embracing it, recognize what it's doing that's negative and then try to excise as much of that negative stuff, that baggage, that crap that distances me from the people I love, that makes it hard for me to get work done, while also enjoying the fact that, hey, there are good things about Clubhouse and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat and- and Facebook and whatever else. I don't want to be a Luddite. I just want to... I want to get as much of the good stuff without the bad.

    30. CW

      What are some of the tactics that you use to ensure that happens in your own life?

  17. 46:33 – 51:28

    If Adam wrote the book today

    1. AA

    2. CW

      Uh, the book's been out for a while. Like, has there been anything new that you've come across? Like, if you were to tack a, a chapter that synthesizes some of the most interesting stuff since it's been out, uh, are there any things that you would put in there?

    3. AA

      Yeah, there's a huge amount. The book would be very different if I wrote it today. I started writing it in 2014, which is a very long time ago. In fact, when I tried to sell the rights to the book, I had a bit of trouble, because there was a bit of pushback from people saying, "This is a storm in a teacup. No one cares about this." Like, no one's worried about screen use or tech or anything.

    4. CW

      Look at you with your Cassandra complex, Adam.

    5. AA

      Right. Exactly. Like, "What's wrong with you?" Um, why ... Let's write another book about how great tech is. We don't need one that says it's bad. Um, and they were wrong, because as I was writing the book, things started to shift. And by the time the book came out in 2017, things had, had well and truly shifted. Um, I would spend more time writing about ... So the, the, the subtitle of the book is, um, The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. The business of keeping us hooked, I struggled to get behind the curtain, because not many people inside these big companies were talking about what was going on. Now, since the book came out, beginning about six months after the book came out, there were a whole lot of expose tell-alls. And I wish I could've included some of that. But I, I even arranged an interview to speak to someone from one of these large companies in LA. Flew across the country, landed in LA, and he ghosted me. So that's how hard it was to get behind the curtain in 2015. So things have changed. Um, so I would tack on some of that. I would, uh ... What else would I do? Um ... I, I probably want to talk more about VR and AR than I did, because they've come a long way. Um, I, I talk about it briefly for, like, a couple of pages, but I didn't have much more to say about it at that point. So there, there are a few things. Um, I ... You know, early on, I had a lot of pushback from people who said, "How do you know these aren't just great products?" Like, the definition of a great product is one that people can't stop using because they like it, they get great benefit from it. And maybe it's just that these companies are great, are the greatest product developers of all time. They just know more about humans than any other, other company. And then at the end of 2017, Sean Parker, one of the early investors in Facebook, came out and said, "Oh, we- we've known that this is terrible for a long time," basically. "We, we don't care," or, "we didn't care. I feel bad about it now. We knew we were robbing you of your time, your attention."One of his friends said to him, "I'm not going to use this." And he said, "Oh, you will, and we're going to get you." I mean, this is a guy who's talking about how, how people inside Facebook's inner circle were talking in 2004, '05, '06. And they knew exactly what they were doing. It was predatory. And so I put more of that in the book as well.

    6. CW

      I think that's one of the things that I often try and get across when I have this conversation with people for the first time. So, uh, the first touch of the red pill. The digital red pill.

    7. AA

      Mm-hmm.

    8. CW

      Um, I try and put across that it is an unfair fight by a magnitude that you can't understand. There are thousands of data analysts, some of the most powerful algorithms on the planet, and several tens of billions of dollars behind every single swipe and press of your thumb.

    9. AA

      Yeah.

    10. CW

      And you just think that you're dancing through the daisy field that is Facebook or Tinder or TikTok. But it's not. It is very, very curated. I was told recently that apps and websites specifically are able to detect someone's level of ambient anxiety just through the movement of their mouse and the way that they're moving around on the screen. That they've been able to infer if someone's feeling a little bit more anxious, and that means that you can perhaps tell, oh, well this person might be more susceptible to a chocolate ad, or this person might actually need an alcohol ad, um, because the, the movement of the mouse is in a particular fashion which has been associated with other people in anxious states.

    11. AA

      If it's not true, it will be. So that's, that's how most of this stuff works. You know, it, it sounds interesting, it sounds plausible. Whether it's been operationalized is another question. But it sounds absolutely like if it's not happening, it's one step from where we are, and it's, shouldn't be that hard to implement, right? As long as you can gather the data and process the data. I know, uh, some researchers at NYU have done a lot of work on what you can tell about people based on how they're moving a mouse. So I'm sure that's true. You can tell about indecision, for example. Which makes sense. Right? If you're moving a mouse, the pace at which you move, the acceleration, if I want to go from here to here and I go ... There's no indecision. I'm decisive. I know exactly what I want to do. If I'm wavering and I'm kind of like, "Uh," you can, you, you may not recognize that as a person using the tool, but it's absolutely written in every movement you make. And, and if you have the data, you have the coordinates, all you need is the X and the Y, you can say, "This person's a little bit unsure." And then you can make decisions on the basis of that. I totally believe

  18. 51:28 – 56:23

    Implications for childhood development

    1. AA

      it.

    2. CW

      What are the implications around childhood development when using these devices? Have you looked at that?

    3. AA

      I have. We don't really know. Um, and, and part of the reason we don't really know is the tech is fairly young. The research on the tech is even younger. So in 2007 when Apple introduced the iPhone, the first gen, there were no researchers doing work on this. It took us a few years to catch on. Which means that we've never really had kids who were born into the phone world. And, and very few kids get a phone when they're born. You know, like, as a four year- four month old, you're not using a phone yet, or you shouldn't be. Um, and so it makes it difficult to know exactly what it's doing to especially infant development, um, toddler development. There are a few things, a few hints though. Um, one of the hints is that if you are, if all of your social experiences are mediated through a phone, you get very poor feedback, low fidelity feedback that takes a long time to reach you. So everything you do on a phone, if you're speaking to someone else, or on a screen, is lower fidelity, contains less information, and it's, it's less rich. It's poorer information. So if I'm a kid and I'm in a room with another kid, I take that kid's toy. The kid bops me on the head. And I'm like, "Oh, that didn't work out so well." I shouldn't take the kid's toy. Or I should, but I should make sure that I'm aware that that's going to upset the other kid. You learn that really fast by doing. You learn it much more slowly if you're trying to work out, like, what, what's the social effect of my actions through a screen? Um, just think about bullying on, on social media. The kind of bullying that goes on on social media wouldn't happen in person. Most of those bullies would not be able to do what they do staring into the face of the person, into the eyes of the person they're upsetting. It's just, that's not how humans work. But if you distance us, give us social distance, psychological distance, we'll do all sorts of terrible things. Um, there's research on that going back to the, the '40s, '50s, and '60s. So, um, I think that's one big effect, that kids are going to be socialized more slowly to the extent they spend time behind screens. They may not be fully socialized at all in certain respects. One of the things we learn to do by being in the presence of other people is we learn to distinguish subtle emotional changes, especially facial expressions. So the difference between frustration, fear, anger, sadness, in facial expressions, as adults, most of us can do that effortlessly. I can tell what someone else is thinking. Kids need to learn that. They need, it takes a bit of time for them to get there. And if you're looking through a screen the whole time, you know, I have the sense that I'm, you and I have eye contact right now, but we're looking at, at a screen and we're looking at a camera. It's not quite the same as actually looking at a person's eyes directly. So, um, I think a lot of that means that kids are going to be develop- developing a little bit more slowly and maybe some of the faculties won't fully emerge until they have more face-to-face experience with other people.

    4. CW

      Hm. I remember, I was out for dinner in Dubai, um, in November, with a young couple and they had the kid. And when the, I think he must have been about three or four, and when he was getting a little bit unruly, uh, one of them would just get the phone out and put YouTube on and just plop You- YouTube in front of the kid. And I was, I remember thinking at the time, I was like, well, from my perspective, I wanted a quiet, peaceful meal. So it was quite nice for me. But I wonder what that's doing to the child's development. Like, what does it tell us during our most formative, most developmental years, that when you face discomfort or hardship...You can anesthetize that with a screen.

    5. AA

      Right. Yeah, exactly. Uh, and, and, this is, as a, as a parent of two young kids, I, I'm constantly faced with that, that question. Right? It's always easier to give your child a phone. It's always going to be easier. It's an incredible tool. It's an amazing pacifier. Um, but that's, that's the question. In the long run if, if we're constantly using this pacifier, you teach your kid that there's no such thing as boredom-

    6. CW

      Mm-hmm.

    7. AA

      ... boredom should not be tolerated for even a minute, your own thoughts are something to be afraid of. You know, the, the moment when you are sitting there just inhabiting your own head space, that that's a problem, that the only way to deal with it is to medicate it with a screen, that's problematic. The idea that sitting at a table is such a hardship, that there needs to be a way to deal with it, that's way more entertaining, like visiting entertainment upon a young brain, because the act of sitting at a table is, is just too unpleasant, that's problematic too. So, um, you know, I, I became much more kind of... I, I became much less hard-line when I became a parent, because I know how hard it is, especially with kids, um, to, to manage a lot of this stuff. Um, but also obviously I'm very mindful about it. I, I don't want to... I don't want to do something that will affect my kids in a, a way that, that makes them less happy and healthy. Um, but these are all the things that I think about as well. I think it's, it's a big part of it.

  19. 56:23 – 1:06:18

    Is it educational

    1. CW

      Whose job is it to fix this problem? Like is it educational? Is it policy-wise? Does it need to come top-down? Is it cultural? Do we need new language around this? Is it bottom-up?

    2. AA

      Both. I think it's both. I think we all, as individuals, have some responsibility. That's the bottom-up part. Um, and, and the good news is, in the last... Uh, as I, as I've seen, I've tracked it from 2014, it's seven years now, um, there is much more bottom-up pressure on tech companies. Whether it was because of Cambridge Analytica, privacy concerns, whether it's about now the, the rise of awareness about how tech companies are behaving, um, and the, the hooks they're embedding in these programs, we're, we're certainly much smarter and savvier about all this, this stuff. And so that's, that's I think a good thing. So there is bottom-up pressure. Um, but I think some of it has to come also from, from governments, from legislation, from policymaking. A lot of people bristle at that. They don't like the idea of the government intervening. But the government intervenes on so many things that I think, um, I, I am not opposed to it if we can find the right kinds of interventions. And certainly there are testing grounds around the world. In East Asia, there's a lot of this. In, um, parts of Western Europe and, and Northern Europe this is starting to happen as well, where they're starting to introduce small bits of legislation. It's very piecemeal, but the legislation is, is designed to improve the experience of the-

    3. CW

      What like?

    4. AA

      ... end user. Like in France, for example, if you have a company that's got more than 50 employees, the, the, um, the company needs to have a, a written charter that explains how those employees will be protected from email after hours. So what will the company do?

    5. CW

      No way.

    6. AA

      Batch emails? Yeah. It's, I think it's a good... Maybe it's not exactly the right move. The details might not be right. But the idea of having companies say, "You know what? I, I guess we don't need to send you emails at 2:00 AM. So what we're gonna do is batch them, and then when you wake up at 7:00 AM, we will release a tranche of emails that have been stored overnight." That kind of thing. Um, or vacation policies, like, you know, when you go on vacation, instead of just sending the email to you anyway, we're gonna batch them, we're gonna hold them. Or even better, there are some companies in Germany now that are just deleting those emails. So if I'm on vacation and you email me, you'll get a re- response that says, "Adam's on vacation. You can email that same email again when he gets back after this date, or we can just, if you send a reply that says 'Forward', we'll send it to someone else who can help in, in his absence." So I on vacation don't even know that you've emailed me, because if I know that, that destroys my vacation to have to keep checking those emails. So whatever my inbox looked like when I left for that vacation, it looks like when I get back. So there are these, these kinds of small, small, um, changes that I think have a pretty big effect on well-being, some of them driven by legislation.

    7. CW

      I wonder whether-

    8. AA

      So all of this is worth...

    9. CW

      ... I, I wonder whether there'll be a tool, um... I'm going to guess there probably will be, someone will tell us in the comments, kind of like schedule send but schedule receive. So not just an out of office, but actually a dam that you can place on the other side of you between you and your inbox, and it can just allow everything to, to build up, and it means that you don't need to concern yourself and there's no notifications and then it can release it. Um, yeah, I wonder as well, I mean we've got laws around the minimum age that children can drink at and that children can have sex at.

    10. AA

      Yeah.

    11. CW

      Um, and that's because they're not s- given the right amount of agency to be able to make decisions on their own. Now, you could argue that the effect of a couple of years of phone use could be as detrimental or perhaps more detrimental in different ways to alcohol and substance abuse. Um, I, I, I don't know whether that's quite true, but it's definitely in the same sort of paradigm. So yeah, it makes, it makes complete sense. I think you're right. Legislation, we're, we're definitely seeing more sort of cultural talk around it, and as that begins to get more and more nuanced... The problem obviously is that the Leviathan, the Goliath, slow-moving, slumping monster that is government and policy is always going to be playing so much catch-up. Um-

    12. AA

      Yeah.

    13. CW

      Here's another thing actually as well. So I have a, a theory around COVID and the fact that we were delivered such a, a piss-weak pathogen as our first modern era virus, that it's almost inoculated us in a systemic way. Culturally, we understand in the modern era what it means to have a virus. We understand what it means to have global travel, but also need to shut it down. We know what PPE is, we know what social distancing is, all of that sort of stuff. And I wonder if, um, it's actually going to be a benefit for us as a civilization, because if the next one happens in 100 years' time and the mortality of that is 5X what COVID was-... we will be ready for it. I wonder if the introduction by tech companies of these platforms at this stage, with the glass ceiling that we have on the level of interaction, actually means that we're going to have the policies, the culture, maybe even sort of the, the education to be able to deal with when AR and VR arrive because some of the psychological hooks will, will maybe be inoculated against them. What, what are you, what are your thoughts on, on that?

    14. AA

      Uh, yeah. It's, um, it's possible. I... That, that's why I was speaking about AR and VR, which I think is the, the next level. If we can manage to cope with these devices, then I think we're in a much better place to cope with, with headsets and things like that. So, I think, I think that's right. Um, uh, it's interesting you say, "I- in 100 years." You know, there was a pandemic 100 years ago and it was very damaging, and yet we didn't learn a damn thing from it. So, I, I think the, the half-life is, is small, um, is, is short. It's brief. If for another pandemic to come, I hope this does, doesn't happen, but if there were another pandemic and it, it were shortly after this one, then sure. We've learned a lot about PPE and vac- vaccinations and social distancing and all that sort of stuff, and the masks, whatever. But humans have a short memory. Um, we're not, we're not gonna remember this for that long. And a lot of the podcasts I've done recently have been about this, this new normal idea. Like, what's changed forever and what hasn't? Are we still gonna be working from home in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years? I think a lot of things are gonna, gonna back to the way they were. That's happened after almost every crisis that humans have ever faced. Most things, the vast majority of things go back largely to the way they were. Um, and I think that's gonna happen here as well. I know that's not about screens and tech-

    15. CW

      No, no, no.

    16. AA

      ... but you... It was an interesting, it was an interesting question you asked, or, or interesting idea you, you posed.

    17. CW

      You mentioned over email that you're working on something new. How much of what your current time is taken up doing can you tell us?

    18. AA

      Um, you mean, do you want me to tell you what I'm working on?

    19. CW

      Yeah.

    20. AA

      Yeah, so I'm, I'm working on a third-

    21. CW

      I just didn't know if it was super, super-duper secret.

    22. AA

      It's not super-duper secret. Um, I'm working on a new project. Uh, it's, it's, uh, a third book, um, and it's about getting unstuck. So we think of being stuck as, um... And it, it's a kind of natural extension of some of the other work I've done, but we think of being stuck as a kind of glitch. Um, and it's, it feels very personal when you're stuck. Like, "I, I don't know why. Why is this happening to me? I don't know what to do about it." It could be stuck in relationships, in work, in any kind of change you wanna make in your life. Um, but it's a feature. So if you look at success and you look at how people succeed, there, there are almost no stories where there wasn't, uh, just a string of sticking points. And so some people overcome them, some don't. Some businesses overcome them, some don't. Some governments overcome them, some don't. Some species overcome them, some don't. And the question is, what are the kind of tools and tricks you can divine? Like, what can you extract from all of this to learn? You are gonna be stuck. We're all gonna be stuck at some point. We collectively have been stuck for a year in some respects, physically and otherwise. So what can we do to become more resilient to, to these sticking points? And when they arrive, how do we overcome them more quickly and more effectively so that they become a feature of our lives rather than this, like, calamitous quake? There's this term this, this guy Bruce Feiler uses which I love. He says, "On average, we will experience..." I think it's something like between 5 and 10 lifequakes through the lifespan. And a lifequake is just one of those colossal events. We have a lot of small changes in our lives, but a lifequake will be a really big event that will really shape the foundations of your life. We, we always experience those as just, just calamity. Like, "I don't even know what I'm gonna do now." And that'll, they'll be there. Every one of us will face them. So the question is how can we be more resilient, and how can we prepare for them a little bit more effectively? So that's what I'm working on.

    23. CW

      How long is it gonna be, do you think, before it's out?

    24. AA

      Uh, I'm writing it now. Um, I'd, I would guess 2023 to be conservative about it. Um, it's... The, the final manuscript is due in 2022, but there's a production lag in all of that. I'd say 2023, but I- I'm not sure. We'll see.

    25. CW

      Exciting, man. I'm really, really excited. I will be-

    26. AA

      Thank you.

    27. CW

      ... 100%... Now that I've got your email, I'll be 100% reaching out to, uh, to get you back on for that.

    28. AA

      (laughs) Thank you.

    29. CW

      I don't mind. Uh, it's been a long time coming. We've been talking about doing this for a long time. I'm very, very glad that we've got on to talk about this today. I think it really is one of the most important conversations that everybody needs to understand. Uh, and I appreciate the work that you did and the Cassandra complex that you must have felt, um, after writing it in 2000... (laughs) Starting in 2014-

    30. AA

      I did.

Episode duration: 1:06:19

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