Speaker 1: A day in the life of Alice. Alice works at
Speaker 1: the plant. Alice has a strange pay system at her
Speaker 1: job at the plant. Instead of getting weekly paychecks, every day,
Speaker 1: her employer deposits one seventh of her weekly income into
Speaker 1: her bank account. She makes what passes for an average
Speaker 1: median wage in the New U s territories, so this
Speaker 1: means about a hundred and twenty one credits shows up
Speaker 1: in her bank account every day. It's Saturday if she's
Speaker 1: off work, and she's out of food at her apartment,
Speaker 1: so Alice decides to go to the grocery store to
Speaker 1: buy a few things to make herself some lunch and dinner.
Speaker 1: On our way walking to the store, she sees another
Speaker 1: woman walking an extremely cute puppy. Alice goes up to
Speaker 1: ask the woman if she can pet the puppy. The
Speaker 1: woman says, okay, but it will cost you three credits.
Speaker 1: Alice thinks about it for a second, then makes a
Speaker 1: few swipes on her identipad and sends this woman the money.
Speaker 1: She pets the puppy. Of course, she enjoys the experience
Speaker 1: because hey, puppies are great. On the way to the store,
Speaker 1: she stops four other dog walkers and pays them each
Speaker 1: three credits to pet their dogs. Now, dogs are still
Speaker 1: great when you can find them. Petting dogs is still wonderful,
Speaker 1: but Alice notices that each time she stops to pet
Speaker 1: a dog, she gets less happiness out of it than
Speaker 1: she did the last time. Having spent fifteen credits on dogs,
Speaker 1: she's now down to a hundred and six credits for
Speaker 1: the day. Halfway to the store, she walks past the
Speaker 1: scene of an auto car accident ambulances a peacekeeper detail.
Speaker 1: She doesn't really want to look, and she feels guilty,
Speaker 1: but she can't help it. The feeling of curiosity is
Speaker 1: so overwhelming she has the irresistible urge to peek and
Speaker 1: see if anybody got hurt, but she gets caught. An
Speaker 1: armored peacekeeper walks up and says, ma'am, I noticed you
Speaker 1: watching the scene. There's a surcharge of twenty six credits
Speaker 1: if you want to do that. Reluctantly, Alice hands over
Speaker 1: the payment and then spends a while watching the scene.
Speaker 1: Now she's down to eighty credits of the day, and
Speaker 1: on top of that, she feels pretty guilty about snooping
Speaker 1: on the wreck in the first place. On the way
Speaker 1: to the store, she has more encounters like this. She
Speaker 1: stops to watch a couple having a heated argument a
Speaker 1: parking lot. They charge her forty credits to watch, and
Speaker 1: all it does is make her feel bad. Then outside
Speaker 1: the grocery store, a vendor is selling crystal lattees. She
Speaker 1: buys one for five credits and stands there drinking it.
Speaker 1: It is a truly delicious crystal latte, so she buys
Speaker 1: another one, and then another one, and then three more.
Speaker 1: By the time she's done, she is highly overcaffeinated, feels
Speaker 1: twitchy and anxious, and has a horrible stomach ache, and
Speaker 1: she only has fifteen credits left to buy groceries with.
Speaker 1: This is not enough for her to make what she
Speaker 1: was planning for lunch and dinner, let alone enough to
Speaker 1: save what she needs each day to pay for rent
Speaker 1: her virtual reality bill, or save for that Ganymede Mec holiday.
Speaker 1: She's been dreaming of what happened Alice in this story.
Speaker 1: At every stage of every part of the she was
Speaker 1: doing what she wanted to do in the moment. Nobody
Speaker 1: coerced her at all, nobody forced her to do any
Speaker 1: of that stuff, and yet everything has gone wrong. Her
Speaker 1: financial plans for the day have been completely destroyed. What happened?
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stup
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: what we just read was an attempt to sketch out
Speaker 1: an illustration of an idea that we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about for a couple of episodes here. This is
Speaker 1: going to be the first of a two part episode
Speaker 1: about the attention economy, the technosphere, and the war for
Speaker 1: your eyeballs. And one of the core ideas that we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about today is the idea that we
Speaker 1: should start thinking about our attention, what we pay attention to,
Speaker 1: as a finite resource that has to be invested in
Speaker 1: things with deliberation and care in order for us to
Speaker 1: get what we want out of life. If you think
Speaker 1: back over the story we told about Alice and simply
Speaker 1: take out the money, remove the credits from the scenario,
Speaker 1: is it a day well spent? Is the story? Okay?
Speaker 1: If you take out all the money she spent staring
Speaker 1: at the at the wreck, at the argument, at the puppies,
Speaker 1: at the Latte's um. It's still not quite right, is it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The great thing about this little story is that we
Speaker 1: have these sort of fun dystopian sci fi elements, but
Speaker 1: at heart we have a very dystopian idea that matches
Speaker 1: up with our our daily life, our daily struggles over attention. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: because even if you take all of the money out
Speaker 1: of the story, she wasn't spending money, but she's spending
Speaker 1: something that cannot be replaced, which is her time and
Speaker 1: what she devotes her mind to. Yeah, thinking about that
Speaker 1: purchase that she wants to make, thinking about the situation
Speaker 1: that she's a mere bystandard too. Right, It's a distraction
Speaker 1: from whatever else it is you want to do with
Speaker 1: your life. Because our attention is truly finite. It might
Speaker 1: feel like an infinite and value uncoupled resource to us, right,
Speaker 1: because there's just so much of it for us to give,
Speaker 1: and we squander it so much of the time, and
Speaker 1: there's no explicit dollar value attached to it. But think
Speaker 1: about it like this. You do work so that you
Speaker 1: can get a paycheck that will number one by you
Speaker 1: the basic necessities of survival, But then what do you
Speaker 1: work for on top of that? It's because you want
Speaker 1: to have money in your paycheck that will allow you
Speaker 1: to spend your free time devoting your attention to things
Speaker 1: you want. You like to spend your attention on family,
Speaker 1: on friends, on books and movies and enjoyable meals, and
Speaker 1: sports and the outdoors and meditation and how abbies and
Speaker 1: personal projects and all of all of that is attentional desires.
Speaker 1: The reason we want to have free time is because
Speaker 1: we want to be able to spend our attention on
Speaker 1: these things. And we at least subconsciously realize that we
Speaker 1: only have a limited amount of attention to spend. Our attention,
Speaker 1: quite literally is our lives. And over the next couple
Speaker 1: of episodes, we're gonna try to offer some evidence and
Speaker 1: make an argument that we increasingly live in a world
Speaker 1: of incredibly powerful, highly evolved attention vampires that we have
Speaker 1: thoroughly integrated into our daily lives and allowed to just
Speaker 1: suck away our attention at a massive scale without us
Speaker 1: even noticing it. Because do you ever realize that you've
Speaker 1: been sitting there scrolling through your Facebook news feed mindlessly
Speaker 1: for half an hour when you really meant to be
Speaker 1: doing something else, Or do you ever suddenly snap, as
Speaker 1: if from a trance from watching a long string of
Speaker 1: random YouTube videos, not videos that you went to YouTube
Speaker 1: specifically to watch, but videos that have been served to
Speaker 1: you as related content, compulsively clicking on the next video
Speaker 1: or allowing it to auto play, like you're just hypnotized. Yeah. Like,
Speaker 1: I often have this situation where I feel like if
Speaker 1: I were a primitive human, I would be seated and
Speaker 1: say a clearing um, perhaps you know, next to a tree,
Speaker 1: and I would be working on some craft. Perhaps I'm
Speaker 1: I'm chipping away at what will be an arrowhead or
Speaker 1: the head of a spear. And then occasionally I'll look
Speaker 1: up from my craft and I'll look around at the
Speaker 1: surrounding territory, you know, just to make sure that the
Speaker 1: rival tribe is not attacking, that there are no predators
Speaker 1: creeping up on me, and then continue with my work.
Speaker 1: But in my day to day environment, it's not merely
Speaker 1: the physical surroundings that I had that I gaze up
Speaker 1: from and look at. It's the all the social media
Speaker 1: um aspects of my environment, like gazing over at at Facebook,
Speaker 1: at Twitter, at Reddit, at at what have you, many
Speaker 1: of which are tied to my job. I'm looking at
Speaker 1: feeds for the podcast feeds for work, and yet it
Speaker 1: is it is getting in the way of my my
Speaker 1: actual job. But you often get derailed. I bet, don't
Speaker 1: you Like you go to Twitter or you go to
Speaker 1: Facebook because it's something you have to do for your job,
Speaker 1: and say, I need to check the page for X,
Speaker 1: or I need to upload a link to why. But
Speaker 1: then that news feeds there isn't it, Or some things
Speaker 1: are scrolling in and you get kind of sucked in,
Speaker 1: or sometimes you're not even in there for any other reason,
Speaker 1: but you feel this kind of inexplicable tug. Do you
Speaker 1: ever notice yourself getting derailed from important or interesting projects
Speaker 1: they frequent unnecessary compulsion to check Twitter and see what
Speaker 1: happened on it? Or do you ever have that feeling
Speaker 1: that suddenly a whole evening is gone by and you
Speaker 1: didn't really do anything productive or enjoyable. You just had
Speaker 1: a long sustained session of consuming digital content without making
Speaker 1: any conscious choices or decisions, and all you're left with
Speaker 1: is this hollow feeling of regret. What happened to my night? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's something is is nonsensical too, is just a
Speaker 1: sudden need to explore the filmography of Rod Steiger or
Speaker 1: something that added fact. You know, it's like it's just
Speaker 1: like I wonder what his big film was, and then
Speaker 1: and then going out. Yeah, like the encyclopedic rabbit holes,
Speaker 1: going one Wikipedia link to another. That can happen too.
Speaker 1: And this is what we're gonna be talking about for
Speaker 1: these next couple of episodes. So I came across a
Speaker 1: startling fact that's often cited by a technology ethicis that
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about in these couple of episodes.
Speaker 1: A guy named Tristan Harris. You might have seen him
Speaker 1: in the news over the past couple of years because
Speaker 1: he's been leading this new movement. Will be discussing a
Speaker 1: little bit. But Harris often cites the fact that the
Speaker 1: average person with the smartphone checks their phone hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty times a day. Yeah, well that doesn't that doesn't
Speaker 1: sound too far off. I I shudder to think that
Speaker 1: could be true. But that might be true about me.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but I would be scared to see
Speaker 1: the number if somebody kept track of how often I
Speaker 1: checked my phone, because it begins to feel like coming
Speaker 1: up for air. It's just something that you almost do
Speaker 1: as a reflex. You know, I'm walking down the hallway, Well,
Speaker 1: nothing to do but check my social media. Yeah, if
Speaker 1: that number is true, And if you're in that average
Speaker 1: band and you check your phone about a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty times a day, think about what that does to
Speaker 1: your day. Even if you only spend an average of
Speaker 1: thirty seconds each time looking at your phone, that's seventy
Speaker 1: five minutes of every day staring at your phone. But
Speaker 1: we all know it's not just thirty seconds, right, Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's thirty seconds, sometimes maybe a little bit less. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you open the Facebook app or the Instagram app and
Speaker 1: it turns into ten minutes, twenty minutes, or an hour.
Speaker 1: Why is this happening and how is this affecting us?
Speaker 1: One of the funny things about this is the fact
Speaker 1: that we're using in this conversation the word phone. I
Speaker 1: know we've had this talk before about how like one time, Robert,
Speaker 1: you were like, it's not really a phone, is it? No?
Speaker 1: I yeah, I have. I have gotten in the habit
Speaker 1: of trying to refer to it as a tiny pocket
Speaker 1: computer because it feels far more accurate than saying phone,
Speaker 1: because phone sounds utilitarian. I have my phone in case
Speaker 1: an important call comes through. It's a tool for getting
Speaker 1: in touch with the hospital or something like. But it's not.
Speaker 1: It's a tiny pocket computer full of data streams and
Speaker 1: games and various social media bells and whistles and and
Speaker 1: ultimately also it's just this portal for anxiety, you know,
Speaker 1: like all the various, all sorts of bad news can
Speaker 1: come flying through this black little screen. And yet we
Speaker 1: we want to be next to it at all times,
Speaker 1: you know, we we need to be there when when
Speaker 1: the bad news comes to calling. We have talked about
Speaker 1: how it should be called a tiny pocket computer, and
Speaker 1: that would be much more accurate. But I also think
Speaker 1: people should run this experiment. Try this exercise. Anytime somebody
Speaker 1: says a sentence about their smartphone and they're not actually
Speaker 1: talking about like a landline telephone, if they're talking about
Speaker 1: a smartphone, replace the word phone with the word god
Speaker 1: and see how the sentence sounds actually. Just search Twitter
Speaker 1: for some my phone statements and turned up things like
Speaker 1: I hate going out when my God isn't fully charged,
Speaker 1: my God died mid inst alive, It's been a big day.
Speaker 1: High school really is a waste of time. I just
Speaker 1: sit here on my God all day. Now. I wonder
Speaker 1: if we could give the god a proper name like
Speaker 1: phone Hovah or something. That would be kind of fun,
Speaker 1: but no, it would more accurately represent the I mean,
Speaker 1: the the value in time and attention that we give
Speaker 1: this device. I think it is not exaggerating at all
Speaker 1: to say that we now have a religious level of
Speaker 1: devotion to these personal devices that are Internet connected. We
Speaker 1: consult them in a way that if we if we
Speaker 1: were suddenly exposed to this world, if we hadn't been
Speaker 1: eased into it over the past, you know, ten years
Speaker 1: or whatever, if we just popped into this future and
Speaker 1: saw everybody checking their phones and staring at their phones
Speaker 1: all the time, we we would think this was absurd.
Speaker 1: We would think this was a ridiculous way to live. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I mean I have moments where I do snap
Speaker 1: out of it and for a few minutes anyway, and
Speaker 1: realize this is this is crazy that we're all pouring
Speaker 1: ourselves into these devices all the time, and it it's
Speaker 1: it's beyond mere convenience. And yet when people bring this
Speaker 1: up in a satirical context, I often see people making
Speaker 1: this point. Everybody's staring at their phones all the time.
Speaker 1: It is treated as an indictment of the behavior of
Speaker 1: people and not an indictment of the design of the technology.
Speaker 1: If you notice that it's like, oh, all these stupid
Speaker 1: people staring at their phones all the time? Yeah, wake up,
Speaker 1: people are are often at times, there's there's sort of
Speaker 1: this this this this anti youth vibe to it as well, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's millennials won't stop looking at the fields. But I
Speaker 1: think we all have seen enough examples to know that
Speaker 1: humans of all ages are susceptible to the the the
Speaker 1: sirens song of the smartphone. Right later in this pair
Speaker 1: of episodes, we're going to be discussing a lot of
Speaker 1: the specific ways that our technologies that are personal devices
Speaker 1: and the apps within them are absolutely totally designed to
Speaker 1: hijack our attention and make us behave this way. I
Speaker 1: think it's not because people are stupid, it's not because
Speaker 1: they're weak. It's how we are. We have certain vulnerabilities
Speaker 1: in our brains, and these devices and the software within
Speaker 1: them exploit those vulnerabilities brilliantly. Yeah, we have just we
Speaker 1: have crafted an ever evolving neural parasite that we all
Speaker 1: pay top dollar for. I want to discuss a couple
Speaker 1: of findings about the effects of having of like phone
Speaker 1: and interruptions, the interruptions they provide on our attention, and
Speaker 1: the way this happens in our lives. Before we dig
Speaker 1: more into the meat to the topic. Just in, Robert,
Speaker 1: I think you might have seen the study. I think
Speaker 1: maybe we talked about it. There was research out of
Speaker 1: u T. Austin just last year in that found something
Speaker 1: pretty weird. People who had their smartphone within reach did
Speaker 1: worse on tests of cognitive performance than people who had
Speaker 1: it in another room. This is even if the smartphone
Speaker 1: was turned off. If it's visible or within an arm's length,
Speaker 1: it was distracting enough to deduct from our effective I
Speaker 1: Q and I have anecdotally noticed this in my own life.
Speaker 1: I'll be working and having trouble focusing on work, even
Speaker 1: if I'm not actually checking my phone, I will be
Speaker 1: in a more distracted state of mind if I've got
Speaker 1: my phone on me, And if I merely take my
Speaker 1: phone to a different room of the house and shut
Speaker 1: the door and then go back to my work, I
Speaker 1: can focus more. I'm serious. I have found this as well.
Speaker 1: If I can stick it in a drawer now, as
Speaker 1: as I am saying, this as I am speaking into
Speaker 1: the microphone. My phone is situated over here to the side.
Speaker 1: I have it an airplane mode so that it won't
Speaker 1: interrupt me. But still it's there in my peripheral vision,
Speaker 1: like kind of staring at me with its with its
Speaker 1: dark screen, and there's this this sense that's still this
Speaker 1: is this idea that it might light up at any moment,
Speaker 1: I might get some sort of an alert, even though
Speaker 1: it should not be able to give it to me,
Speaker 1: right yeah, even though it's not doing anything to you,
Speaker 1: it's in your It's in your consciousness at some level.
Speaker 1: Right in the same way that somebody's god belief becomes
Speaker 1: a part of their conscience, the presence of your phone
Speaker 1: becomes a part of your situational awareness. It's always lingering there.
Speaker 1: It's always a potential, right yeah. And sometimes the potential
Speaker 1: is just for mundane stuff to happen, like, oh, the
Speaker 1: doorbell will ring at my house. That means a package
Speaker 1: has been delivered, you know, and it's just I don't
Speaker 1: need that information. It's just you know, a box of
Speaker 1: of cat food. I don't need to be there, and
Speaker 1: no additional plans need to be made. But yet the
Speaker 1: delivery of cat food has interrupted my daily workflow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The English psychologist Glen Daniel Wilson I've read, has shown
Speaker 1: that the distraction threat of things in the digital realm,
Speaker 1: So like the example would be an unread message sitting
Speaker 1: in your inbox, you're aware of that, and you've got
Speaker 1: that distraction threat on your mind. It can lower our
Speaker 1: effective i Q by about ten points. But then think
Speaker 1: about what happens when you actually have the distractions coming in,
Speaker 1: Like if you've got notifications turned on on your phone.
Speaker 1: Interruptions matter a lot to your ability to focus on
Speaker 1: projects and activities you care about. When a notification interrupts you,
Speaker 1: it's not just the time you spend looking at the
Speaker 1: interruption that you lose. Interruptions degrade the quality of your
Speaker 1: focus on your primary activity. Some psychologists call this quote
Speaker 1: a task shifting penalty. Robert, I'm sure you've felt this before, right,
Speaker 1: I feel this all the time. Yeah. You get into
Speaker 1: a certain workflow and then something pops you out of it, right,
Speaker 1: and that's and that's when, or if you actually get
Speaker 1: back into the task at all. According to a two
Speaker 1: thousand five University of California, Irvine study by Gloria Mark
Speaker 1: and colleagues. Regaining your original focus on a project or
Speaker 1: task after an interruption takes people, on average over twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes. And if that's they actually resume the task
Speaker 1: on the same day they were interrupted. Sometimes they don't
Speaker 1: resume it for the whole day. So what happens when
Speaker 1: you get when you're working on something or you're focusing
Speaker 1: on something, is if you're gonna get interrupted, it takes
Speaker 1: you longer to get back into the zone. And that's
Speaker 1: if you even pick the task back up, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it will take you a while to do that. Interruptions
Speaker 1: are more than just the content of the interruption. They
Speaker 1: totally degrade the quality of our engagement with every goal
Speaker 1: pursuit we care about. You know, this reminds me of
Speaker 1: some some research I was putting in on another topic
Speaker 1: where an individual touched on the nature of torture and
Speaker 1: one of the psychological aspects of torture is making the
Speaker 1: torture recipient unsure about what is going to happen at
Speaker 1: any given time. And this is a power that we
Speaker 1: have handed not only over to the torture but also
Speaker 1: to the smartphone and various other devices in our life. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we were just recently reading some stuff about pain and
Speaker 1: the role that that uncertainty and anxiety plays in the
Speaker 1: amplification of the sensation of pain. So anyway, given all
Speaker 1: of this, I have to start wondering in a quite
Speaker 1: literal sense. I I don't mean this as an exaggeration.
Speaker 1: Are we currently living in an attention dystopia? All right?
Speaker 1: You think about that while we take a quick break,
Speaker 1: and then we'll come back and try to regain focus.
Speaker 1: Than alright, we're back now. I think we should think
Speaker 1: about the idea of attention. We've already discussed that attention
Speaker 1: essential is our lives. Attention is what we value in
Speaker 1: our lives. When you think about the life you want
Speaker 1: to live, what you really mean is you want to
Speaker 1: be able to spend your attention on certain things, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because I mean when you start thinking about what attention is,
Speaker 1: it's more than just looking at something or thinking about
Speaker 1: something momentarily. It is Uh, it's it's crucial to what
Speaker 1: I've seen referred to as the selective directedness of our
Speaker 1: mental lives, right, having a having a will for how
Speaker 1: you use your mind. Yeah, I mean, in some models
Speaker 1: of consciousness that we've discussed on the show even center
Speaker 1: on the manner in which humans utilize their attentive powers.
Speaker 1: As such, there are multiple philosophical arguments for the nature
Speaker 1: of human attention and the reasons for our limited process
Speaker 1: and capability. Yeah, but ultimately it's kind of like the
Speaker 1: primitive example I gave earlier. You know, there's no doubt
Speaker 1: that we evolve to handle various streams of stimuli at
Speaker 1: once and to apply selective attention based on their importance.
Speaker 1: This is why we can go to a party and
Speaker 1: you can tune out all the other voices in the
Speaker 1: party except for the person you're talking to, or that
Speaker 1: you can do the exact opposite, tune out the person
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be talking to and listen to a
Speaker 1: more interesting conversation in the vicinity. But one thing you'll
Speaker 1: notice if you do that is it really degrades what
Speaker 1: you take away from any of those experiences. That's so
Speaker 1: like if you were trying to talk to one person
Speaker 1: in a crowded room, you can focus on them and
Speaker 1: pay attention to them, But if you're trying to switch
Speaker 1: between paying attention to them and eavesdropping on somebody nearby,
Speaker 1: you're not really going to get a very good sense
Speaker 1: of either one, right, But still there are limits to
Speaker 1: what you can encounter in a like a physical real
Speaker 1: world scenario. You know, even if the tribal meeting is
Speaker 1: is rather crowded, there's only so much you're gonna be
Speaker 1: able to hear over the shouting and of course the
Speaker 1: sacrifices to to ug uh you know, I mean, it's uh,
Speaker 1: there are going to be limits in place. There's the
Speaker 1: world of multiple stimuli streams and fixed and moving objects
Speaker 1: that we evolve to thrive in, and then there's this
Speaker 1: world we've made a place of over stimulation, over choice
Speaker 1: in myriad voices to command our psyche. This is a
Speaker 1: really good point because we could easily think of the
Speaker 1: virtual world we've created, the world within our phone operating systems,
Speaker 1: or computer operating systems, or the web, especially the modern web,
Speaker 1: which is so highly designed focused, or our social media
Speaker 1: apps and all that. We could think of that as
Speaker 1: an extension of our world. It's just like the world
Speaker 1: is going into this virtual space. But I don't think
Speaker 1: it's like that. This is not an extension of our
Speaker 1: physical lives in the physical space. It is a different
Speaker 1: world with different properties, and it operates on different rules
Speaker 1: and the rules it operates on. As we're about to
Speaker 1: get into our the monopolization of your attention primarily, that
Speaker 1: is the ultimate goal of most of this stuff we
Speaker 1: interact with in the information age. The attention devouring technosphere,
Speaker 1: i would say, is not an accident. It's by design.
Speaker 1: These apps and devices are specifically engineered to suck out
Speaker 1: as much of our attention as they can get. And
Speaker 1: you know this, rightly, feel it. You can see that
Speaker 1: in every piece of clickbait headlines, right you know, or
Speaker 1: anything like that. It's trying to get your eyeballs. People
Speaker 1: in the industry talk about the idea of eyeballs. They
Speaker 1: want eyeballs on things. Yeah, there is kind of the
Speaker 1: the content product, and then there is the the the
Speaker 1: app product, the interface product, and all of them are saying, hey,
Speaker 1: look at me, look at me, do this, interact with me,
Speaker 1: use me more, read me more, consumedly more, and ultimately
Speaker 1: probably purchase more. Right exactly, so we should ask the
Speaker 1: question why, like why are so many highly calibrated technological
Speaker 1: monsters vying for our attention in the first place? And
Speaker 1: this is an interesting question. One paper we might want
Speaker 1: to mention is that back In two thousand twelve, the
Speaker 1: M I. T economists Eric Brynjolfsson and U he Oh
Speaker 1: wrote a paper called the Attention Economy. It was essentially
Speaker 1: geared toward trying to quantify the economic value, the money
Speaker 1: value provided by free content and services on the Internet,
Speaker 1: because obviously the abundance of all these free services, you know,
Speaker 1: websites that you go to for free, apps that you
Speaker 1: use for free, all that stuff that's offered online is
Speaker 1: providing value to people because they're choosing to spend their
Speaker 1: attention on it, and that value isn't getting directly measured
Speaker 1: in the economy the way the value of many other
Speaker 1: consumer services would be. Like if you want to measure
Speaker 1: the value of a bottle of drain, Oh, it's the
Speaker 1: value is what people go to the store to spend
Speaker 1: on it. Right, But the consumer is not spending money
Speaker 1: on these apps and devices and stuff, but they are
Speaker 1: spending something something that has some kind of value that
Speaker 1: we need a way to measure. Well, it sounds an
Speaker 1: awful lot like engagement to get into sort of the
Speaker 1: business terms of websites and and even podcasting, right, The
Speaker 1: idea that you want you want to user engagement, right,
Speaker 1: and the user, the user or the consumer. One of
Speaker 1: the things we've got to understand is that the user,
Speaker 1: the consumer of these information services, these free internet services
Speaker 1: like Facebook or any any digital media, even what we do,
Speaker 1: the user is not really the customer because they're not
Speaker 1: paying money. The customer is going to be the advertiser,
Speaker 1: and the user is the product. Essentially, you cultivate a
Speaker 1: product by getting eyeballs, and then you sell access to
Speaker 1: those eyeballs that you gather to an advertiser in any way.
Speaker 1: That paper I mentioned earlier, those two economists estimated that
Speaker 1: over at the time, this was back in two thousand twelve, quote,
Speaker 1: the increase in consumer surplus created by free internet services
Speaker 1: was quote over one hundred billion dollars per year in
Speaker 1: the US alone. There's an enormous amount of perceived value
Speaker 1: or wealth being offered in these free internet services. But
Speaker 1: somebody that they exist mainly because we live at a
Speaker 1: time when your attention alone is worth money to somebody else.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned the idea of ad supported media. Most
Speaker 1: of the internet and online services that you uh that
Speaker 1: you use are offered to you for free, and it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be this way, right, We could have
Speaker 1: a tech economy where everything that you got over the
Speaker 1: Internet or through your devices had a fee to access, right,
Speaker 1: Do you ever think about why it's not that way? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean both. Part of it is that we have
Speaker 1: we have grown accustomed to getting things for free on
Speaker 1: the Internet, and that applies to everything from newspaper articles
Speaker 1: to music, and that's been one of the that's been
Speaker 1: one of the hurdles for for online business to try
Speaker 1: and figure out how to get people to pay for things. Again,
Speaker 1: do you think free music sharing through piracy and Napster
Speaker 1: and all that in the early days of the Internet
Speaker 1: helped shape the free ad supported information content of the
Speaker 1: Internet today, Like people got trained on the idea that
Speaker 1: it wasn't really stealing because you know, I can't remember
Speaker 1: who this is. But there was once a comedian I
Speaker 1: heard doing a comedy act about those old piracy commercials
Speaker 1: that are like, you wouldn't steal a car, why would you?
Speaker 1: Why would you steal music? But the comedian said, you know,
Speaker 1: I would steal a car if all I had to
Speaker 1: do was touch the car, and then an instant copy
Speaker 1: of the car would be created and I could have
Speaker 1: it and the original person could keep their car, and
Speaker 1: you know, it created the sense because it was digital
Speaker 1: information that could be copied without consequence, that you weren't
Speaker 1: really taking from anybody. You're just getting a copy of
Speaker 1: a thing. Yeah, it's out there, and all I am
Speaker 1: doing is breathing it in as if it were air. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so it's like trained people on this idea that that,
Speaker 1: you know, information should be free, and as has been said,
Speaker 1: information wants to be free, but it's led to this
Speaker 1: world where Okay, to produce information, you have to spend money, right,
Speaker 1: Like anything that is made on the internet. If you
Speaker 1: want to run a website, if you want to write
Speaker 1: an article, if you want to create a podcast, if
Speaker 1: you want to create a video, almost none of this
Speaker 1: can be done for free. You have to invest in it.
Speaker 1: And so that's got to be paid for somehow. And
Speaker 1: so the way everything works, including us here, is that
Speaker 1: you pay for things by running ads. That's right, I mean,
Speaker 1: And that's not even getting into the idea that people
Speaker 1: are putting their time into creating things, and that time
Speaker 1: has to come out of your life and you and
Speaker 1: the individual the individual creator has bills to pay and
Speaker 1: a route to maintain, and needs to have food eat, right,
Speaker 1: and so the way technology companies and digital media companies
Speaker 1: can pay for themselves is to run advertisements. And the
Speaker 1: way they can increase the amount of money they're making
Speaker 1: uh and that they can charge advertisers is basically twofold.
Speaker 1: I think one is simply by selling more exposure to
Speaker 1: your eyeballs to the user's eyeballs. The more attention you
Speaker 1: spend on a platform, the more advertising that platform can
Speaker 1: show you. So if you go to Facebook and they
Speaker 1: get you to stay on Facebook twice as long, they
Speaker 1: can show you twice as many ads, so they can
Speaker 1: charge the advertisers that much more. You increase the supply
Speaker 1: of attention that can be sold to the customer, which
Speaker 1: is the advertiser or The other main way media companies
Speaker 1: can make money off your attention is by gathering data
Speaker 1: about you. The more you use a social media site
Speaker 1: like Facebook or whatever, the more social media, the more
Speaker 1: that social media site knows about who you are and
Speaker 1: where you live, and what you're interested in and what
Speaker 1: you'll spend money on and so forth. And the more
Speaker 1: it knows about who you are, the better they know
Speaker 1: how to sell you stuff. You might have noticed that
Speaker 1: in the early days of the Internet when you were
Speaker 1: getting targeted ads, they were bad. You. I remember the
Speaker 1: days when I was getting targeted ads on Facebook that
Speaker 1: were for ridiculous things I would never want. But over time,
Speaker 1: targeted advertising has gotten a lot better, hasn't it. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's gotten really really good. It's like to the point
Speaker 1: where you you look up an item on Amazon on
Speaker 1: you're thinking about thinking about getting it. For instance, recently
Speaker 1: I looked at the blu ray of the movie Screamers,
Speaker 1: A Wonderful Fishman, which one the one from the nineties
Speaker 1: with Peter Weller or the no, that's a great film too,
Speaker 1: but though this is the Fishman movie and the Italian one, yeah,
Speaker 1: the Italian one. And I wasn't actually gonna buy, you know,
Speaker 1: but I looked it up. I was curious to see
Speaker 1: if the blue, if the blue ray was available, And
Speaker 1: then it seems like every day for the following week,
Speaker 1: when I first went onto Facebook, i'd be hit with
Speaker 1: that Amazon targeted ad for that very blu ray disc.
Speaker 1: Now that's the easy part. You've already looked that up.
Speaker 1: They've sold that data to somebody else, or they're using
Speaker 1: that data to run targeted ads for you on another platform.
Speaker 1: That's pretty straightforward. It gets creepier though, what about what
Speaker 1: about when they show you ads for things that you've
Speaker 1: never looked up as far as you can recall, but
Speaker 1: they really are in your wheelhouse. Yeah, yeah, I'm into that,
Speaker 1: Like it's another Fishman movie that I'm not familiar with,
Speaker 1: and or it's a Fishman comic, or it's a an
Speaker 1: All Gillman, you know, doom that band, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I had no idea, but that sounds like the kind
Speaker 1: of thing would be into, right. So this is another
Speaker 1: reason the providers of these technology platforms want your attention.
Speaker 1: It's because the data is valuable to them directly. The
Speaker 1: more you use the platform, the more attention you give them,
Speaker 1: the more data about you you give them, and the
Speaker 1: more they can target you in the future, the more
Speaker 1: they learn about how to glazer in on exactly what
Speaker 1: you'll click on and buy. So it's also it's valuable
Speaker 1: for that reason. It's also valuable as the data is
Speaker 1: valuable as a commodity that can be sold to third
Speaker 1: parties that want to know things about you in order
Speaker 1: to target sales or advertising. And actually, I'd put in
Speaker 1: a third motivation for capturing more attention, and Robert, I
Speaker 1: wonder what you think about this. This doesn't get cited
Speaker 1: as much, but I would argue a third major motivation
Speaker 1: for commanding your attention on a platform is habit formation.
Speaker 1: What do we usually reflexively do with our attention when
Speaker 1: we've got free time. We do what we've done before, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. We fall into the hal bit of going
Speaker 1: on Facebook, or for me, one of the worst is
Speaker 1: just going into my my email, not to actually read
Speaker 1: meaningful emails, but to clear out garbage, to clear out
Speaker 1: not even necessarily spam, but the sort of promotional emails
Speaker 1: that I think you signed up for, that I signed
Speaker 1: up for, that I'm for some reason, I'm still like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to actually unsubscribe, but I'm also not
Speaker 1: going to read them, but they just keep coming. I'm
Speaker 1: just sort of maintaining this weed garden of of crap,
Speaker 1: and it's taking away from my day. And that's a
Speaker 1: habit you formed. We are creatures of habit. We mostly
Speaker 1: do what we've trained ourselves to do in the past.
Speaker 1: Most of our behaviors are not novel. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: we tend to shop at the stores we've shopped at before.
Speaker 1: Most of the time, we go to the restaurants we've
Speaker 1: gone to before, and we do the same thing in
Speaker 1: our digital spaces. Every time you make a decision about
Speaker 1: what to do with your attention, you are training your
Speaker 1: brain to make similar decisions or the same decision in
Speaker 1: the future, which is kind of a daunting thought, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I think that's absolutely true. But you need to think
Speaker 1: about the fact that every time you act, even in
Speaker 1: trivial activities throughout the day, you are altering the source
Speaker 1: code of your own brain to encourage your future self
Speaker 1: to behave more like your behaving right now. And of
Speaker 1: course all this is even more nefarious when you realize
Speaker 1: that not everyone is selling a product. A lot of
Speaker 1: people are selling an idea or a or or or
Speaker 1: some sort of vision of reality, a political ideal, a
Speaker 1: social ideal. They are attempting to tell you how to
Speaker 1: feel and how to think. But that all depends, of course,
Speaker 1: on continued access to that consumer of information. Right. So,
Speaker 1: if you are a platform like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any
Speaker 1: of that, and you want people's attention, it's it's important
Speaker 1: to help people form patterns of habit in which they
Speaker 1: learn to give that attention to you. They'll be more
Speaker 1: likely to keep giving it to you in the future
Speaker 1: because it's become familiar and easy and habitual. It's what
Speaker 1: they've done before, so it's what they'll do again now.
Speaker 1: I want to come back and say that we want
Speaker 1: to be clear. I think that not every bid for
Speaker 1: your attention is bad or evil. Right. There are lots
Speaker 1: of things we do with our attention that we consider
Speaker 1: good uses of our attention. And there's lots of for example,
Speaker 1: ads supported media that obviously we think is worthwhile and
Speaker 1: worth having. I mean, I listen to podcasts that run
Speaker 1: ads in order to pay the bills and keep producing
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm fine with that if I care about
Speaker 1: the podcast and want to make that decision deliberately with
Speaker 1: my time, right Yeah. There's nothing evil about that, right,
Speaker 1: I Mean, that's just we've recognized that's part of the
Speaker 1: economics of how the content we like and care about
Speaker 1: is produced. What becomes more nefarious is when we find
Speaker 1: ourselves using technological services and consuming content compulsively or impulsively
Speaker 1: reflexively without really making a decision about something we want
Speaker 1: to consume or that we care about, right yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where it's just this click click, click, it's just this uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's not even becomes a situation where you're not
Speaker 1: even really absorbing information. You're just dipping into the information
Speaker 1: stream exactly. Yeah, you are becoming a passive receiver of
Speaker 1: what is being fed to you by a platform that
Speaker 1: you have habitually formed an information consumption relationship with. You're
Speaker 1: on Facebook, and it's just streaming into you. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and there's so there's this like informational context to it,
Speaker 1: but also there's there's a tactile context to it as well.
Speaker 1: You know, the swipe of fingers over the over the screen,
Speaker 1: and then the the acknowledgement that you have clicked something,
Speaker 1: you've checked something off of this list. In a way,
Speaker 1: I think we should take a quick break and pay
Speaker 1: the bills with some advertising, and then we should come
Speaker 1: back and look at some actual data on the way
Speaker 1: people use their attention on digital devices and how they
Speaker 1: feel about that. Thank alright, we're back now. You might
Speaker 1: have seen this idea of like the distractions and the
Speaker 1: attention war come up in the in the news over
Speaker 1: the past year or two with respect to technology, apps
Speaker 1: and social media. And one reason you might have seen
Speaker 1: something about this is that words been spreading about a
Speaker 1: particular movement and nonprofit organization called Time Well Spent, which
Speaker 1: was founded by a guy I mentioned earlier, a former
Speaker 1: Google employee named Tristan Harris, and a number of other people.
Speaker 1: And these people were not the first to point out
Speaker 1: that the media are controlling the economy of our attention
Speaker 1: in negative ways, but having worked in the modern tech sector,
Speaker 1: I think they've got a more specific message about the way,
Speaker 1: for example, your phone and the apps on it are
Speaker 1: not just sub optimal, but possibly really driving your life
Speaker 1: and the culture in general into an extremely unhealthy space
Speaker 1: that runs contrary to our goals and what we want
Speaker 1: our lives to be. And so they've been doing a
Speaker 1: lot of media interviews recently in the past year so
Speaker 1: and so I think maybe we should take a look
Speaker 1: at some at some time well spent information and data.
Speaker 1: That sounds good job. This sounds like time well spent alright,
Speaker 1: So how good are we really at spending our attention
Speaker 1: in ways that make us happy and give us a
Speaker 1: sense of fulfillment. Maybe you're out there listening and you're like, now,
Speaker 1: I don't buy it. I use my attention exactly how
Speaker 1: I want, you know, when I use Facebook, it's just
Speaker 1: it's because I want to do that. I'm living my
Speaker 1: own life. Yeah, or you know, or you you sort
Speaker 1: of qualify the kind of content. Well, I use it
Speaker 1: to keep in touch with my friends. My real friends
Speaker 1: are my real family, and it's about maintaining that social network.
Speaker 1: And there's some truth to an argument like that. Oh sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: we don't want to totally demonize any particular app. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've been saying a lot of negative stuff about Facebook
Speaker 1: and related apps, but there's no reason to totally demonize
Speaker 1: an app to its core. But we should be aware
Speaker 1: of what its capabilities are and how we're interacting with
Speaker 1: it on average. So there's an iOS app called Moment,
Speaker 1: which is a device usage tracker, and what it does
Speaker 1: is it logs how much time you spend using your
Speaker 1: iPhone or your iPad and which apps you spend the
Speaker 1: most of your time on. And so the Moment app
Speaker 1: has partnered with time Well Spent what I just spent
Speaker 1: before and the associated UH nonprofit, the Center for Humane
Speaker 1: Technology to gather data about how much time people spend
Speaker 1: on various apps and how they feel about spending their
Speaker 1: time that way. So to be clear, this is something
Speaker 1: where the user can see how they're spending their time on. Right,
Speaker 1: So the app says, hey, did you know you spent
Speaker 1: x a number of minutes on this app and this
Speaker 1: many times a day, and what it shows you your usage.
Speaker 1: I like this idea because it reminds me of how
Speaker 1: with a lot of the modern video games we have,
Speaker 1: they'll tell you how many hours you've sunk into the game,
Speaker 1: but you spent twenty seven days playing. Yeah. It's it's
Speaker 1: generally horrifying to read because because it's the sobering moment
Speaker 1: where you're like, oh my god, I spent that much
Speaker 1: time playing this video game or any video game or
Speaker 1: anything that isn't uh, you know of of of really
Speaker 1: intrinsic value in my life. Yeah. So, there was an
Speaker 1: initial study conducted in a pool of two hundred thousand
Speaker 1: iPhone users on this this moment uh and time well
Speaker 1: spent partnership. And when you look at the results, there
Speaker 1: is an immediately apparent and overwhelming correlation between apps that
Speaker 1: we spend more time with and a feeling of unhappiness
Speaker 1: with spending our time in the apps. Now, you might
Speaker 1: be able to explain this correlation in a number of
Speaker 1: different ways. We'll get to that after we discuss the data,
Speaker 1: but first let's just look at the results. Apps like Facebook, Snapchat,
Speaker 1: and tweet bought people tended to spend roughly an hour
Speaker 1: or more in each day, and the majority of users
Speaker 1: reported that they were unhappy having spent the time in
Speaker 1: the app. For example, Facebook, the average daily Facebook use
Speaker 1: was fifty nine minutes, and sixty cent of users, or
Speaker 1: about two thirds, reported that they were unhappy that they
Speaker 1: had spent the time that that amount of time in
Speaker 1: the Facebook app, and the apps that made people the
Speaker 1: most unhappy seemed to be things like social media, dating apps,
Speaker 1: and games like candy Crush. Meanwhile, let's look at the
Speaker 1: opposite end of the spectrum, which apps did people claim
Speaker 1: to be the most happy with the time they spent using.
Speaker 1: The list is more diverse here. It's more populated by
Speaker 1: things like books and podcasts. It makes me feel good
Speaker 1: about podcast space, but books and podcasts, music, weather apps,
Speaker 1: navigation apps, fitness, meditation, and calmness. So the general trend
Speaker 1: here is that I think these are things related to
Speaker 1: intellectual stimulation like books and podcasts, uh and even like music.
Speaker 1: Personal improvement like you know, wellness, and all that, and
Speaker 1: functional utility tools that are useful in your life, like
Speaker 1: navigation or weather right or the flashlight app. Let's not
Speaker 1: forget that at all the ding dang time. I'm sure
Speaker 1: people are very very happy with their use of the
Speaker 1: flashlight app, and yet people reported spending much less time
Speaker 1: engaging directly with these apps that made them happy. For example,
Speaker 1: people were happy with the time they spent with Audible
Speaker 1: the audio books app, but they only spent an average
Speaker 1: of about eight minutes a day with it, which is
Speaker 1: a lot less than people spent in Facebook and Candy Crush,
Speaker 1: especially given how long some of the audio books. Are
Speaker 1: you planning to finish that thing anytime? Saying I don't know,
Speaker 1: People spent a lot less time, but they felt good
Speaker 1: about the time they spent. They were happy about the
Speaker 1: time they spent with podcasts, but spent only an average
Speaker 1: of about eight minutes a day there as well. Again,
Speaker 1: so these episodes seen to be about an hour long,
Speaker 1: the two coming out a week, You gotta you gotta
Speaker 1: crack the quip a little bit more. Well, you gotta
Speaker 1: think about these are averages of courses, So you know,
Speaker 1: maybe people listen to one podcast a week I'm just
Speaker 1: thinking of Joe and Jane average out there. Now. I
Speaker 1: wonder if I don't know exactly what the methodology here is,
Speaker 1: So I wonder if this could be an artifact of
Speaker 1: how moment tracks app usage. Like if an app runs
Speaker 1: in the background without being the first app open on
Speaker 1: the screen, I don't know how that gets tracked. Does
Speaker 1: that get Does that get tracked the same way a
Speaker 1: screen oriented app like a game or Facebook would. I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure, but I want to think. I think
Speaker 1: we should think about explanations for this. So why is
Speaker 1: it that the apps we spend the most time with
Speaker 1: make us the most unhappy? It could be that the
Speaker 1: same apps that command the most of our attention just
Speaker 1: coincidentally also happened to be the ones that leave us
Speaker 1: feeling regretful about spending our time with them. Well, you
Speaker 1: know one thing that instantly pops out at me too
Speaker 1: is these examples of positive experience apps. They are not
Speaker 1: as focused on the machine itself. You know, like when
Speaker 1: I'm listening to music, I am potentially doing something else.
Speaker 1: I'm not staring at my phone and looking at Spotify,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm doing I'm engaging in some of their activity.
Speaker 1: But people were very happy with their books apps, and
Speaker 1: so like, if you're reading your kindle app or something,
Speaker 1: people that made people happy. But where are you when
Speaker 1: you read a book? You're not really in the phone,
Speaker 1: in the imagination in your mind. Yeah. And then likewise
Speaker 1: with some of these mindfulness apps, whereas what are you
Speaker 1: doing when you're looking at Facebook? You are kind of
Speaker 1: in the default mode network of worries about your own
Speaker 1: social situation past in future, you're in the Facebook space. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So another explanation could be a more direct correlation, right.
Speaker 1: It could be the fact that we spend so much
Speaker 1: time with an app is what makes us regretful about
Speaker 1: using it, Right, Like, would we be happier with our
Speaker 1: Facebook usage if we only spent ten minutes a day
Speaker 1: on it? Would we be sad about our Audible or
Speaker 1: Kindle usage if we spent an hour or more a
Speaker 1: day on that? I feel like there might be a
Speaker 1: yes to the first question, but a node to the
Speaker 1: second one, right, Like there, I can't be sure, but
Speaker 1: somehow I doubt that we would be sad using Audible
Speaker 1: for an hour a day because I don't know when
Speaker 1: I listened to audiobooks for a long stretch of time
Speaker 1: while I'm doing yardwork or cooking or something. I feel
Speaker 1: very happy about that. Yeah, it doesn't feel like a
Speaker 1: slur to say, to say, oh, man, Joe is an
Speaker 1: audible theme. It's an audible freak. Joe, get out that audible,
Speaker 1: you know. But if we if we inserted a Facebook
Speaker 1: or Twitter in instead of instead of an audio book program,
Speaker 1: it would be a different connotation entirely. Now I should
Speaker 1: say I just realized we've run audible ads on the
Speaker 1: show before. They're not paying us to talk about any
Speaker 1: of this. This is just what the results were. But
Speaker 1: I can honestly say I do enjoy books and podcasts
Speaker 1: related apps much more than social media apps. But then again,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Like, so imagine that the average Facebook
Speaker 1: usage was only ten minutes a day, and it's still
Speaker 1: the same kind of usage. It's not like having a
Speaker 1: specific interaction with somebody or looking up an event page
Speaker 1: or something. But just ten minutes a day scrolling through
Speaker 1: the algorithmically generated news feed. Would people be happy about that?
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't know.
Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't sound that happy. Yeah, I want to
Speaker 1: look at a second set of results compiled through the
Speaker 1: Moment app with Time Well Spent. This was just a
Speaker 1: separately compiled page I found uh In this separately compiled
Speaker 1: set of results, the top apps that people were happy
Speaker 1: to have spent time with were in similar categories. There
Speaker 1: are things like, uh, you know, books and meditation and
Speaker 1: wellness and learning and music. And the average amount of
Speaker 1: time people spent per day on these top happiness apps
Speaker 1: was around seven minutes. Another way of measuring the usage
Speaker 1: is that they noted how many times a day did
Speaker 1: you pick up the app for these apps? The answer
Speaker 1: was generally about one to three times a day. The
Speaker 1: top apps that people were unhappy to have spent time
Speaker 1: with were generally social media apps and games, and these
Speaker 1: apps people spent closer to around forty five minutes to
Speaker 1: an hour a day on less time on the dating
Speaker 1: apps than the other social media and games. So for
Speaker 1: the purpose of this conversation, I think we can assume
Speaker 1: that these results are more or less correct. They certainly
Speaker 1: ring true to me, though I haven't found an in
Speaker 1: depth description of the methodology by which they were arrived at,
Speaker 1: but these organizations seem trustworthy to me. I think these
Speaker 1: are probably basically correct findings. But assuming this is roughly correct,
Speaker 1: why are we living the technological part of our lives
Speaker 1: this way? Why do we spend the most time using
Speaker 1: our technology in ways that end up making us the
Speaker 1: least happy. That's kind of the the ultimate uh, like
Speaker 1: kicking the pants at the end of a day, right
Speaker 1: where you if you look back and you think, oh,
Speaker 1: I spent I spend a fair amount of time doing
Speaker 1: things that brought me no joy? Why didn't I use
Speaker 1: that time? Why didn't I scroll that time away for
Speaker 1: the things that I need to do and or really
Speaker 1: want to do? Exactly? Nobody's forcing you to scroll your
Speaker 1: Facebook timeline over and over, your your news feed or
Speaker 1: Twitter or Reddit or any of these other things. Nobody's
Speaker 1: forcing you to just spend your time running through this
Speaker 1: infinite stream of content. And yet you do it. You
Speaker 1: keep doing it, you keep going back to it sometimes
Speaker 1: during the things that we want to do. Have you
Speaker 1: ever had this experience where you're you're watching a movie yeah,
Speaker 1: or a movie you're interested in yeah, and then for
Speaker 1: some reason, like I mean, on one hand, I kind
Speaker 1: of get into it this way, like I'll I convinced
Speaker 1: myself it's certainly okay, to go to IMDb and look
Speaker 1: up people in the movie. So who's who's that? Who's
Speaker 1: that actor? All right, I'll look him up, and I mean,
Speaker 1: that's all right. But then it goes beyond that, because
Speaker 1: then I'm just on a reflex. I'm pulling open my
Speaker 1: my work email account or my personal email account, or
Speaker 1: I'm even worse, I'm clicking on social media or or
Speaker 1: or Reuter's or something instead of just focusing on the
Speaker 1: one distraction that I'm supposed to be into right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're detecting that there is this inherent tension. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing we talked about in the story we
Speaker 1: used to illustrate the problem at the beginning. There is
Speaker 1: a tension between what we want to do with our lives,
Speaker 1: what we want to want, and the things we do
Speaker 1: with our technology of our own free will. Seemingly moment
Speaker 1: to moment when we have these impulsive, tempting little bits
Speaker 1: of digital candy to pull us a side and distract
Speaker 1: us and lure us in and then just keep us
Speaker 1: gobbling for you know, minutes, hours, for as long as
Speaker 1: it can keep our eyes glued to the screen. And
Speaker 1: I think in the next episode we should focus a
Speaker 1: little bit more on how technology is doing this to us,
Speaker 1: how it's changing us, and how it works, what tools
Speaker 1: it uses in order to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities. Yeah,
Speaker 1: next next episode is going to be more of a
Speaker 1: fight the power. I'm hoping it's gonna be. We wanted
Speaker 1: to explain the problem in this one. Yeah, the next one,
Speaker 1: you're this This episode was about finding out what the
Speaker 1: terminators are. In the next episode you'll find out about
Speaker 1: how to blow them up and you know, make your
Speaker 1: own kitchen pipe bombs to do it. Right. So, when
Speaker 1: that social media app says I need your clothes, your boots,
Speaker 1: and your motorcycle, you say no. You say no, sir, no,
Speaker 1: thank you? All right? Well, hey, in the meantime, head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find
Speaker 1: various blog posts as well as links out to our
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