 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show about how tech and innovation can make us all merry and bright. I hope you enjoyed your Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or just plain old day off work with friends. But now New Year's is on the horizon, that time of sincere resolve to change your life next year for the better, and then never using that new gym membership ever again. In that spirit, we're going to discuss the ways that digital tech have changed our routines, but even more significantly, even our basic brain chemistry in all kinds of unintended and often harmful ways. The too long don't read version, your brain's been hacked, and what we should consider then doing about that. As usual, I'm your host, Paul Matzko, with me are Will Duffield and Aaron Powell. To start, let's lay down the baseline. We're talking about smartphone use to get real simple. How old were you guys when you got your first smartphone? To define that, let's say a phone that could and you did used to go online, it's not just like phone text. I mid high school, I got a hand me down Blackberry for my uncle, which I guess was the first internet phone I had. I had Twitter before it actually on a dumb phone, and it was great because it was one of the few ways you could get live news updates through SMS because you could follow like CNN breaking news and set them. It was certainly when internet phones were pretty new because there weren't any limits on tethering at that point. At my high school, you couldn't use the school network for all sorts of gaming, movies, whatever else. I was pulling like seven, eight gigs a month through this tether connection on this slide. I really used it. My first smartphone was less a smartphone and more of a wireless modem. I will now distinguish myself in age from Will by answering. I think I was either 30 or 31. It was shortly after finishing law school, moving out to DC to work at Cato. I got, it was the T-Mobile like G2, one of the early Android phones and it was terrible, but that was my first. I went through all of my childhood and all of my college years and all of my law school years without a smartphone. I did have an iPod touch in law school, which I guess is kind of like a smartphone that only works when you're in the building. You had Wi-Fi though, so you could, yeah, yeah. You had Wi-Fi and you could use the internet, but it was very interesting with that first generation of smartphones. It wasn't an app ecosystem yet. It was basically a miniature, it was a web browser that you could carry around. You could check your email, but beyond that, I don't really remember what functionality. I was making use of. Well, I think for, at least for me, I'm in college is when I have my first smartphone, but the stuff that we associate with smartphone use among, well, especially teenagers now is stuff that you did on a computer, right? So like AOL, AOL Instant Messenger, right? Like that was our version of texting, what I used in high school. Really? And enough of your high school compadres were also on ICQ? My nerdy friends, yes. All of us, fancied ourselves, computer hacker sorts, were on ICQ and there was the competition about your, because you didn't have a user ID, like you didn't have a user name in ICQ. You had a number and it was just a sequential number. So it was like this is the number of users you signed up. So there was the, you know, you were super cool if you had a low ICQ number. No idea what mine was. So I mean, I think what's what's striking about this is that so some of the stuff we're going to be talking about here, we're doing a giant experiment on an entire generation of American, really Gen Z, I suppose, who are the founders is what they asked to be called the recent MTV did a survey of what they'd like their generation to be named and the winning was the founders. Founders of what? What are they? It's not. We've got to wait and see. Yeah. I don't know. That has a little bit too much of like new founding fathers vibe to me. Maybe I've just watched too many, there's purge movies. Yeah. I didn't have a strong opinion of this generation a little bit. I didn't have a strong opinion of this generation until I saw that. And I was like, maybe they could be worse than the millennials. Hey, hey, give us our avocado toast. Give us our we're doing all right there and you bitter Gen X. Yeah, Gen Xers don't have any, you know, no viable presidential candidates, really, they're getting beat by a bunch of septuagenarians. We invented all this stuff. You're the missing generation, frankly, there is a version. I'm going to say it's likely, but there's a version of the future in which we just skipped from the last baby boomer president, Donald Trump or let alone Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders next cycle from Donald Trump to a millennial. Well, we're going to get Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, you know, it's only only men that have to wait until 35. We should we should get back on topic, as I can see, Tess, our producer in there is kind of working to strut. She's a little restless. OK, so we're back on topic, but we've established that we are older than the the folks who grew up using this technology, right? So like for most of us, it's teenage college, early thirties. Really, the concern here is that there's an entire generation who are from toddlerhood even already using smartphones, tablets, and we're starting to to question what the effects are on just kind of basic human psychology from using these devices at that young of an age. Some of the stuff I and I think particularly how they're used at that age. What do you mean by that? Well, well, it's it's one thing for a kid to watch TV shows on a tablet. It's another for the tablet to be treated as a pacifier by the kid's parents. It works wonderfully. There's does. I'm sure it does. But the context of that use feels unhealthy. You're supplanting some means of care with that that Netflix tablet. And sometimes you're really exhausted. That's just I haven't been a parent yet. It's going to be a trip. Well, I'll share an anecdote. My partner was out on the walk, saw a young mom clearly exhausted, pushing a pram with like a one one and a half year old sitting in there, holding her mom's phone, watching, I don't know, blues clues or something. Right. And the question was who is self who is self soothing here? And the answer is they probably both are, right? Like you're a tired parent, you just give them the device and they're quiet and content for like an hour and and you need that, right? But there's all kinds of like when I call this a grand experiment, it's because we don't know during a developmental stage what this will do to these kids patterns of thinking, patterns of even socialization. Like it's one thing when you adopt this once your neural pathways are already relatively formed, like Aaron's pretty much in concrete by the by the time he gets a phone, he's 31, his brain is functioning the way it's going to function, right? And even in your 20, changing him now, no, it's can't teach an old dog new, new smartphone tricks. I think the saying, but the reason why I think folks are concerned is because when you use these devices, it's an active device. Yeah. So it's not just like watching a screen, but that activity has been designed by developers to encourage kind of basic primitive chemical releases in the brain. So when you do certain things in your phone, you get rewarded with a dopamine rush. Your body gives you a little exhilaration, like, hey, good job. And that a lot of the software is programmed to provide that. Like they're actually consciously thinking these days. They have, you know, neuro neurologists. They have folks with training in brain chemistry who are working with designers. How can we get folks essentially addicted to maybe probably call that addiction, but get them hooked on using the software and continuing to use it. So I mean, what strikes me is interesting about that in in this context is it's always been the case that product designers want to design products that are engaging, right? And so you want this to be a product that people are going to use a lot because then they're going to recommend it to friends or they're going to want to buy the next version of it or whatever else. But there was always a distance between you as the product designer and kind of the use of the product and the only way to so, A, you couldn't really measure, you know, like if Wired magazine prints out a print edition of their magazine and mails it to people, they can they can measure like are people resubscribing? Are they canceling their subscriptions or submission rates growing? But they can't really see how people are using this magazine. Maybe they can get a sense of like sales for advertisers went up by X amount when this thing went out. But you it's there's this pretty crude, it's pretty crude. Whereas now you have, I mean, they can instantly they can be measuring you in effectively real time as you're using the app and it's pinging back to the server. And it's not just measuring when you were to buy an egg beater, say, after buying it, the egg beater company wasn't making any more or less money, whether you used it regularly or not. But when it comes to Facebook or really anything else with an ad driven model, every minute you're spending there is revenue for the company. Right. But even even if even if it's a sales, like it's a one off sales of the app, they can still they can be measuring this stuff and then they can be tweaking this stuff. And then the difference, the other difference too, is when you buy that egg beater, even if they later are like, oh, there's a there's better ways to make this egg beater and they release egg beater version 1.5, you're not going to get that unless you decide to go out and buy another egg beater. And for a lot of products, we just don't buy new ones until the old one breaks, but they can now push the updates out to you in either real time, if it's websites or close to it, if it's over the air updates. And so you can create these feedback loops, but one of the things that gets lost then, or I guess one of the I think the results of that is that when you are the product designer designing, a product designer has a lot of values they're trying to bake into this product. And so there's there's considerations like you want a product that works well, but also like we want a product that has certain aesthetic qualities, we want a product that has a certain feel to use, we want a product that we can be proud of, like these are all values that exist, but the feedback loop of testing plus instant optimization, I think in a lot of cases crowds out all other considerations in designing the product except engagement. There's I think it's from Tristan Harris, who was an Apple engineer, Google manager, and actually was Google's internal design ethicist was his title. Now he's he's left to basically complain about how terrible these things he helped create are. But he I'm pretty sure it was him who gave the illustration of how on Instagram, they'll they'll track their users and they've noticed that certain users will they respond favorably they engage more when instead of releasing notifications of likes, whenever they happen, so someone like your Instagram post and so you get Oh, that person liked that notification Oh, that person like notification. They've noticed that some people respond better when they cluster the likes so that the dopamine rush is bigger when instead of one every five minutes, you get a batch of five and a half an hour and suddenly five people liked my post and it triggers that dopamine release more powerfully so like they can do that on the fly and I mean it's not some literal engineer for each person calculating that their algorithm their eight artificial intelligence systems are are doing that for you without any kind of human oversight and they just say here's we want to maximize these results track individual people figure out what gets them to engage more and more and more is is that wholly a dopamine chasing story. I mean I I notice that on Twitter when I've said something foolish and a bunch of people are dunking on me. I won't get all of those notifications at once. I'll get them in a staggered fashion and for me I you know if I'm getting a couple hundred people chiming in or liking or whatever else get I don't I don't want a constant stream of notifications I'd rather those be packaged and given to me every half hour rather than my phone just dinging constantly so I it's a good thought I don't know I can see other reasons why you might want to do something like that yeah but certainly the in the way Harris presents it feels but I think one of the I mean one of the points or takeaways of this this production cycle is that in the past a product designer would have had to sit down and think about how this product might be used and make those kinds of considerations like say do I think and based on the evidence that I might have which is going to be a little bit rough do I think that I'm going to get more engagement by clustering versus dripping them out at a more even pace and is engagement like is the kind of engagement that creates the kind of engagement I want is it going to have lead to long term less use of the product or is it going to you know hurt my brand reputation because people will feel addicted whatever but now they you don't even need to make that decision you can just be like well what I'm going to do is put out two versions of the app like randomly assign people to buckets and see what works and I'm going to optimize on the measurables because you can then I mean it's nice to be able to go to your boss and say look all the measurables have gone up and it might be the case then to that like will you seem to respond better when they're clustered but Paul you seem to respond better when they're spaced out and so you guys are going to get what you get and from the from some the perspective I mean this causes kind of you can imagine someone who is not a libertarian looking at this someone who doesn't who sees their kind of natural inclination is to see thing to be like well what role could the state play in this like this seems almost like the market breaking in a certain interesting way right because you've got you've got people product designers following incentives their incentive is they want their product to stay in business these are incredibly competitive markets the advertising margins are razor thin so every last bit of engagement is important so they're simply following reasonable incentives but the result in the aggregate is that our phones are filled with these things that have been like laser focused designed to just make us behave like the rat just hitting the thing to get you know the treat over and over again which most of us think is on the whole not a good way to live well it's causing burnout right it's causing but it's you know and like if we could step back and inject other values into the design process we might say like we try to design different products but but each individual actor that you can't be the actor who does that because then it all it means is that your app is just not going to get used as much as the other ones and it's going to go under and so is this a good booster stock price and yeah is this the kind of situation where what you need is an outside third party that has a different set of values to kind of impose and say no you need to you know we need to put a limit on this or you need to pursue other values at the only way out of this kind of vicious cycle that'd be a real twist for a Kato podcast for us to be like actually we do need the state to step that no so I mean it's a is a reasonable line of argument right you can get it's it's logically proceeding from some prior assumptions I think as we look at what's happening though we see adjustment being made without state action and we can talk about that some here me even even Tristan Harris why just mentioned he's part of an organization called the Center for Humane Technology he's joined by the guy who invented the infinite scroll as a Raskin there's a number of former engineers we're all saying wait a second we didn't intend for it to be like this or to get this bad let's roll this back even Apple and Google as we will talk about here in a bit they've started to introduce measures to discourage people to use their products as much functionally and we could we'll talk about that like we're seeing voluntary self-organized organized action so I mean I mean I think that's the libertarian answer is that we don't need the state to do this in fact if they try to do it they'll be super clumsy about it I mean I have to is watching congressional hearing of you know of a Google CEO the other week day to realize how ham fist they shall check out will's Twitter feed during any of these hearings because it's just him banging his head into the desk over and over come by the office and just I hear a bang through my door yeah I can hear it down the hall so I mean there's I mean there I think we can rely on the market to correct its own failure here but in thinking about like is this market failure perhaps but what I think of it what's interesting is to the extent to which it's just human failure in as much as we decided for a variety of interesting historically contingent happenstance reasons we gave a bunch of like 20 something year old often college grads college dropouts they're young most of whom don't have training in the humanities and ethics and philosophy and why or whether you should do things they just have training they have the skill set to make stuff and we told them make things people use a lot and they did that and didn't appreciate the ramifications of it I mean in this so you take take like the infinite scroll that that novel I mean you look at the creation of the interstate highway system or the Manhattan project or I don't think they're that young right I'm more I don't know maybe I'm but let me put it this way so I mean I think Aaron mentioned this in conversation off the air which was that what's different is that the kind of adoption curve so let's say you create a new interstate highway system yeah there's all these unintended knock-on effects for changing designing for a very specific purpose without a whole lot of thought given to the broader second order effects of what you're building right and that affects you know first of all hundreds of thousands of people and then as it starts to reorganize the built structure of America millions of people now hundreds of millions people so there's a curve over the better course of a century of it transform American society you can change you can create the infinite scroll within a year billions of people around the world one generation are using this right so though if there's a skate exponential curve and adoption rates that's going on that's that that's I think significant here you so I think that makes a difference that just sheer scale of adoption speed of it and the fact that you have young folks who weren't trained to think about these questions making those decisions and experimenting we were all the we are all either part of the experiment or the control group and that's that's curious I think that is different and interesting so what do we have so far in terms of hard data on the effects of this I mean obviously again it is all still pretty new but you look at someone my age and I grew up with dial up got a smartphone and here I am today in the app web point web 2.0 environment that so there are some like there's a big longitudinal study and the science is always behind the tech right so but there's a big I think as Harvard is running the adolescent brain cognitive developmental study with like 10,000 plus kids involved so they're going to track and they're going to track basically entire generation of kids who are born into this tech unlike us who got it mid development or later and what the effects are going to be over the next couple of decades so I mean I don't think we're going to have the best data for a while yet but the early results there was a there's been some good pieces talking about the generational order effects I mean I know Aaron you can't you despise millennials but um spies them you know they're doing the best they can in the broken world we've been left we've been left that millennials but especially Gen Z are having less like I guess you call these upsides in a sense they have less sex about a third fewer sexual partners on the average the sexually active a year or two later on the average in high school they take fewer drugs they have less criminal behavior by half then Gen X or or boomers the flip side of that is they also have a significantly higher depression rates a higher suicide rate and this is harder to measure but it kind of goes with the criminality in sex and the drugs they're less there might be less anti- authoritarian which I think is interesting to think through as a libertarian so there's almost then in a nest the sizing effect they don't have rock and roll either the rock rolls dead so the sex drugs and rock and roll is gone for an entire generation yeah I don't know how people like that can turn out okay um how confident should we be that all of these effects are linked to tech I mean couldn't it just as likely be say the fact that they all lived through the great recession watch their parents lose their jobs and maybe have and had less going out money as kids and became risk averse as a result of just watching that collapse I think that's as plausible as the idea that it's all smart phone trip test just pointed out that Gen Z has Halsey does that mean something to Halsey's fun good driving music I have no idea what that is she's like a you know synth pop princess but I think we can all I mean we can bracket the like what kind of scientific data do we have is it is it too early to have much data because we haven't had people who have really been raised kind of immersed in this stuff from day one and also that the causal questions will that you raised of how much of this stuff is caused by the tech versus other environmental things or cultural things or whatever else but I think it's the case that all of us who have a smartphone can recognize our own addiction to the smartphone oh yeah totally but I feel like that's on me recognize like you know so I can I can see how prior to having a smartphone or prior to having a smartphone is good enough that I actually wanted to use it fairly regularly that that early Android phone was not that that I am have a harder time to with sustained focus say like I have a harder time just like sitting down and reading a book for a couple of hours the way that I used to it's probably very good that I didn't have a smartphone in college and law school because I probably would not have done as well like we can the kind of subjective experience is both very real for most of us and appears to be incredibly uniform among tech users so I don't I still can't help but think of it in terms of individual responsibility in intentionality and I could be off base there but I can pick up my phone and I can bounce around on Twitter or just scroll through Facebook without you know aimlessly or I can open the Amazon Kindle app and keep reading whatever novel I was into on my smartphone and it's up to me to choose which of those things I want to do I just often don't approach the use of technology with as much intentionality as I ought to and neither do other people but so let's see that as a techish if we put this put this like addiction question a sense we're kind of talking about like we don't blame addicts as much as we blame there's this sense in which it overwhelms your like you know conscious decision-making process and so we're having an addiction conversation here you put that in other can't read a novel on my crack pipe though right but here so do we blame someone who uses drugs for decision to become addicted to you know opioids right well yeah we do I mean there's individual responsibility but we also note that there's all these structural factors and unintended consequences of essentially the FDA and cartel of pharmaceutical companies pushing opioid use on people as well like I mean so it's both like a structural pipeline issue and individual responsibility and raising awareness and there's all these unintended ill effects so I mean it's obviously not a severe as opioid addiction but if we think of it in that context I think we don't have to choose between yeah it's your fault well for being obsessed with Twitter and you know dunking on I mean it is though it is my fault I ought to use technology better but this is I failed to do so but you can ultimately the agency rest with you and we can say like it's not the tax fault because the tech doesn't have agency it can't make you pick it up I downloaded Twitter and made an account in the first place I could have never started down that back but it's also the case that the environment in which we find ourselves makes can make good behavior however we want to define it or the kind of behavior that we would aspire to easier or harder yeah and so yeah but that's not just the phone environment that's you know how I've architected my Saturday morning if I don't eat breakfast and don't get out of bed and just lay there for two hours two hours in I am much more likely to just pick up the phone and scroll through it if I get up and go for a run and eat a good breakfast the phone doesn't have the same appeal so this this takes some of the onus off off if you will you can rest easy now now so just like I was blaming 20-something-year-old under aware designers for doing things they understand the second-order effects of well that same thing is true of us like we have it it's not like we were aware that oh if I use this tech it's going to really drastically change my daily experience in my brain chemistry until really last couple years we're starting to wake up to the fact that oh every time I get a notification there is a cortisol response my body pumps a chemical into my brain that it's the fight-or-flight hormone and the cortisol so every time I get that notification my body says oh you got to do something and it was just why you reflexively look at your phone when you get the notifications and the companies structure those notifications to try to trigger either dopamine releases from good ones cortisol triggers from from bad ones and that builds in a kind of base level constant routine anxiety now we when you made a decision to use any of those apps you were aware of any of points you didn't have the knowledge you needed to make an educated decision in that regard right and one I can use the app without getting the notifications all the time you should turn the notifications off and frankly it's rather amusing that with this panic about brain hacking and tech addiction the one notification now you struggle to turn off on your phone is the one that pops up every day telling you how long you've been on your phone yes but we that's information we have now or in the last year or two 2016 no one's talking about dopamine and cortisol and the effects of infinite scroll and the effects of right like this is a new conversation how you made use of some app and think about whether it's healthy or not if you're on Tinder say and you're matching with people but you aren't really sending the messages you're just getting a little warm glow knowing that someone likes you because you don't feel like going out whatever you can look at that and say I'm not using this in a very healthy fashion I don't think I need knowledge about how dopamine is rolling around my brain to make to draw that conclusion but this brings up the other thing we talk about which is this and what you raised in response to the like shouldn't there be a law question about the tech companies starting to bake into because so one of the things is you have to recognize like part of realizing you have a problem you know and so the hi Android and IOL it's have in you know in recent updates have baked in applications that will tell you how long you've been using a given app how long you use your phone how often you pick it up how often you unlock it that kind of stuff and even even someone who's kind of subjectively aware of oh I'm on my phone a lot the first time you get those numbers they're presented to you like today you spent X number of hours on Twitter and opened it up once every six minutes or whatever you're it's just it's like mind blowing and you just are kind of embarrassed and hope no one sees those numbers you know in the same it's the same reaction is when you know you used to hear these stats about like how much the average American watch TV and you'd be like God how can anyone possibly watch that many hours of TV and then it's like you're doing three times that much Twitter every day you know so so the tech is I think before it was it's harder to know and especially when you're in bed and environment so when I take the metro home or take the bus home from work each day every single person it's rare to see someone who isn't on their phone and so you're in bed environment which is kind of acceptable or the fact that all of us during the half an hour we've been talking have checked our phones multiple times is on airplane mode I have checked the time and nothing else you can all check it still is checking the phone so yeah this is you know where we're kind of we're so embedded in a culture that does this and so then the question is can the tech push us back out of this by by giving us by I mean this kind of nudge of like well you're using it too much or enabling me in the you know Ulysses asking his men to tie him to the the mass to the ship right like like I know that I lack the willpower to overcome this so what I want you to do apple is lock me out of Twitter after 20 minutes each day oh and you've you've long had you know been browser apps that will keep you from visiting certain sites while you're trying to study one I mean very minor marginal design feature shift in the latest generation of pixel phones that I I'd like from this perspective is it'll give you an option to turn notifications off when you set the phone face down and and there's a nice physicality that accompanies that sort of do not disturb functionally it's healthy to build in breaks I mean all these things are whether it's your phone your your your I watch Apple watch Apple I'll say I'll have an Apple watch that saying hey take a minute to breathe you'll live 20 years longer around a thousand years longer forever if you do or it's your app telling you I think test don't you have a does your phone tell you to get off at 1030 or something like that hi guys yes my app tells me at 1030 it's time to go to bed and usually at that time I'm scrolling through Instagram so did you set the 1030 yeah yeah I have it set for at 10 o'clock it reminds me it's almost bedtime and at 1030 my screen shuts down and it shows this little what would you call it the sand thing oh yeah yeah the timer saying it's time to go to bed in your screen time is done for the day when you get the 1030 does it read the the children's storybook go the fuck to sleep I mean oh whoa this is a family podcast wasn't thinking that I said that yeah is it though is it I did recommend diapers no but you can get that on YouTube now so no but it also gives me the option to like extend my time on whatever app I'm using by 15 more minutes and then in 15 minutes it tells me to go to sleep like the opposite of a snooze function yeah like that yeah I think the where it can get very interesting there is when the application will actually incentivize you with reference to your in-app goals to log off for a while you think about something like the rested experience function in World of Warcraft when when you're offline it'll build up a bar of double experience and while you're playing that that doesn't build up so the idea is that you know don't don't binge it take a few hours off and frankly you'll be benefited for doing so so I mean it you know in your right like we're building in break systems a way of incur of incentivizing nudging people into getting off their device getting out of a program and spending some some time IRL in real life and and and this is of this is voluntary it's not requiring state action I think that's encouraging from a libertarian perspective but this is a very old concept if I can take a moment to step back and put on my historian hat so it's history time which is just like hammer time but with way worse pants better pants this was a question actually in literature so if you go all the way back to the 18th century it used to be that writing didn't have chapter divisions that was actually somewhat unusual so you wouldn't divide things into chapters it was just one long you know litany of words and one of the innovations in the early novel was we're gonna break that up we're going to divide it into chapters which incentivizes nudges people into taking a break so Henry Fielding who's an 18th century novelist said quote those little spaces between our chapters are an in or resting place where he may stop and take a glass or any other refreshment as it pleases him so they're like this is this this idea of this as a tech is pre-digital it is very old the idea of when people are engaged with with some kind of mode of entertainment or any kind of engagement really it is natural from a design perspective to build in breaks and that in so doing even though it discourages sheer quantity of engagement it makes it more sustainable and more enjoyable for the user so functionally what Google and Apple all these companies are doing in response to these concerns are implementing four-century old tech into our devices which I think is kind of cool right it's a very old conversation being applied in a new way I think the whole conversation is is quite old outside of technology it's also difficult to live intentionally to be mindful of how you're interacting with others making use of technologies etc it's not localized to the smartphone it's hard to be a virtuous person what did your your kind of literature structure as tech it it reminds me it can go in the other direction too I'm reminded of the crime novelist Ed McBain or Evan Hunter as it was his real name he wrote under that and Ed McBain but he he talked once about how he would try to structure paragraphs to make the page easier to read so that the the reader just like kept going because the text because it's you encounter a giant block of text and it's like a hurdle to overcome you read it slower or you lose your place so if you break things up in certain ways or you have the dialogue flow in certain ways he figured out he get his readers well so I mean you've got the in plus how do how with most crime novels they still have chapters how do they end the chapter a cliffhanger right so you want them to take a break but you want them to come back I'm sure we could think of tech corollaries for your smartphone yes you know Google might at 10 30 tell tests to to go to f the sleep but next morning it's gonna have a bunch of notifications just paying away come back tests come back it makes that sound I assume no because my notifications are turned off except for my Kato notification you're so bad you guys are texting me at 10 o'clock where's the podcast and I don't know you're so much better than you're so much better than me tests the so okay so we have these responses to this problem design choices being made maybe on another kind of on another angle to take on this our program specifically designed to help us be more to use will's word here mindful mindfulness software am I using is it mindfulness is that the phrase yeah and like there's apps that help you meditate I understand there and that there's an app that will that promises to enlighten you at like booted like levels within the day or two I'd probably not that's such a promise would be hard to fulfill but yeah no there's I mean then there's the tech that is so so far we've been talking about tech that addicts us or tech that kind of makes us unmindful in the way we're approaching things and then ways that the tech can kind of place stop gaps to prevent us from going down that road but then there's this whole line of tech that is supposed to kind of elevate our level of focus and our level of mindfulness and so yeah you see I mean some of those popular apps in the app store are these guided meditation apps a headspace is probably the the most popular one and there lots and lots of people use them they make a ton of money you know executives in Silicon Valley like encourage employees to use these sort of things I might my mini rant about them which is why you team this up because I haven't made this ramp before is guided meditation apps are if you're if your goal is kind of the sort of mindfulness that meditation is supposed to cultivate so so this generally like Buddhist practice of mindfulness meditation focus on the breath that's called pasana if that's your goal mindfulness like guided meditation apps like headspace are just don't don't bother they're not so because these these are techniques this kind of focus thing is a technique that takes 90 seconds to learn it's very easy it's just focus on the breath and when your mind drifts away focus on the breath and when it drifts away focus on the breath and so having you know having someone explain it to you like a you know a five minute guided meditation that just gets you here's how it kind of works is all you need and then the these apps they're like well you're there here's a 10 minute meditation on leadership it's like no what you're listening to is a soothing slow-paced Ted talk on leadership while pretending to meditate so it's like one of those things out of it like a movie from the 80s where they pop in the cassette and it's like you are a strong and powerful person be a leader yes yes so it's it's affirmations or something but it's not it's not mindfulness meditation and it's it's certainly is not helping you improve your mindfulness meditation because i think it's actively interfering with it so if you're you're serious about pursuing that just get yourself a timer and sit there and focus on the breath but there are ways that tech could be used to help if not improve at least gauge the efficacy of meditation i mean all of this yeah so this is the kind of out there you know that the 10 20 years down the road of where does tech is away not only that you know tech right now kind of interferes with our ability to focus and live mindfully which is the the theme that a lot of people pick up from from all of this then you can see kind of almost you want to call them sci-fi stuff but they're not that far off which is like if if focus focus is just a mental state right being being in a state of focus of mindfulness of like awareness of non-distraction or whatever you want to call it is simply a brain state and we can measure brain states then you can imagine all sorts of crazy like bio feedback like think yourself into this state and the machine will kind of a buzz or give you some indicator when you're there so you know very clearly oh this is what that feels like and as you drift away okay that's what's drifting it away and as you drift towards okay that's what and and you can imagine it like radically accelerating our ability to cultivate these kinds of traits and mental states that like a metal detector for enlightenment beep beep beep you're getting close right are those things the Scientologists detect emeters they don't need to go there but yeah so you could see I mean this is the interesting thing is I think I think that when the that it feels like the era we're in with this kind of technology with smartphones with apps with social media with kind of addictive tech feels incredibly pervasive right now it's everywhere and it feels like this is just the way things are and it's just going to get worse because like these people are going to figure out even more sophisticated ways to get us using their stuff but I suspect that in 10 or 20 years this this culture that we live in of like everybody on the bus staring into their smartphones all the time and like the moment you get on to the elevator the first thing you do is you're riding up three floors because you've got that extra 20 seconds of time is pull out your phone and you know reload the Washington Post or whatever like that's going to look incredibly bizarre to people not too far into the future and they're just be like what we're wrong with these people like they just it's I think that this this problem will be solved it'll probably be solved both through cultural shifts through kind of awareness as we all you know suddenly become aware that this stuff is addictive in a way that we weren't five years ago or at least weren't talking about and as they the underlying technology and as the people who are making this technology say oh I forgot there are other values that matter and their values that matter not just to kind of me as a human being like I don't want to be creating a world where everyone is addicted but also as consumers start to say I don't want to buy tech that's simply addicting me I want to buy tech it's like these are features worth paying for to have tech that's going to help me out or is it was not going to just not a dick me but maybe even take it further and help me in these regards and so I think that this conversation to some extent in 10 years is going to look kind of silly yeah yeah well and we're at kind of peak concern right like we're at that inflection point where folks are just on a kind of mass level starting to wake up to oh this yes I've noticed that when I get off you know social media I feel happier and when I engage I feel miserable but like that's a real problem that we should think about collectively and do something about like we're at that peak we're start entering that peak inflection moment we're going to start to do that we're going to start to kind of solve the problem um it's not I'm actually reminded of a previous bit of a tech panic I guess we could call it which is the concerns in the 1950s and 60s about pinball machines well that actually would fit pinball work it's going to corrupt the whole generation and so god you state power to stamp out the pinball machines no I was thinking market marketing basically madmen the madmen of you know that modern advertising was going to corrupt our minds we were they used the word brainwash in the summer anyways we were basically being brainwashed by advertising we were against our will there's nothing you can do they're so clever and how they can manipulate sound and image and ideas to create captive audiences and we're all mindlessly consuming and the modern ad man is is the god of tech consumption tech fix that with uh they live glasses and then you can see the advertising zombies and avoid them you're fine that's right um well but it's the same kind of thing like there was a moment of peak concern and functionally everyone said hmm this is a problem maybe we should be more why and like we're not worried about that to the same extent because we all kind of wise up as a society right we're not as mindlessly to the following advertising like the folks were worried about in late 40s and early 50s and I think the same thing can apply here and just as we look back about those concerns as being a little bit paranoid now folks will do that down the line like you're saying Erin I can imagine that um and maybe this should mitigate um one last thought here this is something you shared will was uh an article by John Richardson for the intelligence or the children of Ted this is like kind of the extreme opposite reaction we're kind of saying hey chill out it'll be okay but there's another group who are kind of going the opposite direction just neo-Kazinskyists um the unabomber right Ted Kazinsky yeah and and they see the fruits of industrial society is being if not universally at least um on balance negative or disastrous for humanity um I think there are some libertarian concerns there um though more broadly um there's a naturalism inherent to it that uh is often at at cross purposes with the kind of human liberatory elements of of libertarianism you could almost do a whole whole episode on them in their own right but um yeah so it's not liberal stuff you know when you look at the world do you imagine coming about after the industrial society has been sabotaged and collapses it's uh red in tooth and claw and fairly phishistic in terms of uh how one how a survivor might go through their life yeah well it's something of that that you know uh uh to tune in tune on drop out I'm trying I can't remember the phrase turn on tune and drop out turn on drop out leery's phrase right there's uh we're going description of these yeah proto-kazinskiite willing to use violence to tear down the industrial order willing to kill people in order to do so uh on a massive scale if possible who you know they're going back they're like they're they're camping in the woods learning survival skills learning to be blacksmiths forging their own hatchets there's like this primitive return to nature component to it I'm not sure that's going to uh I mean it's going to remain on the fringe and uh I'm not sure that's uh I don't think many of our listeners are are saying hmm I'm really annoyed with the cortisol response I'm getting from my google apps I'm going to go you know mail send mail bombs to people so I'm not sure just yeah like good good luck industrial society is a hard nut to crack obviously there's some uh potential failure points power grids that kind of thing but more more broadly um I think they've got their work cut out for them and uh thankfully so yeah we don't want to talk about their new year's resolutions for 2019 um I think on that note we have somehow managed to go from um all the way from meditation apps to proto kazinsky bombers uh go figure but uh that's all we have time for today so until next week don't check your phone as much and be well building tomorrow is produced by test terrible if you enjoy our show please rate review and subscribe to us on itunes or wherever you get your podcasts to learn about building tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts visit us on the web at libertarianism.org