A.I. Vibe Check With Ezra Klein + Kevin Tries Phone Positivity

23:30We have alignment problems between human beings and corporations now. We have alignment problems between human beings and governments now, between governments and governments now. And that I worry a lot about the absence of trying to solve those alignment problems. So a critique I have, honestly, of frankly both the safety and the ethics communities, but more the safety one on this, is I think they are just inattentive in a crazy way to capitalism. I've written about how important I think the business models that AI companies are allowed to have is. The kinds of models we get are going to be shaped by how you can make money on them.

24:06What just drives me up the wall is that we appear to have decided the way AI is going to work is through a competitive dynamic between Google, Microsoft, and Meta. And as such, because what is really working in the market right now are chatbots, we are then going to really emphasize creating AIs that are designed to fool us into thinking they are human, right? The more persuasive and, frankly, manipulative an AI is, the better you're going to do at rolling it out. I don't think you should be able to make money with an AI system that manipulates human behavior at all. I mean, I think right now the law should come down that you cannot make any money by tying these systems to advertising.

24:47I do not want to see more personalized systems that are tuned to make human beings feel like they have a direct relationship with them, but actually make their money by getting me to buy Oreos or whatever it might be. So how should they make their money? That's a great question. I am not sure. One thing I would like to see is prizes for scientific discovery. I still think the most impressive AI system we've seen was AlphaFold, which was by DeepMind and substantially solved our ability to predict the structure of proteins. You can imagine a world where the U.S. government or other governments put out 15 or 20 drug discovery, mathematical, and scientific challenges.

25:23And if we believe them to be so profound that if you could solve them, you get a billion dollars. You just get it free and clear, but we get the result in the public sphere, in the public domain. Like that would probably get us very powerful AI systems tuned to problems we actually have, not the problem of Microsoft really wishes people use Bing instead of Google. I'm not saying it's not important to be focused on how the systems work, but how we work the systems, like pretending this is all a technical problem and not a problem of human beings and economic models and governments. Alignment problems are not just about AI.

25:57So I think there's this big middle space that just isn't getting as much attention as I think it deserves. But I think it's really big. It is kind of new problems, but not truly new. They're just large-scale civilizational problems of how we don't understand how to make systems actually produce the outcomes we want them to produce. And we need – like this really emphasizes that we need to like figure out some governance mechanisms to do.

26:21We'll be right back.

26:40You wrote in one of your recent columns that basically there are two paths toward solving pieces of the AI problem. One of them would be to dramatically slow down the development and deployment of AI technologies. and I get a sense of how you might go about that. You could do that with regulation. You could do that with sort of mutual disarmament packs between the AI companies or something like that. But I want to ask you about the other side of that solution, which is the sort of faster we can adapt to AI as a society, the better off we'll be. So how do you think that goes? What does that look like for a society to adapt to the presence of, you know, say, large language models?

27:21I'll be honest that that is one of those sentences where it hides a lot of, and I don't know. I'm familiar with the type of sentence. But let me give a couple thoughts on that. So one is we need governance and input mechanisms we don't currently have. I was talking to the group Collective Intelligence. They're trying to build structures we know pretty well from various deliberative democracy and direct democracy experiments. So you could have a rapid and iterative way of figuring out what the public's values are coming from representative assemblies of people. And that you could then put that into different levels of the process, maybe at the regulatory level.

28:04And that then goes into standards that you cannot release a system or train a system that doesn't abide by those standards. So that's the kind of governance we don't currently have. But we may need to create something like – I'm very skeptical that Congress as it exists today has – I don't just want to say the capacity, but I think the self-confidence, which actually worries me quite a bit, to regulate here. I think Congress knows what it does not know here. It does not have a good internal metaphor to the extent it has any metaphor. It is to replay the social media era and try to deal with privacy breaches and regulating the harms on the margin.

28:39So adaptation might be governance structures, input structures. And then slowing down, and this is a place where my own thinking has evolved. I don't think the simple slowdown position is going to be a strong one. You mean like the one that came out in that letter with the thousand AI researchers and technologists saying, let's put a six-month pause? Let's just put a pause. I think you need to say clearly, both because it is politically important, but also because you need to do something with the time of your pause, what you are attempting to do. So one thing that would slow the systems down is to insist on interpretability.

29:17Like if you can't explain why your large language model does what it does, you can't release it? Right. So if you look at the blueprint AI Bill of Rights that the White House released, it says things like, and I'm paraphrasing, but you deserve an explanation for a decision a machine learning algorithm has made about you. Now, in order to get that, we would need interpretability. We don't know why machine learning algorithms make the decisions or correlations or inferences or predictions that they make. We cannot see into the box. We just get an incomprehensible series of calculations. Now, you'll hear from the companies, this is really hard.

29:51And I believe it is hard. I'm not sure it is impossible. From what I can tell, it does not get anywhere near the resources inside these companies of let's scale the model. The companies are hugely bought in on scaling the model. And a couple people are working on interpretability. And when you regulate something, it is not necessarily on the regulator to prove that it is possible to make the thing safe. It is on the producer to prove the thing they are making is safe. And that is going to mean you need to change your product roadmap and change your allocation of resources and spend some of these billions and billions of dollars trying to figure out the way to answer the public's concerns here.

30:32And that may well slow you down, but I think that will also make a better system. I also think, by the way, even if you just believe we should have a lot of these systems out there in the world and they should get better as soon as possible, for them to be stable in society in the future, you're going to need to do this. If you think the regulations will be bad now, imagine what happens when one of these systems comes out and causes, as happened with high-speed algorithmic trading in 2010, a gigantic global stock market crash, right? I mean, what the flash crash did then compared to what a bunch of hedge funds running poorly trained, poorly understood AI systems that try to achieve the goal of making lots of money through ways they may not recognize, right?

31:16You know, it would sure make a lot of money if all the competitors for this company we're investing in didn't exist because they all had a gigantic cybersecurity breach. And nobody knows the system has come up with that idea. And so you actually want to be able to have control of these systems to not have the regulatory hammer come down because you release one into the wild. It did something terrible. And now everybody's like, full stop. So I think we can do a lot to adapt. I think we can do a lot to improve. I think a lot of that would slow them down. But I would like to see more of a positive vision of what we're trying to achieve here rather than simply the negative vision of, you know, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

31:52Not because I don't think there's a case for that, but because I just don't think that case is going to win. I agree with you. I was more sympathetic to the idea that these systems should take a pause. Like, I understand it's very unlikely that the big companies are going to unilaterally disarm without some sort of pressure. I just don't know how the government is going to develop a coherent point of view like the one that you just laid out if it doesn't have at least six months to think about it, right? And I guess what I worry about is that if six months go by with sort of unchecked developments, and if these companies do start to train more powerful models even than the ones that they just released, then by the time the government has a point of view, it's sort of already outdated.

32:31I'm not against it, right? If you told me tomorrow that Joe Biden was so moved by the letter that somehow he convinced all of it, great. Like, I'm not against it. I think it is much likelier for them to come out and say, we're in an information-gathering phase. And we need a kind of information you can't seem to give us in order to come up with our rules. And you need to give us that information. Think about this. If you would like to build, say, congestion pricing in New York City, the congestion pricing effort in New York City just had environmental— This is where you would charge people more for driving in demand.

33:10For driving in New York City. The environmental assessment for congestion pricing for New York City came out in August, and it was more than 4 ,000 pages. And until that 4 ,000-page report, which included all kinds of public community meetings and gathering of data, until that could be compiled and finished, you can't do congestion pricing. And my view is that took way too long and was way too extensive for congestion pricing. I do not think that is too much or too long or too extensive for AI. And so this is my point about the pause, that instead of saying no training of a model bigger than GPT-4, it is to say no training of a model bigger than GPT-4 that cannot answer for us these set of questions.

33:55And I don't think it's impossible that Congress in its current state could come up with five good questions or the FTC could come up with them. I talk to people at the FTC. They've got lots of questions. There are a lot of things they would like to know. I think you pick some things that you would like to know here. And you say, until you can answer this for me and answering it might require you to figure out technological capabilities you have not figured out, you can't move forward on this. That is the most banal thing the government does in this country. You cannot do anything until you have satisfied our requirements.

34:26You need to fill out this form in triplicate. I want to play devil's advocate here because I think what we just saw with social media was a lot of people saying, like, the same kind of criticism. We don't know how these feed ranking algorithms work. We don't know how these recommendations are being produced. We want you to, you know, show us. And so, you know, very recently, Elon Musk open sourced the Twitter algorithm. them. And this was sort of seen as like a trust building exercise that people would see how Twitter, you know, makes its decisions about what to show you. And it was not greeted with a lot of fanfare.

34:59No one really seemed to care that you could now go and see the Twitter source code. So if the same thing happened with AI, if these companies were forced to explain how these large language models operate, and it turns out that the answer is really boring, or that it's, you know, just it's making statistical predictions, there's no like, hidden hand inside the model steering it in one direction or the other, if it's just very dense and technical and not all that interesting, do you think that would still be a worthwhile exercise? I do. I do on a bunch of levels. One, I'm using interpretability as one example here of the kind of thing you may want.

35:31And I think there are a lot of things you may want to put into the models before you can begin to train GPT-6 or 7 or whatever it might be. But the thing about the Twitter algorithm is the only the Twitter algorithm does is decide which tweet to show you. The thing about these models, these general purpose models, is they might do a lot of things. And many of them already are. I mean, models way less sophisticated than what's coming out from Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or Meta or whomever are involved in machine learning ways. I mean, your book is partially about this, Kevin, in making, you know, predictive policing decisions and sentencing and deciding, you know, strategic decisions for companies, we should be able to get an account, a decomposed account of how it came to that conclusion.

36:19When Bing Sidney decides to say, Kevin, I love you and you don't love your wife, let's be honest here, I want to know what happened there. What did it draw on? What lit up in the training data? I mean, you know, because I wrote a piece about this, that my view is that the system predicted fundamentally sort of you wanted a Black Mirror episode. You were a journalist looking for a great story and it gave you one. That's my blame the victim, classic. But I don't know if that's true. I would like to know more. I don't know how much more we can know, but I think we can know a lot more than we currently do.

36:52And I don't think you should have these rolling out and integrating into a million other apps and onto the internet until we do. Now, I'm in a place of like learning and uncertainty here. I'm not saying that you should listen to Ezra's view on what we should know. I'm just saying that there are ways to come up with a series of views about the public would like this to be true about models. And the way you're going to slow them down and also improve them, make them more sustainable, make them closer to the public's vision for AI is to insist the company solve these problems before they release models.

37:26It's pretty hard to run an airline in this country. It is hard to build an airplane in this country. And one reason it is hard is because airplanes, we do not let them crash. It is not that it has never happened. It is extraordinary how rarely it happens. And that is true because we have said in order to run an airline, there's going to be a lot of stuff you have to do. Because like this technology, it is important. It is powerful. It is good. It is dangerous. That is a good metaphor here. How do you think these technologies, which are fundamentally, you know, things that arrange words in sequences, which is also what the three of us do, how do you think that these AI language models— You're just a stochastic parrot.

38:09You know, on bad days, yeah, I'm just doing next token prediction. How do you think these technologies could change our jobs? I don't know yet. I'd be interested if you think this is true. One of the things I observe is that the pattern of usage for me and for people I know, when any one of these new ones comes out, is like for four days, you use it a lot, and then you don't. And I observe the people who seem to tell me they're using it a lot, and I wonder, is your work getting better? And without naming names, I don't think it is. Now, you could say, yeah, this is this generation. Soon it's going to be really good.

38:52Maybe, maybe. The hallucination problem is going to be really difficult, though, for integrating this into newsrooms. Because the more sophisticated and convincing the system gets, the harder it is going to be for somebody who does not themselves know the topic they have asked the AI to write about to check what the AI has actually written. So I don't think this is going to roll out easily or smoothly. And then there's the other thing, which is one reason I am skeptical of the predictions that this is going to upend the economy or create hypergrowth. A world where AI has put so many people out of jobs is a world where what AI has done is create a massive increase in automated productivity.

39:32And that should have been true for the Internet. So if you had said, hey, look, one way the economy and scientific discovery is simply constrained is that it is hard and slow to gather information. It is hard and slow to collaborate with people. It is geographically biased who you can collaborate with. And I said, oh, great, I have a technology that will answer all of that. And you say, wonderful. Like, this is going to change everything. And then how has productivity growth been since the internet? Crappy. So why? People have different theories on this, but my theory is that it also had a shadow side.

40:05It distracted everybody. If I also said to you, I'm going to create this technology that is going to make the entire world 35 % more distracted and is going to shrink their attention spans. And every time they have a thought, they're going to interrupt it by checking their Gmail or Slack. How is that going to be for productivity? And the answer is bad. Productivity really matters in terms of like the level of economic intense concentration you can bring to a thing. I feel so attacked right now, but keep going. So I think it's very likely that AI looks more like that, or at least has as much of that effect as the other.

40:37That will supercharge productivity in some corporate context, but that we'll all be so busy, like, hanging out with our replica girlfriends and boyfriends. Exactly. That it won't actually change our productivity as workers. I've used this analogy before, but I sometimes will work at a coffee shop with my best friend. I am not more productive when that happens. I enjoy it more. It's great. I really enjoy going to a coffee shop in that context, but we hang out. And if you watch the movie Her, it doesn't actually seem to me that the main character becomes more productive. Right. That is not a portrait of economic productivity being supercharged.

41:10So precisely because I think at least in the near term, these are going to work better for kind of social and entertainment and distraction purposes. Like we may get way better at making immersive video games really, really quickly or immersive movies or whatever it might be. I think it is very likely that way before AI is automating everybody's job, it is distracting people in a more profound way. And you might say, look, we have enough content already. I would have said that before TikTok came out, but then TikTok came out. After that, we didn't have enough content. We needed much more. And I think that the move not to social media, but to companions who are always there with you, I think that could be distracting.

41:51maybe enriching, maybe beautiful, but in a totally different way, right? I'm not sure we realize how much of life there is to colonize with socializing, with interaction prior to what is about to happen. And so I just see a much smoother path to making us less productive than more. That's not a prediction, but it is maybe meant as a provocation. I know we're almost out of time, but I want to close by asking you about skepticism. The last paragraph of one of your recent columns on AI really resonated with me. You were writing about sort of the mistake of living your life as if these AI advances didn't exist, of sort of putting them out of your mind for some sort of cognitive normalcy.

42:42and you wrote that skepticism is more comfortable. And then you quote the historian Eric Davis saying that in the court of the mind, skepticism makes a great grand vizier, but a lousy lord. And I've been thinking about that a lot because some criticism that I've gotten since I started writing about AI, I think we've probably all gotten some version of this is like, you're not being skeptical enough, right? You're falling for hype. You're not looking at all of the pitfalls of this technology. And I think there's a lot of media criticism of AI right now that is, I would say, skeptical in a way that feels very comfortable and familiar, kind of like reviewing AI like you'd review any other technology, like a new smartphone or something.

43:21But it seems like you're arguing against a kind of knee-jerk skepticism when it comes to AI. You're saying maybe we should take seriously the possibility that the people who are talking about this being the most revolutionary technology since, you know, fire are right and try to sort of dwell in that possibility and take that seriously. So make that argument. Like, convince me that the knee-jerk response of journalists and other people evaluating AI should not be skepticism. Maybe the way I'd say this is that I think that there is a difference between skepticism in the scientific sense, where you're bringing a critical intelligence to bear on information coming into your system, and skepticism as a positional device, a kind of temperament where you prefer to sound to yourself and to others like you're not a crazy person, which is very alluring.

44:14Look, one of the ways I've tried to talk about this is using the analogies of COVID and crypto. And I remember periods early on in COVID where I was on the phone with my family and I was saying, you all have to go buy toilet paper right now. And I was talking to them about a trip. Like, we're going to come see you in three weeks. I'm like, you're not going to come see me in three weeks. In three weeks, you will not be going anywhere. Like, you need to listen to me. And it was really hard. You sounded really weird. And I was not by any means the first person alert to COVID, but I am a journalist and I did begin to see what was coming a little bit earlier than others in my life.

44:49And one lesson of that to me was that tomorrow will not always be like today. So that also should not become a positioning device. I think there are people who are always telling you tomorrow will not be like today. So then I think about crypto. And I mean, we were all here in the long ago year of 2021 when that was on the rise. And you'd have these conversations with people. And you'd have to ask yourself, does any of this make sense exactly? That there's a lot of money here. A lot of smart people are filtering into this world. I take seriously that smart people think this is going to change everything.

45:21It's going to be how we do governance and identity and socializing. And they have all these complicated plans for how it will replace everything or upend everything in my life. but what evidence is there that any of this is true what can i see what can i feel what can i touch and it was endlessly a technology looking for a practical use case there was money in it but what was it changing nothing and so my take on crypto was until proven otherwise like i'm going to be skeptical of this you need to prove to me this will change something before i believe you that it will change everything and one of the points i make in that column about ai is that I just think you have to take seriously what is happening now to believe that something quite profound is going on.

46:04I think you can look at the people who already have profound relationships with their replicas. I think that you can look at automation, which has already put people out of work. I think to my point that a world populated by things that feel to us like intelligence, if you believe my view that that is one of the profound disruptions here, that has already happened. It happened to you with Sydney. We already know that militaries and police systems are using these. So you don't even really have to believe the systems are going to get any better than they currently are. If we did not just pause but stop at something the level of GPT-4 and just took 15 years to figure out every way we could tune and retune it and filter it into new areas, imagine you retrain the model just to be a lawyer, right?

46:50Instead of it having a generalized training system, it was trained to be a lawyer. That'd be very disruptive to the legal profession. How disruptive would depend on regulations? But I think the capability is already there to automate a huge amount of contracting. They don't have to be sentient to be civilization altering. I just don't think you need a radical view on the future to think this is pretty profound. Totally. Well, Ezra, we're going to have to ask you to stop generating. The token generating machine is off. Ezra Klein, thanks for coming. Thanks so much, Ezra. Thank you for having me.

47:30All right, that's enough talk about AI and existential risk and societal adaptation. It's time to talk about something much more important than any of those things. Just me. Oh my God. Get over yourself. Get over yourself, Bruce. When we come back, we're going to talk about my quest for phone positivity and why I'm breaking my phone out of phone jail. This is a long way of saying we're going to talk about how I was right.

48:20Casey, I did something very empowering this week. Oh, what was that? I got rid of my phone box. Kevin, the phone box that was one of your New Year's resolutions? Yes. So a couple months ago, we talked on this show about my attempts to control my out-of-control phone use with the help of a box that you plug your phone into. It charges your phone, but it also starts a timer and tells you, like, how long you've spent away from your phone. Yeah, you could call it a phone box, but it was a prison. You built a prison for your phone. You expanded the carceral state in this country by building a phone prison, and you locked up your phone for several hours a day.

49:00And if I recall correctly, you said sort of like you feel like you've been spending too much time looking at this dang thing, and you were going to lock it up, and it was going to sort of help you be more present with other people. Yeah, and at the time, you responded to me with what I thought was a pretty crazy position, which is that you are not worried about your phone time. That's correct. In fact, you're trying to maximize your phone time. Yeah, we're going up in this household. You're a phone maxer. Yeah. But I was conflicted because I felt my own use of my phone sort of creeping up. And among other things, you know, I have a kid, and I didn't want to sort of set an example of always being on my phone.

49:36And so I was hoping that this phone box, and I also installed this app called OneSec that basically puts like a little like five or ten second speed bump in between when you're trying to open an app and when you actually do it. Yeah. You've installed technology to harass you every time you try to use your phone. Yes. And the way I thought of it at the time was like, this is going to help me be intentional about my phone use. But I found that what it actually did was just make me incredibly guilty. Every time I looked at this box on my counter, every time I like ran into these little speed bumps on my phone, I would just be filled with like sort of guilt and shame as if I was like, you know, eating a slice of cake that I wasn't supposed to be eating.

50:18I mean, to be clear, these are shaming technologies. Yes. If you have a prison for your phone in your house, that doesn't make you say, I've really got things under control over here. And for sure, an app that sort of says stop every time you go to open Instagram is only ever going to make you feel bad about yourself. Right. So I just had a kind of revelation the other day when I was looking at my phone box and I thought, you know what? I don't want this. I don't want to feel guilty every time I use my phone. Good. And I want to adopt a position that is more like yours. I want to learn how to coexist peacefully.

50:59And so I am starting now a new project, which I'm calling Phone Positivity. Okay, let's talk about Phone Positivity. So my new approach to my phone is that instead of treating it like a kind of radioactive object, in my house that I have to imprison in a phone prison to keep myself from using, I am going to start appreciating my phone. Okay. And how are you going to do that? Well, so every day I say affirmations to my phone. No, I don't. No, I don't. I don't. But I do try to really be aware of what my phone is allowing me to do at any given time. So, you know, for example, the other day I was in the room with my kid.

51:44He was crawling around on the floor. I was fielding work emails and Slack messages. And there was a moment where I thought, I feel really guilty about this. I should not be paying attention to my phone. I should be playing with my kid. The second thought, my phone positivity thought is, you know what? It's amazing that I have a tool in my pocket that allows me to be physically present with my kid while also doing work. You know, my grandfather couldn't do that. If he wanted to do work, He had to leave the coal mine. Get in the car. He worked at an electrical plant. He had to get in the car and drive to work.

52:23He had to literally leave his family to work. I have a phone that allows me to do both at the same time. What an amazing tool. Okay, so I think that that is a great realization, and I'm excited that you will now be leading an abolition movement for phone prisons. does part of your new phone positivity plan mean that you are also uh deleting this speed bump app which i believe you said you had bought a lifetime subscription for yes i i i turned the speed bumps off i now have unfettered access to every app on my phone and you know what what my screen time has gone down no seriously you're measuring this yes my screen time in the past week after i started thinking about phone positivity is down 30%.

53:10Okay, well, see, now this makes so much sense to me now that I've thought about it for a beat, because if your phone has been locked up and you get one conjugal visit like every 12 hours with this thing, of course, you are not gonna put that thing down until the warden, you know, splits you up again. But now because you're actually looking at it when you need it, you're more relaxed about it. Yeah, like all of my interventions that I tried for screen time, what it was actually doing was just compelling me to spend more time on my phone because it was so annoying and time-consuming to get what I needed out of it.

53:43So I actually find that with the speed bumps gone, I'm able to get in, do what I need to do, and dip back out. And so it has resulted in less screen time, even as I no longer feel this kind of overwhelming guilt about it. Interesting. So as you think back on the very brief 90 days that you spent with these technologies, do you feel like they failed on a technological basis? or do you feel like you just got to a different place emotionally and they didn't make sense anymore? Well, a couple things I think happened. One is that a lot of the things that I was truly addicted to, like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, just got less interesting to me.

54:23And I don't know whether that's because, you know, people just aren't posting as much as they used to or my friends and, you know, people I follow are just not interacting as much on those platforms. but it does feel like those apps got a little less shiny to me. At the same time, I think viewing my phone through a more positive lens, like looking at the things that it can do, that it enables me to do, and appreciating that also helped me use my phone in better ways. Right. So there's this study that came out five or six years ago about social media that said, you know, actually, maybe not all screen time is created equal.

54:57Hashtag got all screen time. and the difference between active and passive use of social media, right? So when you are using social media passively, it appears to be bad for you. And by passively, we mean sort of like mindlessly scrolling with your thumb and sort of like paying half-hearted attention to like what your aunt is up to without really feeling compelled to leave a comment or actually engage with another human being. Right. You are leaning back. You are just sort of scrolling and observing. You're lurking. But this study also showed that active use of social media can actually increase mental well-being, can increase your sense of connection with people, can help you stay connected to weak ties in your network, people that you don't live near, family members that are far-flung, or people you haven't seen in many years but still want to maintain a connection to.

55:45And that really tracks with my own experience of this, where if I'm just looking at TikTok or Instagram or Twitter for an hour, like it feels bad. I feel bad, like viscerally about it. But if I'm using it to connect with people or send texts to the group chat or whatever, like that feels much better to me. I want to ask you one other thing, because as I've been thinking about this journey that you have been on, we've also been spending a lot more time together. We've been recording the podcast. We went to South by Southwest. And you are not a phone goblin. Like I have some friends where if there is one dull moment in the conversation, that phone is out of their pocket so quick and they're, you know, they're scrolling Instagram or doing something else that doesn't seem urgent at all.

56:31I don't see you as that person. Do you just make sort of a conscious effort when you're out and about in the world and like the issues that you have happen more when you're kind of laying around the house? Or has something changed for you in the past few months? Yeah, I think I'm pretty sensitive to not being a phone goblin, as you put it. Like when I'm with people face-to-face, I try to sort of focus on the conversation. But I also have done a lot of calibration of my phone so that, you know, I'm not getting every notification. I think this goes hand in hand with the phone positivity thing is like you actually have to make your phone work for you.

57:06Yes. Right. You have to set up your notifications so that the people you want to notify you get through. But you're not getting a ping for every email, every text message, every spam call. So I think that spending a couple hours up front really setting up your phone in a way that is maximally useful and minimally distracting to you is a necessary piece of this. Okay, so if someone were to come to you today and they were going to say, Kevin, I just listened to the first time that you talked about the phone box and I haven't listened to this episode yet, and I'm thinking about bringing phone box into my life, what would you tell that person?

57:40I think that for some people, reducing screen time is a good goal, right? There are people who spend— If you're Sam Bankman Freed and you've been using that screen to commit a global scale fraud and destroy the effective altruism movement, maybe put the screens away. Right. You need a phone prison. Maybe. Maybe a real prison.

58:02So I think that for some people, reducing screen time is a good goal. Right. And I think especially for adolescents or young people, like the effects of screen time on mental health are much more severe. But I think for adults and for people who, you know, use their phones and their screens for work as well as leisure, I think we could all do with a little more positivity around these things. Like, that's actually a much better experience than being consumed with guilt about something that you're in the process of doing. You know, like, be okay with who you are. I've been going to therapy, and that's pretty much actually just what they tell you.

58:40Well, your point when we last talked about the phone box was that like there may be something bigger here than phone addiction, right? Like for a lot of people, what presents as like I can't stop using my phone is actually something deeper. It's I have anxiety or I am unfulfilled by the things in my life that I would be doing otherwise if I weren't looking at my phone. There's some bigger problem there. Yes, absolutely. It's like, you know, I talked the last time about like the Grindr was one of these apps for me where it was like sometimes it'd just be on my phone and I would feel horrible. And what I ultimately realized is like I am seeking validation in this app that is not actually there.

59:16So I need to stop, you know, but it's like you could put the phone in the box and like that's not going to make me feel the validation that I was looking for. I think it's important to be purposeful about your phones. I don't want it to seem like I'm just advocating for maximizing all forms of screen time. Like I'm not actually at your position of like the more the better for screen time. Except that as you've been describing it, you've been making me realize that everything that you're saying is how I've done my phone. Like I do look at my phone whenever I want to, but I have also taken the time to develop an intentional relationship with it.

59:46I am very selective about what I will allow to notify me, you know. You got to kind of figure that out for basically this everything on your phone. So it is a massive project, but once you sort of get through with it, I do think you can just kind of use your phone when you want to use your phone. Because to your point, it's bringing a lot of amazing things into your life all the time. Right. It makes me think about this old Steve Jobs quote about computers being a bicycle for the mind. Remember this quote? That's right. So I think that we forget that the point of computers, of smartphones, of technology is to help us do things and get places and be more productive and efficient and bring us joy and entertainment, but also to accomplish things.

1:00:25And so, you know, very few people are out riding bikes all day just for the fun of it. Like, you're usually using it to get from someplace to someplace else. That's right. And so I've tried to use my phone more in that way. Like, I am doing a task. Once I finish that task, I will put away my phone, but I'm not going to, like, feel guilty about it the entire time. I think that's beautiful. If you love your phone, come out to the town square and just say it loud and say it proud. I do. One of my favorite things that I learned when I was researching my book about automation is that when electricity first came to a lot of small towns in America, they would throw parties.

1:01:04Like, everyone would come out on the town square, and at some of these, like, they would do these symbolic things where they would, like, bury a kerosene lamp and, like, hold a mock funeral for it. And like the Boy Scouts would play taps, you know, to symbolize like the fact that we don't have to use these like crappy kerosene lamps anymore because we have this amazing electricity. And I feel a little bit of that now toward my phone. Now that I've stopped like being shamed by it, it's like, wait a minute, I can like take a photo of my kid and send it to a wireless photo frame in my mom's house thousands of miles away.

1:01:38Like that is unbelievable. And that is like a realization that I never would have had had I kept treating this thing as a source of shame. All right. Well, I'm calling the Boy Scouts and we're going to have a funeral for your phone box. Just burying it in your backyard, moving on with our lives. Mission accomplished. R.I.P. You was here for a good time, not a long time. It was not a good time. No. It was here for a bad time. Yeah.

1:02:35Thank you. you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. And if Kevin's phone is out of prison, we'll read it.

1:03:10Thank you.