How to stop being so phone addicted (without self-discipline or meditation)

23:09Can I confess that this was an unusually strange episode to work on? I thought it'd be one of the easier ones to make. A conversation with a smart person, supported by some writing. Here's what happens instead. I recorded the conversation with David from New York. The next week, while turning it into an episode, collaborating on some cuts, working on the writing that goes in between, I was remote, at a conference in Scandinavia. And that week away, I was more tightly glued to my phone than usual, waiting to get some clarity on some possible bad news in my personal life.

23:47Everybody has or will have one of these weeks where you just wait for the news. News about yourself, or worse, someone you love. And you wonder when it'll arrive. And if so, will this be one of those chapters of life that pulls you under the surface for a while? Into grief world. So you wait for the bad news. Knowing that when it arrives, it'll arrive, of course, on your phone as just one more buzz. Another bid for your attention in the daily parade. Phones, of course, did not invent anxiety. We've gotten bad news from telegrams, from knocks on the door. Phones have just tightened its leash. So for a week, even more than usual, my phone tortured me.

24:30It tortured me in a way that was both abject and a little bit hilarious. I found myself trying to take in the beauty of a field of wildflowers alongside a fjord, Just willing my nervous system to flood with wonder instead of the anxiety about the buzz I just felt? Was this spam from a retailer? A note from a friend? News? My news? How did we end up with these infernal, chittering devices? I looked into it, and the push notification, it turns out, was not invented by the devil. It was invented by Canadian software developers, a team at a company called Research in Motion. Research in Motion invented a phone you might remember called the BlackBerry, a phone with a little keyboard and the first push notifications.

25:19Meaning, if someone sent you an email, you didn't have to go check for it. Your BlackBerry would just buzz. It would proactively tell you there was something new to see. I never owned a BlackBerry, but I was an early adopter to the device that would replace it. This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. I remember the Steve Jobs presentation. I remember him on stage in his black turtleneck. Three things. A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device.

26:03Any of these three new devices would have been exciting. but the punchline was that now they would all be contained in one. And we are calling it iPhone.

26:17Today, today Apple is going to reinvent the phone. I remember my first year with iPhone and how that early version actually did not yet have very many push notifications. Meaning that year, if my phone buzzed in my pocket, it meant text message, phone call, email, or alarm clock. That was likely it. I'm an unreliable narrator of these things, but I'm pretty sure that the first iPhone did not perforate my attention the way its kids and grandkids would. It did not clamor for furtive dinner table glances like a profoundly insecure romantic partner. Even though 2008 was a very newsy year. I think the winds of change are blowing all across America.

27:03I was tracking what I naively thought was the most interesting election America would ever have. George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas. They are out of touch. And if you stand with me in 70 days, they'll be out of time. I'd often read politics blogs in my downtime, but when I was done reading, the information left me alone. The internet, despite being in my pocket, was a place I was still choosing to visit. Not something seeping under my front door. That is where the push notification service comes in. But push notifications for iPhones arrived in 2009. No matter what application you're in, you won't miss them.

27:44And you can provide buttons on them where if they're selected by the user, will automatically launch your application. And after them, a competing ecosystem of apps, each trying to burrow more deeply into your nervous system than its competitors. Facebook started pushing notifications in early 2010. Twitter at the end of that year. News apps like the New York Times and its competitors, they really only started barraging me and you with breaking news alerts in 2016. Like a lot of problems in modern society, things didn't get bad because one person wanted them to be a certain way. We just created a system of incentives where if anyone behaved well, they'd be quickly overtaken by someone willing to behave worse.

28:24We try to make tools for people in the end. And tools to enjoy entertainment, tools to communicate, tools to create. Sometimes I have this completely irrational question, which is, if Steve Jobs had lived, would any of this be any better? That's why I love what we do, because we make these tools, and they're constantly surprising us in new ways and what we can do with them. That's right. I know it's strange to, on some level, pray at the altar of the ghost of a tech CEO, but I just think about what the iPhone arrived as, a library you kept in your pocket, connected to all world knowledge, and what it's become, a digital vape you keep under your pillow so you can always suck on it.

29:11And I wonder if the person visionary enough to invent this device would have been visionary enough to fix it. Instead, in 2014, three years after Jobs' death, Apple unveiled a new device, the Apple Watch. A reporter named David Pierce wrote a story about its development that's pretty incredible to read now, 11 years later. It's called iPhone Killer, The Secret History of the Apple Watch. It's about how early on, the idea was that the Apple Watch was supposed to be the solution to the iPhone's plague of notifications. David even quotes the man in charge of the Apple Watch team. Quote, People are carrying their phones with them and looking at the screen so much.

29:52People want that level of engagement, but how do we provide it in a way that's a little more human, a little more in the moment when you're with somebody. The idea, supposedly, was that you could quickly glance at a notification on your watch and decide if it was worth paying attention to. You wouldn't have to get sucked out of the present moment. David says this was the early thesis of the Apple Watch. I think Apple was serious, that this was a real solution to a real problem. I think Apple is a company that is famous for cannibalizing itself. It built the iPhone and totally destroyed a really great iPod business.

30:28It has done that with computers in the past. It has done that with all kinds of devices. It was a belief inside of that company that if you're not destroying your own products, somebody else will. And I think there was a real sense inside of Apple, maybe not among everybody, but among some people and some important people, that the watch could do that to the phone. And if not do it permanently, then at least do it in spots, right? And so the theory is like, okay, well, how do we give you some of that stuff that you crave and are used to and will not go away from, but do it in a way that is quicker and saner and more understandable?

31:08Like the team at Apple spent all this time on haptics, which is just basically what it feels like on your wrist when you get a notification. There's like that little buzz that's all from this engine inside of the watch. And they spent all this time thinking about, okay, what should it feel like when someone you love sends you a text message versus what does a news alert feel like? And this stuff is like insane, right? These are objectively ridiculous conversations to be having. But I think they meant it. Like I think that is the idea that they were like we understand that people are this connected and want to be this connected.

31:41And so the question is, how do we insert something that intermediates it a little bit in a way that is healthier? And I think knowing what we know now about the Apple Watch, it never really had a chance to do that. But I think the desire was real. Of course, we know how the story ends. The Apple Watch turned out to be another expensive gadget. Many people like it, but it certainly didn't solve the iPhone problem. That problem, for most people I know, has only gotten worse. I know that there are people who are rolling their eyes at me. People would say that asking the question, would Apple ever help us become less addicted to iPhones, is just heartbreakingly naive.

32:23But this is my thinking. Apple makes money by selling iPhones, not by selling iPhone addiction. I don't pay Apple per minute. I pay Apple every few years when I upgrade. So if people like me are desperate enough to spend money on alarm clocks and black and white e-readers and absurdly long phone cords. Why not take my money by selling me a version of an iPhone that does not give me the feeling I so often get? The anxiety of a tourist on vacation wandering through a noisy, grabby bazaar. But David said what I'm missing here is how, actually, in the 17 years since the iPhone's launch, Apple's business model has subtly evolved.

33:02The short version of the story is that Apple, in addition to making a lot of money every time you buy an iPhone, increasingly makes money every time you use an iPhone. And when you do something like make an in-app purchase on your phone, Apple gets 30 % of that. When you use Apple Pay on your phone, Apple gets a cut. And it has gone from being almost entirely a hardware company to being very much a services company. And so for Apple, this is where all of the incentives get screwed up. And it's especially true with the in-app purchases, right? Because Candy Crush would like to make me spend as much money in Candy Crush as possible, right?

33:45In theory, Apple has no skin in that game at all. So my fight now is with Candy Crush and only Candy Crush. But if Apple gets 30 % of every single dollar I send to Candy Crush, now Apple has skin in the game. So it's actually now in Apple's best interest for me to spend as much time playing Candy Crush as possible. And once you do that, it's all broken and there's no going back. And this is the subject of vast quantities of regulatory fights and there's a world in which it gets pulled back and all that stuff, but whatever. But we have gotten to the point where it is now like a meaningfully large piece of Apple's business for me to be playing Candy Crush.

34:20I see. And that's the root of all evil in this kind of stuff as far as I'm concerned. I want to ask you one more question that is so dumb. I really did get so stuck on this. I spent the weekend just reading the 600-page Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography, which is fascinating. I hadn't spent time in Jobs' biography in a while. And there's so much in there. He's such a complicated figure. But, like, do you think I'm naive? This, like, weird religious hope I have that were Jobs alive, he might have seen this as a design problem to be fixed. Is that just silly? Like, what do you think? I've thought so much about this.

34:57And I think the reason it's impossible to know is that Steve Jobs never got to say no to this stuff, right? Like this whole world of software as a service and everything being so important just really came after he died. And so I think the counter future of Steve Jobs like reckoning with monthly subscriptions to everything I think is so fascinating. But I think everything we know about Steve Jobs suggests that he really wanted to make a lot of money and was maybe not nice to a lot of the people in his life, but cared really, really, really, really deeply about the experience of people using his products.

35:41And I think it is just unassailably true that being a user of tech products is worse now than it used to be. And there is this constant feeling like I am being milked for every second of my time and dollar that I have. And like, I can absolutely imagine a world in which Steve Jobs just rolled up one day and was like, push notifications are bad for the world, turn them all off. Yeah. Like, do I think he would have done that? Probably not. Money is really fun. And when you have a lot of money, it's really hard to have less money. But I do think there was a sense with Steve Jobs, at least, that there was like one person whose taste was the only thing that ultimately mattered, right?

36:22Like, all you had to do at Apple was make the thing that Steve Jobs wanted. And by and large, those were good things. The world has changed a lot since the last thing Steve Jobs made. But, like, he was right more than just about anybody. And so part of me is, like, I also hold on to this hope that, like, if Steve were still here, this would all be better. But I wonder that, too. Of course, we'll never know. Steve Jobs died in 2011, which meant he lived long enough to see Apple begin to profit from in-app purchases, but not long enough to see how the iPhone experience would change.

37:04A decade and a half later, we're left with this problem. And the hope is someone else will come along and fix it. And people are trying. Human beings continue to invent new technology, not just to make money, although there's that, but also to make little arguments for how we should or could live. We're going to take a break and then go back to our temporary gadget review show, where David will talk about one more thing, a newish gadget that gives your iPhone a feature that I constantly wish it had, 2008 mode. Let's after these ads.

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41:15Welcome back to the show.

41:20So to recap, we learned earlier in this episode that there were some crude solutions that were helping David Pierce. A long cord, sleeping with the phone outside his bedroom. And there were some tech solutions that seemed promising on paper, but in my opinion, did not actually work so well. Dumb phones, Apple Watches. But the good news. It turned out, at the time we were talking, technology has actually started to turn a corner. There were solutions David was actually excited about. He told me about this strange device invented by two frustrated Gen Z college students. It was the one I'd noticed at a friend's house, the Brick.

41:58So Brick was created by these two friends who were college friends at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their names are TJ and Zach. They have grown up in the iPhone world in a way that, like, I'm 36, and I think I'm about the last person who remembers the world before smartphones. For them, like, if you're in your 20s now, everyone has had it the whole time. And they had essentially the same problem that I did with screen time limits, which is that they're too easy to get past and you can just ignore them. So they pretty quickly came to this idea that what they needed was some kind of separate physical blocker.

42:40And there are things out there. Have you ever seen the Yonder case? This is the thing you get at like concerts? Yeah, or honestly comedy. If they want to make sure that the audience can't film, they'll make you put your phone in this Yonder case that can only be unlocked by the venue. Yeah, that's right. So the Yonder case is one of the things out there, but that's mostly, like you said, used at events and stuff. They wanted something that you can just have in your house. The brick is not some hugely complicated piece of technology. It's this two-inch by two-inch cube. It's gray. It's super boring.

43:14And then it's a magnet underneath. And it is basically designed to be stuck somewhere, like on the side of your fridge or, you know, on your desk or something like that. And you tap it and it quote unquote bricks your phone. In case you're not yet picturing this, you have a little plastic square in your house, probably where you leave your house keys. When you tap your phone against the square, it turns off every single app on your phone you've labeled as distracting. Your iPhone becomes as dumb a phone as you want it to be until you tap the square again. So if you were going to the park, you could tap your phone against the brick and kill Instagram and email and everything but your map and text messages.

43:54And when you get home, you could tap again and turn your phone all the way back on. There's just enough friction there and it also makes it a thing I have to stand up and go do. Like now, if I'm sitting here and looking at my phone and I want to use Instagram, I have to go upstairs, tap my phone on the thing, and then come back downstairs and look at Instagram. And there's something really powerful in just that moment of, I have to have said out loud that I want to do this, that really works. And if we're thinking of this as, I'm forcing you to help me turn the search engine for one episode into a product review podcast, like if this was a product review, what doesn't work about the brick that you wish you could change?

44:34So one is it's very expensive. Each of those little tiny readers that don't really do anything is$59. Oh, wow. And so the idea of having a few of these adds up fast. The other thing is it's really sort of a blunt instrument, right? It doesn't have sort of a schedule that understands like what you're doing and the idea that like, oh, I actually need to check this one thing, but only for two minutes, and then I don't want to be able to look at it again. It's also, I should say, a really easy habit to break. The reason that it works is that it is really straightforward to do. Their idea is that you'll like put one brick, I don't know, on your desk at work and another one by your front door at home where you leave your keys, right?

45:22And so you like brick it when you get home, unbrick it when you get to work, like whatever. You sort of build that into kind of the routine of your life. I forgot to do it once and completely fell out of the habit of doing it for like two weeks. So, the brick. Not perfect. Can certainly become one more piece of unused fitness equipment in your home. And it's pricey. But it's an option. David mentioned there's also, separately, this much cheaper app you can download that tries to do a cruder version of this. It's called OneSec. With OneSec, you can pay for this feature that forces you when you try to open a distracting app to justify why you're doing it.

46:04To type, for instance, I have proactively decided I want to see a photo of my former bully from high school. So that's two products you could try. The Brick or OneSec. To me, what's exciting about these products, and the reason I wanted them amplified by search engine, is there evidence there could be a market here. a market I selfishly hope more companies try to serve. I say all this imagining some younger version of myself, sitting at my beige gateway PC in the computer room of my parents' house, patiently waiting for the dial-up to load. If you told that kid that one day he'd have wireless internet via a computer that fit in his pocket, but that the most exciting gadget would just be an off switch for that device, that kid would have been very confused.

46:53But David and I, we found ourselves as we signed off just talking about the funny role that millennials play in all this. A generation who loved the internet before we got bit by it, who are still trying to process the relationship we ought to have to these miraculous little demons we've let into our homes and minds. The way I have come to think about it is that our responsibility is definitely to remember what was good about not being on our phones all the time. But the problem that we have is we think phones are awesome. Like, we also grew up in the time when all of this stuff was just cool.

47:35Was just exciting and didn't feel problematic. And taking 100 pictures of my drunk college friends and posting all of them on Facebook felt exciting and not horrifying. And I think we have the full spectrum of that experience in a way that almost no one else does. And I think our responsibility is to sort of hold all of that in our head at the same time, which is really challenging. That, to me, feels like the job. And that's a really hard job. And does it feel for you just funny that, like, all of this is part of your job as a person? They're like, David, there's a new gadget. Like, does it feel strange that you have to bring all that to bear?

48:15I mean, I know you do a lot more technology coverage than that. But do you find it funny that generational burden is part of your CV now? Oh, yeah. David, there's a new gadget. It's not an unreasonable explanation of my job. So that's fine. I'm not mad about that at all. Yeah, I think it's definitely shifted a little bit. We talk about gadgets as gadgets so much less than we used to. They're like cultural objects in a much more real way. And I think that's been a sort of natural shift of my career. But like, do I look back on like my great enthusiasm for the first iPad and wonder if maybe I should have thought more about what it means that I'm just going to spend way more time sitting on my couch looking at this thing?

48:57Probably. Yeah, I think we should have asked the like, what if this takes over the world question a lot more often about technology over the years. But that said, like, new gadgets are awesome. Especially if we're going to get into this phase of how do we make these things not just attention sucks, but actually start to do useful things for us again. I think that's cool. Like, I think we might be at the end of a particular phase of the internet where the whole idea of a social network is just dying. Like, YouTube and TikTok and Instagram are just – they're just streaming services now. Like, we should talk about them more like Netflix and less like text messaging.

49:39And I think we're coming to that. And so the next question is going to be, okay, it turns out people just want to hang out with each other in group chats all the time. And so how do we make that stuff more useful instead of trying to disrupt that and put ads next to it? And maybe there is a next turn that is like, okay, we spent 20 years pushing everything into our phones. Can I build better stuff if I build outside of it again? And if all that starts to happen, we're going to get this really weird boom in weird gadgets. And we're going to like figure out how to make things work again instead of just shoving everything into my pocket so that it can notify me 100 times a day.

50:15and that I'm very excited about.

50:23David Pierce. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can find him over at his home podcast, The Verge Cast, where he and his co-host, Neelai Patel, approach the technology industry with both curiosity and critical thinking. I really recommend it. David, thank you. It's really helpful to talk to you about this. Anytime. This is all I do. Ha ha ha ha ha.

51:24Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Shruti Pinnimaneni. Our senior producer is Garrett Graham. This episode was produced by Hazel May Bryan and fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Additional production support on this episode from Sean Merchant. special thanks this week to martin boas if you'd like to support our show and get ad-free episodes zero reruns and occasional strange experiments please consider signing up for incognito mode you learn more at searchengine.show our executive producer is leah reese dennis and thanks to the rest of the team at odyssey rob mirandy craig cox eric donnelly colin gainer maura curran Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schaap.

52:10Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're doing a little test to try to figure out how many people actually listen to the entire credits of the show, like how many of you lunatics are here right now. If you've made it this far, go to, in the podcast description, there's this place where it says you can make a comment, like it's in the summary of the podcast. It's like, comment on this episode. Click there. It will take you to the search engine website and leave a comment that says tangerine. Okay, we're going to find something out this week.

52:50Thank you for listening. We'll see you soon.

53:34The End Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.