Transcription
Most of you that are tuning in right now, you're watching me on a device that I'm about to talk about, and it's these little things uh right here that we all carry around all day long. It's tiny. It's thin. You're holding it in your hand. It's propped up on something on your desk. It's probably 18 in from your face. And I want you to notice something before we start. You didn't decide to hold it that way. You don't remember picking it up. It's just there. Your brain's going to say, "Oh, yeah. I already knew that." But I want you to hear this with the full weight of what it truly means.
Your attention is worth more per ounce than gold. And I mean that literally. There are companies out there worth more than the GDP of most countries. and their entire balance sheet is built on one big ass asset. It's the thing that you're pointing at your screen right now. And it's not your eyes, it's your attention. And most of us statistically, we are giving away 96 times a day uh this to a device that was engineered to take it away from you. That's once every 10 waking minutes. So like total touches or scrolls or whatever for your phone is 2600 per day for the average person. And people who use their phones heavily are over 6,000. When we're talking about scrolling on short form content, you scroll about the height of the Statue of Liberty every day with your thumb. That's the physical labor you're performing for companies for free. And average screen time uh in the US is now between 4 and 5 hours. 4 hours a day is 28 hours a week. That's more than a full day of your life every week. gone into a piece of glass in in a reality that's not even your real life. If you run that across an entire year, you're at 60 days. So this is 2 months of your waking life annually. If you take a 30 year old, if you run that forward to age 80 at this current numbers, the person will like use their phone somewhere between 8 and 10 years years of conscious existence just while they're awake. So, a decade. That's the price. And nobody really remembers agreeing to pay the price. You didn't decide to do this.
A notification on your phone is a script interruption and that's all it is. You're cooking, you're in the kitchen doing something, you're working, talking to your kid, and the buzz on your phone, the vibration, the noise cuts in half uh all the script that was running. And we think like, oh, my focus drifted towards a phone. Your focus was seized. That's a seized level of focus there. It's the same mechanism that kept your ancestor alive when the stick snaps behind the bush. The phone is cracking a stick about 80 times a day on purpose. Look at what's built into the interface. Blue check marks, all the follower counts, the verified algorithm. The algorithm decides whose face appears in front of you, whose ideas and whose opinions. And if you're honest with yourself, and some of you are, what's happening is your brain is saying, "Who do I watch? Who do I need to imitate? Who do I defer to?" And a recommendation algorithm owns that selection process. You, and I'm willing to go on a limb here and say you didn't choose the voices that have authority in your life. They were most likely served to you. And it's hard to admit it. There's an ego hit to admit something like that. So, we have group chats and uh goal streaks and a little your friend is typing right now bubble that comes up on social media. They voice the new belief and either the tribe welcomes them uh or they feel welcomed or they don't. They get rejected. That's the like button. That's the that's the mechanism behind all of this. Your feed's not sorted by truth. And then you think, then you're like, "Oh, yeah. I already knew that." You're like, "Oh, yeah. My feed's sorted by evidence or by interest, right? It's not sorted by interest at all. It's sorted by arousal. It cares that you feel something. You have 10,000 engineers running millions of experiments. They keep what captures attention. They kill everything that doesn't. And evolution did the rest. and Evolution reverse engineered all this stuff uh for the algorithm.
I want to walk you through one pickup of your phone really quick. And I want you to do this with me in your mind step by step. And we'll kind of do this in slow motion because once you see the pipeline, I think you're going to feel it happening. And I want to get you to a place where you feel the pipeline happening. So step one, the phone buzzes. A script interruption. focus is seized, not captured. It's seized. You haven't even looked yet and your focus is seized. And then we get to step two. This is the part uh the dopamine research actually shows and almost everybody gets it backwards. Even YouTube neuroscientists get this backwards. Dopamine doesn't fire when you get a reward. It fires in anticipation of the reward. So the hit happens in this little space, this little gap between the the buzz, the vibrating phone and the looking at the phone. The not knowing is the drug. It could be your kid's school calling you. It could be someone liking your post. It could be some telemarketer, right? Your brain floods in that uncertainty window. And then we get to step three here. Uh, and the scientists have a word for step three. This is called variable ratio reinforcement. This psychologist BJ Skinner figured this out with pigeons probably 70s something years ago. If you reward every pec, the animal works steadily, non-stop. If you reward randomly, the animal starts pecking frantically and they never ever stop pecking because the rewards are random. So it even after the rewards are are finished and they stop giving out the rewards. It the behavior keeps going. It's the most addictive reinforcement schedule that's ever been documented in psychology. Sometimes notification matters a lot. Usually it doesn't.
Look, I know you don't want to watch another end. I don't blame you, but I have seen this change too many lives to just let you scroll past it. There's a moment that most people have where something feels off in a conversation and we ignore it. And it's not because you're wrong, but it's just because we don't trust what we're seeing. And that's where all of this starts. NCI level one isn't about learning a bunch of tricks. It's about finally understanding what you've been noticing your whole life already. You start to see behavior a lot more clearly. the body language, the emotional shifts, the intent that's behind someone's actions. So, you don't guess anymore. You read what's going on. You understand what's going on, and you can actually respond with precision. Most people ignore what they see. This is where you learn to trust it. NCI1 is a foundational course in behavior profiling, and the link is right down in the description.
If you look at your phone, you'll watch all of this kind of lineup. You pull down to refresh. You drag the screen down and wait to see what comes up as it's waiting. The gesture is exactly like what what do we see the same gesture with? This pull down and wait. It's a slot machine. It's mechanically and it's psychologically identical. They put a slot machine in your pocket and you pull the lever 96 times a day for free. the guy who invented infinite scrolling on social media apologized for it publicly. So, why does the endless scrolling work? And if it's not you, if you're telling everybody in the chat here that you're above everything and and better than all this, maybe it's someone you know, but why does endless scrolling work? Cuz it takes out the stopping cue. a page that ends. If I only show you 15 things at a time, like you get to an ending point, it gives your brain a completion point. It closes a loop and it gives you a little brief moment in time to contemplate what's happening. Infinite scrolling means that loop never closes. So, it's more like a casino. And you know already what an open loop does to a human brain. There's no bottom. the red circle that you see all the time, the little notification icons on your phone, on social media, of all the colors they could have picked for that notification dot. They pick the one that your visual system is ancestrally wired to. And it's wired to treat it as like blood, fire, danger. A gray dot won't get opened. And they know this because they actually tested it and published the results. someone's typing back to you in RCS, I think it's called for Android or iMessage. It's those three dots thing that's going up like those little watching those little three dots move. This is an open loop that you can't close yourself. You'll sit and stare at those little animated dots like your life depends on it cuz half a million years ago, some unresolved social signal did mean that your life depended on the answer. Some platforms have been reported to do what's called like batching. That's a word that exists. Batching up all of your likes. So the all your likes exist somewhere. They're sitting on some server farm somewhere. But the system holds them and releases them in bursts and they're timed for when you're most likely to drift away. The welcome signal that we we get from our own people, our people, right? and they're metering it on this little mouse rat maze reinforcement schedule. It's like a dog trainer with a little fanny one of those little fanny packs full of treats. We don't recognize manipulation in places that we go to rest.
So you check those four things. Focus. Where does this person's attention live? Who controls what they look at hour by hour throughout the day? And then we have authority. Who do they treat as the voices worth listening to? And then who selected those voices? who picked them and then tribe. Where does their that person's sense of belonging come from? Where do they go to feel accepted? And then in the emotion side of things, what's the big source of their dopamine when they feel flat? And when their dopamine feels super flat, where do they in almost instinctively reach for? When one entity owns all four of those things, uh, that's a cult. That's the actual mechanism of control and everything else is just a not a cult. But your phone qualifies for them on all four channels. And I and I'm not saying this in a kind of it kind of qualifies. It holds the monopoly. And I want to be really accurate or really precise about why this is worse than any cult I've ever seen in my life. If you think of a cult leader, the David Cares or you whoever you want to think of, works with a few hundred people. And what do they have? What every cult leader has in droves? intuition and charisma. And if you look at your phone, this thing runs a personalized model of you, resting time, what makes you uh hesitate. They time how long it takes you to touch the screen again. They know thumb hesitation. They know what you watch twice, what time of night that your resistance starts dropping, and it starts updating the model uh every time you touch something. This thing measures and knows all of that stuff. The biggest difference between you and a cult member is that the cult member had to be recruited. And when I say you, I mean we like we bought we paid for and purchased the recruiter ourselves. Maybe $1,000 for it. We sleep with it 8 in from our skull and we check it before we even say good morning to a human in bed with us.
Researchers have been cataloging dream content for decades. These are tens of thousands of dream reports. And here's what they found. The phone is almost completely absent from your dreams. Let me know how that if that hit you in the stomach, cuz it did me. You spend a third of your waking life looking at a phone and it barely registers in dream content at all. You dream about people in your life you haven't seen for 20 years. You dream about that house that you lived in as a kid. You dream about falling and maybe riding on some rhinoceros or something like that, being chased by something, showing up to school in your underwear. You don't dream about scrolling. And think about what dreams are for really quick. Just think what are dreams for? Your brain basically replays and consolidates what matters. the experiences that are worth encoding, uh, the threats that the brain might want to rehearse and prepare for, the people that are worth keeping in your life. Four hours a day, every day, we're on phones, and when the lights go out, your own brain looks at that time and files those 4 hours under nothing happened at all. The biggest influence operation in human history has nothing to do with any government at all. It's in your pocket. It knows you probably better than your spouse, your kids, your therapist. It never sleeps. And it gets smarter every time you pick it up and you touch it. And at night, your own brain testifies that none of it was real.
This is the fourth rule about scripts that we talked about scripts a lot. And you know it. If a script is openly discussed, it's its power gets lessened. I'm not saying you need to go throw this thing in the trash. I have one. I don't have social media on here, but I had this. I might also pick it up more than I should. I'm I'm not perfect. I don't have all this figured out. I'm not a guru. Maybe get those numbers and maybe you go on a social media diet. Just a diet and watch how your life kind of comes back to reality.
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