How Your Smartphone Is Short Circuiting Your Brain - A Hacker In Your Pocket - #009

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. So, it's been a couple of weeks since the last episode. I know that I promised I was going to do one every single week, and I've fallen within the first month of that. However, I have a good excuse. I was away in Palmer on a yacht, and then in Dubai with my dad. It's a hard life, I know.
This week, I'm sitting down with Yusef and Jonny from Propane Fitness, and this is probably my most anticipated episode to date. And I say mine, I mean by myself, not by anybody else. We're gonna be discussing the ethical use of technology and how social networks, social media manipulates our cognitive biases and uses unseen persuasion techniques to keep you on site. Now, all of this might sound a little tinfoil hatty, but I promise you it's not. It is, as far as I'm concerned, probably one of the biggest and most important issues that we've got going on at the moment. If you think about how ubiquitous phone use is amongst everybody on the planet, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which recently came out where it turned out that some users on Facebook's data had been illegally acquired and manipulated, caused absolute uproar. And all that was happening there was people were being targeted with ads and some of their data had been stolen. Your phone is stealing your time and that's the one resource that we can't get any of it back. That to me is a much bigger scandal that needs to be spoken about. Our phones are with us more than any partner, any friend, any family member, any pet, probably any other item that we own. They're with us every single step of the way and they're possessions that we cherish to a degree and that we live our lives through. They're a window between us and the world. They mediate our experience of the external world and they manipulate our experience and our judgment of other people, both celebrity and friend. It's something that we put an awful lot of faith into and yet our brains are being hacked by billion dollar companies and behind every press of every button on your phone, there is a team of software engineers who have manipulated you into pressing that particular button in order to keep you on site because they need your attention, because that is how the money is made on that particular platform. So, hopefully, you will come out of this understanding the tactics that are being used to keep you on your phone. You'll be more aware of why and how this is happening and also we will give you some tips and some strategies that you can implement to mitigate the amount of time that you get trapped within your phone. So without further ado, here we go.

**Yusef** (3:08)
I think someone was selling a dildo on Facebook Marketplace yesterday, Rump and Rub it.

**Jonny** (3:15)
Is that the thing that you said?

**Yusef** (3:16)
I might have sent it to you both.

**Jonny** (3:16)
Yeah. They don't believe when you say it's not being used.

**Yusef** (3:19)
Yeah. I mean, why else are you selling it? Like, who buys it?

**Jonny** (3:23)
Well, it hasn't been used.

**Yusef** (3:24)
Maybe it was a gift and they thought.

**Jonny** (3:27)
Yeah, they have two of them.

**Yusef** (3:29)
Still, I wouldn't trust it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:30)
Well, someone could have been purchased, too, thinking that they wanted that. They bought it online. They overestimated their sexual appetite.

**Yusef** (3:42)
I see. So either they double tapped the add to co-op button or they tried it, didn't like it. Either way, I'm not putting it in my vagina. I think it's a-

**Chris Williamson** (3:52)
Well, it's not just the vagina, is it? Potentially.

**Yusef** (3:54)
Or bum. Yeah, you're right.

**Jonny** (3:56)
I think you can put it anywhere. That's what's so great about them.

**Yusef** (3:59)
Yeah, we shouldn't discriminate. I think that's very judgmental of us to assume vagina.

**Chris Williamson** (4:05)
Judgmental on who? People that prefer anal.

**Yusef** (4:07)
Yeah.

**Jonny** (4:08)
People with or without vaginas.

**Yusef** (4:09)
We need to be nice to-

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
Docking. Could use it for docking. Use the second one for docking.

**Jonny** (4:15)
Can you explain in the clearest possible way what docking is?

**Yusef** (4:20)
When a man interpenetrates another man with his-

**Jonny** (4:25)
With a tool.

**Yusef** (4:26)
A tool.

**Chris Williamson** (4:27)
Urinary tract, right?

**Jonny** (4:28)
With a device.

**Yusef** (4:30)
Yeah. Essentially.

**Jonny** (4:32)
Interpenetrates.

**Yusef** (4:35)
So, he places his appendage. Into another man's appendage, so.

**Jonny** (4:47)
Is that right?

**Yusef** (4:49)
I mean, you think it wouldn't be possible. I thought, but I thought I could tell you about it.