Introduction

0:00 so system one is immediate it's impulsive you know it's that image you look at a social media post you get that initial emotional reaction so imagine that how that affects younger kids age 16 and below they just simply don't have the neurological hardware to make decisions that are best for their long term but again with these phones there just isn't that end point on most of

0:29 these apps and that is by design because it keeps your attention and it keeps you attached to it when you're talking about these devices you're not just fighting the world you're fighting a multi-billion dollar organizations that are actually designed to get you to stay addicted essentially to these devices let's uncover what is better with humans welcome to the first episode of better with humans

Meet Richard Lalchan

0:55 i'm joined by my good friend Richard Lalchan a digital well-being and clarity coach richard helps parents and leaders reclaim their god-given commission from addictive algorithms by bridging the gap between ancient faith renewing the mind and modern tech so richard welcome anything else you'd like to add to that introduction no um not nothing that won't necessarily come up in our

1:16 conversation um author as well so we'll we'll touch on that no doubt um so yeah that's that's fine okay cool not going to spoil in it's spoiling surprises so today richard and i and we've known each other for for around three years now and we really have spoken a lot around the impact of technology when there's various things around that happen around the world particularly on technology

1:42 technology and it's really been on richard's heart looking at what's the impact of that on our kids and in the conversations i've had with richard we've we've actually explored quite a bit about how well what happens when technologies things like mobile phones when they get introduced we allow them into our lives and it's not not the impact of it we don't look at until later and we go oh no look at

2:05 the impact it's had on our children look at the impact it's had on our lives i look at tv you know and go yeah look at that impact tv had on my life and a computer when i had a tv and a computer in my room so we're really going to really explore in particularly the impact technology and ai on our kids so actually as we as we just um as i just mentioned about smartphones richard what is so bad

What's so bad about smartphones for kids?

2:29 about kids having smartphones well yeah it's obviously such a um a hot topic at the moment and um i mean the good first thing i should say is it's great now that there are many more people talking about it um when some of us were looking at this you know years ago um hardly anyone was talking about it so it's great that it's um that people are talking about and yeah like i say it's

2:54 such a hot topic with um now you know phone bans in school and various sort of state-driven um social media bans and ongoing consultations um that there are so but one aspect i'd like to almost like start looking at is actually just how our brains work and and how it works with that and look at how the impact of the technology um on on our brains so there's a wonderful um book uh called

System 1 and System 2 Thinking

3:23 thinking fast and slow by a guy called daniel kahneman and he explains the brain in this way he talks about system one and system two thinking so system one is immediate it's impulsive you know it's that immediate you know you look at a social media post you get that initial emotional reaction and that's actually done with the amygdala part of our brain and then we have system two which is much more

3:50 slow much more considered it's the if you look if you think of them as um like the system one is like the accelerator pedal and system two is the brakes so it holds us back helps us to think and that's why he calls it thinking fast and slow so but it's not that system one is bad and system two is good imagine if there was a fire in your house and someone shouted fire you don't want to be waiting

4:19 for ages thinking slowly is this true is this not you want to pretty soon get out there um so so it's using them in the right way so so actually the system two comes out of our prefrontal cortex and and that's the decision making center of our brain where we make those sort of executive decisions um but the interesting thing that people don't necessarily know is that that part of our brain

4:47 doesn't mature until the age of sort of 24 to 26 so you think about the impact of that the decisions that we're making um that that are really long term as well so it's not just the immediate what's going to suit me now it's actually how does this decision i'm making now affect me in you know months years time so a good example of this is you know when when facebook first came out and um well years

5:16 after it came out actually when people were used to it there was all of these posts with um university students obviously it started in universities and there was a lot of these sort of alcohol fueled exploits that were getting posted um people posting the student posting them themselves and part of that so you're talking what 18 to sort of 21 year olds and they're not really thinking about

5:42 what impact is this going to have on my work on career security you know several years down the line because it's all about now and getting that sort of social approval things like that but that's 19 20 year olds so imagine that how that affects younger kids age 16 and below who they just simply don't

Kids Under 16 Lack the Neurological Hardware

6:07 have the neurological hardware if i can put it like that to make decisions that are best for their long term so then when you're when they're given a phone or given a device that's got a bottomless scroll you know you think of instagram you think of whatsapp um or whatsapp to an extent and tiktok things like that anything that doesn't have uh that is basically an endless scroll you they don't have

6:35 the ability to self-regulate you know if you think about having a book reading a book yeah even like a kid's book uh which you've made one yourself haven't you um so with a book you're reading it you've got an you've got a start you've got an end point yeah you finish the book you close it you decide what you're going to do next when you're scrolling on these phones or looking at youtube you don't have

7:01 an end point and so having that ability to regulate is so crucial um i guess another example would be um overeating yeah with with with eating whatever meal you've got you're going to finish it at some point or um or if you're eating after chocolate a lot of time you're going to run out of chocolate

Endless Scroll by Design

7:26 yeah but again with these phones there just isn't that end point on most of these apps and that is by design because it keeps you um it keeps you keeps your attention and it keeps you attached to it that you want to keep coming back to the device but you know saying all of that that can be it's easy to kind of like then say well you know shouldn't parents be doing more and sort of point

8:00 fingers but you know someone looking at this from the outside you know i'm not a parent myself you know i see it very much as a has pretty much like like a trap that you you get in to you know the idea of sitting your child in front of an ipad or giving them a um smartphone just to get five minutes peace you know is completely understandable but the problem is that's put quickly become the

8:27 default um yeah so yeah i mean be interesting um to know some of your thing as a parent as well you know there are things that you've kind of found that you relate to in terms of the devices well it's interesting there's a couple of things that come to mind i think one is that when we look at the progression of mobile phones that we did used to have devices that all they could do was make a phone

8:57 phone call send a text it well i mean the texts were really expensive when we first could first had proper mobile phones i mean ones that weren't bricks so we had to carry around but you could actually could fit in your pocket what we found was so there those were you'd use them sparingly because actually also the calls were relatively expensive so you were tends to still use in the

9:17 way that you used their physical wall phone because you'd have to pick it up and you can you make a phone call you go and see your friend that was it really it wasn't my parents maybe on the location might use it to call but not because it was still quite expensive i might use it to call them to say where i was at or ask for a lift say it was really just a tool and of course as it progressed

9:38 into starting to have you know games on there and then development of apple and then the app store of course created a whole different beast which we weren't necessarily really prepared for and that's part of the challenge isn't it with the emergence of technology is that some parents would have gone yeah okay fine you know that you can you can have that and at some point it was okay so for us

10:03 our generation going yeah we were fine actually we didn't even have mobile phones or you know even some of the older and younger than us did have mobile phones yeah that's okay so that's just part of the challenge isn't it we because part of some of what we're talking about is is having to have a bit of a future thinking mindset of going let's not just go well what's the impact right now what's

10:25 the impact in the in the the future and as a parent just if we just take technology aside completely

Parenting, Letting Go, and Peer Pressure

10:32 and you just look at it as a parent you want to see your children grow and you want them to be empowered and empowerment means you have to let them at times make their own mistakes i remember with my youngest daughter when she was a small when she was a toddler and there's a little step little step with her um her aunt's her place and she would be worried about her going up and down the

10:55 step like oh is she gonna fall and we just had to go no we just had to say to say to ourselves okay she's got to give it a go and just it's only it's you know it's just a step you know and she stumbled a few times but eventually by the end of that day she was running up and down this one step now if we'd actually every single time held her hand and gone up and you know she she wouldn't

11:17 have got there as quickly maybe shouldn't go there at all we just don't know so that there is that element of we have to kind of let our kids let go and i think that plays into when we do think about the use of technology and then of course there's also peer pressure it's like oh my friend's got the phone so it's a so it is a real challenge in in terms of it's almost feels can sometimes feel

11:39 like you're fighting the world yeah good way to put it in terms of like fighting the world because when the when you're talking about these devices you're not just fighting the world you're fighting a multi-billion dollar um organizations that are actually designed to get you to to stay addicted essentially to these devices so when you're talking about an individual individual parent

12:02 it's like almost like what what can they do well you know it's it's very difficult for the individual parent i mean there are things you can do and we'll come on to those but um but but you are yeah you're fighting against this whole industry which is designed to essentially that their business models are made on you being um you know addicted essentially to their devices but with the um

12:29 with the you mentioned about you know your daughter and letting her go that's the that that's the challenge with the devices because it's very difficult there's so many things that it does to inhibit progression um development or progression that when it comes to devices i'd almost say you can't just you know let them go i know that's not what you were saying but but with the devices you

12:58 can't just sort of let them go and it's very much should be um parental monitored all the time because

Devices as Pacifiers

13:08 effectively it's it can help in um some of the problems can be that it's rewiring them to to see these devices as the pacifiers yeah and so and the problem with that is that it can essentially end up being that that's what they might use to self sue so they're not really emotionally regulating so when they're angry frustrated they get the screen um and so that's sort of built into them

13:41 whereas actually life is full of you know pre-screens life is full of anger frustration thought and you have to kind of like deal with things like that without having a you know device to to soothe i think one one of the other challenges just is is the whole sort of screen time issue yeah so because people um the problem of sort of say minimizing screen time is focused on in my

It's Not Screen Time. It's What They're Not Doing.

14:12 opinion a bit too much because it's actually the issue isn't the screen time it's actually thinking about well what are they not doing when they're looking at the screen and again that links back to links to things like boredom and daydreaming all of these kind of things are good for us as humans you know and we we need them they really help our brains develop um and creativity and critical

14:39 thinking come out of um come out of some of those things and so having the device in front of you is sort of inhibiting that rather than the free-flowing being able to be bored you know and come up with your own solutions yeah that's it's really interesting i think you're absolutely right i mean i think it's um it's like sleep as well and dreaming isn't it it's that same thing that we

15:05 there are things that our brain needs time even just quiet time i find it difficult myself my brain's going 100 miles an hour often often but however i know they're going for a walk and with nothing leaving my phone it must feels liberating and it's like weird why does it feel liberating not to just even have the feeling of the phone in my pocket but at that point i can't be contacted i can't be

15:27 dragged into doing some scroll doing some doom scrolling and as he said doing that endless scrolling and i think it just it really is going back to what we said about the the battle because i think one of the challenges that parents have is and it really is that thing as should i should i not you know have the device i'll give a device and oh well maybe i can i can track them i can call them

15:50 i can know where they are so there is that element of them wanting to to parents wanting to just feel that security but one of the challenges is even if you if you lock down and i that's what i did with my my daughters were younger you lock them down and they have limited ability to the to what they can do on the phone the challenge is that that's not it's not really very accessible like you talked about

16:14 screen time that's really about it isn't it as far as you know restrictions i mean you can restrict apps and things but it's just not really designed the phones are not designed that way you know the the applications that are developed to do that are few and far between and i say it's not really as we said the ecosystem is not really focused on let's let's actually make sure the children are kind of

16:38 using it you know for the you know for the right reasons as you said i mean i really love that analogy of it of a pacifier because actually that's reality of if you go somewhere and it's not and this is not we don't want to sound critical because we're we're kind of older and it's just that when we look at and we you go into a restaurant you see kids with phones and and tablets it's just kind of sad i mean i

17:03 think because it's not it's just that actually in that moment as you say there is a such a powerful opportunity to help our kids in interaction and so if we if interaction gets taken away then obviously then that's more of a challenge just in a slight defense of people in that situation just in the case again that's it's and i've done this as well so it can be very quick to judge people in that

17:32 situation but i guess you don't always know whether that child for example has particular um condition where they can't communicate without that which that's rare that's extremely rare but it is possible so it's just oh yeah yeah oh yeah no yeah totally this is not yeah definitely we don't we're not sort of this isn't about judgment it's actually just an observing and saying well this

17:57 this is a you know um it wouldn't be great if it's a different way i mean i've got a friend and um who has a son and he has learning difficulties he's autistic and you just have to let him wander around the restaurant i mean if he's going to take him somewhere you cannot expect him to sit and so even if he had a device he might use it for a short period of time but he has to

18:20 be in a place where he can wander around a little bit he won't just be able to sit and so that's of course the thing isn't it i think it isn't about and that's the other thing is interesting thing isn't it that you say there is the element of we don't know maybe there are reasons for that and we need to that the kids kids need that particularly because you know they they uh they

18:42 might even be non-verbal and so there's there's obviously those those scenarios but it's also that other challenge looking at it and going well yeah i mean what what are we doing it for i guess that's a really good question isn't it is asking the question so less less thinking about as an observer going you know oh they're doing that or they're doing this but going oh you know i don't really

19:03 know what they're doing it for and you know but the questions we're asking ourselves when we're if we're giving children phones and and things in any situation you know if it's a situation where okay i need and i of course as a parent yeah you totally yeah you were given things but it's necessarily a phone but you'll find something to get them to occupy them um particularly mothers

19:26 if they've if they've you know been with a child all day and maybe there's been a difficult day maybe the child is is is is maybe ill or just you know there's been a lot going on or and so that you know you can understand there's times you know i could just i could just get them to give me 15 minutes a piece then and then that would be really helpful to do this so there's certainly we can understand

19:47 why and of course as you say yeah it's important to not be judgmental it's also and also just it's to be honest about faster reality isn't it yeah yeah i mean and we make and we can make those those like uh snap assessments which as you say are not always necessarily accurate yeah that's the the system one kicking in but um yeah i mean in terms of again it's looking at what it does long term

20:15 and um i mean jonathan height who's a um absolutely one of the experts in this area key voice in this area and personally i think it's largely because of him and writing books like the anxious generation that some of the governments are talking about um some of these these bands but he talks about

Play-Based vs Phone-Based Childhood

20:35 the whole idea of where we've essentially replaced play-based childhood with phone-based childhood so that whole idea of what you get with the play with the rough and tumble all of that kind of thing your your what your brain is processing all of that in a different way than just sitting in front of the screen it's allowing it to develop in in different more human ways so that's really

21:01 quite key um but i mean another sort of issue when it comes to that is things like um social isolation and um social contagion um and by that i mean that you know the tech companies have designed these tools so well that they become when you're talking about say schools they become the hub of all communications so the social life of that child is focused around these tools now um i've seen it in

21:37 families i know well you know where um the kids are just yeah using particularly whatsapp again even if it's a cut down minimized version but they're still um using that so of course if you don't have a phone or you don't have a phone or you don't have a phone with whatsapp the child feels completely left out they then they're not they're considered you know a social leper um and so

22:05 and again unless there's sort of this collective um i think jonathan height calls it um it's like collective action trap so basically unless you've got say all parents or many parents coming together and deciding what to do then um that actually a lot of their children are not going to have a phone or going to have a cut down phone then it's it's very difficult isn't it for that one or two um that

22:35 feel like that social leper yeah it's interesting because it reminds me of i was being at school actually i was being at school and not getting picked you know and the teams are football and you know no i don't want Shaun in my team and and it is you know we we and i think growing up we'll have experienced that i wonder how much that comes into play as we make those decisions about wanting to

22:59 make sure that our children don't experience that that pain because i mean it can be to be feel like left out and that's a really interesting observation as you say that actually it's a collective and this is the difficulty thing isn't it that it doesn't take it's we often say oh it only takes one person but yeah it might only take one person but that person needs to find the another person

23:19 that's that and another person be able to say collectively you know we can come together as a group and we can bring our children and they can we can have them play together and we can we can do that it's but it's so interesting that something else that i came across recently was someone that found it difficult to communicate so they would use their phone to write things down and

23:42 and and you know show you to to to read it as well so that's that interesting that we have these very positive elements elements where you know mobile phones can be very powerful tools but what we've seen is that actually the the direction of a lot of the actual use of the phones and that's that's predominantly come from as you say that we've come from the organizations that are saying yeah

24:09 actually we want you to consume our content and not only once you consume our content we'll actually get other people to create the content so it's a it's a win-win there's little for us to do rather other than manage the platform and keep you on the platform so that we can advertise to you so that we can and it isn't to say that that there isn't again in these you know in these platforms where we

24:30 have found advantage and we find we're able to to connect with people but it's it's how we balance those things isn't it i mean how do you how do you balance that in your own life how do you balance the amount of well yeah i mean before just before come on to that just just it's interesting just

Big Tech in Schools and the UNESCO Findings

24:48 thinking about um you know the the schools putting on the devices and things like that i mean i mean that is a big problem in itself because you've essentially got these big tech companies who have got contracts with the department for education with their with the individual schools and they're pushing their technology you know onto um onto the schools and the schools have got struggling with budgets and

25:15 things like that and so they're getting this technology for extremely cheap or if not free and from the company's point of view it's like we want to get these kids for life you know so so they get them into their ecosystem and then that's what they use um and so um so what the trouble is the teachers and the school heads and they've been sold on all the benefits um you know

25:40 that increased productivity being able to do assessments um so much better more efficiently all of this kind of side do things quicker um but actually they're not told unsurprisingly um about all the negatives and a really interesting um uh study by unesco um i think it's in 2023 they basically um said yes it's 2023 and they basically found out they said there's little robust evidence that digital

26:14 technology actually adds value to education you know so you've got these companies pushing this technology onto the school and yet um studies kind of show this isn't actually increasing the value of education and and so it's so you've got all that kind of um side of things as well which is a real problem but to answer your question so my my own sort of approach to technology i mean my i i felt

Richard's Own Smartphone Addiction Story

26:47 that um i guess i'm trying to think when i got my first iphone so the iphone came out in 2007 i believe um i didn't get it immediately but i had an iphone fairly sort of soon sort of with a few years i guess after they came out and um and i felt that after you know probably 10 years after that so i was very much um addicted to it and i was using it um all the time all the typical things

27:20 you know photo taking photographs which of course when you the way we take photographs is like is different now we're essentially outsourcing our memory to a device yeah how many times have you taken a photo of a poster you know or something like that and um notice um whereas before we would have either written it down or even noted it down um whereas whereas now we're offloading it to our to

27:45 a device so our brain is not actually having to remember and do the things it used to do but so i was doing all of that i was using google maps and the classic case with google maps i so often used it when i knew exactly where i was going you know and one thing where it was sort of triggered me i was i'll go to norwich um fair bit and i was going to norwich this time and i went by train and then

28:10 once i get off the train i go to um the house i was going to and i would always have my earphones in with google maps directing me i'll see i know exactly where i'm going but it was just habit you know i would just do it um out of habit and then one of the things that i was into in a big way at the time was sport and particularly football tennis and um formula one and so i would be on the bbc sport

28:42 website multiple times a day i would be listening to i'd be watching you know match of the day match of the day x sub program i've been listening to football daily podcast you know i'd be watching that's as well as watching matches on sky sports or bt sport whatever it was then and so this would be all quite consuming and to show you the level of it my friends would come to me to find out the

29:09 latest information on their own teams they must sport different teams to me and yet they knew that i would know more about what's happening with their teams than they would and so it was just all consuming and i tried to um wean myself off so i did things like switch the um iphone to grayscale you know and that's a really good tip for people if you've not heard of that already because i come

29:36 from a design background so i understand how color works and the power of color and so the red on the notification buttons is designed specifically to trigger that in anxiety that's why warning signs are in red and things like that so you pay attention if you switch that to grayscale it just becomes another shade of gray so it just completely loses its impact so things like that helped me getting

29:58 rid of um loads of apps probably at the same time i came off facebook um because i just felt it was just damaging for me and so um and and then a big thing happened when i mean my job i've been working in digital marketing for 25 years and um and sort of whatever 20 years at the time uh and so and part of what i was doing was actually training companies to create content that was sticking that people

30:28 would want to come back to and i'm thinking something's not right here i'm struggling with looking at this content myself and i'm coming off some of these social media platforms and yet i'm telling people how to make this kind of content which i don't like and so i just had to stop that so i stopped working pretty much stopped working a lot with social media and i came off

30:50 instagram came off uh i've come off facebook already and i just really lessened and i stopped being involved in training anyone to do anything with um social media then what then helped me a lot was in 2020 um i started this course um by consciously digital institute uh which i'm actually now repeating again because it's so much more information about ai but it was a digital well-being coaching certificate

31:19 and um and interestingly enough we started the course february 2020 two weeks before the first lockdown in the uk first covid lockdown and so um so a few things happened there um the first thing was that um i'd made a commitment to the group there was a six-month course and i said by the end of the course i will have given up my smartphone um so that was one thing and then because i was watching things

31:51 like football and sport all the time um what happened with the lockdown of course there wasn't any so immediately there was this that there wasn't any and i was thinking this is great this is you know i wasn't very quickly i just realized i just didn't miss it and it was just fantastic from going watching you know a few matches per week um since that time um since 2020 i've watched about one and a

32:24 half football matches in the whole what five years and and the other thing as well with the phones so i did get rid of my um smartphone and i got an old nokia on the old ones back in there but since then i've now got three phones i've i still have that iphone which i keep in the kitchen i've got an android smartphone which i use for things like banking um and a business networking group um and

32:52 then and i've got a digital minimalist phone and i'm not remotely addicted to any of them yeah which i just i couldn't that wasn't the case five years ago so um i mean one of the things that that sort of

How Environment Shapes Habits

33:06 shows um is that because of the uh the lockdowns and the inability to um to to watch anything it's kind of like that changes our environment yeah so if your environment is changed in that case through no fault of my own um then that can actually have a lasting impact on your own habits and there is research that kind of shows that um uh one example which is most famous more famous example is um

33:38 the example of um vietnam soldiers in in in the vietnam war um and their addiction to heroin yep so imagine being out in the jungles of vietnam and you're seeing you know death all around you horrible situation all around you well how do you cope you know well they coped some of them coped by using heroin because it was accessible all around them and so then you've got peers using it as

34:06 well and so it's easily accessible but what they found was that once the war ended um and then these soldiers came home um only a small minority of them stayed addicted and like researchers were like how does that happen so they've been addicted they were using it for you know i don't know how long but a decent about period on end which anyone if anyone was using it for that period that regularity

34:34 um at their home in the west then they would have um been addicted in all intents and purposes so what they found was was basically it's the it's the um environment had changed so all of those cues you know james clear for example in atomic habits which is a book i highly recommend you know he talks about your cue talks about your craving your response and then your um and then your reward

35:05 and so this is like the sort of four laws of behavior um change and so their cue they they were out there they saw everyone around taking heroin and so it was a trigger for them so then they had the craving yes i want this you know i need this also to cope with the horror that they were seeing and then they have the response so of course you can respond you can either ignore it but it's so

35:32 powerful you know when it sparks in your brain the dopamine the urge the anticipation and so um they crave it and their response was to have it and then of course they get that reward which then is a cycle and then you want it again so but that's a really good um understanding that model can really help us with changing our own habits and um uh and i can tell you directly how it's helped me

36:01 very recently as well uh as well as uh changing my smartphone um habits is that so one of the things

The Habit Control Lock

36:10 one of the challenges i was having was um in my evening routine at about um 5 30 i try and finish um finish up work so whether i'm out and i come back in or whether i'm working from home try and finish so i would then um put a podcast on via youtube on my apple tv in my dining room i'd send the sound to my kitchen to the home pod in my kitchen so while i'm making dinner i'm listening to the podcast

36:39 and then when i finish i'm making the dinner i take it back to the dining room and i sit in front of the tv and i watch the rest of the podcast and of course being youtube once the podcast finishes um i see something else either something else autoplays or i see something else interesting and i click on it and i watch that sometimes i kid you not you know i've been sitting there for

37:01 three hours three hours just watching video after video you know which the algorithm thinks i would like and it's just like three hours i won't get back you know and so what one thing i to change my environment if you like one of the things that i did and this might seem drastic to some but this works for me is i put my apple tv um the tv itself and even my laptop and phone put it all in a

37:35 cupboard so i to access the apple tv i have to open this cupboard now so that's one thing that having some kind of like resistance um some the friction that stops you um that at least makes you think makes you have that system two thinking do i really want to do this and so but also on the cupboard i changed the um handles on the cupboard so that i could put a lock on it so i've put a it's called

38:00 a habit control lock which you can set to a timer so what i do at 5 30 i'll put a like a two hour timer on there so i've got no access to my devices for the next two hours and that in and of itself is is is sort of fine but one of the um important things about it is why why why do you want to do that you know for me i want to read more you know and i've got so many books you can see behind me you

38:30 know i've got so many books um and i want to read more and i can't when i'm sitting for three hours watching youtube so now if i don't have after i finish dinner i finish dinner much quicker by the way which is the other interesting thing um and i don't listen i'm having dinner in silence so i don't um so i'm not even listening to music and that gives me an opportunity to actually actually be

38:53 have more gratitude for the food you know to actually savor the taste to actually focus on those human things rather than be observed by whether it is music or podcast or whatever so so just having dinner in in quiet is really good but then after that because i finish much quicker because i'm not washing anything i'll then wash up and then um and then i can sit in my lounge and

39:16 read and i have my books there primed ready so i don't have to there's no friction there i just literally pick up the book and read and you know more often than not in the weeks that i've been doing this it works so i'm reading a lot more so just changing different things in your environment can really help you change your habits but it's it's a good point to start with is actually

39:45 understanding well why do you want to do this what's what's your goal behind it because you can do lots of the practical things to change a habit but if you don't have that full motivation um then it just won't be yeah it won't necessarily be as powerful hmm yeah it's so interesting and i it's just how you know take in i mean i resonate some with

40:10 your journey as well so i have in the gray scale on my phone i've turned off all the notification on my phone so i actually have to go in and check and that has been a game changer for me it doesn't stop me i mean this is the thing about you talking about resistance that's some resistance but actually going out for a walk without my phone you know it's as you say correct and i love that

40:32 habit lock i might have to actually um look at that as well and and we were gonna i'll be good we're gonna be sort of um right at time we were going to talk about some other things so we'll probably have to get you back on on to talk about those things as well particularly about the ai on our kids so we didn't actually um get to even get to that yet because it's so interesting

40:51 that we can talk about emerging technologies and technologies coming but we real that we have a real thing here of mobile phones and they're still around they're still getting updated they're still going to be around for a while and only going to evolve and if they evolve in the way that uh all the big companies willing to involve evolve they're going to evolve in a way that's going to make this

41:12 problem more difficult you know if we're wearing we're using wearable technology that is basically a phone that we're wearing or or glasses or we're embedded in our glasses things that we contact lenses which yeah yeah things that we wouldn't put into a cupboard because we're like well we we need those things so i think that's that is for another time one of the other things and i um i'm asking you

41:35 about this because my recollection is is vague on this but i remember we spoke i spoke previously about um an organization that there's got a box that you can put your phone in that when you put your phone in the box it's a charger so you can put your phone in the box in a charger when you close it it basically doesn't allow any signals so you can you can do that and i know you can expand on this

41:56 a little bit and i remember one of the things that the testimonies on that was that how one of the parents had gone one day gone to the box and found the kid's device in there so that so that the child had gone yeah and deliberately put it in there to go and have some other quiet time and i love what you said about intention or that that intention why am i doing this why if you're just locking it up

42:21 just because i don't want to do those things well if we try if we don't want to do something that's an away approach isn't it and if we're trying to go away from something i really envisage it as looking at that thing and walking backwards whereas if we turn around and we say actually i want to like for me i want to learn play more on my guitar you know same as you i also want to read books i

42:42 want to spend more time with my wife i want to do more things with my friends so having those focus on those things is um is really what is really what we want to be looking at as opposed to actually you know yeah looking looking at the things like you said what do we want to actually do why are we doing it what else do we want to do

43:04 not just i don't want to do a thing isn't it yeah this happens a lot with other addictions like smoking alcohol it's it's whenever you try you give up something often they find people become addicted to something else if they don't have a well i want to do this thing inside if anything in mind that they're going to fill that that time with or that will feel that you know this is thing

43:25 i remember somebody saying once about smoking was that there's this thing that people have where when they bring their hand up to their mouth they're expected to be a cigarette and that can be a trigger for them wanting a cigarette yeah that's the cue but yeah the cue and so instead of that they just go and put their hand through the hair you know yeah just trying to change that change that

43:45 motion basically yeah yeah definitely and i think it's um it it's interesting with that in terms of our thinking about these um these habits because i mean just in terms of thinking critically that using our sort of the system two part where we stop and take a step back um that enables us to think about the future and think about our intention so you know we're both coaches so so one of the

44:20 things you know we we do is help people almost like visualize the future where is it that you want to be what does that look like what does that taste like what's that feel like so you're really helping people inhabit this um space where all of these things are going well and then it's working out well how do you get there what is what's the one next step you can take to get closer to that um that

44:46 uh situation um so yeah it's how we think is is just vital and i know we'll talk about that more yeah maybe another one yeah yeah i totally agree with you and it's it's been so interesting to have this conversation with you actually we said earlier the view of we were going to okay we're going to cover some things about ai and kids we're going to cover some things about critical thinking of kids

45:09 so we'll definitely have to have you back because actually there is so much to cover

We Can't Wait 20 Years. The AI Conversation Starts Now.

45:13 just in terms of really what i take from this is there is a reality that mobile phones are still thing we need to tackle and we talk about forward thinking what we don't want to be doing is thinking too far forward and saying well actually you know we're ignoring that or accepting to go well that's it we'll accept it and go well yeah mobile phones well they are here to stay but how we use them

45:39 we can change that well to give you an example of that i mean you know you think the iphone came out 2007 and so we're now 20 years down the line and we're only now are we talking about um you know phone bans in school and things like that so ai is basically smartphones and social media on steroids yeah how and again i know we'll talk about that more in next time it's how it affects our brains

46:08 and and so we should be talking about that now you know we can't wait 20 years 20 years down the line is too late you know so that's that's why it's so important to be talking about these things and i've been to you know say different sort of workshops on ai where the only question and thought is how quickly can you implement this you know what are the nice tools that you can use there's no thought

46:33 uh in terms of well okay if i'm outsourcing my critical thinking to a device how is that going to affect me in you know six months time in a year's time and and so on so it's it's a conversation we need to have we need to keep having yeah yeah so thank you so much for coming on richard because it's been really good i think we feel like we've kind of in some respects or i have anyway i've come

46:58 to a conclusion through this conversation which is actually as we've been talking about and the concept of the of the better with humans podcast is how we look at a technology and really as you've just just spoken about how do we look at it in terms of what is the longer term impact going to be let's not wait and see and then try to retrospectively you can understand why teenagers are up in arms

47:21 going you can't take off why take our phones away you can't you know you can't you know there's companies kind of social media you can see why the the countries want to do that as the companies make countries why we do that because the challenge is that actually it's much harder to take something away that somebody's been freely given yeah and not understand really why would you why are you doing

47:45 it because they're not really seeing the consequence so helping people to understand the choices that we're making and again we'll cover that in more as well in actually importance of us making choices