Transcript 0:00 There are many behavioral psychologists employed by these companies, people whose full-time job is to make these things more addictive. What do you see as the biggest threat right now to society with these devices? 0:11 The biggest challenge facing young people and people of all ages is pornography addiction. They had forty-two billion visits in 2019. That's about six visits for every person on planet Earth. 0:22 Thirty-seven hours a week is the average social media usage for a teenage girl in the US. It's like the volume has been turned down on the world. It's like the color has been sucked out of the world. 0:32 I would just kind of assume that they are practicing predatory attention-grabbing strategies for financial gain. 0:38 What if the device in your pocket is the single greatest threat to your family, your relationships, and your wellbeing, but nobody wants to talk about it? 0:48 Today's guest has spent 15 years in the trenches as a clinical psychologist and community mentor. 0:53 But in recent years, he's heard story after story about the harm smartphones are causing for teenagers, marriages, and even entire households, and he has the data to back it. 1:05 He even speaks nationally about smartphone awareness and helps people by providing them structures to avoid the destruction they cause. Dr. 1:14 Johann D'Souza is on a mission to expose this danger and how tech giants are engineering addiction for profit. He wants you to know what it's costing you. Welcome to my conversation with Dr. Johann D'Souza. 1:28 As much as you think about phones and the addictive nature of these technologies and these screens, what do you see as the biggest threat right now to society? 1:36 Not just to individuals or whatever, but to society with these devices. Yeah. 1:41 I've been mentoring young people for 15 years, and I have thousands of clinical hours, and to me, it's very clear that the biggest challenge facing young people and people of all ages is pornography addiction. 1:53 It doesn't get a lot of talk, but... and precisely because it is so shameful, but it is very prevalent and is extremely disruptive. 2:02 We're talking about the things that are most important in a person's life, their, their closest relationships, their marriage, their relationship with women in their lives, even their ability to, to love their children and to be selfless in those relationships because when someone has a serious addiction, it's going to show up in other areas of their life. 2:23 So that, that's what I would say is the number one challenge. Well, and you've talked about the prevalence of it, too, when i- as far as the sheer volume. 2:28 What percentage do you think, among the nation at least, we'll, we'll just say in the United States among adults? You know, it's hard to get good numbers on this. 2:37 I think that people typically, uh, underrate, uh, their usage. Also, uh, it, it's difficult to measure it with very young people, right? 2:45 I mean, average age of first exposure according to Common Sense Media from a few years ago is 11 years old, but Diocese of, uh, of Arlington did an independent study. 2:54 They found it was six years old in their diocese, but it's gonna be hard to, it's gonna be hard to ask those questions to someone that age, right? 3:02 But to give you a sense of the volume, the largest pornography website in the world, the most popular one, it's owned by a Canadian private equity firm called Ethical Capital Partners, in case you were wondering about their morality. 3:15 It... They had forty-two billion visits in 2019. My word. 3:20 That's about six visits for every person on planet Earth, and this is one pornography website, so it, it is an extremely large, large business worldwide with many, many users. 3:32 For example, uh, under one statistic, 30% of teens are exposed to pornography during the school day alone. 3:39 I spoke to a group, uh, and I asked them, "How many of your friends, or how many of your friends do you think are addicted to pornography?" They said 85%. 3:48 We landed on that number, and this was a group of very mature people, so I think it's, it's m- it's much higher than we give it credit for. 3:57 And it's having ridiculous effects on, on relationships, as you mentioned earlier, too, but, but also the brain, and I know that there's a lot of study [chuckles] that's gone into, uh, understanding the effects of screens and I suppose pornography use itself as well. 4:11 But what is the effect on the brain for us from, from using all of these devices and I suppose the software that's on it, too? This is reported in the book, uh, Molecule of More, dopamine. 4:23 So the idea here is, according to the opponent process theory of psychology, that when we experience an above average and really unnatural amount of a particular brain chemical such as dopamine, which is the pleasure molecule, the brain compensates by shutting down receptors, meaning even though there are these dopamine molecules floating around in our brain, the, the receptor cannot absorb it. 4:49 It just bounces off. It's just floating in there in space, uh, without being absorbed. That has two consequences. 4:57 The one consequence is that the addictive behavior is no longer as pleasurable, as satisfying as it once was, so the person has to seek more of it, spend more time engaging in it, and also seek further novelty. 5:10 So if we're talking about pornography, it gets into more and more perverse content. If we're talking about something as seemingly innocuous as doomscrolling on, on Etsy, it just... 5:21 it leads to more and more scrolling in order to get the same feeling of, of the same dopamine high. 5:26 The other consequence that's more insidious perhaps is now that the dopamine receptors have shut off, it, it's not like it, it only shuts off when in the face of the addiction. It... 5:38 They, they're shut off in everyday life. 5:40 So everyday things that used to give us fulfillment such as spending time with family over a dinner, in-person time with friends, going outside in nature, looking at the trees, looking at the squirrels, looking at the birds. 5:53 That's what I was doing this morning. I really enjoy it. Reading a book. How many people can read a full book these days? These simple activities, taking, uh, fulfillment in a job well done. They lose their pleasure. 6:06 It's like the volume has been turned down on the world. It's like the color has been sucked out of the world. 6:11 There's a low-level depression, malaise that people experience, and the only time that they feel themselves again is when they're engaging in the addictive behavior. Does that sound like anybody you know? 6:23 That's like everybody I know right now. My gosh. I- so you talked about nefarious activities and more nefarious things that companies are doing. 6:30 What are companies actively doing that they won't tell you about, but you're seeing it because you're in that world? 6:37 There are many behavioral psychologists employed by these companies, and just, uh, be- behavioral experts in general, people whose full-time job is to make these things more addictive. 6:47 So two things, two kind of, uh, discoveries in psychology come to mind. So one is a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, actually. It's called a no- it's called the, uh, supernormal stimulus. Very simple concept, in fact. 7:01 The idea here is if you can identify what is addictive about something and then maximize that, then the become... thing becomes irresistibly addictive. So this is done with food engineering. 7:12 This was done with, uh, cigarettes, maximizing the certain, like for example, with food, the, the sweetness of the thing. 7:20 Now, the way this was studied is in butterflies, the researchers hypothesized that what makes female butterflies attractive is the size of their wings and the color of their wings. 7:30 They created plastic models of butterflies with larger, brighter wings. 7:35 The male butterflies preferred to mate with the plastic butterflies than with their real-life counterparts, which is actually what's happening these days. 7:45 You have this whole generation of impotent men who prefer to mate with a video of someone they don't know on a screen than with their own wife, in fact. Uh, it's very sad. Uh, it's very sad. 7:58 Uh, don't wanna give too many personal anecdotes of things I've heard. So that's the one, that's the one discovery, the supernormal stimulus. 8:06 We did- we identify what is attractive about something, so this is done in pornography, of course, but it's also done in, in things as simple as the color of the icons on your, on your iPhone, the shape of the icons, the little curve, the, the haptics, the little, the sense of touch that you, that you get, the little- Oh, yeah... 8:25 kind of noise. Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? When, when you touch it. Uh, in fact, this most recent iOS, which I despise, as I typically do all updates, it's called Glass on, on iPhone. Uh-huh. 8:38 Wow, is that a d- I mean, you just look at that thing and you feel like you're in Disneyland. Uh, they, they really know what they're doing with these things. 8:45 So that's the, that's the one discovery, the supernormal stimulus. The other, and it is baked into everything, is my point here. 8:53 The other discovery is, okay, what, what is the way of rewarding people that is most addictive? And this is called variable reward ratio or random reward ratio. They're similar concepts. 9:07 This is the technology used in slot machines. When you pull the lever of the slot machine, or now when you just press the button on the, on the screen, I don't see how that's as rewarding. 9:16 I would, I would like to pull the lever if I'm gonna be addicted. But at any rate, uh, you don't know when you're going to get the reward. 9:23 Because if you knew when you were gonna get the reward, you would just play to the reward, and then you would stop, or you just wouldn't play because you realize the reward is too far away. 9:31 So when it, when it's unclear, when it's random, unpredictable, that's when it's most addictive. Th- this is baked into the algorithms. 9:38 For example, with social media, with TikTok, the platform, it has a random element of how many people will see your post. 9:46 It's not, obviously it's not completely random, but there is a random element, especially when you're an early user, it exposes you to more people. 9:54 You get more positive feedback in the form of just views, comments, likes, that sort of thing, and you, you're not sure what you did to get there, so you keep trying, and then it'll randomly reward you through greater exposure, and that's what makes it addictive. 10:10 That's fascinating. 10:11 Uh, yeah, 'cause I can see myself doing that too, you know, just randomly, "Oh, I haven't heard from this person in however long," or, "I didn't know this person was paying attention to anything I was doing." It... 10:19 And all of a sudden I'm thinking, "Well, gee, if I'm reaching them, you know, what-" Exactly. Yeah. And maybe somebody who's... 10:25 Because I'm not thinking about it all the time, but teenagers think about it much more often. So making these kind of addictive technologies- 37 hours a week if you're a girl in the US. Oh. 10:33 That's just social media, by the way. 37 hours a week is the average social media usage for a teenage girl in the US. It's a full-time job curating their own personal profile and looking at that of others. My word, 30. 10:46 And I just can't... I know it's happening, but I can't imagine it, you know? And then- Mm-hmm... 10:51 uh, you talked about, you know, not being outside and not doing all the, not having personal interactivity with other people too. What are the effects of that? 10:58 If I'm spending 37 hours a week on social media, what is that doing to me internally? One phrase that I love from Jonathan Haidt, the zombification. And I... 11:09 He's, he's a scientist, so now we can actually use this term that, that he made up, zombification. He-- People, people are very passive. 11:15 When I meet young people, I can tell in 30 seconds how, a young person, I can tell in 30 seconds how they've been raised. Do they look you in the eyes? Do they smile? Do they introduce themselves? 11:23 Do they give you a firm handshake? Hmm. Uh, most people don't. Most people are staring at their, staring at their shoes. When they feel uncomfortable, they take out their phone. They don't know how to talk to an adult. 11:33 They don't know how to talk to a stranger. These days, it's kind of sad. 11:37 I, I like to walk around in my, in my neighborhood, especially around lunchtime, and it's hard just to have a normal human interaction because people are, are plugged in and they're staring at their phones, and they're just... 11:50 Even when you pass right by them, like I try to... 11:53 I, I often like listening to something, but when I pass by someone, I, I like to remove the headphones and say, and smile and say hi, and, and oftentimes they don't even know that I've, I'm even there. 12:03 Uh, they're just looking at their phones. So, so it's a little bit sad. And I, I think what we can examine ourselves in- Is just this, this passivity. 12:13 It's hard to be aware of it when our brain has deteriorated as a result of the addiction. Yes. That's why it's very helpful to experience a dopamine fast and abstinence for a week, two weeks, uh, even a month. 12:25 That brings back our clarity because our brain can, will, can and will heal itself with time. Gosh, dopamine fast, I don't even know what that would begin to look like. I, I would have a hard time for a day. 12:36 And, uh, but it's, it's... We need it. We absolutely need it. 12:40 So if I'm s- recognizing these things, uh, in myself maybe, but how do I recognize it in the device where these systems are created to start supercharging me and, and getting my brain into that addictive nature? 12:53 I- is the question, how do you recognize whether a particular, like, app is problematic? How do I start to see that cycle happening? Like, I'm thinking back to Glass. You know, you mentioned the Apple Glass. Oh. 13:03 It's beautiful, it's easy to manipulate and all that stuff on your screen. It feels very interactive, right? 13:08 What kinds of things like that are maybe recognizable to somebody who's paying attention, but less so to people who aren't? 13:15 I, I think the, the most general thing that we can ask ourselves is, am I going to it or is it going to me? Am I controlling it or is it controlling me? So for example, notifications. 13:27 Are, are we constantly passive in the face of notifications and just respond every time that we feel, uh, we experience, uh, some sort of notification? What, what that's going to do is two things. 13:38 It i- is going to train our predictive attention to expect to be interrupted at any moment, and that makes it very difficult to focus on the thing in front of us. 13:50 And then the second thing it will do is for us to seek out the interruptions over time when we are facing a difficult task. So it's those moments when I don't know how to proceed in this task, when it's... 14:05 I feel like it's boring, when it's difficult, when I've just been... When I'm tired, I've been working for a while, and it's difficult to keep going. 14:12 That's when I'm going to seek out now, uh, the distract- and my brain is going to offer the phone or the technology as a potential task to switch to, which is the definition of a distraction, and then I'll give into it. 14:25 So the alternative to that is for us to be very deliberate and intentional with how we use our time and what we pay attention to, which is one of the most important things that we have, is our attention. 14:37 In fact, do we really have anything other than our attention? Think about that. 14:41 So planning out, "I'm gonna work for this amount of time doing these steps and protecting myself from these distractions," putting the phone in my bag or maybe in another room, and then at the end of that, I can check my phone. 14:57 Really what I, what I ad- advocate for is just the flipped model of phone use in general, which is I just never have my phone on me unless I'm traveling, and I check my messages once a day. It's my goal, you know. 15:09 So I go to it, it doesn't come to me. That's amazing. 15:12 I, I remember hearing a, a study, I can't remember who did it, but they basically said that if your phone's on your desk, you're X more times distracted than if it's 20 feet away. Mm-hmm. 15:21 I, I think about just that, that physical distance of not having the notifications immediately within arm's reach. 15:27 And they studied that with sleep too, and they found that the sleep quality, it goes up as the distance from your head to the phone goes up. 15:37 So if your, if your phone is, is something like, I think, less than five feet from your head, that's the lowest threshold of sleep quality. 15:45 I come back to thinking about these companies and, and what they're doing to, to entice us to keep them at arm's reach and to keep those notifications going, to keep our attention into whatever they want us to be paying attention to. 15:56 Is there any kind of movement or anything that's moving toward at least, at least some kind of medium ground here, where they're able to be profitable and we're able to live a sane life and somewhere get back to that true happiness that we knew before? 16:09 You point out 2010 as being kind of the critical mark there, but the pre-2010, now post-2010 era, uh, of cellphone use or of smartphone use. Is there any kind of discussion about that? 16:19 Well, in the, the discussions I'm aware of are pretty small players, and maybe that is... Maybe frankly, that's the only way. 16:27 Because if you look at the history of Christianity, it's the history of a small group of God's faithful people facing an overwhelmingly powerful and corrupt evil empire. 16:41 And that was true for Canaanites, the Babylonians, Roman Empire, Greek Empire, the British Empire, and the US empire in which we live today. So I, I think just to... 16:54 What it means to be a Christian is to be countercultural. Many are called, few are chosen. So I think it's kind of a fool's errand to look for hope in a broad global solution. 17:08 The broad global solution is Christianity, and that's an individual calling which we have to respond to. 17:13 So we, I mean, we can and should do our best to influence these institutions the best we can, but at the end of the day, the devil is the lord of the world, as Christ himself told us. Mm-hmm. 17:25 So I, I look for kind of smaller, more local solutions, starting, starting with a- and maybe even ending with the family. Mm. 17:33 So we need strong fathers, we need strong mothers, and that's where, that's where I have my hope, in faithful Christian parents. 17:43 Yeah, so the, the, the family unit and then the agency of the individual to make those conscious decisions- Mm-hmm... of setting boundaries, right? 17:49 And so and you talk a lot about boundaries and making sure that everybody has appropriate boundaries around them, and you speak about this nationally. So what are, what are the boundaries that you would recommend? 17:58 I'm thinking more adults. I mean, uh- Sure... I, I can visualize what it would be for a teenager, but, um- Yeah... adults have no boundaries. We just have comfort zones, and we kind of fall into those, right? 18:08 So what do you recommend for adults? All addictions start with sincerity. Uh, rather the solution to all addictions start with sincerity, and this is one of the insights of the 12-step method. 18:18 Oftentimes it requires hitting rock bottom first. Hopefully it doesn't. But being honest with ourselves about whether the benefits outweigh the harms. 18:28 And then if we, if we discover that the harms do outweigh the benefits, then being honest with ourselves about what, what am I willing to let go of in order to live a better life? 18:40 I, I think we all have a voice in the back of our head that, that tells us, "Hey, this is disordered. I'm spending-- I shouldn't be doing this right now. I'm spending too much time on this. 18:49 This is-- I'm going a little bit too far." So listening to that voice. I can give some concrete recommendations. 18:54 Again, the most powerful thing that I've personally done is this flipped model of s- of, of cell phone use, smartphone use. I mean, um, you can even ask yourself, "Well, is it necessary at all to have a smartphone?" 19:05 I know very successful people that don't have a smartphone. But other smaller things that we can do are putting the phone in black and white, reducing notifications to only five apps, maybe less, 19:19 putting the phone on do not disturb or silence habitually, deleting un- doing just a purge, a cleanse, deleting unnecessary apps, cleaning, cleaning the phone up, 19:30 uh, making your wallpaper and background just a blank black screen. Just different things to counteract the built-in addictiveness. I would recommend that no one have social media really. 19:43 I see-- I have X for professional purposes, but I kinda wish that I didn't. But yeah, in general, my rec- my, my purpose of being on social media is to convince people not to be on social media. 19:55 So I, I think that everyone would be healthier if social- Yeah... media didn't exist. Maybe, maybe it's, uh, our only way to take down the globalists, so you know, maybe there is a positive benefit to it. 20:07 And then doing as little, uh, on the smartphone and instead transferring those activities to a desktop, desktop computer. For example, email. 20:16 People sh- treating email as if it's text now, and, and that really prevents them from being able to just have calm focus throughout the day. There's always a sense of, "I could be doing something right now. 20:28 I could be productive right now." 20:30 Which is in opposition to contemplation, a contemplative spirit of being in the present moment, enjoying the good things of God, and being oriented towards God, which we can only do i- in inner silence. 20:45 So maybe on the deepest level, fostering inner silence and contemplation. And there are certainly immediate spiritual benefits to doing that kind of thing, but, uh, I, I mean, to the, that intercon- contemplative life. 20:58 But what are, uh, there, there are probably psychological benefits to it too that we don't even heed on a regular basis 'cause we're so caught up in our fast day-to-day life. Are there actual tangible benefits to it too? 21:09 Yeah. Pro- probably the most obvious is turning off threat mode and activating the rest and digest mode. So 21:19 we, we have our autonomic nervous system has two activations, which is sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic is the threat mode, the fight or flight mode. 21:32 The parasympathetic is the rest and recuperate, rest and digest. And, and I think many people are experiencing a low level anxiety in their day-to-day lives, which we can call threat mode. 21:44 It's the sense that there's, there's something in the back of my mind looming, bothering me, some worry I have, some distraction, rather than almost like if you're walking down a dark alley in a bad neighborhood. 21:58 Nothing bad has happened yet, but you're on alert. You're on, you're on guard. Uh, and it's im- it's very difficult to, to pray or to just be with people i, in that mode. 22:10 So by acting in the way that I've suggested, we can over time turn down the activation of the fear center, the limbic system, and turn up the activation of our judgment center, the prefrontal cortex, and we physically feel differently, and these are, differences are measurable. 22:28 So the, the skill or exercise that most powerfully accomplishes this is mindful breathing, so that's a positive- Hmm... healing alternative to doom scrolling. I, I'm gonna practice that today, Johan, [laughs] 22:41 'cause I need to do that more myself too. I actually did that during Lent a little bit more, uh- Good... every day. And I'll tell you though, I felt the effects immediately. Mm. 22:49 Whatever anxiety I was feeling, it, it, it was still there. It, it was more manageable. It felt more manageable at least. And, uh, there was something else I could do with it. I, I had a place for it in my mind, I guess. 23:01 But I, you know, I think back to this whole 2010 switch thing. 23:04 I-- When-- As soon as you said that, I, it, it, it really registered to me, 'cause I think the iPhone came out in 2008, and that's when the smartphone revolution really kicked into gear. 23:11 So 2010 is right when all that stuff was hitting everybody's hands, right? So I know that's when I got my first smartphone, so I'm part of that. 23:19 I'm trying to imagine what changed, what societal changes existed at that point. What, w- was there anything that you've seen in measures or studies that, uh, is demonstrably different now than it was then? 23:30 [laughs] Yeah. That's how I start my presentation. So, so 2010 is the inflection point in which mental health for young people changed dramatically. 23:42 So since 2010, depression for girls has gone up by 230%, for boys, 290%. Anxiety prevalence among US undergrads has gone up more than 200%. ADHD has gone up 172%. Self-harm and hospital-- So sorry. 24:00 Uh, ER visits due to self-harm and hospitalization due to self-harm for girls has gone up by more than 400%. 24:08 Uh, the only thing that hasn't gone up is time spent with friends, which has decreased dramatically for young people. So time spent with friends, also frequency seeing friends has decreased. Outdoor play has decreased. 24:20 Unsupervised play has decreased. 24:24 And this all happened just dramatically starting at 2010 for the youngest age group worldwide, and we found that the younger the person, because it's been split up studied among different age groups, the oldest category experienced no change. 24:37 The younger you are, the more you have changed. So we have to ask ourselves, what occurred worldwide, partic- particularly among secular, wealthy English-speaking countries that would've affected young people the most? 24:53 There's some things that haven't changed. Radio adoption hasn't changed. TV adoption hasn't changed. Even computer ownership hasn't changed. Internet usage increased slightly 19%. 25:03 Social media usage increased a lot, 60%, and smartphone usage 190%, uh, since 20 per- since, since 2010. So 25:14 then this leads to the conclusion that Jonathan Haidt had in his book that, well, what changed is smartphones and social media. That, that is the... 2010 is when, uh, smartphones became popularized. 25:25 As he said, it came out slightly before, but they were, they were very special, expensive. People didn't really know what it was. I didn't know what a smartphone was in 2008. 25:34 2010 is when they became more popularized, and also 2010 is when the first social media for smartphones came out, which is Instagram, still one of the most popular ones today. 25:44 Another problem is 2010, that was 16 years ago, so these people who were teens then are, are adults now. Like, that would be my age group. Uh, so now it's not, now it's not just teens. Now it's, now it's adults. 25:57 That's funny. 25:57 I didn't realize that Instagram came out that year as well because I, I imagine Facebook or, or even Twitter was, I think came, it came out later in general, but I would imagine Facebook would've come out sooner. 26:07 But you're right, it was, uh, Instagram. I, I totally forgot about that. Well, well, I, 26:11 Face- Facebook, I, I think did, it did come out sooner, but the, what was unique about Instagram, it was the first of its kind, at least the first popular one- Sure... is it was designed for the smartphone. 26:20 So I don't know if you remember Facebook and, and MySpace, if you remember that. Like those were- Oh, I do. Yeah... designed for, for desktop, right? Like I, I- That's right. [laughs]... had both of them. 26:26 They were designed for desktop. Nowadays they're kind of dumb. I think young people don't think they're cool. But Instagram was designed for the smartphone. That's why it's so much more addictive and popular. 26:36 Oh, interesting. Yeah. Because it was designed to maximize that addictive nature of it. Mm-hmm. 26:40 And ha- that instant gratification, I guess, of taking the picture and being able to put filters on it and whatever else, and share it with the world, so. Yeah. Um, well, that's a- absolutely fascinating. 26:48 And you mentioned, uh, sorry, you mentioned Etsy earlier. I- I- I- when you're talking about addictive apps, and I'm just- Mm-hmm... I'm not an Etsy user, but what is it about something like Etsy? 26:58 Because I, I, I get Instagram, I get Facebook, I get X- Yeah. [laughs]... but I don't get Etsy. Yeah. So I think it's, like, an interesting example because 27:08 it doesn't, it doesn't seem like something addictive, but what, what all these, uh, what all these platforms have in common now is the infinite scroll. Mm. So there, there is no, there is no stop point. 27:17 It can just go on forever. And the longer you go, the more you feel your resistance deteriorate. It, it actually puts us into a negative hypnotic trance. 27:26 I know that because I, I have studied trance work and I, I do some trance work in my practice from time to time. So there's positive trances, flow, good thing, try to get into it every day, and there's negative trances. 27:40 Like when you, we can't get out of these worry loops or when we just can't stop scrolling, and we just feel our willpower disappear. It's like we're not even alive, and in some ways we, we aren't. 27:49 We're just a, a, a shell, an empty robot without an operating system is how some people have described themselves [laughs] in these zombified, uh, modes. Uh, so that's what's harmful about it. 28:01 So as those of us who are thinking about looking at, at different companies or, or folks who are offering these smartphone tools, what should we be watching out for? 28:10 Not necessarily for ourselves, but in those companies to recognize whether they are trying to, uh, almost predatory, uh, attention seeking from, for their perspective, for their financial gain. 28:21 How do we look for that, or what do you recommend we look for in those companies? I mean, w- wouldn't you... I, I would just kind of assume that they are, they are practicing [laughs] 28:32 predatory, attention-grabbing strategies for financial gain. I mean, can you, can you be as successful as they are without doing that? I mean, I'm, maybe I'm being cynical, but... So I would look for... 28:44 Un- unless someone is intentionally advertising that they are, they're, that they're actively fighting against this, and they've shown through personal sacrifice that, that there's some truth to that. 28:56 Like for example, Tri- uh, Tristan Harris, he was, he worked for Google and then he broke off and started his own thing precisely for this reason. 29:04 So now he's looking for more like hu- um, humane, Center for Humane Technology, I think that might be the name of his group, if I'm not mistaken. 29:11 So I trust him because he gave up a highly paying job, and he, he did try to change the system. He was completely ineffective in doing so, so he started his own thing. Mm-hmm. 29:22 Um, but other than that, like I don't know how we could trust, uh, the FAANG companies, for example. Mm-hmm. Dr. D'Souza, we thank you so much. 29:30 Uh, thank you for taking this time with me, and, uh, Johann, I really appreciate you and all you're doing, and, uh, keep up the great work, and I hope this isn't the last time we get together in this format. 29:38 This was fun, Matt. Thank you. 29:40 [outro music]
