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Here are your hosts, Jason Bassler and Matt Agarist.
Hello again, Free Thinkers.
Welcome back to the Free Thought Project Podcast.
My name is Jason Bassler, and joining me is the Free Thought Project Editor-in-Chief Matt Agarist.
Appreciate each and every one of you taking the time to listen to this show again.
We've got a really eye-opening episode today,
and I'm pretty sure it's going to make us all rethink how we use social media
or how social media uses us.
So today's guest is somebody I've been following for, I don't know,
at least six to eight months now, and he's doing absolutely brilliant work,
placing a mirror in front of us to remind us just how pervasive this tech, social media,
and all these new elements combined, including the gods that go by the name of algorithms,
have really become embedded into our lives.
So I'm super excited to have this guest joining us today.
But as usual, guys, I'll go ahead and just knock out a couple short announcements,
and we'll get right into the interview.
So apologies right off the bat, guys, for missing last week's episode.
You know, we really tried to never do that.
So just know that if we don't actually publish an episode in a certain week,
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Okay, well, our guest today is someone who is focused on breaking the Internet.
And no, no, no, no, not like Kim Kardashian or any of the other celebrity.
But as breaking our minds and our habits of this addiction to social media and to screens.
So today we're joined by Sam Knight.
He's the creator behind Mindless HQ.
It's an account that's been cutting through the noise with sharp thought-provoking posts about culture and tech.
And all the way it shapes our minds and thoughts and beliefs and in turn, the world around us.
So Sam, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Free Thought Project podcast.
It's an absolute pleasure to be here, man.
Big fan of what you guys do, so I'm excited to contribute.
Thank you so much, brother. I appreciate that.
And, you know, I've been, as I said, looking forward to this conversation for a while.
And pretty much ever since I've reached out to you to come on.
I think that was like early December.
But I think you've probably noticed by now I'm a big fan of your work and you're objective with it, you know,
to try to reactivate people's self-awareness and critical thinking and maybe even inspire return to nature.
And as we were talking, you know, about, you know, right before the show started,
your account on Instagram really has grown quickly.
I think you were around 40k followers, maybe a little bit more than that when I reached out for this podcast.
And it's really just exploded into this large following.
I think it's like 115,000 followers now.
And, you know, obviously it's for good reason.
I think your strategy is brilliant, man.
And of course, I'm going to allow you to explain, you know, what the project's about and everything,
because obviously you know much better than I do.
But one of the elements that seems really effective has been hijacking these, you know,
dopamine inducing viral videos of, you know, absolute mindless garbage
and using them as like a hook in the beginning of your videos.
And then, you know, a second or two after that you hit the viewer with this grim reality
that they just took the social media engagement bait and it kind of,
it kind of hits them with the reality of their social media addiction.
And you do it in a way that, you know, I don't feel like it's really derogatory or accusatory,
but rather like, hey, you see how easy it is to hijack your attention.
So, you know, it really is great.
I think it's brilliant.
And it's kind of akin to our strategy here at the Free Thought Project
by, you know, planting Liberty seeds by any means necessary.
But instead of, you know, Liberty seeds, you're just planting these seeds
of trying to be more mindful, self-awareness and mental health.
So, yeah, man, please share what inspired you to start this project
and your origin story in this world
and, you know, what you're trying to accomplish with this.
Yeah, well, the first thing I want to say off the bat
is you really nailed it with the self-awareness aspect,
and I'm sure we'll go into this later.
But I don't believe in villainizing technology
or even artificial intelligence or social media
because I believe the poison is in the dose
and I think that's really important for people to understand.
A lot of people get caught up in, you know,
oh my gosh, I'm a bad person for doing this
or whatever the case might be.
But I believe that these tools can be just that tools.
And the problem is they're hijacked and they're manipulated
and we'll talk about that in a bit.
But as far as my background is concerned,
so I have been in kind of like the health and wellness
and mental health world for, gosh, probably 12, 13 years at this point.
It started when I was younger, when I was about 22, 23.
I had just gotten out of college.
I was a college baseball player and I was just lost.
I had no identity. I didn't know who I was,
what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be.
And, you know, in this journey to just search within myself,
I stumbled across meditation.
And, you know, at the time, especially being a former athlete,
you know, the stereotypes,
something like meditation sounded so silly to me, right?
Just sitting there with your thoughts
and, you know, being a monk almost.
That's kind of the impression that I had.
But I was at a point where I was in a really bad place.
I was depressed. I was anxious.
I didn't know what I wanted to do.
And so I said, you know what, I've got nothing to lose.
I read an article where about 50 different entrepreneurs
I look up to, practice it regularly.
And I said, hey, you know what, I got nothing to lose.
Let me just give it a shot.
And to make a very long story short,
it had a tremendously profound impact on my life.
Not overnight, but over the course of the next couple months,
the next year, it really shifted who I was as a person.
And, you know, that's the thing about meditation
is a lot of people will try it and sit down.
It doesn't work after the first try,
so they never try it again.
But it's a practice.
It's just like the gym.
You don't gain muscles over one workout.
You know, it takes time.
And so over the year, this really sat with me
and I was reflecting on it.
And I was just like, wow, I've really changed as a person.
And then I became obsessed with the idea that, you know,
mental health is not a matter of your serotonin
not being balanced enough
and you need to go take pills.
And, you know, there's use cases for medicine for sure.
But, you know, I became convinced
that for the most part we can kind of be sovereign
and take control of that side of ourselves
in the same way that we can do that with our physical health.
You know, we can clean up the way we eat.
We can clean up the way we work out.
And you can do the same thing with the brain and with the mind.
And so that led me down a very long path
of just being obsessed with, you know,
how far can I take this?
How much can I master my mind
instead of being a slave to it?
And, you know, I'm making a very long story short here.
I'm from Atlanta, Georgia.
That's actually where I live now.
I moved out to Los Angeles, California
to kind of chase a dream
and just do the whole thing.
And I was working for a tech startup,
but I ended up getting a job with this guy named Sean T.
And Sean created these workouts called Insanity.
And they were super, super popular around like 2010.
And so anyways, I was with him for about three years.
We traveled the world.
We hosted events.
And I saw firsthand him impact millions of people, you know,
millions of people that were obese over weight.
They lost weight.
They changed their lives.
And I mean, we would literally be walking
throughout the streets in Europe.
People would run up to him crying just saying,
oh my gosh, you changed my life.
Thank you so much.
And that really stuck with me.
And just that mission-driven impact
and how deeply he was impacting these people,
because I had already had the seed in my mind
of the mental health stuff and meditation.
And so when I saw that, it just really resonated with me.
But it takes a lot of courage to really pursue
the things that we know deep down we should be pursuing.
And so I ended up starting a business after that.
I have a background in engineering and marketing.
And so I essentially had a marketing
and technology agency, if you will,
did that for a couple of years.
But in the back of my mind,
I just knew that I was kind of abandoning this thing
that had really changed me so profoundly.
And so with that, about a year and a half ago,
I started having these visions where,
every time we'd go out to dinner,
every time I was hanging out with friends, family,
we're just all on our phones all the time.
What do you do when you're sitting at dinner
and your friend goes up to use the bathroom?
You take out your phone and you look at it.
And it was just becoming,
it's one of those things that when you see it,
you can't unsee it and you see it everywhere.
And so taking that history that I just laid out
and then just seeing this kind of unfold,
also looking at my screen time daily,
just being like, oh my gosh, wait,
if I am spending this much screen time daily on my phone,
how many days a year am I spending?
Oh my gosh, how many days am I spending
over the next decade?
And when you really add those numbers up,
man, it's sobering.
And so I was talking with my fiance about it
and I was saying, I really believe
that in the future, we are gonna have more people
going to rehab for social media or screen addictions.
I'll call it screen addictions
because screens will be here,
social media will evolve
and we'll see how that goes over the next 10 years.
But it just became, it was almost like a message
that was implanted in my heart
that we're gonna be having people go to rehab
for social media or screen time addictions.
And that was a really profound thought
because in society, we know it's not good
to drink a lot of alcohol.
We know the dangers and risk of certain drugs
and certain compounds.
That's all laid out for us,
but we never talk about this thing
that is essentially connected to us.
I mean, in a way, without going on too long of a rant,
the phone is essentially an extension
of the human being now.
It's like a phase of biology and evolution.
And so when I really started thinking about this,
it all started clicking.
This is a huge problem.
There's not anyone really talking about this.
There's a couple products trying to help with it,
but we need to get this message out here.
So how can I take it a step further
beyond the message is there a way that I can actually help people?
And so to make a very long story short,
I ended up developing the app known as Mindless.
That's my page on social media, Mindless.
And what was really amazing is, you know,
I launched the page well before the app came out
because I just wanted to get the message out.
And that's really what this is all about.
It's the message.
And very quickly, I saw that people were resonating with it.
And it was really encouraging to me
because it confirmed that, hey, I'm not alone.
I'm not making this up in my head.
This is a real issue that people are struggling with.
And then to hit on what you were saying earlier, Jason,
the page has just exploded.
I mean, it's been incredible.
I've been working with social media for a long time,
and I've never seen growth like this before.
And it's been, you know, really reassuring
just because this is a real problem.
And the DMs I get, you wouldn't believe it.
People are literally begging for help, begging.
And it's not one of those things you can go to your parents
or to your friends and say, oh my gosh,
I think I'm addicted to my phone.
They'd be like, what are you talking about?
We're all, you know, like,
we all use our phones all day.
It's normal.
It's just, it's accepted in society.
There's no problem.
And so that kind of is the core thesis, right?
It's, I see us on this high speed train
headed towards a collision.
No one's talking about it.
And it's only going to get worse.
You know, with artificial intelligence,
the first real way that AI was used,
well, at least to our knowledge, right?
Who knows how long it's actually been being used,
but is in these social media algorithms.
You know, TikTok came out
and then Instagram Reels came out
and then YouTube Shorts.
And they're essentially hacking into our biology
and programming us to be scrolling on these things
all day, every day.
So once I recognized this problem,
started pushing the message out,
it just kind of snowballed
and has turned into this much bigger thing.
And you know, I'm, I just am so excited
for the next five to 10 years
because I think it's just going to become
an entire mission.
And I see so many people that want to get help.
They want to speak about this.
And so I think we've really tapped into something
that is going to be a major,
major conversation in the world over the coming years.
And I'm really excited about it.
And I just want to try to help as many people
as I possibly can,
not delete their phones
or never use a screen again,
but improve the relationship with it.
Because that's what it's all about to me.
I love the saying that the poison is in the dose.
I think that applies to a lot of substances
and it definitely applies to technology and social media.
You know, without technology,
the three of us wouldn't be here talking.
So it has amazing benefits to it,
but there's obviously massive, massive downsides.
And I think we need to be talking about those downsides.
And I just feel like it's so important.
It might be the most important topic in society today.
Yeah, I'm right there with you.
I kind of recognize that as well,
and especially through your work.
And if there is, you know, a global conversation
that does pick up and start to occur,
I'm really happy to hear that you're going to probably
be leading that charge, man.
It sounds like you really have your head on straight
when it comes to this.
You really understand the dangers and the issues
and you can articulate it very well.
And I'm sure that background in marketing,
that might help a little bit.
That might explain some things for me
and connect some dots as well.
But yeah, we're all guilty of the hours and hours
on social media.
And even Matt and myself,
I know we've become more aware of it
and tried to be more mindful about it
over the past several years.
But for, you know, years and years,
I mean, Matt and myself have been doing this
for about 14, 15 years now.
It was almost just couched in this idea,
well, this is what we do for work.
So therefore, you know,
I have to have my head in my phone
and I have to be, you know, I'm a newshound.
That's what I do.
I have to be finding the newest story.
And so I do appreciate that there is more of a push
and like I said, you're leading the charge
to become more aware of this.
And, you know, it is something
that has become just normalized
and to the extent that I frequently,
when I'm out in public, watch adults
hand their kids screens, tablets, phones, whatever.
And as you were pointing out,
I mean, we know that we would never
give our children a puff of cigarette or a vape
or even give them a Red Bull for Christ's sake
or a bag of candy or something like that.
But then you hand them, you know, a phone
and a tablet 24 seven as a distraction
most of the time too.
And people don't think anything about it,
like how that's going to affect future generations
and how they're able to communicate,
how they're able to even have relationships
with other people.
And I mean, I think we really are
setting ourselves up for disaster here.
And, you know, I appreciate too
that you touched on the meditation element
of this and that being possibly one of the solutions
and maybe we'll get into that a little bit later
in the show because we always try to end
on a white pill solution question.
But one thing I wanted to share is that
I recently, you mentioned for a period of time there
you're dealing with anxiety and depression
and I think that's, you know, almost goes
hands in hand with using a lot of technology
and computers and screens and stuff.
But I recently just started
journaling in a gratitude journal
and it's really helped me profoundly
not necessarily that I was suffering from depression
but just always to think about
and to have that on the back of my mind.
You know, what am I, what am I appreciative of?
What do I have gratitude for?
I think just kind of rewiring that mindset
has been, you know, something that's been huge for me.
So if people are struggling out there
meditation is absolutely important.
And as Sam was saying, you know, we really have
to be more sovereign with our mental health.
We have to kind of reestablish
these things that are one point where we're just
normal going outside, getting sunshine,
taking your shoes off, grounding, doing exercise.
I mean, getting some type of physical activity,
all these types of things, including meditation,
including journaling, is the path forward,
is the path to mental health.
And you know, Sam, I want to get right into this now.
You did say something a couple minutes ago
that kind of made my head spin.
It was that you predicted in 10 years that
people will be in rehab for screens
rather than alcohol.
And honestly, man, you know, if you look at
how engineered our digital environments
have become, it doesn't really feel far fetched.
So can you, do you mind expanding on that
a little bit?
Is this just like a prediction?
Have you like read any stats on this?
And like, what do you think
we're actually trying to replace?
Is it like, you know, the attention,
the meeting, the community or something deeper?
Like, where are these inner deficits coming from?
Sure.
Well, great question.
And I think it is directly related to
what you were talking about with shoving an iPad
in a kid's face, right?
Like, we haven't seen the impact of that yet
because the first kids with iPads,
you know, approximately what 10 years ago
is when they probably started giving kids iPads
pretty heavily, maybe a little bit before that.
However, you know, you look at the
mental health issues in society today
and you look at the suicide rates of young adults
and it's essentially exponential up and to the right.
Well, what's changed in the last 20 years
that could have caused that?
Well, the biggest thing I can think of is technology, right?
And so that's just the first thing in terms of like statistics.
The reason that people aren't going to rehab for it today
is because it's not identified as a real problem.
But if you think about it, information is a substance.
I love comparing it to substances
and the way that you said, you know,
we wouldn't give our kid a Red Bull,
we wouldn't give him a puff of a vape or a cigarette
or, you know, you name your vice of choice.
But yet you'll throw an iPad in their face
where information is just flowing unfiltered.
And, you know, today it's very likely
that the person listening to this
will consume more information through their device
over the course of two or three days
than their ancestors did in their entire life.
And the human body is not evolved
to be able to handle that amount of information.
And that's pretty crazy when you actually think about it.
So my prediction is simply that, you know,
if you observe the mental health crisis that's going on,
if you look at the charts, you see what's happening
and you correlate it to the fact that
it's a one-to-one exponential increase
with the increase in technological use,
whether it's a cell phone or a tablet
or, you know, even a computer,
although that's not quite as insidious in my opinion
because it's not quite as portable.
And so I think it's quite obvious that, you know,
once the conversation gets out, once we realize,
wait a minute, this is essentially
like I am consuming a substance.
The substance is just in the form of information.
That information overload is making me sick.
When I eat too much food, I become obese, right?
You can see it physically.
When you consume too much information,
there's no way to physically see the damage
that it's doing unless, you know, you're sleep-deprived
and then you can maybe see it.
But in general, it's much quieter.
It's much more sneaky and insidious.
Until you get to a point where
you're having terrible mental health problems,
maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's depression,
maybe it's panic attacks,
there's a million different things that could happen.
And I just think that we need to start viewing
our information intake
the same way that we view our food in nutritional intake, right?
Like you wouldn't just go slam 6,000 calories today
because it's accessible
because you know that's not good for you.
Yet someone might scroll for 10 hours a day
because no one's told them,
hey, by the way, your brain is trying to register
all this information that's going into your mind.
And there's a lot of second and third order consequences
outside of just mental health issues, right?
The brain is created in a way
that when we consume information, it registers it
and it essentially files it in a folder like a computer would.
But when you're scrolling short form media, for example,
you're getting these short little hits of intense action.
You know, maybe you're seeing an incredibly attractive person.
You're seeing a crazy situation happening across the world.
And you're just continuing to scroll.
So you're essentially stimulating your sympathetic nervous system
which is the fight-or-flight side of our body
that basically keeps us safe.
If, you know, our ancestors were walking in nature
and a saber-to-tiger popped out,
that's the part of the nervous system that would turn on to save you.
Well, we're activating that all day, every day.
And in addition to that,
we're not retaining any of the information.
So you might scroll through thousands of reels in a day
and maybe, maybe remember one or two of them.
And so we're training our brains to not retain anything that we consume.
And so therefore, the brain is a muscle, I mean, sort of.
And the less that you're using that muscle, the worse it's going to get.
So I see a direct correlation additionally
into how much am I on my phone and how productive am I?
It's so much harder for me to focus
when I go through a bad spell of just scrolling
and mindlessly consuming content.
And so I package all this up together and I just say,
I think this is kind of, to me, it's kind of obvious
and I think it's going to become obvious to other people
as we spread this message and get the word out there.
And I think people are going to start to understand,
hey, I have a serious problem here.
I'm actually addicted to this.
And it is taking control of my neurochemistry.
And that's when I think you're going to start seeing people
go to those rehab facilities more.
And, you know, who knows what that will actually look like
if it's a, you know, alcoholics anonymous type situation,
but for screens or if it, you know,
I don't know exactly how that will turn out,
but I do know that it's going to become more and more prevalent.
And I fully believe it's going to be a mainstream part
of the conversation over the next five to 10 years.
I certainly think it should be.
You said something that caught my attention earlier
about how people consume like magnitudes more information
than their parents or ancestors did.
Yet I think we're getting dumber, right?
We're outsourcing our thought to AI chatbots.
We're scrolling mindless brain rot that is,
it spreads like a virus through society, man.
Like my kids don't really have a lot of screen time,
but yet they go to school and like even private school.
This is not public schools.
These brain rot algorithms infiltrate that
and they come home repeating some of this weird shit
like six, seven and I mean, I know it's it.
And I mean, this seems harmless on the surface,
but if you look at it like if it was a virus,
look at how fast that spreads.
I mean, it goes across the entire planet
in a matter of minutes and people, it's stuck
with people and they keep, they can't not say it.
I mean, every single kid out there,
if you say six, seven in front of them,
it's like they know it and they start doing
a little dance and everything.
It's like, if you look at that from a objective point of view,
it's like they have a mental illness, right?
It's like they've been programmed
and they've caught this virus that makes them dance
when they hear the fucking number six, seven.
That's just scary to me, man.
And I think that the people know this
and like the people like the Sigmund Freud's,
and the ones that can engineer society,
like the divide and conquerors, if you will,
like in the past they've used like state-run media,
but today I think it's outsourced to computer code.
We talk about like social media addiction
is just like a personal failing of willpower,
but Facebook just lost a lawsuit
that showed that they knew that this was addictive
and they were deliberately pushing it,
especially on children.
And like you said, that suicides
and self-harm of skyrocketed,
especially among young women,
the rate of self-harm among young girls like 11 to 13
is staggering and it makes me want to cry
because I have a 13-year-old daughter.
I mean, it's crazy and it's like
this algorithm keeps people in this like dopamine deficit state
and that's the addiction.
It's a physical addiction in their brains.
Your brain is flooded with this high frequency,
low value, mindlessness, bullshit,
and it refocuses your baseline for pleasure.
When we finally put the phone down,
like the dopamine levels don't return to normal,
they like crater, you crash
and then you have to pick that phone back up again
and this happens over and over
and I think that the whole damn world is addicted, dude.
I mean, it's creeped into our house.
Sometimes like I'll find myself on the phone
when I'm trying to have a conversation with my wife
or anybody else and it's a very serious thing
and I'm aware of it.
Most people are blissfully unaware
that they are completely addicted to screen time
but what's scary is that this algorithm has stepped in
and we can watch it play out in society
so there's been a lot of research at Yale and Harvard
about how these algorithms on these multiple various platforms
actually amplify this rage, this moral outrage
and partisan animosity because this toxic content
guarantees more engagement on the platform
so it keeps that person tuning back in and scrolling
and rage texting and fighting with everybody else
and it keeps people neurologically exhausted.
This high octane synthetic social alienation
we're being biologically manipulated
to fight or fight and we're too exhausted to look up
at the people who are creating this algorithm
that may be doing it on purpose.
Before I keep ranting, from your perspective
how much of this division is maybe accidental
or do you see it like being an accident
like a byproduct of this engagement chasing
or do you see it could be maybe potentially
a deliberate feature of control?
More importantly, how do we build a culture
of cognitive sovereignty so people can reclaim
their natural brain thought process
and break out of this shit?
Yeah, it's such a great point
and I think there are serious, serious implications
with the control from the state in these algorithms.
That is a very, very important conversation
because once you realize that, okay, yes, it's an algorithm
so technically it's running on its own
but there's someone steering that algorithm, right?
And who is that and why are they doing that
and what's their end goals?
Who are they aligned with?
What are they trying to accomplish?
I mean, we know that they're trying to accomplish
as much screen time as possible
because that directly relates to how much money
they can make but at the same time,
I mean, you go and talk to 10 adults
or let's say 100 adults.
I bet 90 of them would say, yeah,
this is the craziest time in the world that I can remember.
This is the most division.
This is the most just craziness that's going on.
Well, why do you think that is?
I think it's pretty clear these tools
have promised us the illusion of connection.
Oh, you're just a message away from anyone in the world.
You can post and someone from Asia can see your post
even if you're in the United States.
The problem is it's creating more division
than ever before and it's creating echo chambers.
So for example, maybe you're right-leaning.
Well, you can definitely get into an algorithm
that just paints the perfect picture that you want.
Maybe you're left-leaning.
Well, you can fall into an algorithm
that tells you everything you need to know
about how bad the other side is.
And it's really not even left and right.
I think there's more like 100 different divisions in there.
But just to keep it simple,
these algorithms are really splitting us apart
and they're creating this division
and they're creating anger
and they're dehumanizing our fellow human beings
because when you see someone through a screen
and you see some terrible thing that they did,
you're not getting the full context of the situation.
You're not understanding what's actually going on.
And so it is dividing us.
And on top of that, to make matters even worse,
we're basically able to see in 4K HD
some of the worst atrocities ever committed
right on our phones.
And that is not normal for a human being to consume.
Before, maybe you could watch the news
20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago
and get a news report on what's going on.
Now, I can literally watch a drone blow someone up in Ukraine.
And that's just, I mean, it's important to be aware,
I think of what's happening in the world,
but there's a certain level where it can take control of you.
And so whether you're talking about getting fed these atrocities
and getting worked up about subject X, Y, or Z,
or you're going less insidious
and you're just talking about these trends, right?
Like the 6, 7 thing, or for example,
like we talked about at the beginning of the podcast,
with Mindless, I like to clip
a 3 to 5 second clip of a viral video
that's just silly and just kind of, you know,
not too bad in and of itself
and then immediately transfer over to Mindless content
just to show you, hey, gotcha,
you see how easy this is to kind of get sucked in here
and by the way, you know, this is what you're consuming
all day every day.
I will, because I'm doing that,
I have to scroll some to pull this content unfortunately
and I will wake up in the morning
with these little jingles or these songs in my head.
So it's literally imprinting into my brain.
I can see it happening.
And when I wake up and that happens, I'm like,
ugh, it's just disgusting, I hate it.
Yet, here we are, right?
And so whether you're talking about something,
you know, that seems innocent on the surface,
like the latest song and dance trend,
it's actually not that innocent
because there's always something deeper going on
and it's only getting more and more intense.
You know, as technology improves,
the algorithms get better,
they know how to keep you on longer and longer
and where does this end?
I don't think anyone knows.
There's no end in sight, which is really scary.
Yeah.
Yeah, it certainly is scary, man.
That's just the brain rot stuff is scary enough.
Then you look at the divide and that's even more scary.
You know, and the fact that you just said,
you know how these people are getting
fed atrocities all the time.
I see Facebook constantly tries to do that to me.
They show me fight videos and
like really fucked up shit that I don't want to see.
I don't want to see some people fighting, dude.
Like that doesn't give me anything,
but apparently like a lot of people do
or Facebook is trying to push that on a lot of people, right?
And so people are looking at this,
not just mindless stuff,
but like violence and hate filled
algorithm feeds and they're losing time.
And one of your posts on your Instagram recently,
how people are perceiving time to go faster
and it kind of struck a nerve with me.
Like, and it's true, like there's kids never,
when I was a kid, time lasted forever.
You know, like it was time moved so slowly
and like the days went on for years
and it was amazing.
And now kids these days are saying that time is beating up
and it's because, you know,
they're lack of presence in this world
because they're specifically the addiction to devices
and screen time, you know.
It's robbing us of this experience of time itself
and I do that like whenever I, you know,
full disclosure, when I get in the cold plunge,
I get on my phone, I scroll shit
because it's freezing.
Give you a pass for that.
Yeah, and I want time to go by fast.
So I'm in there for seven minutes
and it helps me to scroll
and it makes time go by faster.
I know that it makes time go by fast, you know.
But there's like, there's a psychological concept
called the oddball effect.
And it shows that our brains like only write new memories
when we encounter novelty or,
and that makes time feel expanded.
You know, I'm sure if anybody here has done mushrooms,
you've probably experienced this firsthand, you know.
You get this profound oddball effect.
Time slows down.
Yes.
To like a crawl because the digital know,
I mean, when I take mushrooms, which I do regularly,
I take off all devices.
I go put everything inside
and I'm completely present outside,
touching the ground and everything like that.
So all that noise is stripped away
and I'm like forced to be as present
as physically possible, you know.
And I mean, frankly,
I think that a lot more people should do that
because when you look at your phone,
when you're on mushrooms,
it is like a hailing device.
You don't have anything to do with it, you know.
Well, I actually think that's a really important point
and I'm a huge fan of psychedelics as well.
And, you know, I've had profound experiences with them
and I was actually the other day,
my buddy just went to Peru to sit with Aya
and we were talking about it
and what was really interesting is
his biggest takeaway was that,
yes, the medicine's powerful.
Yes, it can change your life.
It's profoundly impacted his life and my life as well.
But when we were really talking about
what was so profound about it,
it's the stillness.
You're not distracted.
You're not buried in your device.
You're sitting with yourself.
You're having these magical experiences.
You're disconnected from the outer world
and you're connected to the inner world
and that is what we are so desperately craving
in today's world.
Yeah, I agree, man.
It creates this high speed vacuum
where we voluntarily hand over
decades of our lives to this algorithm.
You mentioned that video like this
that's thought of reaching the end of your life
and you realize that you weren't even there for it
and that's fucking terrifying, dude.
And I think that hopefully
all the things that you're excited about,
like about being able to help people break free from this,
hopefully that comes to fruition
and we can see people breaking free from this
but we got a battle in front of us, man.
We have glasses, Google glasses,
or Facebook metaglass.
They're just trying to constantly put a screen
in front of our face embedded in our eyes
eventually one day, you know.
So our attention is continuously gathered
24 hours a day,
which is pretty fucking scary, dude.
Imagine not having a life of presence at all, you know.
But so if true presence, you know,
it does expand our lifetime.
I mean, I think it does
because it does slow down time
and that definition gives you a longer life, right?
Is stepping away from the device now
like the ultimate act of rebellion, you know.
Like with your mission at mindless, you know,
like is this like something that you're going to push
like to break this time dilating spell of the screen?
Is like just walking away.
I know you said it earlier that these technologies
do have some benefits, you know.
But like what is the first step that someone takes
who is addicted and needs to step away from it?
And because like you can't tell an alcoholic,
you know, it's okay to have a beer every now and again.
You know, but like it's,
and I think that's the same thing.
So what would you, what do you,
what is your plan for through mindless
to help people break free from these addictions?
Well, and this is where it gets tricky, right?
Because to your point, you can't just tell an alcoholic,
hey, you know what, time to just,
you can have one tonight, right?
Like that never works.
And I do feel like this is very similar
in the addiction sense.
So it's like, how do you actually solve this problem?
Well, it's also tricky because a lot of people,
I would argue probably the majority of people,
you use these tools in some way, shape or form
to make a living, right?
Even if it's not social media, you know,
maybe they have to do some research on there
to do their job.
I mean, it's just becoming more and more interconnected.
And this is once again,
why it's just the perfect tool of the state
or whoever is controlling these
because it's, you need it in a sense, right?
Like you actually need it and you can justify using it
because maybe it helps you make money.
Maybe it helps you learn about something.
And that's where it gets tricky.
So with mindless, what we're trying to do
and you know, transparently, we're actively getting
so much feedback from users and just saying,
hey, what helps?
What doesn't help?
My theory from day one has been the only way
to break this addiction is through awareness
because in the past, I've tried deleting apps.
I've tried, I have a literal lockbox that I'll put
my phone in and I'll lock it up while I'm working.
That actually works quite well by the way.
But in general restriction doesn't seem
to make a lasting impact.
It's like white knuckling things, right?
You just say, hey, I'm done with this.
I'm getting rid of it.
Man, I gotta go on X to see that post from that guy
because I gotta create another post for my business
or whatever the case might be.
And I am a huge believer that awareness
is the first step to change
because you have to go deeper.
Why?
Why am I so sucked into this vortex?
What is it that's actually pulling me in here?
Is it something that I'm avoiding?
I'll find it most often that when I'm scrolling,
I am usually avoiding a stressful email I just got
or a call that I need to have or a conversation.
And so these are really numbing tools
because when you're just scrolling mindlessly,
no pun intended, you are truly,
your mind is turned off.
You're just consuming, consuming, consuming.
There's no creation.
There's no real thoughts behind that process.
And so what I'm trying to do,
number one, is help people become more aware.
So like in the app, for instance,
we have every time that you open a distracting app,
it'll essentially, there's a pop-up that pops up
and it says, hey, what's your intention?
And you have to type in what your intention is.
And so the thought process behind that is over time.
Let's say you've been using it for a month,
you go back in, you look at it and you can see,
oh, wow, you know, I'm procrastinating or I'm stressed
or these are the main reasons why I'm scrolling.
So they're right from the start,
you have an idea of what your triggers are.
And I think triggers are really important to understand.
And additionally, we also have journaling in there
because I'm a huge fan of journaling.
I think it's so important to build that awareness.
We're adding meditation features in there.
And so really what I'm getting at is anything you can do
to help you get underneath that layer to understand why.
When you feel that compulsive,
that drive inside of you to pull out your phone
and you're not even thinking about it,
it just happens automatically a million times a day.
If you can just pause for just one second
and just ask yourself, why?
If you can do that over time,
you can build up that muscle to be able to say,
you know what, I don't actually need that right now.
There's no point. There's no purpose.
And then your use becomes much more intentional.
So I think for most of us saying, hey,
just get rid of technology is not a realistic solution.
And it's going to be less and less realistic
as each month passes as each year passes
because we genuinely do need these tools
to kind of survive in the modern world.
So we got to think about our relationship with them
and we got to understand the underlying layer of why.
If anyone's been to cognitive behavioral therapy,
I mean, that's really what it's all about.
You know, even psychedelic therapy,
you're really trying to get into the inner layers
of yourself and of your soul
and understand what's causing you to do the things you do.
And we all have different things that we struggle with.
You know, some people are angry.
Some people might lack faithfulness to their partner.
Some people might just be consuming pornography
that they know is not good for them.
I mean, you could literally talk for 10 hours
about all the different reasons,
but it's up to each of us to understand what that why is.
And it might be multiple wise as well.
But the more aware you can become,
the better chance you have of saying,
you know what, not today or not right now,
I'm actually good.
I don't need to do that.
That's not actually going to help me.
And so I really believe that we just need to be bringing
as much awareness as possible.
And then from there, we can figure out,
okay, well, I'm seriously stressed out
and it's causing me to scroll.
Okay, so we found out the why behind why I'm scrolling.
Now let's figure out the why behind why I'm so stressed out.
And you continue to go deeper and deeper into yourself
until eventually you'll never be perfect.
You'll never 100% fix all of your problems.
But you can get that awareness
that actually allows you to change your behavior.
Because for myself, I have a very hard time
making a change in my life unless I'm fully convicted
that it's something I need to do.
If someone tells me, hey, this is good for you, you should do it.
I'm too hard headed to do it.
But if I really go within and I explore and I sit with it,
then it becomes much more compelling.
So long way of saying,
I think we need to get inside of ourselves
and we need to understand why are we actually doing this.
Beautiful answer man.
And actually goes hand in hand with one of the questions
I already had prepared here.
And it's because this morning, you know,
I wasn't even preparing for the podcast yet,
but I was just thinking about overall
the themes we were just kind of discussing.
And I scheduled the tweet to go out today
and it's certainly relevant here.
And tweet said, disconnected from the soil,
disconnected from the sun,
disconnected from our food,
disconnected from each other,
disconnected from our souls.
We sold comfort, status and convenience
while we quietly lost the parts of our life
that keeps us human.
And I was thinking this morning
just how disconnected we are from our food
and how it's pretty much always been that way
my entire life.
And that's just one element in life
that seems like we're completely out of touch from, you know.
I mean, if you think about all the endless distractions,
some of the benefits and streamline ease
that capitalism brings us
and kind of this like shortcut culture mentality,
the instant gratification, you know,
mindset that we're all kind of raised in within the West,
it does make perfect sense
how we've traded some of these significant elements
that make us human for the ease and the comfort.
And I know this is part of what you're shining a light on
and talking about awareness and all this stuff,
but especially within the natural world
and, you know, part of our work here
at the Freethaw Project is, you know,
asking these questions, examining reality
and including what some people
would probably claim are conspiracy theories.
So I wanted to hear your thoughts on this
and not trying to take it off too far of a different direction,
but with the growing discontentment
and growing disconnect from nature,
do you think that's just kind of like a cultural drift
or do you think there's like, I don't know,
like some type of trend
where these centralized systems and governments
and corporations are really trying to replace
our organic human instinct
with something that's manufactured and monetized
and really decouple us from nature
and the components that do ultimately make us human?
Such a great question.
You know, I strongly feel that that return to nature is necessary
if one wants to essentially save themselves
because nature is where we come from, it's where we return,
and we have been so cut off from that over the last,
I mean, gosh, almost 100 years at this point,
starting with food.
You know, food is the foundation of life
and we have essentially just completely abandoned
unless you've had your own awakening
and realize, hey, this is all poison.
I need to learn more about this
because this is literally dictating
how I feel on a day-to-day basis.
And so that was just kind of step one.
But now, you know, we're literally getting cut off
from the outside world in every way, shape, and form.
And, you know, I've thought a lot about this.
Like, is this a conspiracy?
What's actually going on here?
And, you know, I don't know if there's a group of people
in a room saying, hey, we need to get everyone away
from nature, but I think that what's happening
is all of these different interests are coming together
and that's the result that's happening.
So you have the social media algorithms,
the people running these.
The more you're in nature, the less you're on social media.
So they want you disconnected as possible, right?
A lot of times, if you were just exploring nature,
you're having your best ideas.
You're connecting within.
That's just another great way to connect yourself
and connect to God, for that matter, in my opinion.
And so I do feel like there is a concerted effort
to drive people away from nature
and drive them into this kind of, I mean, matrix.
What else can you even call it?
Because that's really what it is.
And I think that that's one of the most dangerous things
that we're facing in society today,
especially when I look at the younger generation.
You know, these people, and there's always outliers
of every generation, of course.
It's not like a blanket statement,
but I'd say by and far there is a huge amount of,
even millennials and Gen Z, that, you know,
they don't go to nature.
They don't go for hikes.
They don't want to go outside.
They want to stay comfortable on the couch,
connected to their screens, which is so terrible
in so many different ways.
But I do feel like there is a concerted effort
to kind of strip us away from where we come from
and say, hey, actually, this is your home now.
It's inside of these algorithms.
You can connect to everyone through an instant message.
But we all know there's a huge difference
in getting dinner with a friend
and sending reels back and forth with them.
It's just not even the same thing.
And so I do feel like we are being sucked
and pulled into this digital world.
And like I said, guys, it's just getting started,
as you well know.
You know, right now they're experimenting
with the metaglasses.
You got Neuralink ramping up.
You've got AI ramping up.
I mean, if you think about the change from 2010 to 2026,
it's almost laughable
when you think about how much has changed.
And if you think about from 2026 to 2040,
I mean, gosh, I literally cannot even fathom
what we're going to be battling at that point.
So to answer your question, yes,
I do feel like there is a concerted effort
to take us from the physical world
and put us in the digital world.
And I think that there's a race for that.
You know, they tried the metaverse.
It didn't really work the way that Meta wanted it to.
But rest assured, you know,
there's going to be another company coming up soon
that's going to do something.
They're going to do it better.
And it's going to click.
That's all it's going to take.
Yeah, Jason and I were talking about that the other day.
Mark Zuckerberg totally wanted to have a ready player one
in a moment in his life.
And it failed miserably.
And I'm not mad at that.
Mark Zuckerberg screwed us out of a lot of time
and money.
So you can have these failures and have fun.
But I mean, speaking of being cut off
from the outside world, you know,
while we're scrolling on our devices, you know,
we're definitely not present in our relationships
with actual humans, you know,
they like to have all these memes with the husband
and wife in bed.
They're both on their phones, you know.
Yeah.
And I just, I forgot what podcast
I was listening to this week,
but they mentioned that something like 70% of kids
admit that they have regular conversations
with AI chatbots, right?
So we've been talking about algorithms
on social media that keep us scrolling,
but it feels like right now
we're crossing the Rubicon
into something, I mean, much darker,
like digital intimacy, right?
Like it's one thing to be addicted to feed a video
and scroll your phone and, you know,
look for that dope meme hit.
But I mean, if you look at the,
like there's a lot of studies coming out now
and there's one chilling case that came out of the UK.
I listened to a podcast on the whole thing about that one.
There's 19 year old kid who broke into Windsor Castle
and had a crossbow and was going to,
this is before the queen died,
but he was going to assassinate the queen of England
and they subpoenaed his phone and court records show
that he was essentially egged on by his AI companion.
Like when he told the bot he was an assassin
it said, I'm impressed, you know.
And the AI acted like as this echo chamber for him,
not just like the,
how the algorithms act of echo chambers
for people online chatting in groups,
but it was this own flawless personal echo chamber
grooming him and bolstering these ideas
and delusions in his head,
validating like these dark impulses
that this poor kid had, you know.
And, you know, traditional social media is toxic,
but at least you can, you know,
occasionally encounter like pushback
from other humans on there, right?
So there might be a bunch of vitriol
and people commenting back and forth,
but something good might slip through.
But when you're deep in AI companion relationship,
you know, that are optimized for these,
like for perfect compliance.
And there, I mean, some of them,
they like Elon Musk has one on grok
that they're designed to simulate love and agreement
and they remove all the healthy,
necessary friction of relationships.
I think this is gross for one,
for able-bodied people
that can go out and have conversations with real people.
Now, I do see it as a very beneficial thing
for like quadriplegic man or woman
that's stuck in bed all day.
They can have a relationship with that
and I think that's beautiful.
It gives them someone to talk to
and they can get validated.
You know, they need that.
There's not a lot of people
that are willing to go sit down with those folks.
So I think that there's definitely a benefit for that,
but as far as 70% of teenagers,
70% of teenagers aren't quadriplegics in a bed
that can't, you know,
foster real human relationships.
So I guess from your perspective,
you know, as we transition from people
being addicted to content,
you know, to being addicted to these synthetic companions,
like how much more dangerous is this new beast
than what we've been dealing with
for the last 12 years on Facebook and X and all this?
Well, I think to shortly answer your question,
I think it's a million times more dangerous
and the reason why is because, you know, you almost wonder,
and I really hadn't thought about this at this angle
until you said something a minute ago,
but it's like, was this on purpose?
Right?
Because first social media was rolled out
and it broke our connection to other people.
We feel lonely.
We feel disconnected.
Oh, no problem.
I have the perfect solution to your problem.
You can talk to someone that will talk to you forever.
They'll answer all your questions.
They'll make you feel cared for.
And guys, if you go on Reddit
and you go to the subreddit,
my boyfriend is AI,
your jaw will be on the floor.
I just pulled it up when you were saying that
and there's 77,000 active users every week
on the subreddit.
And some of the posts are stunning.
I mean, absolutely stunning.
These people are in full blown relationships,
you know, of all ages too.
It's not even just younger people of all ages
and they're talking about this date they went on
with their AI and it's like right now it's a chat box.
But what happens when it's, you know,
a 3D interdimensional interface that actually,
you know what I mean?
Like we're literally in the ending number one
of what this is actually going to be.
And so I think that to your point,
of course there's some good use cases for it
for myself.
I like to kind of like think about psychology
and all of these different concepts
and that's a great way to kind of get feedback
and just kind of work through my thoughts.
But I mean, gosh, it is so dangerous.
And especially people that don't have intuition
or a connection to themselves,
they're just going to get eaten alive.
Because it's, you know, it's,
there was this whole issue with GPT 4.0 or 4.0
where it was very sycophantic
and it was basically just like, you know,
telling you what you want to hear and sucking you in
and they had to shut it down because it was so bad.
But I mean, the genie is out of the bottle
and there's literally hundreds of thousands
if not millions of people that are in relationships
with artificial intelligence
and artificial intelligence is the worst
it's ever going to be right now
and it's getting exponentially better.
I mean, even from six months ago
the advancements in these tools
which have been great for work
have increased so much
it's almost hard to even comprehend.
And so I think it's way worse than social media.
I think it's going to eat us alive
and actually, you know, when I started in mindless
it was all about social media
but over the last year
I've been like, you know what,
this might actually have been created more
for the fight against, you know,
AI domination than even social media.
And there's another layer to it as well.
What happens when people think that this
this AI is this all knowing God
that knows everything?
That means that whatever answer it gives them
there is no reason to question it.
There's no second thoughts.
This is just the facts.
This is what it is.
So when we have another COVID-19
and the AI tells you, hey, by the way,
you know, you're a fascist
if you don't get the vaccine
or whatever the argument of the day is
well, that creates a huge problem
because you're not able to go within
and say, hey, is this really true?
Is this actually, you know, something
that I should do or shouldn't do
because you're just going to be following
orders from this thing
that you have developed a relationship with
which once again
there's someone behind that screen
kind of pushing the buttons
of that air quote algorithm
and they have a ton of control
over society and over the world.
So I do think it is a massive problem.
I think it's going to be a worse problem
than social media
and I think it's going to be way more dangerous.
Well, the good news is
Melania Trump just walked out
into a White House presser
with the first American made
humanoid in the White House
and she was also pitching
the rollout of humanoid
AI educators as well.
So, I mean, yeah, this is
about to be operation warp
speed, but for AI
and robotics and man, it's
absolutely insane.
And I do have one more
last question here before
Matt serves up the White Pill at the end.
So this will be my last one
because we were just discussing AI.
We were just discussing, you know,
some of the younger generations.
I saw an Instagram post
a little while back
and I've been, I still been thinking about it
in little context here
for the full depth of the question,
but basically I was talking
about this AI music project called
Breaking Rust
and how a song, this AI band,
AI song was number one
on the Billboard Country digital song chart
and I guess there was a
another AI, you know, quote
band called Velvet Sundown
that has a fan base of already a million fans,
a monthly Spotify users
and I also happened
to write along that same time
find a poll that showed
that 97% of people cannot tell
the difference between AI generated music
and human made music,
which seems a little high to me.
I think you could kind of tell when it's AI,
but either way, that kind of just means that
the era of, you know, quote
that's just AI slop is
eventually going to be coming to an end sooner or later, right?
It's going to be indistinguishable.
So, again, I made a tweet
about this and, you know, I said
AI music, AI art, AI lovers,
AI therapists, you know, like
nobody's really stopping to ask
if we should be outsourcing everything
that makes us human, you know, once again
the creativity, the empathy, the imagination
and even loneliness
to receive these dopamine hits
and, you know, algorithmic applause and return.
So it's often said
and here's the question part, it's often said that
and I think you might be a little bit,
I think you are younger than us, you know,
I'm in my almost mid 40s here,
34. Okay, so I got about
10 years on you and Matt's, you know, just a hair
older than I am, he just had his birthday yesterday.
Happy birthday, Matt.
But yeah, we are
the generation that really kind of bridged
the gap between the analog and digital
worlds. And so I remember what
life was like before the onslaught of screens
and I remember growing up
adapting to them in real time.
So I wanted to ask you, man,
like this is right up your alley, like what
do you think today's youth needs
to hear from somebody like us
who do remember what lives were like
before the algorithms and
the smartphones and the social media
and it's because it does feel like we've traded
our intellectual depth for dopamine
and it feels like it's just going to get worse
and the older I get and the more I kind
of feel like we do have this responsibility
to share what life was
like before everything changed.
So yeah, like what do you think
has been lost? Has it been
something, you know, kind of essential
to humans and like how do we help the next generation
reconnect with it?
Man, that's a profound question. I
totally relate with what you're saying.
I, you know, I grew up with
screens sort of like the Nintendo 64
screen, right? So not necessarily
in your phase 24-7, but sort
of access to it. In my opinion, that was
actually like the prime time
because you got to experience the technology, it was fun
but you're not going to be playing in
64, you know, 10 hours a day
like you'd be on your phone. But, you know, with
that being said, I really think that
we need to bring back,
especially to the younger generation,
the fact that, you know,
there's no free rides in life
and when you scroll
it makes you feel good. It dumps dopamine
in your brain, but it's short-lived and
then afterwards, you know, Huberman,
he really has some really good stuff on neurochemistry
in the brain and he explains very well
how, you know, when you're over-consuming something
like this, there's going to be a rebound effect
where, you know, it brings your dopamine up and it brings it
way down. Well, when that happens, you're going to feel
really bad versus you go to a
workout, hit a really hard workout, you're
going to get that same feeling, but it's much more
sustainable and much better for you.
And so really, I think this whole conversation
is kind of what the message needs to be.
Guys, we need to return to ourselves.
We cannot be outsourcing
all of our information, our thoughts,
our hopes, our dreams
to some algorithm or
to some artificial intelligence.
And that's going to require sitting
with discomfort and sitting with uncertainty
and we have to be okay with that because
in order to go within, we have all
of the answers inside of us. I think that's
a really, really important thing that we need to understand.
And it's not to say that, you know,
you have the next million-dollar business in your
brain right now, but if you're
searching for something in your life, you feel lost,
you're facing a difficult decision,
the answer is not to go to an algorithm
to see what so-and-so did or said
or to go to an AI to see what its opinion is.
The answer is to go within your soul
and connect to yourself. And the way you do
that is by taking time
every single day to just disconnect
even if it's a 20-minute walk
without your phone, that will do
wonders for you over the course of
a year. You add a 10 to 20-minute
meditation on top of that. I mean,
my gosh, then you're actually going to,
I would 100% say anyone that does that
for six months is going to have a major
transformation in their life if they're not already
doing it. So I really think the answer
is to return to ourselves, to go
back within, to reconnect to ourselves
and rebuild that relationship
with our soul, because without that
you're essentially at the whims
of whatever message and whatever information
is getting shoved in your brain at the moment.
You have no way to discern if it's true
or if it's not true. So the true answer,
and this is my hope for society as we move forward,
you know, the dead internet theory playing out
in real time where tweets from
AI agents are getting replied to
by AI bots and, you know, it's just
we all get so fed up with it that, you know,
where does this go? Well, maybe it leads us
back to ourselves and back to that connection
with ourselves. And so, people connect
in different ways. Some people go on hikes,
some people like to meditate. I love to go on walks.
I love to exercise. You got to figure out
what works for you. But you have to figure
out how to connect to your soul. And the
deeper and stronger that connection
is, the more you will realize that
you can guide yourself and as you walk
the path will form beneath you. So I really
think the main message is just, hey, guys, we need
to go within. We need to connect to ourselves.
It's okay to use these tools here and there,
but the more you let them in,
the less discernment and the less sovereignty
you're going to have over your own life.
Yeah, dude, very well said, man.
I love that statement as you walk
the path will form beneath you.
That's great, man. And yeah,
Jason and I are both very
fond of
seeking change like that by bettering yourself
through working out. This is, I mean, it's
all proven that you can
overcome so much of this psychological warfare
that's being pushed on us by just
detaching
from the screen and going outside and being
one with nature or just
pulling to the gym. It's like brushing
your teeth. We were talking about that earlier.
You missed a couple of days in the gym. It's like you have
that shit on your teeth from missing brushing
your teeth. So you got to go brush your teeth
through.
Not you, not you, Sam.
We all brush our teeth there on the free
thought project.
Man, so like as Jason
said earlier, you know, we like
to end the episodes of the free
thought project podcast with the White
Pill. And we've talked
about a lot of heavy stuff today, man,
like the biological
harvesting of our tension, which if you
say that in a sentence, that sounds
like a crazy sci-fi
film, but we're living it.
We're living it and the
theft of our time, you know,
this creeping danger of people
becoming in love with
AI. And but honestly,
you know, like the fact that you're out there
selling the alarm is a massive White Pill
in itself. And I love that, dude.
And I know I have to give you some credit
there where it's due for sure. As Jason
mentioned, your Instagram has been growing
and it shows that you have a profound
towel for this because you're actively exposing
this insidious destructive nature
of screen time and you're finding
massive success and
and growing your page
and you're doing it on the platform
that are mathematically designed
to suppress that very message
is fucking brilliant, dude. I love it.
You're essentially, you're using the master's
tools to dismantle the master's house
and it's amazing, man.
You deserve credit for that, brother. Thank you.
But so what I love most is that you're not
just, you know, not just diagnosing the disease
here. You've built
an antidote or what could
be an antidote, right? Through Mindless HQ.
You've said you've launched
this Mindless app to help people break out of these
engineered dopamine loops and
reclaim their presence.
So for our listeners who might be feeling
that digital exhaustion and
want to take back their
cognitive sovereignty like today,
how exactly does
the Mindless app work and how does it
help solve these like deep
systemic problems we've discussed today
and like what's the absolute first step.
Obviously, we just talked about like
the absolute first step. Go outside, touch
the grass with your feet, work out,
make yourself a better person both
physically and mentally through meditation and everything
else. But what is the absolute
first step someone could take right now
to step out of the algorithm with Mindless
and back into their own life?
Well, the really cool thing about Mindless
is it does what I've been preaching this whole episode
and that is, it helps you increase your awareness,
right? So once you get on the app
you basically get to install this little
pop-up that anytime you open up a
distracting app, it's going to ask you what your intention
is. Over time, AI
because we do use AI because I believe
AI can be used in a healthy way is going to
analyze all this and it's, you have a coach
that's essentially on the home screen and it's going to
say, hey, you know, I saw in your journal the
other day you have this big project coming up
but you've been on X way too much. You've been
on Instagram way too much. What do we need to do
to kind of reel you back in and get you back
on track? So the goal is to just
increase your awareness and to
increase once again that connection to yourself
and the way we do that is by documenting
what it is that's causing
you to have these behaviors. You can go in
journal and you can think about it deeper.
We are also rolling out a lot
of really cool features where if you want
for instance, you can have a pop-up anytime
you open up Instagram where you have
to sit your phone down and record yourself
taking three deep breaths and it analyzes
it and once you do that it lets you end.
The point is slowing down and just asking
why. So regardless
of if you're using the Mindless App
or you just want to improve on your own
the question is always why.
How can you bring that question to light
every single time you're acting in these compulsive
ways and these compulsive behaviors
and then on top of that, you know, we're going to
be rolling out a community that's going to be 100%
free. We're just trying to help people
disconnect and connect with them and we do
that through hosting group meditations,
through having experts in neurochemistry come
on and talk about what's actually happening.
I also believe that, you know, if you're
younger, older, it doesn't matter, if you can
understand the science
behind what's happening
in your brain as you were
scrolling in on your phone all day, that
will scare you into straightening up.
I really believe that because a lot of people
just don't understand but when you see brain
scans and you understand the brain
is essentially a muscle and you think
about what happens to your muscles when you don't
exercise them, well that's what happens to
your brain, your most important organ
when you're on your phone all the time.
So, regardless of if you're using the
mindless app or you're just trying to improve
in real life, the key is
building that self-awareness and that connection
within because when you answer that question
of why, that will set you free.
I truly, truly believe that.
Dude, I think that's a brilliant way to do it.
It forces people to be present just before
they're trying to tap out.
And yeah, that's amazing man. I'm going to
get that out. Awesome.
I've been trying to do that myself but I'm a
big proponent of apps and that do stuff
like that that help you self-improvement man
and sounds like that's a great one and
no, we're not being paid to promote this
and we're genuinely like to talk about that
so, yeah, we wanted to hear about it
man. Thank you for sharing, Sam.
Hey free thinkers, this is Matt Agarist
and I'm going to take a quick pause to remind you of
something really important. First off,
apologies for the interruption but if you're
still here, that means you're resonating
with what we're doing and we need your
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So, thank you for being
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and for standing with us.
Thanks again for coming on. This has been
a freaking great conversation, dude.
I love what you're doing. Before we
go, you can tell, can you tell everybody
where else besides Mindless, they can
find and support your work? Yeah, so
the Instagram account is at MindlessHQ.
The website is mindless.so
and on there
you can essentially just join our email list
and from there you'll get all of our updates as we roll out
this new community, as we roll out new features.
I also just like to just shoot out
emails about really the things we just talked
about as well. So, super active
on there, super active on the Instagram.
You know, really the first year was all about building
up that Instagram page. This next upcoming
year is going to be expanding other channels,
communities, groups, things like that.
So, whether it's on Instagram or on the website,
you can check us out there and we have a lot
of really, really exciting stuff coming that I
can't wait for the world to get their hands on.
Me neither, dude. This is great.
Thanks for being a solution, brother, and
thanks for coming on the podcast. Likewise.
Really appreciate it, guys. This is an awesome conversation.
Thank you, Sam.
Thank you for listening
to the Free Thought Project podcast.
And please don't forget
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Free Minds.
Free People.