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Wayne: Today we’re gonna be talking about smartphones and addiction.

Cem: We’re all guilty.

Wayne: So, interestingly, if anybody has an iPhone, the update which came out a couple of months ago now, has a feature called Screen Time on it. Which gives you a nice weekly report, telling you how addicted to your phone you are.

Cem: It breaks your heart every time you see it, pretty much.

Wayne: Mine’s not as bad, actually. I thought mine would be worse than it was.

Cem: Mine says four hours a day.

Wayne: That’s not too bad.

Cem: That seems mental.

Wayne: If you’re watching stuff in YouTube, that’s not too bad.

Cem: Not like a lot, though. That’s the scary part. I might put a 10 minute meditation video on.

Wayne: I’m gonna see what my …

Cem: And I was just like … I think mine was four hours and 37 minutes.

Wayne: Gonna open up my report for last week. The thing that scared me, was actually the notification’s thing, and how many notifications I got. My iPad, I think was telling me, that I had an average of 148 notifications a day.

Cem: I didn’t know it does that. So it tells you how many times-

Wayne: Yeah, if you go into the Settings app, and then go into Screen Time, it does give you a bit more of a detailed breakdown, of what apps you are using the most and things like that. They kind of very basic report, it gives you at the start of the week. Is very basic, but you can break it down further.

Cem: So basically, there’s been this study that says that actually 43% of millennials are checking their phone every 20 minutes. I mean-

Wayne: Once every 20 minutes. Now is that at least once every 20 minutes? Or is that … Because I definitely check my phone far more, than once every 20 minutes.

Cem: Probably. I guess at least probably once every 20 minutes. But I was saying to Wayne, we just finished an episode recording, and the minute we both put down … stop recording, phones get picked up, then you’re checking.

Wayne: I think I’m at the point at the moment, I probably check my phone every two minutes.

Cem: Really?

Wayne: I’m really bad at the minute. Really, really, bad.

Cem: See with me, I kinda have to.

Wayne: I’m just so popular, dude. What can I say?

Cem: Are you just hoping that somebody will text me, please?

Wayne: Yeah. Partly.

Cem: But that’s got to be having some serious consequences, because I was even saying to my girlfriend, I was saying like, when you check your phone, that can actually be a downward spiral, whereas you’re like, “I’m just gonna check my phone.” But that could literally kill … In that moment you check your phone, could kill like 15 to half an hour.

Wayne: Well, that’s it, because you don’t just check your phone, you then check … you have like … If you haven’t checked it in 20 minutes, then you’ve got Facebook’s telling you one thing, Instagram’s telling you another thing, Twitter’s telling you another thing, email’s telling you another thing, WhatsApp’s telling you another thing. Then text message is telling you another thing, so I mean, maybe you are that popular. It’s a hard life.

Wayne: But, you’ve got all of these notifications, so it’s not just like, “Oh, I’ll just text to see if Cem has text me,” for example. It’ll be, “I’m just gonna check to see what’s going on in the world.”

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: And then you have to get a full overview of everything that’s going on. Then possibly respond to those, then get deep into a conversation with somebody-

Cem: That’s why I actually have to prepare myself.

Wayne: And then be like, “Oh shit, I’m halfway through watching Great British Bake Off.”

Cem: I also have to prepare myself, it’s like, “Cem, do you want to open like your emails?”

Wayne: I just said Great British Bake Off, what the hell is happening to me, Cem?

Cem: Do you watch that?

Wayne: I do now.

Cem: Oh.

Wayne: I do now.

Cem: Oh, yeah. They’re almost going crazy about the vegan one, weren’t they? Get over it. It’s a cake.

Wayne: Yeah, I’ve watched so much trashy TV recently. Anyway …

Cem: But no, I was saying, even you get … I get anxiety, where I’m like, “Cem, you know, by you picking up this phone right now, you could be sucked into the abyss of that circle of, suddenly having to answer an email, answer an Instagram question, answer this and that.” And so, I have to mainly say to myself, “Cem, understand, if you wanna go check your phone now, potentially you could be locked in,” which is why Airplane mode is my best friend.

Wayne: Yeah, one thing I would say, and I’ve become very good at this, and actually I think the latest … Again, this is gonna be talking from a perspective of iPhones a lot, because we use iPhones, both me and Cem. So apologies to the Android folks, but maybe you should change.

Cem: So you’re laughing at.

Wayne: But, the latest update of the iPhone is actually made the notifications system so much better. There’s a notification center, which was introduced a few years back, which I never used, which I find myself using all the time now. But one of the things that I have done, to kind of mitigate the, again, sucked into the abyss of checking stuff, is actually turning a lot of notifications off of my lock screen. So, a lot of things now only have a little red badge.

Wayne: But just kind of, not giving … It’s a big productivity hack, which I’ve really enjoyed, and benefited from doing, which is, just not giving every single app that asks for full access to your notifications, access. Be … Decide what you need to know, to the minute, like text messages, phone calls, and possible-

Cem: Just-

Wayne: Not emails.

Cem: You said they’re like … they’re actually saying in this article, that actually the five most urgent notifications are text, phone calls, emails, Facebook Messenger, and FaceTime, in that order.

Wayne: Oh, yeah. I’d say … I’d probably agree. Everything else you could, if you wanted to, turn off, and not really lose out on too much.

Cem: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wayne: But just go through … If you go into your notifications settings, it will give you a whole list of all the apps on your phone, and it will tell you what the settings are for the notifications. Just go through each one, and just be like, “Do I need to hear it beep at me, and for it to pop up on my screen? And for it to give me a badge? And for it to vibrate my phone? Or, can I just be fine just not having to know about it, until I go into the app?”

Cem: And also, there’s an interesting study here, Wayne, which we know you are a toilet texter.

Wayne: I definitely am a toilet texter.

Cem: 77% claim they check their phone in the bathroom.

Wayne: Oh, yeah. I actually saw a meme I was gonna send you yesterday, around toilet texting. But I can’t-

Cem: Toilet hustle.

Wayne: Yeah.

Cem: Wayne’s toilet hustling.

Wayne: But I can’t remember what it was. It was really funny.

Cem: Oh, well we’ll find it.

Wayne: Great story, Wayne. Tell it again.

Cem: If it … yeah, yeah. That really helps, that really gives us the visual of how funny it would have been.

Wayne: It was great. I was gonna send it to you, ’cause I always talk about toilet hustle.

Cem: Toilet time, init?

Wayne: Toilet time.

Cem: Toilet time Wayne Ingram, where Wayne gets shit done.

Wayne: That’s where I get all my shit done.

Cem: Literally.

Wayne: Literally.

Cem: That’s going to be it isn’t it. Toilet time, when you would get older-

Wayne: Dude, I’ve told you … How many times have I said we need to get a toilet hustle T-shirt.

Cem: Yeah, with the text message, init? And it says, “Get shit done.”

Wayne: It’s on the podcast now, so we have to do it, ’cause somebody’s gonna nick it.

Cem: Someone wants that T-shirt.

Wayne: I want that T-Shirt.

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: I’d proudly wear that walking the streets everywhere.

Cem: You know if that was on Gary V, he’d be like, “That, make it,” and then tomorrow, he’d have a T-Shirt of it.

Wayne: Exactly. So, we need to get it done.

Cem: Toilet hustle tees coming soon.

Wayne: Toilet hustle tees coming to Powerful Nonsense website near you.

Cem: Uh-huh. So, Wayne, is this a bad thing? You think this is messing up our minds?

Wayne: So, I had-

Cem: Are we distracted?

Wayne: I had a moment, right? I had a … It was not quite existential, but I had moment of-

Cem: Is this on the toilet? Or this was just?

Wayne: No, this was at London Bridge, I was-

Cem: You weren’t hanging off the edge, were ya?

Wayne: No, I was at the train station waiting for a train-

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: And I just looked around, and I saw a few people on their phone, and I was like … And then I had a moment where I was thinking about, if you told me 20 years ago, that this is what the world would be like, and I was thinking about the perspective of kids growing up now, and how they see people attached to their phone all time. Then I was just looking around, and with that in mind, and I was kind of like, “How many people on this train platform, of the 100 that I can see, are actually currently, phone in hand, looking at the screen?” And I was actually very surprised. I would say, of the 100 people I could see, only about 20% were actually looking at their phone screen. Stood, waiting for a train, with nothing better to do.

Cem: What were the rest of those sickos doing?

Wayne: A lot of them, to be fair, had earphones in, headphones, so they were listening to something, but they weren’t actively on their phone, glued to the screen. That probably, if you include those people in it, that probably took it to about 60%, 70%.

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: But even then, that’s still another 30%, 40% of people, that don’t have any technology going on, in their hand or in their ears.

Cem: I think that’s the thing, once that device is in your hand, you are connected, you’re into the matrix like everybody, all the relationships, all the work, everything. So sometimes, for me, especially in that commute, I’m just like, “You know what? Music is the one,” ’cause you know I need to just be-

Wayne: Yeah.

Cem: In my own zone, and phase out for a little while.

Wayne: But I do think this idea that everybody can’t stay off their phones, is a little bit over-exaggerated. Based off just that one incident alone, I was like, “Yeah, this is not as bad as everybody says it is.” I mean, when everybody’s on the Tube, and crouched over their phone, that’s slightly different, ’cause it’s a horrible environment to be in.

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: So, you want to escape. So that’s different, I think. But, yeah, I do think it’s blow out of proportion, this whole kind of like, “We are super addicted to our phones.” Yes, we are addicted to our phones, I’m not gonna deny that. As you said, we finish one episode of the podcast, first thing I did was reach straight over to my phone, and saw what I’d missed in the last 20 minutes that I was off the grid.

Cem: Yeah.

Wayne: But, that’s kind of … In a way, life happens in the internet now.

Cem: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wayne: That’s how life happens now. We have moved over to being digital people. All of my DVD collection pretty much is now in the internet, my book collection is slowly moving over to the internet, my communication with people is all done over the internet. Other than the people that I’ve arranged to see, or happen to bump into, everything else happens over the internet.

Wayne: So, to say that, “Oh, yeah, we’re addicted to our phones,” it’s like, “No …” I’d actually say, we’re living in the lifestyle that we now have to live in, because the times have changed. In the same way that, you know, hundreds of years ago, everybody used to farm, and then, all of a sudden, the farmers started to buy tractors.

Cem: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Wayne: People probably complained about that as well, “Oh, well, it doesn’t take as much skill to drive a tractor around a field, and churn up all the wheat.” It’s the same shit, I think.

Cem: Yeah, for me, I would just say, it’s just that getting sucked in the iPhones the most sort of dangerous is that, again, if time is your only sort of value … the most valuable thing you have, than that’s the thing you should be protecting. I just think, I know myself, when I get into my phone inside, I’m like, “Shit, I just browsed like funny videos for literally 40 minutes.”

Wayne: Yeah.

Cem: Which again, is nice, it’s fixed your brain up, but then if it’s kind of done in a way that, “Shit, how the fuck did I waste 40 minutes just looking at videos?”

Wayne: Yeah, that’s the dangerous-

Cem: That’s the part that I think that people need to watch out for.

Wayne: Yeah.

Cem: Cool.

Wayne: Cool. But, one thing I would say, before we close up is, do you got-

Cem: Hurry up, so I can check my phone.

Wayne: You gotta take some responsibility. If you do … If you are the sort … Be self-aware of this, if you are the sort of person that’s, you know, gonna lose 20 minutes watching YouTube at work on your phone, ’cause you’ve decided to check your emails, then delete YouTube off your phone. Really, that would be the answer.

Cem: Yeah, just check … Like you said, there’s these things available that would track how much, and what you’re doing, then just look at that once in a while-

Wayne: Yeah.

Cem: Just to be like … ‘Cause the same with me, if it says, “Fuck four hours a day,” I’m like, “Holy shit! What was I doing for those four hours?”

Wayne: Yeah, data is amazing, actually. Particularly the amount of data we have now, particularly, given that our lives happen on our phones, we can track data for everything that we do. So, look at it. Look at it, and learn something from it, and act accordingly.

If you want any questions answered, or if you have any ideas for anythings you’d like us to address, send us an email, Wayne@powerfulnonsense.com or Cem@powerfulnonsense.com, or you can look us up on the Twitterz @PN_Podcast, and we will take it into consideration. And also, please do leave us a nice little review on the old iTunes. It really does help get the word out there for the show. Five stars or more, greatly appreciated.