Mobile Sim Card Reader Tool 3.0.1.5 Crack Cocaine
Kat Guinnip
4. How does the Kale Phone work? I can check this 24-7 - but it's so damn vanilla I don't feel the need to. If I want to procrastinate on it, I must read a book or generate ideas in my notes. (Win-Win) I get 90% of the upsides of having a phone -- with none of the addiction.
On the right is my second phone: an older unused iPhone 8 that I have been telling my wife I would put on Craigslist to sell for the past few years, but I never did (probably because I was wasting time on social apps).
The constant picking-up is an issue because it sends me down random rabbit holes that consume 20-minute chunks here (scrolling Twitter / ?) and 15-minute chunks there (watching random NBA highlights).
Why are variable rewards such powerful motivators? Because the anticipation of a reward motivates behaviour more than actually receiving the reward. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective as survival relies on constantly seeking out food, mates and information.
Slot machines are the canonical example. If players knew the exact outcome for each play, the game would become boring really fast. It is the unpredictable payout that makes slot machines so addictive.
The iPhone 8 browser is so small and slow as compared to my iPhone 11 Pro Max (aka Cocaine Phone), that dicking around in Safari is actually not that pleasant of an experience (but better than a Kindle device).
Also, my usage is a bit different than how George laid out, specifically on time. I do a quick social/messaging sweep on the Cocaine Phone in the morning. Then Kale Phone until the afternoon (and go only Kale after 8-9pm).
But the Harvard Business Review did an interesting study in 2018. Researchers wanted to uncover the effect of smartphones on cognitive ability. They put two groups through cognitive tasks with one difference: the first group had their smartphones in another room, while the other group had the smartphone in their pocket.
Because I co-founded an AI-powered research app called Bearly AI. And I really like putting blue buttons in this email. If you press this blue button below, you can try AI-powered tools for reading (instant summaries), writing (ChatGPT) and text-to-image art (literally type some text and get a wild image).
Thoughts on Oppenheimer: When you become a parent, the ability to randomly leave the house for 5 hours at a time goes out the window. All social excursions need to be planned far in advance. As a result, I have only seen two movies in theatres over the past 6 years: Dunkirk (2017), and Oppenheimer (2023). Both are Christopher Nolan films about World War II, which means two things. Firstly, Nolan is the only director that will get me into a theatre to pay $30 for a large popcorn. Secondly, I am a living embodiment of this tweet:
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Apple co-founder [Steve Wozniak] was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players.
One thing about Wechat that I haven't seen anyone in the West talking about is its mini-app capability. It's basically turned into a platform for developers to make really lightweight applications on top of....so practically every restaurant in China (even Kfc and mcdonalds) uses it for in-restaurant ordering and payment. It's even supplanted dedicated e-commerce apps, so stores like Uniqlo have built their e-commerce/online shopping with it. So a lot of its growth has been organic third-party driven. Will twitter/X be able to replicate this?
Another thing is that wechat's only been able to do all this because online payments in China is a duopoly, wechat/alibaba have basically split the market. I'm not sure that the social media/DM functions in wechat have anything to do with its success, since Alibaba/alipay have half the chinese market for online payments an e-commerce without having had the SM/DM functions.
My friend George Mack \u2014 who writes a great newsletter that curates interesting ideas \u2014 recently shared a method to beat smartphone addiction. He calls it \u201CThe Cocaine - Kale Phone Protocol\u201D, and I am sharing it below with his permission:
1. The Smartphone Paradox - Your phone is a gateway to the world's best knowledge \u2014 and the world's best distractions. It's like having the best teachers, strip clubs, and social clubs in your pocket 24-7.
5. How does the Cocaine Phone work? I don't check it until \u223C12pm on weekdays and \u223C2pm on weekends. I still get the optionality that smartphones and social media produce. But I don't consume it 24-7 until my brain melts.
The constant picking-up is an issue because it sends me down random rabbit holes that consume 20-minute chunks here (scrolling Twitter / \uD835\uDD4F) and 15-minute chunks there (watching random NBA highlights).
Because every smartphone owner is going up against the world\u2019s top engineers, designers and behavioural psychologists, who are paid ridiculous sums of money by Big Tech firms to get people addicted to their apps.
The main way they hook us is by using variable rewards. Most of you readers are probably familiar with this concept, but here is a refresher. In the 1950s, psychologist B.F. Skinner conducted an experiment to see how he could influence the behaviour of pigeons (and later rats). Skinner put the pigeons in a box \u2014 called a Skinner Box \u2014 and got them to peck a button by giving out food as a reward. The key finding was that a pigeon pecked the button like crazy when the food reward came at seemingly random intervals (as opposed to a predictable schedule).
I did experiment with a Kitchen Safe lock box, though. Physically locking away my iPhone definitely reduced the urge to use it, but the lock box was too restrictive and I couldn\u2019t contact my family.
It got to the point where I would read one page on Kindle, then check my Twitter. One page on Kindle, then check G-Mail. One page on Kindle, turn on a Spotify podcast and listen for 5 minutes while scrolling NBA highlights on YouTube (I believe Andrew Huberman calls this \u201Cdopamine stacking\u201D).
Research in cognitive psychology shows that humans learn to automatically pay attention to things that are habitually relevant to them, even when they are focused on a different task. For example, even if we are actively engaged in a conversation, we will turn our heads when someone says our name across the room. Similarly, parents automatically attend to the sight or sound of a baby\u2019s cry.
Our research suggests that, in a way, the mere presence of our smartphones is like the sound of our names \u2014 they are constantly calling to us, exerting a gravitational pull on our attention. If you have ever felt a \u201Cphantom buzz\u201D you inherently know this. Attempts to block or resist this pull takes a toll by impairing our cognitive abilities.
I think the concept of \u201Cgravitational pull\u201D applies to the Cocaine Phone perfectly. All these social, news and messaging apps are tugging at our brains because they are \u201Chabitually relevant\u201D (oh, also that sweet sweet dopamine).
For me, going full Luddite and throwing away everything doesn\u2019t make sense. That is why the Kale Phone is so great: I get the benefits without having to deal with the \u201Cgravitational pull\u201D.
Twitter rebrands to the \uD835\uDD4F. Followers of Elon\u2019s career will know that his second startup in the late 1990s was a payments firm called X, which later merged with another payments startup to form PayPal. The original plan for X was to create an all-in-one financial platform (banking, lending, trading etc). Since acquiring Twitter last fall, it became pretty clear that Elon would use the social networking platform as a jumping-off point to fulfill that original vision for X.
7fc3f7cf58