Chris Johns

Our decision to leave social media has come up, you know, a business cost to us, if you can call it, doing here a business.

Because I used to have thousands of followers on Twitter.

And every time I posted the podcast on Twitter, you know, I could see the numbers tick up as some of those people clicked on the pod.

And I got the dopamine hit because our numbers went up and I got a few likes and I got a few comments.

And it's those sorts of experiences that teach you that this is not healthy.

This being obsessed by numbers, by all of the different ticks, hearts, all the different ways in which we are liked and approved.

We get approbation.

It's the attention-seeking economy.

And you get the short-term hit, but the long-term cost, I think, is ultimately mental ill health, which is what the Royal Colleges of Medicine are getting at here.

And whereas I feel better in myself for not doing nearly as much of this as I used to, I still do too much.

You know, I look at the numbers on this podcast, the number of listeners, and I see the trends.

And thankfully, we still have thousands and thousands of listeners, despite not advertising the pod.

But the bottom line is, Jim, because we're no longer on social media, let's just say that our numbers are lower than they otherwise would have been, because we're not part of this attention seeking economy.

And the other thing we don't do is

is create outrage on the podcast, because that's what seems to get the hits is if you come up with absolutely extreme views, much more extreme than the right wing fascist stuff that you came out with earlier on Jim about taxes.

You have to be much more extreme than that to get attention.

And that's the point, is that you're driven, contributors to social media are driven further and further into the extremes, competing with each other to be more extreme.

And there's no limit to that.

And that's why it's gone insane and driving us all insane.

But on a slightly different note, but relatedly, I don't know whether you saw the Pope's remarks on AI yesterday.