The End of Porn? (Nick Stumphauzer) | Ep. 556

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Pints With Aquinas: The End of Porn? (Nick Stumphauzer) | Ep. 556

Episode Theme/Purpose

This episode features Matt Fradd in conversation with Nick Stumphauzer, the creator behind the anti-porn and digital distraction tools “Escape” and “Shift.” The episode explores the personal, philosophical, and technological aspects of combating pornography and digital addiction, particularly through the lens of Catholic anthropology, practical virtue, and societal challenges. Nick shares his personal journey from atheism to faith, details the limitations of current accountability software, and unveils the permanent, free porn-blocking tool “Escape” and lifestyle-changing “Shift.” The conversation touches on parenting, virtue, technology’s impact on society, and the lived experience of cultivating holiness and attention in a disordered digital world.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

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1. The Modern Pornography Challenge

• Nick’s Background

  • Grew up Catholic, became an atheist, lost meaning and fell into porn addiction post-deconversion [04:04–04:35].
  • Encountered porn young due to misleading domains (e.g., utube instead of youtube) [05:07–05:21].
  • Explains, "The concept of without God, everything is permissible came into my mind, and I had no defense against it" [04:47].

• On the Severity of Modern Temptation

  • Analogy: Saint Anthony was tempted by the demonic apparition of the Queen of Sheba—modern kids are exposed to “4K sex acts, 5 million women, way hotter than the Queen of Sheba, at age 8” [09:31–09:48].
  • Quotes:
    • "You're demanding saintly levels of virtue from essentially a crack baby... you come into this world addicted to porn." – Nick [08:48]
    • "We are being tested in a vulnerable state beyond our capacities." – Nick [11:59]

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2. The Limitations of Current Solutions: Self-Control, Accountability, and Blockers

• Self-Control Isn’t Enough

  • "We’re approaching [the porn problem] so stupidly. Imagine telling a cocaine addict to just keep cocaine in their pocket and never do it. ‘Just be strong enough.’” – Nick [07:36–07:58]
  • Discusses the fallacy of telling young men to “just be chaste, put it down”—urges the need for practical boundaries [10:11–10:19].

• Issues with Accountability Software

  • Accountability partners/software are “post hoc,” often introduce shame but little effective deterrence [17:32–17:56].
  • "If it's possible, you will find a way." – Nick [18:13]
  • Subscription blockers can always be worked around, e.g., “just stop paying,” or deleting the app [20:59–21:15].
  • Using blockers that can be circumvented is “assisting [users] in betraying themselves again.” – Nick [22:10]

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3. A New Solution: Shift and Escape

• Escape:

  • Permanent, Free Porn Blocker for iOS
    • "Escape is and always will be free." – Nick [22:27]
    • Once installed, cannot be removed; only solution is buying a new device. “When Escape is applied to an iPhone, it is permanent. It cannot be removed. Your phone cannot be factory reset.” [27:04]
    • Blocks not only browsers but also searches within Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and Siri [29:48–30:08].
    • Can’t be bypassed by VPN or factory reset. Also applies to iPads [32:12].

• Shift:

  • Distraction-Blocking Tool
    • Allows users to create a “shifted” mode on their iPhone/iPad: distractions and addictive apps are removed, but necessary functions (maps, bank, Uber, etc.) remain [36:33–36:57].
    • Only administrator is the linked laptop, not the user—meaning one must physically return to a computer to disengage “Shift” [43:12].
    • Shift can be scheduled or triggered by geofencing (e.g., automatically activate at home or in library) [54:08, 113:27].
    • One-time purchase; no subscription [38:42].

• Technical Philosophy & Security

  • "The user is not the administrator." – Nick [27:04]
  • Users’ privacy is respected: no access to photos, texts, or private content; only network traffic needed for filtering [34:29–55:49].
  • Emphasis on customer support: text or call access to the real team, not ticketing systems [53:03].

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4. The Deeper Issues: Society, Virtue, and Agency

• Virtue, Willpower, and Habits

  • “Virtue is habit, habit of doing the good. You can’t build virtue in the midst of practicing vice...you have to over-correct.” [13:23]
  • Quoting Aristotle: "Bend the stick back the other way more than you need to." [13:47]
  • Shift/Escape don’t replace self-control but create a refuge for it to grow [13:22–13:45].

• Environmental Problem

  • “Shift is 50% of the solution and reveals 100% of the problem, which is we live in hell. Our existence is intolerable.” – Nick [60:03]
  • Cites the “Rat Park” experiment to demonstrate that addiction is worsened by impoverished, disconnected environments [58:32–59:48].

• Society and Media’s Role

  • "Companies...they want your money more than your well-being." [79:08]
  • Discusses the inflation of sexual currency due to overexposure; diminished intimacy and distorted expectations in marriage [192:03–195:12].

• Privacy, Surveillance, and Digital Exhaustion

  • Raises concern over TikTok, Instagram, and other apps accessing and leveraging user data [48:10–51:51].
  • “Your phone has never been less porous than when you have shift on your phone activated.” [52:16]

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5. On Parenting, Childhood, and the Next Generation

• Overwhelming Children with Digital Vice

  • “We want to permit a generation to rise in the absence of pornography. That’s our mission statement.” – Nick [74:45]
  • Escape and Shift allow parents to give kids devices without fear: "It was the only thing that gave me peace of mind to give my kid an iPad." – Matt [121:04]

• School and Institutional Applications

  • Geofencing can automatically “shift” devices in schools [123:56].
  • Potential partnerships with school districts to ensure safe use without total bans or mechanical pouches [124:28].

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6. Controversies, Caution, and Cultural Critique

• Modesty and Porngraphy Definition

  • Nick: “If you're going to claim to restrict porn...you have to ask, ‘what is porn?’" [183:06]
  • Nuanced, contextual understanding of modesty; critique of objectifying gym wear and the inflation of sexual currency [188:27–190:20].
  • Matt: "Pornography is material which depicts erotic behavior and is intended to sexually arouse, or has that effect." [184:30]

• Reflections on Tech Minimalism, Self-Knowledge, and Grace

  • Tech minimalism’s focus on “distraction” is a socially acceptable cover for porn addiction: "At least 40% a cover for porn addiction." – Nick [69:30]
  • Importance of self-knowledge: “It takes courage to look at yourself and say, I need this thing… I’d be a better man if I didn’t, but self-knowledge, which is vital, is telling me I need it.” – Matt [153:43]
  • Shift/Escape as spiritually and anthropologically realistic tools that respect fallen human nature, not just “discipline” over-promises.

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• On Modern Temptation:
  “You're demanding saintly levels of virtue from essentially a crack baby. You come into this world addicted to porn.” – Nick [08:48]

• On Self-Control vs. Environment:
  “If you had a screenplay, you would stop drinking. If you had a beautiful home life, Instagram, who gives a crap? You'd forget about it.” – Nick [172:11]

• On Refusing to Enable Relapse:
  “The most violent political act that I can perform is to give away the solution to pornography...solutions free, see who wins.” – Nick [24:08]

• On the Limitations of Current Tech:
  “Opal doesn’t work. Neither does Brick. The user is always the administrator… until we came along.” – Nick [40:44–41:36]

• On Parenting and the Next Generation:
  “We want to permit a generation to rise in the absence of pornography. That's our mission.” – Nick [74:45]

• On Society’s Loss:
  “We have all of the proximity and none of the intimacy. You’re obligated to care about more people than your concentric circles and all of the world’s problems.” – Nick [84:47]

• On Virtue and Tools:
  “Are we serving the virtuous development of people or are we inhibiting it? … I realized the answer is the same as with infant baptism—sometimes you need a benevolent, moral authority to save you until you can want the good for yourself.” – Nick [151:39–157:29]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Nick’s Personal Story / The Origin of Escape: [03:52–06:41]
• The Analogy—St. Anthony vs. Kids With the Internet: [09:31–09:48]
• Limitations of Blockers & Accountability: [17:32–22:10]
• What is Escape? How is Shift Different?: [22:15–28:16]
• Technical Explanation & Security Policy: [34:29–55:49]
• Addiction is Environmental (Rat Park, Virtue, Willpower): [58:32–60:03]
• Statistics About Screen Time, Social Media, and Modern Life: [63:21–66:26, 83:27–84:47, 121:13–121:41]
• Society, Community, and the Disordered Digital World: [84:47–88:57]
• Philosophy: Habit, Virtue, and Self-Limitation: [151:39–157:29]
• Modesty, Porn Definition, and Social Impact: [183:06–192:03]
• Future Plans: Geofencing, School Partnerships, Computer Version: [54:08, 123:15–124:43, 108:36–110:54]

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Episode Flow & Tone

Matt and Nick maintain a warm, candid, and deeply reflective tone—sharing personal anecdotes, philosophical explorations, and practical solutions. Nick’s irreverent humor (“I think all pornographers should be hung in the street.” [65:33]) tempers intense social criticism, while Matt acts as a grounding, realistic, and sometimes confessional host (“My favorite thing to do is to leave my, usually my computer and phone here, go home for the weekend, read books, hang out with my kids, smoke cigars, chill…” [36:57]).

Their back-and-forth, peppered with timestamps above, offers practical hope for listeners struggling with porn or tech addiction—without shaming or promising magic, but instead with realistic, hard-won insight.

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Useful Links & Resources

• Shift: shiftyourphone.com – One-time $99, distraction-blocking app for iOS
• Escape: escapefromporn.com – Free, permanent porn blocker
• Episode-specific references:
  • “Rat Park” experiment (addiction studies) [58:32–59:48]
  • Magdalene Ministries for women and porn (magdalaministries.org) [73:10]
  • Brian Holdsworth’s YouTube video on modesty [190:43]
• Contact:
  • Customer support links on Shift/Escape go directly to Nick and his small team [176:36]

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Summary Takeaways

• Professional accountability tech is mostly ineffective if the user can override it; permanent solutions like Escape change the game.
• Self-control must be supported by virtuous environments and practical boundaries—habituation, not willpower alone, builds freedom.
• Modesty and digital restraint are key for restoring healthy intimacy, leisure, and human flourishing.
• The real enemy is the society and tech ecosystem that turns attention, virtue, and sexual innocence into products; tools like Shift and Escape help reclaim those goods, but “rat park” (genuine community, meaning, leisure) must be restored for sustainable healing.

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“To become the type of person who actually wants what is good for him, sometimes you need someone else—someone who loves you—to set the boundaries until you can desire them yourself.”
— Synthesis of episode’s deepest insight

Transcript

[Matt Fradd]

Pints with Aquinas is brought to you by Truthly, which is a groundbreaking Catholic AI app built to help, you know, live and defend the Catholic faith. Start your 7 day free trial today when you download Truthly on the App store.

[Nick]

You know St. Anthony Desert Hermit, right? I don't know if you've heard the story that he was in the desert where hermits go, and the Queen of Shiva appeared to him naked to tempt him.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. I don't know about this. Yep.

[Nick]

And it's like, that sounds tough, but imagine being eight and having.

Having.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[Nick]

Yes. 4K sex acts.

[Matt Fradd]

500 women. 5 million women. Way hotter than the Queen of Sheba.

[Nick]

Probably. She's probably ugly.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know, maybe she was beautiful.

[Nick]

And I also think that the most violent political act that I can perform is to give away the solution to pornography.

I think that is the most vicious thing that I can do to people who hate me and who I hate in this world and want to see all of us in hell forever. They're drugs free. Okay? Solutions free. See who wins.

[Matt Fradd]

Hey, everybody. Before we get into today's interview, I want to tell you about my brand new book. It's called Jesus, Our Refuge. If you, like many people, and like all of us to one degree or another, have been seeking refuge in things other than Jesus Christ and have just found yourself increasingly weary, then this book is for you. This book is about taking Jesus seriously when he says, come to me, you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. It's getting great reviews and I know it will be a. A healing balm to your soul. Check it out. Jesus Our Refuge. You can get it right now on Amazon. Thanks. So Mike Pantille, a mutual friend, sends me like an Instagram direct message or something, which I never check, but happened to check this one day, and he said, my friend Nick has come up with this program that blocks distracting apps on your phone. And I thought, you know, like, good for him. That's. But I'm almost certain it doesn't work because I've tried every one of these things, right? And his. And he said, well, no, he thinks it definitely does. I'm like, of course he thinks that.

And he said, well, would you be interested in meeting with him? I'm like, sure, yeah. And so you. I forget why, where you were or whatever. You'd swung by the studio to show me this. I don't want to bury this, so I want to say it right up front. Shift. What's the URL?

[Nick]

Shiftyourphone.com Shift your phone, dot com.

[Matt Fradd]

And I was shocked that it worked, and it's been such a blessing to me and my family, so I'm really grateful to you. Yeah. So I know we're gonna get into all the details about this and why people should be interested, but just so people know, I mean, for years I've been talking about how I hate and love the Internet, how I need to leave Internet land to, like, dedicate my mind to study. Cause I can't seem to live in two worlds at once. But this blocks all distracting apps from your phone, and there are zero workarounds.

[Nick]

And.

[Matt Fradd]

And it's been a game changer for me, and I'm really grateful.

[Nick]

So, yeah, I remember you. I remember your reaction of like, yeah, but it probably doesn't. And that's the correct reaction.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. Hope it wasn't insulting.

[Nick]

Yeah, no, not at all. No, it feels good. It feels like we're doing the magic trick that we set out to do because, yeah, there's always a workaround except for shift.

[Matt Fradd]

So, yeah. So, yeah, we can get into this. Sure.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Why did you ever get into the business or why did you have the desire to create something? It would block distractions from your phone total.

[Nick]

So, yeah. I am a filmmaker by trade. Always wanted to be. I have no technical background whatsoever, never wrote a line of code, and.

By God's grace, was freed from a porn addiction for a couple of years.

Still while being, I would say.

Classical theist, but not in the church. I was raised Catholic, left the faith, was a vehement atheist, thought I was the smartest person in the room for several years. Can't imagine everybody consuming the opiate of the masses. That is religion.

You know, destroyed my. My life, my happiness, you know, very, very tragic.

Effects on my spirit. And I actually have the. The journal entry because I journaled for about 10 years, 2015 to 2025.

And I have the journal entry of, like, very shortly after I lost faith, the. The concept of without God, everything is permissible kind of came into my mind, and I had no defense against it. And immediately following that was born. Now I had. I had encountered pornography when I was 11 by accident.

That porn companies will buy up domains that are similar to domains that people tried to pursue. So I. I think I typed in YouTube the letter U tube instead of Y, O, U, and boom, there it is.

But it wasn't until years later, after I left the faith, that, you know, became an issue. But through, again, God's grace and I guess just some Natural virtues. I was able to kick that for a couple years, maybe two years, something like that. And one night I was going to bed and I just asked myself the question, what would I pay every month to remove self control from the equation regarding pornography? Because it was always part of the equation. Even with Covenant Eyes or Canopy or any of these services out there that I knew existed.

What would I do to remove self control from the equation? And I said, $30 a month because I'm cheap.

But that framing of the question I realized nobody had really asked before, how do I remove self control from the question of pornography? Because I never accepted, even while I was within the addiction, I never accepted.

It as reasonable. I was always. I was like, writing essays about. I was researching, like, addiction. I couldn't understand why this was such a problem beyond the fact that, like, obviously it's super.

Stimulating to dopamine. You know, people just throw around neurotransmitters like they mean, well. This has 100% increase in dopamine, therefore you are now a slave forever.

And I was just desperately trying to under for years trying to understand this. And the drug language around porn was obviously salient. Everybody was kind of using it. You know, your brain on porn did a lot of good work on that. The great porn experiment on It's a TED Talk. Gary Wilson, Great Porn Experiment.

And.

I thought, well, if it's true that this is a drug.

We'Re approaching this so stupidly, right? Because swap it out for a drug, say cocaine.

And you're telling people, I want you to bring a bag of cocaine with you and keep it in your pocket. I want you to have a pile of it sitting on your coffee table. I want you to have some on your bedside. And I want you to only watch movies about cocaine and then never do it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, right. Just be strong.

[Nick]

Just be strong enough.

[Matt Fradd]

Just reject the thought.

[Nick]

And I saw an Instagram reel of a priest saying.

The. The. If your eye causes you to sin, cut it out. He says, if you're watching porn on your phone, get rid of your phone. I'm like, yeah, if you drive to the liquor store, just get rid of your car.

[Matt Fradd]

Ah.

[Nick]

What are you doing? You're not help. You're not helping anybody here. And you're also demanding, not just this priest, but like the religious right, who has been for decades trying to address the porn question has been, in my opinion, unfairly.

Castigating the victims. I believe that to a large degree, porn consumers, at least at first, are victims.

And they're demanding saintly Levels of virtue.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa.

[Nick]

From essentially a crack baby. You come into this world addicted. Very nearly come into this world addicted to porn. I mean, 11, eight. Now it's eight. Eight year olds addicted to porn.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, seven or eight. That was before the Internet. So.

[Nick]

Yeah. Okay, so get that person in their most formative years, just barely escaping the age of reason, and give them. My friend Will told me about, you know, Saint Anthony Desert Hermit. Right. I don't know if you've heard the story that he was in the. In the desert where hermits go, and the Queen of Shiva appeared to him naked to tempt him.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, I don't know about this. Yep.

[Nick]

Yeah. And because he was like a.

A man against lust, that was sort of like his niche of holiness was to combat lust. And so the demons manifested the Queen of Shiva naked to him. And it's like, that's. That sounds tough, but imagine being eight and having.

Having.

[Matt Fradd]

Whoa. Yes.

[Nick]

4K sex acts.

[Matt Fradd]

500 women. 5 million women. Way hotter than the Queen of Sheba.

[Nick]

Probably. I don't know, maybe she was.

[Matt Fradd]

Teeth were definitely better today, you know, wow.

[Nick]

At 8 and you're in. You're telling that kid when he's 15.

Just be chaste, Put it down.

Say, all right, we're coming at this completely the wrong way.

And so, yeah, I was asking myself, what would I pay? What should one pay? Is there a way to just subtract self control from the equation? Is it even fair to ask of people self control? Like.

There was a recent conversation between Peter Hitchens and Matthew Perry from Friends. I don't know if you saw.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I did. Yeah.

[Nick]

I don't know how recent it was.

[Matt Fradd]

Because it's a while ago. Yeah.

[Nick]

Several years, I think passed from a drug overdose. And they were debating drugs and I think they were talking past each other pretty strongly. Matthew Perry said, this is an addiction. I can control the first drink, but I can't control the second. So I do all of these things to make sure that I don't have that first drink. Peter Hitchens in his lovely British accent is like, you know, you're full of it. You have, you have total control. Which I was surprised that a man who studied as, you know, the church, and I mean, he's an Anglican, but still is studying all this stuff as much as he did, didn't understand, like, yeah, grace builds on nature and like, virtues are habits and vices are habits. And like, you become more and less culpable the more you consume or perform certain vicious acts and so on. So, like free Will is not binary.

You don't have absolute freedom and then make every bad decision. This exists on a gradient. And they were just talking right past each other. Peter Hitchens is like, you know, jail drug dealers, jail those who do drugs. And Matthew Perry is like, I am a helper, helpless victim of a substance that has total power over me.

And I just thought, I think it's both, like, we're not St. Anthony. We don't have that level of virtue. And we're being tested in a vulnerable state beyond our capacities. And it's, I think, a masterful work of pride to get this narrative into our minds of like, just work harder. Just work a little bit harder. Just pray another rosary. Do another devotion to St. Joseph. Yes, do all of those things. But you're, you're standing in the shower with a towel, trying to dry off, like, why isn't this working? Whoa. So that's. That.

[Matt Fradd]

That is so helpful. Thank you for saying that. Because.

You know, we. Yeah, you really, I think, threaded the needle there between those of us who just cry victim and don't want to change our life. And then the recognition that, as you say, this crap was foist upon us when we were children. And not just once, but repeatedly, like before the time of the Internet. My best friend's mom is buying us porn videos to watch every weekend.

[Nick]

What a rude lady.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And then the Internet came in and it was good night. And so in saying how do we remove the self control, you're not saying how do we not grow in self control? But it's like, how do we take refuge so that we can grow in self control?

Or. No, no.

[Nick]

Yes, something like that. That's precisely what I'm saying because I think it's pride to pretend that you can build virtue in the midst of practicing vice. Like, there has to be an over compensatory mechanism. Right. I think Aristotle talks about this. You would know better than me that like, if you, if you're habituated in a vice, you have to over correct to the virtual.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Bend the stick back the other way more than you need to.

[Nick]

Yes. And. And that. Okay, if virtue is habit, if it's practiced behavior of the good and then the appetite follows later.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's usually the case, isn't it? I mean, I think of working out and eating right, you know, like our mate Mike Bantille, you know, like he's. He'd probably be the first to say, like, Well, I think we'd also. I wouldn't put it on Mike because I Don't know what he'd say, but I think I would say, and my wife would say, maybe you would. That like the kind of non food, the poison we've been fed since we were children. And then we wonder why we can't lose weight, why we can't get in shape, and why we're constantly sick. Yeah, it's like, well, some of this wasn't your choice.

[Nick]

You sent me that voice memo recently about.

Kind of how our relationship with technology is like eating McDonald's three times a day. And then we're just aghast at our inability to perform optimally in all areas of life.

So that was sort of the start of what I thought was a different way of looking at the problem, but not just in the philosophical or psychological sense of addiction, but also in the technological of if this is true. We are so confused about our approaches to this. So, for example, why are you subscribing to a porn blocker? Red flag number one to me. Are you solving the problem or are you renting the solution?

Now they might say, well, it's training wheels. Right? You want to get yourself to a point where I don't want training wheels. I don't want to ever have access to pornography. I get angry when it shows up on my Twitter feed. I get angry when I'm watching a movie and it hits me. Christ says we're supposed to flee from it, not combat it.

I don't want this as part of my life. So I don't want to rent the solution. I would like my devices to be void of that. I want them to no longer have the capacity to present images of sexuality and pornography on my device. Is that possible? These are questions I was asking. I was immediately told no.

[Matt Fradd]

And who did you ask?

[Nick]

I can't say. I can't say.

[Matt Fradd]

But many people who knew what they.

[Nick]

Were doing or one person who really thought they knew what they were doing. And then sort of the general consensus is what I was trying to ask of software required permissions. Required, not just permissions, but like access to a level of the software that I was told specifically Apple would not permit.

[Matt Fradd]

Right. That's what I've been told.

[Nick]

And I was like, well, I don't accept this. I don't think only evil people can have good ideas.

So that was. That was one thing I wanted. And then another was, I don't like accountability partners. That was confusing to me. I don't want my phone not naming which company does this, taking photos of my screen every couple of seconds, analyzing it with AI. And when it's something illicit, sending that to an accountability partner to then create this awkwardness and tension, I think.

That dissuades a lot of people from pursuing help.

[Matt Fradd]

You don't see any value in that?

I mean, you're not saying you don't see value in accountability, presumably? Or are you? I hope not.

[Nick]

I mean, I don't think we should be accountable. No, I think it's. It's the tail, not the dog, where you're trying to.

Create what structure should have been there.

On a very micro level. And you're putting this on an individual who. It's post hoc. Right. Hey, I just got a notification. It looks like you're looking at something.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Nick]

Sorry. Yeah, I fell. Please pray for me. I'm really tempted right now. Like, it's all post hoc. It's after the fact.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

I had accountability partners. Didn't do a damn thing.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, you would.

[Nick]

You would text them. I'm tempted. I'm struggling right now. Please pray for me. Turn off the phone. Go watch porn.

The way the mind works with addiction is when it's possible you will find a way. I think that's why cigarettes are so ubiquitous in terms of, like, what they describe as addictive substances. They're not particularly dopaminergic in comparison to other drugs. Even alcohol is more pleasurable than it's. I mean, personally, I love cigarettes. Still do after all these years.

But it's their accessibility.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

You buy a pack of 20, you got it whenever you want it. It's just. It's always there in the palm of your hand, just like a phone is. Alcohol's a little bit harder. You know, you can't drive and drink because we live in a prison planet.

[Matt Fradd]

North Korea.

[Nick]

What is this, nuts? You know, you can't walk around in the street and drink.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, right.

[Nick]

There's a lot more boundaries against this. Yeah, but it's. Accessibility permits addiction or at least permits compulsive use of a substance.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Yeah, I would think those. Have you heard of the three A's? Anonymity, affordability, and accessibility.

[Nick]

Perfect.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And porn is all three of those.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And to me, it's just like accountability partners are sort of admission of failure. Hey, man, I really want to drive to the liquor store and get some booze. Hey, man, don't do it, okay? But I have a car.

My car will start when I get in that car. I have money in my bank account. Means, motive, opportunity. Don't do it. Like you didn't solve the Problem.

[Matt Fradd]

So when you were using accountability software, did you find it helpful at all.

Or. Somewhat, but not nearly enough.

[Nick]

Well, I, by God's grace, was freed from pornography without any technical interventions.

I downloaded Covenant Eyes after to stress test. What are they doing? What's the competition doing? How hard is it for me to get around it? And.

It'S funny because.

Okay, it's like, these are a subscription model. 13 bucks, 17 bucks, whatever it is, per month.

And during that time, it's supposed to be very hard to delete. In fact, you have to call Covenant Eyes and give them a code and then they'll liberate it from your computer. And at the time, I wasn't tech savvy enough to know if that actually was like, if I could have done it myself. I bet I. There's a 50, 50 shot that a tech savvy person might be able to get around it. I don't know. This isn't like encouraging people to do that. It's just that when you can, you will.

And then it just struck me like yesterday. It's like, oh, just stop paying.

[Matt Fradd]

Stop.

[Nick]

Paying, stop paying for the subscription. Okay, Right. Because they're not gonna service you if you're not paying.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

So wouldn't it make sense for the service to deactivate, to stop being effective?

[Matt Fradd]

But that's not something you can do in the heat of the moment. Just stop paying?

[Nick]

No, but just sort of in perpetuity, you could.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I just. But I think that when people have a resolve to.

When people want to, as you say, look at pornography, they'll find a way. But they usually then regret it and have another burst of resolve shortly after.

[Nick]

But that I think is extremely damaging to a person. So self esteem, I think, is a relationship that you have with yourself that you will do what you say that you will do. And when you recruit the assistance of an organization, you say, please help me with this. I want to exchange my money for your service of helping me build my self esteem and not lie to my inner child, that after I hit rock bottom, I'm feeling so ashamed of myself. And I say, never again. And in that moment, I subscribe to this service. If I can get around it. You just assisted me in betraying myself again.

[Matt Fradd]

How is that different to shift? Aren't I renting your services to not betray myself?

[Nick]

We, well.

Escape is not a subscription.

[Matt Fradd]

Say what that is.

[Nick]

Escape is the name of the porn blocker. So we kind of jumping ahead to what I ended up developing, which is Escape. That's the porn Blocker.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Escape is and always will be free. When's it available, the viewers watching this can download it. Come on. It is and always will be free.

[Matt Fradd]

What's the URL ESC.

[Nick]

Escapeescfromporn.com okay, I don't want.

[Matt Fradd]

I know you want to get to that. Sure. So I don't mean to make you.

[Nick]

No, no, that's what.

[Matt Fradd]

I can't wait to talk about what you've developed here. But okay, so would you want to address that though? Because that seems like you're throwing stones in a glass house a little bit like you're saying to Covenant Eyes, I don't want to rent from you. Doesn't that somehow take something away from me? But how is what you're doing any different?

[Nick]

Because it's permanent and you don't pay for it.

[Matt Fradd]

And it works.

[Nick]

And it works. Okay, cool. Tada.

And look, I don't condemn, by the way, any of the efforts. I don't think it's immoral to charge for a porn blocker.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Nick]

I'm a greedy capitalist.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

I think it's totally fine to service a need.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And it costs a ton of money to develop these sorts of things.

[Nick]

Not only develop, but to run. You are, you are parsing crazy data that's going from the Internet to the device you're filtering through. That's what it is, it's a filter. So you need to be aware of the content that's coming in and then you need to be discerning about the content that's coming in. All of this requires compute. All of this requires services, space. All of that is expensive. And the more users you have, the more expensive it is. So it makes total sense to me that somebody would pay for this. I think there's ways to accomplish that without having to pay for it. And I also think that the most violent political act that I can perform is to give away the solution to pornography.

I think that is the. That is the most vicious thing that I can do to the people who hate me and who I hate in this world and want to see all of us in hell forever, their drugs free. Okay. Solutions free. See who wins.

[Matt Fradd]

I think it's really important that we jump ahead and talk about how this porn blocker works, because everyone's on the edge of their seat, I think, at this point. But like, what is this thing? Okay, well, and then we can circle back if you want.

[Nick]

But sure. I mean, I'll tell you what it isn't. And because it's proprietary, thankfully, when we started this.

We looked at the available tech, and there's a reason why it hasn't been done yet. And as far as I'm aware, it hasn't been done yet. And I've been told by people now, three years later into development, that, no, nobody's done this yet.

And so normally, to achieve what we achieve, you would have to completely factory reset your phone, so you'd be starting with a brand new phone. And I'm speaking exclusively about iOS right now. We do service Androids, but that's sort of a different discussion because they're much less persnickety than Apple.

So normally, to impose something like mobile device management or supervision on a device, you would have to wipe the phone. You couldn't bring your own device. If you did, it would be wiped. And the main problem, and this is speaking holistically about the objection, I guess this is a good connection back to what we were just talking about. The things that I was considering three years ago at the start of this is the user is always the administrator. Which is a fancy technical way of saying, if you want to stop it, you can. You will find a way. Until we came along, because companies, for some reason, respect their customers. I'm kidding. But like, they. They want to honor changes of mind. Well, I don't want to pay for this anymore. Well, but. But I need this one particular thing over here. It's kind of inconvenient now. I had somebody tell us this is Shift. This wasn't Escape, but the Rehab mode on Shift, which I'm sure we'll talk about, is making it more tempting for me.

To watch porn, they said, but not having access to it is actually. They were trying to get us to release the Rehab, which we wouldn't do.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

They're saying not. Not having this. You know, my brain's trying to find a way to go get the. Please just let me go. Just let me go. And companies, because they're so deferent to the customer, which is, in my opinion, a philosophical failing about how to serve people in a marketplace, say, oh, okay, yeah. So with Escape, the user is not the administrator. When Escape is applied to an iPhone, it is permanent. It cannot be removed. Your phone cannot be factory reset, and you will forever on that device.

Be unable to access pornographic or sexual content.

[Matt Fradd]

Real quick for the people at home. So Shift is for distractions.

Escape will block pornography on your phone forever. There's absolutely no way around it unless you go buy a new device. Okay. So just, I wanted to make sure we.

[Nick]

If you buy a new device. My understanding, nobody's done this yet because it's new, but my understanding is if you buy a new device and you try to transfer all of your content and data, it will. It will not let you do so unless that supervision applies to the new device.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. Wow. But I just want those two things I want people to be aware of is Shift and Escape. So we're going to throw those words around a lot and I want people to know what we're talking about.

[Nick]

Yeah, well, just think. I mean, they're keys on the keyboard, right? Shift, you're going to have a shift in your modality every day. And Escape, boom, you're gone, you're out of there.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

You are no longer bound by this thing. And yeah, Escape is mediated through the desktop application that is Shift. We should probably mention that these exist on the computer and they interface with your phone. And once it's applied, nobody has to pay for Escape. And you're not obligated to buy Shift in order to have Escape. It is a gratis, forever. Everybody gets Escape.

[Matt Fradd]

Have you done it on your phone?

[Nick]

Escape?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nick]

The early. The beta versions.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Nick]

I think I actually sent you two screenshots of what happens when you search on Instagram. Do you remember this?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes. Tell people about that because that's what's shocking to me.

[Nick]

So we actually developed a way to filter third party apps, which is bananas, pretty tough.

[Matt Fradd]

So hard. Covenant Eyes can't do that.

[Nick]

Canopy can. I don't know if Covenant Eyes does.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, maybe things have developed since I.

[Nick]

Used to be there. Yeah, I mean, it's not like ground. I shouldn't say. We developed, we implemented a solution to this. And that's another thing, too. Part of. There's 15 reasons why I've decided to make Escape free. One of them is that.

It'S sort of penicillin. Like, we've known about it for a long time. DNS is old, VPNs are old. Internet filtration, it's as old as the Internet is. And metadata is old. Like, what is this thing that's being sent on the Internet? Do we know what it is? What are the contents of this webpage? Can we become aware of it and be selective about what goes to a device or doesn't go to a device? It's all old.

And it's not hard. So I don't take pride in filtering porn. I take pride in how we've administered the solution and the protections that we've implemented that other people haven't and maybe that's sort of the general philosophy behind Shift and Escape. But porn blocking is not really hard.

So the.

The way that we solve the third party app thing on the phone allows us to. If you're on Instagram, if you're on Twitter or Snapchat or Reddit, you can't search for porn on those apps either. It's not just the browser on the phone.

[Matt Fradd]

That's wild. That's great. That's really cool.

[Nick]

You can't even search on Siri.

[Matt Fradd]

Really? Yeah. You sent me those two screenshots on Instagram and I forget what you typed in, but I think you showed me when you typed something.

[Nick]

I just typed in porn.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And nothing came up.

[Nick]

Well, yeah. So you type in porn on Instagram and you're going to get accounts either onlyfans models or porn stars or accounts that have some variation of the word pornography in order to all active, all full of porn. And then with Escape on the same thing, it's like there's no, no results for your, you know, whatever. Wow.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. I want to tell you about Hallow, which is the number one downloaded prayer app in the world. It's outstanding. Hallowed.com Matt Frad sign up over there right now and you will get the first three months for free. That's like a lot of time. You can decide whether it's useful to you or not, whether it's helpful. If you don't like it, you can always quit. Hallow.com Matt Frad I use it. My family uses it. It's fantastic. There are over 10,000 audio guided prayers, meditations and music, including my lo fi. Hallow has been downloaded over 15 million times in 150 different countries. It helps you pray, helps you meditate, helps you sleep better. It helps you build a daily and a habit of prayer. There's honestly so much excellent stuff on this app that it's difficult to get through it all. Just go check it out. Hallow.com mattfrad the link is in the description below. It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little bible stories to them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com Matt Frad this reminds me of the time we homeschool our kids. But back in the day my wife was struggling with health and so we put one of our children in this school for a little bit and I. That was what I was terribly concerned about, right, is my kids seeing porn. So I'm like, so how good are your filters? I'm walking down the hallway typing in all sorts of insane, obscene things on my phone. On their WI fi.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And my wife didn't blink. She's like, good, keep going. But I think the principal.

The principal.

[Nick]

Was a little horrified and their IT guy said like, what is happening here? Are you seeing these logs? Yeah. Well, the benefit of this approach as well is it's not constrained to WI fi. It's network traffic simplicitaire. So you don't have to be on a router, you don't have to be on a WI FI network. If you were to impose this on a router or a WI fi network or something, and then the kid just turns off WI fi on their phone or you do as an individual. I mean, I'm trying to service everybody as well, the individuals. Then you could just get around that. You can't vp. That's another thing. You can't VPN around Escape for people who know about VPNs. You cannot implement a VPN to get around Escape either.

[Matt Fradd]

So you're telling me get a phone, download Escape for free? Yes, it'll always be for free. And I can't look at porn on this phone anymore.

[Nick]

Or your iPad. Yeah, because we service iPads too. And 2026.

[Matt Fradd]

And if I call you and go, hey, listen, what if. Just hear me out. You won't. You can't. You don't get. Yeah, I mean that. I mean, have you thought about the legality there? Are there people. Is there a way that you could get in trouble by denying customers what they want?

[Nick]

Well, I mean, they're not customers. They're paying. They're not paying.

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[Nick]

Yeah, it's free and we've got all the terms and conditions. Okay, good. But the thing is with terms and conditions and we could talk about privacy later.

You know, like we wrote them. This wasn't a lawyer writing them 50,000 pages that you're not reading. It's not chatgpt writing them. Like, we understand how our software works when it's on your phone. You can go into VPN and device management and you can look at what we're asking for and you can validate. Is what Nick said about what they're asking for from my device. True. And am I okay with this? And then you can compare. Like, here's what Apple says about what they're asking for. You know, we can't access your photos. Other companies do, by the way. We can't access your text messages. We can't change your passcode. We can't wipe your phone. We don't know what. Besides like, browser traffic, Internet traffic that's going to and from your phone. You know, we don't have access to these things.

So, yeah, people can validate. Are we. It's not. You don't just have to take our word for it.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, I just wonder, though, what's going to happen when this becomes big and there are a lot of people who would like their porn back. Please.

[Nick]

Sorry, I can't hear you. Excuse me.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, is it just a. Is there a spam account that all these emails are going to get filed into when they start writing to you?

[Nick]

And.

[Matt Fradd]

And maybe a more serious question is, have you. Will it accidentally block things it shouldn't block? And then what are you going to do?

[Nick]

No, because it's a living document. That's not. It's not a document, but it is a living service. So we are getting customer feedback and implementing it as well as working on it ourselves all the time. So learning, in a way, it's learning. That's probably a better way to put it is. It's learning. So if somebody's like, hey, I'm trying to like, scan a QR code to get like a restaurant menu and it's blocking this. Like, all right, just give us three minutes. Like, okay, now it's good. Now you're free. And because, you know, you're trying to categorize the entire Internet. Yeah, but it's easier to say I don't want to see porn than it is to say, let's filter the entire Internet through a bunch of different lenses, like distractions, which is where shift. We block browsers.

Except specifically requested URLs for whitelist. So, like, if somebody needs a two factor authentication for work, that's available, but what's not available is your ability to go on Google.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, my goodness. Guys, everyone watching this, please go get shift. It has been a game changer for me. I know I said this at the beginning. I want to keep saying it. I mean, my favorite thing to do is to leave my, usually my computer and phone here, go home for the weekend, read books, hang out with my kids, smoke cigars, chill, walk around the block with my wife, but when I go home with my phone, it's just like this thing that's always beckoning me. And I think, I don't think I'm worse than other people. I think I'm more aware of it than other people. Yeah, I know that sounds arrogant, but I don't think it is. I look at other people tell me they don't have a problem, and I'm like, you definitely have a problem. I don't know. I think I'm just more sensitive to the fact that I have a problem.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

But my point is, these last few weekends, I shift my phone.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And I go home with my phone. And so now on my phone, I have text messages and I have email. And that. That's not a distraction for me. But what I could do before I shift my phone is I could delete email if I wanted and then shift my phone. And now I'm going home just with text messages and phone calls and maps and Uber. And I have my bank accounts, which is just like I've talked about these.

What do I call them? These ideological benders. I go on where I go and buy this dumb phone for like a thousand, not usually that much, but 500 bucks, and then I realize, oh, my gosh, it's just very difficult to live in the modern world without this phone. And I also run a YouTube channel, and I need two factor authentication. And they don't always email you. You sometimes need to scan a QR code. So the point is this, personally, for me, has. And just so everybody knows real clear, you're not paying me to advertise you. And I don't.

[Nick]

I've tried.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Well, I'm not taking a cent to do this.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So when I'm pushing this on everyone watching, it's only because I have benefited from it greatly. Sorry.

[Nick]

No, no. So SHIFT was the accident.

[Matt Fradd]

Ha. So this began as just a porn block.

[Nick]

That's it. But in order to develop the degrees of control that we needed to block porn in the ways that I set up wanting to do to sol the glaring issues, the Achilles heels that I saw in the other services to truly solve the problem once and for all, that led us down a rabbit hole of development where there were no developer docs. You couldn't go on like developer.apple.com and read what they say, well, if you're trying to do this, use this code. We wrote this thing from the ground up. We were testing SHIFT originally. Took an hour and a half to get onto your phone. You know, there have been so many iterations to get to this point.

So SHIFT was the accident. But I had never sold software before. I had never developed software before. I didn't know what I was doing. And I thought, well, let me try to sell Shift first. Learn all the things that I don't know, and then release Escape.

[Matt Fradd]

And to be clear, for people at home, Shift is a one time purchase.

[Nick]

Of $99, which is a subscription, which.

[Matt Fradd]

Is so nice because we're all so sick of these subscriptions that are just draining bank account. So just to have like one payment, which I paid, and then it's like, oh, I think you gave it to me for free. And then it's done. But 99 bucks, that's incredible.

[Nick]

Yeah, well, so a new light phone is 699 wise phone is 399. Subscriptions to things like Opal is 100 bucks a year. Lifetime subscription to Opal is $400.

[Matt Fradd]

And just so we're clear, Opal doesn't work.

[Nick]

Well, neither does Brick, which was the next one I was going to mention. So there was a new.

Scene that arose of. They're called NFC tokens. And NFC tokens, it's similar to rfid. You tap it to the back of your phone and it interfaces with the phone in a very particular way. And so there have been these 3D printed bricks or cards called block. And then there was Bloom, which was like a titanium card or whatever. And they'd have a little NFC token in it. And when you tapped it on your phone, it would engage the screen time the Apple native in your settings. Screen time features to limit stuff. And so their advertisement is this is a physical distraction. You're going to set up your configuration, which I also think is a problem. Oh, Instagram's not a problem for me. I just need to block Twitter. Yeah. And when you don't have Twitter, what are you going to be on? Right, right. So the user gets to decide what's distracting for them. They codify that. They tap it to the brick and it will block it. And unless you tap it back, your phone is restricted. There's a litany of issues with this. First of all, Brick Block, Bloom can fit in your pocket. It's pretty hard to fit a laptop in your pocket.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

So you can just take it with you. Tap it, undo.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. And are there other workarounds? Like I remember I got Opal. I was the biggest, like advertiser of opal for like 20 minutes. You know, I was telling everybody about it, how great the app was, and then I realized, oh, you can just go into settings and click one button and it's not working anymore. Why did I spend money on this stupid thing?

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

And then this Catholic fella comes along. He's like, I figured it out, don't worry about it. How is that possible?

[Nick]

Yeah, so they, they, I don't know. How they get away with saying this, that there's no workaround. They say in their ads, well, I don't know about Opal, but Block does on their website. No workarounds. I think Brick in their messaging says.

[Matt Fradd]

You get the sense that this is.

[Nick]

A physical thing between you and that, and you just leave it at home. Again, the user is the administrator. And so in screen time settings, the same API, the same request that Brick makes to the device is the same thing that you, because you are the owner of the device, has permission to disable and then delete the application. So security conscious people might be saying, so are you saying I'm no longer the owner of my device when I use Shift or escape? Kind of.

[Matt Fradd]

This reminds me. Henry Ford said, if I had have asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse. In other words, shut up, customer. You have no idea what you want. I know what you want. I love that you've taken this.

[Nick]

You have to. And guess what? We get pushback. Okay, I won't convince everybody. People buy Shift. They might not read the privacy policy. They might not read the FAQs. They get through the enrollment process. So they're going through the enrollment process and they go, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're going to own my phone? No. Apple makes us say this, but there is a transfer of the keys to two parties. Your laptop and my company.

And your alternatives are you can turn the thing off whenever you want, or you share the permission with your laptop and with this company that has pledged to uphold what your stated goals are, and we will work together to protect you in perpetuity.

So.

Yes, you can disable brick block, bloom, all these things, but you might say, well, I can just go back to my computer and disable it. And so we have something called focus sessions. 30, 60, 90 minutes. Then we have schedules, then we have holidays, and then we have rehab.

How hard was it to get out of rehab when you actually put it on?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I mean, that's a different thing because I had to call you up.

[Nick]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

Most people don't know you personally. They just shift, and then they're screwed.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So, okay, so just so people. I can answer that question just so people know. So you download the Shift application to your desktop on your laptop or what have you. Then from there you connect it to your phone and. Or iPad. And then only from your laptop can you shift or unshift your phone.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

So this is why I left my laptop here. I drive home and I'm out of Luck. There's nothing I can do about it.

[Nick]

You also one day clicked rehab, not thinking it was gonna work.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, so I clicked. So just so people know. So rehab is what? Just say it real quick.

[Nick]

30 days and you.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's it. You can't get out of it.

[Nick]

You cannot get out of it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes, I clicked it. And maybe, I don't know, maybe I lied to you. Maybe I bent the truth. Maybe I did mean to do it and then regretted my whole life.

[Nick]

Oh, no.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Forgive me if I did that. I remember. Sounds like something I would do.

[Nick]

I remember your voicemail. You said, what? Theoretically. What if somebody had accidentally clicked? Maybe.

[Matt Fradd]

See how I got around that lie?

[Nick]

Not thinking that it would work. What would you do then?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, so there was zero way to get around it. But of course I know you personally. So then we get on the phone, call with you, you and some tech guy, and then for 20 minutes I'm typing code into my computer, terrified. I was about to blow my computer up.

[Nick]

Yeah, well, and to those hackers, those smarty pants is out there who think then that they could just come up with the code. That's actually not how it works. The reason why we were able to liberate yours was because we had the administrative permission on your device. So my point being is that just cause you have your computer does not mean you can unshift your phone if you have selected. So for example, my shift starts at 8pm Yep. I'm a family man now. Gotta get off the phone. 10:00am it unshifts. Because if it's 6:00am, I ain't praying.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah. Or it's hot.

[Nick]

I, I, I feet hit the ground. I'm on social media if my phone's not shifted.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. A lot of people are like that.

[Nick]

I'm not above. I'm not pretending to have saintly virtue.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm not too good for that. I'm not too good to be on Twitter before my feet hit the ground. Yeah.

[Nick]

I mean, let's be honest, a lot of times it's in bed, you know, just check the notifications.

[Matt Fradd]

Right, exactly.

[Nick]

So we solved the administrative issue. That and Opal. It's funny, I saw in 2024, I think November 2024, there's like a forum, an Opal forum. And this one guy's comment stands out to me to this day. Says.

They have to figure out a way to stop us from getting around this. I feel like an idiot paying for this app.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And they said that they solved it. And the irony was they solved it via the shortcuts widget within. Are you familiar with this?

[Matt Fradd]

I was on there for that 20 minutes. I was an Opal fan.

[Nick]

Oh, hilarious. You tried to.

[Matt Fradd]

I couldn't even figure it out, but yeah.

[Nick]

Right. Well, it's 15 steps to just follow these simple 400 steps to manually create a shortcut that, like, redirects you. When you try to go to the spot that you can disable, you just kick the can down the road. Right. So just delete that shortcut.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Nick]

And now you're free to delete Opal.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

So again, it's sort of like the security conscious people. I think that privacy, this concept of privacy is. I want. I want to be kind. I want to be kind to people who. Who care, but I really think it's misplaced. I don't think the concept of privacy is misplaced. I think how it's being leveraged is misplaced. When you have an iPhone. First of all, single greatest surveillance technology on the planet. Next to a Huawei phone. Huawei phones are even worse.

[Matt Fradd]

What phones?

[Nick]

Huawei. It's a Chinese phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, okay. Can you tell me why this is the case?

[Nick]

Yeah.

Let's take TikTok as an example. So with TikTok, when you.

Accept the terms and conditions.

There are thousands of pages of. Yeah, I agree. Whatever.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I've never read one of those things in my life.

[Nick]

Of course not, never will.

People don't understand that they are agreeing to send hundreds of thousands of packets of information off their device to TikTok, whoever owns it. It was China, now it's Israel, to their servers with complete, unfettered access. So you're giving them access to not just your photos because it'll ask you for. If you want to upload something, for example, would you like to allow some permission, all permission to your photos?

[Matt Fradd]

Everyone's like, yes, it's all permission.

[Nick]

Yes, everything. You want to have dinner with us tonight? And then there's also.

Microphone access, there's camera access. Well, of course, because you want to take a TikTok, right? You want to film a TikTok.

But what about when you're not in the application?

[Matt Fradd]

Do you have that option to choose only in the application or not?

[Nick]

That's typically location services, tracking the location, not microphone. Well, microphone you can choose to not turn on. But it gets more sinister than this, because just having TikTok on your phone there is, in my understanding, through my research, you know, somebody might fact check me on this. But as far as I can tell, TikTok Instagram, specifically.

24.7Microphone and video camera access. Meta actually was sued because. Have you ever. So you do face unlock on your phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Have you ever not been looking at it, but the moment your eyes move to the screen, it unlocks. There's a setting, some attention, something. I can't remember what scope the word attention is in it. You can see it in the face lock settings. In iOS.

There is an infrared camera on the top of your phone that if you were to peel the infrared filter off of any one of these cameras here, we could see this live your phone. And three times a second is taking a picture of your face. And this is why when you scan into your phone, you do this.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, Right.

[Nick]

So it's that, like, kind of no matter what angle you're at, you can unlock your phone, but then there's this attention setting where maybe you don't want your phone to accidentally unlock there. So it's waiting for the cat's eyes rebound of the infrared light on the back of your eye and it sees it right there. Well, Meta goes, oh, cool. So I know where you're looking. Right.

So when you're scrolling on Instagram, I know where your eyes are.

[Matt Fradd]

Gosh.

[Nick]

It's called a heat map, so I know what you're attending to.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, my gosh. How did I not know this? I feel like an idiot for not realizing they must have that technology. But that's. That's wild.

[Nick]

And so. So I run Meta ads now. I'm just learning the whole terrifying world of how do I. Yeah, solicit to every human on the planet?

And there's this ephemeral concept of the algorithm. Just let the algorithm give it money. It'll find your customers. Because your credit card information, your IP address, your email address and your geographic location are associated to you as a person. And every bit and byte of information that you experience on the Internet is associated with that. And that is.

Parsed by the algorithm by huge data centers, so that when you mention something in the vicinity of your phone, you will get an ad for that. Five years ago, seven years ago, that was kooky. Nobody believed that. Now it happens all the time. Well, how does it happen? How does it happen if these apps are sandboxed? Allegedly, if they're constrained? Well, because you agreed to the terms and permissions when you downloaded Instagram, you agreed to the terms and permissions when you downloaded TikTok. So the front and rear facing camera are observing your surroundings, and it's listening to you 24 7. And it has access to your SMS text messages, your imessages. Promise you that. I promise you that. When I was before I searched the Internet for an engagement ring, I texted one friend Twitter the next day, engagement ring ads.

So it's either the text messages or the conversations that I'm having around it. Even though I wasn't saying this out loud.

All of these things are working together to create a profile on YouTube to make a better customer out of you, to target you. All of that stops when you shift your phone.

Because we don't block the apps. The apps aren't on your phone anymore. So people say, okay, you just blocked it. Right. So I can go into my app library and it'll no the phone. The apps are not on your phone anymore. The packets of information cease transmitting data elsewhere. But they come and ask us, hey, where's my data going? Where's my privacy? It's like you're barking up the wrong tree here.

Your phone has never been less porous than when you have shift on your phone activated.

[Matt Fradd]

So what do you say to those who have security questions for you or privacy questions for you?

[Nick]

I mean, we have a privacy. I get on the phone with them.

Try doing that with Mark Zuckerberg.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, but I mean, you're probably going to be doing that for about three more days because this thing is and should blow up. From what I can tell, it is.

[Nick]

Hard to keep up, but it's important to keep up. And so when. I mean, please don't text us unless you have a problem. But if you have a problem, you text us. And what you get is either me, our very intelligent developer, or our support guy.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, you're gonna need more people real quick, I think.

[Nick]

But I would rather scale that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Than ever kick someone over to thank you for opening a ticket with supporthift.com we will get back to you in three to five business days.

People call me, people text me, or they text the other two gentlemen. And I will keep building that because I need to.

Not just do the tech different. I think people's experience of tech needs to be different.

Of tech services, of software as a service.

[Matt Fradd]

So what do you see on people's phones? Like what's. Tell me about the privacy. Make people comfortable who are terrified to shift or escape their phone, wondering what it is.

[Nick]

Well, I'll put it to you this way.

I'll be specific first with. There's a feature of geofences which is coming out soon. So you could pick, for example, your home, you could geofence. You just Select Geofence. Your home. As you walk in, your phone shifts automatically.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

You could do that with your kids phones or whoever.

[Matt Fradd]

I saw that. I wasn't sure what it meant. Thanks.

[Nick]

Yeah, it's coming out soon.

So for that you voluntarily give us location data. And that's asking are you in the geofence or are you out of the geofence?

So. Okay, that's optional. Don't have to give us location data. If somebody hacked our company, they would, they would get your email. So when, when there's a data breach. I don't know if you've ever gotten these emails, you know. Oh, sorry. This company that you've Rocket Mortgage has just been hacked and we lost everything. You know, 600 million passwords and usernames and email addresses and.

Maybe your Social Security number. Right. If you're doing hard credit pulls.

[Matt Fradd]

Yep.

[Nick]

On stuff.

Well, we use Stripe, so we don't have your credit card information and we don't even have a login. It's. It's an email and a license key. So if they hacked our servers.

They would get your email. Okay, so you might get like a spam email from.

[Matt Fradd]

Do you see, can you see what people are doing on their devices?

[Nick]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, so it's not like.

[Nick]

Well, with, with Escape, there's the.

When you filter the Internet, yes, you do see network traffic. That's how you filter the Internet. So with Escape, yes. Shift, no. With Escape, you have to ingest everything that's going to the person's phone and pass it through the vpn. Pass it through the DNS first and say, is this a good site or a bad site? Kick it either way. But when you're talking like, we don't have time to like, you know, read, oh, wow, this guy's on Reddit or whatever.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

And you know, we don't see.

You can't access bank information through this. And again, I encourage anybody who's skeptical about this sort of privacy thing. I understand you don't have, you don't have to use this, but what I'm describing is extremely old. Like, Internet filtering for pornography is very old. We're not using a new method of that. So like, if you're, if you're. Okay, okay. For example, NordVPN. Yeah, NordVPN gets all your data too. Actually, they just sell it. VPNs. They're a total scam. But.

Dashlane VPN, all these VPNs are parsing Internet traffic as well. It's like how it works. But again, what Kind of blows my mind is 2008, Edward Snowden's like, hey, guys, the NSA. The NSA is spying on all of you. And everyone's like, what's for lunch?

Who cares? This isn't.

We willingly give our information to the egregore who hates us.

And we're coming along using a thousandth of the ability to try to offer a service that would actually protect you against the pernicious aspects of this. And then when we get questions about privacy, I'm like, I mean, I'll talk to you on the phone. You can read our privacy policy, and you don't have to use the service. But, like, you're barking up the wrong tree here.

[Matt Fradd]

So how come you figured this out?

How were you able to create something that opal and brick and.

[Nick]

Do you want a corny answer?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

So I've been a close up magician for 21 years. Okay. And.

A very good card magician named Danny Dortiz has a philosophy about how to do magic. He says, start with the miracle.

Don't. Don't care about how you're gonna do it. Start with the miracle. What do you want to see happen? They pick a card, they write their signature on it, and then it appears in their shoe. That's what you want to have happen.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Okay. Now. Now go study. How are you gonna make it happen? Go talk to other magicians. Go read books, Come up with some stuff on your own, then figure out how to do the miracle I wanted. You push a button, porn's gone, you push a button, distractions are gone, and that's it. And I just fought for that magic trick, and people react that way. You literally said it in the video. You said, it's magic. Like, that's what I want people to experience.

[Matt Fradd]

It's like, whoa.

[Nick]

Because I think that's what Steve Jobs did.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

I don't hate phones. I don't hate the Internet. I don't hate social media. I don't think any of those things are the problem.

[Matt Fradd]

What's the problem?

[Nick]

You ever heard of Rat Park?

[Matt Fradd]

You? Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Is this the lever?

[Nick]

Yeah. Water.

[Matt Fradd]

Tell me what it is, because I don't think I know what it is.

[Nick]

It's in the 90s.

Late 80s, I think.

Scientists last name Alexander did a study because the. The addiction studies that had been done up to this point using mice and rats. Yes. Were typically solitary mice in a cage. And so they would give them, like, a water bottle full of water and a water bottle full of sweetened morphine because of the taste of morphine is pretty bad and all the mice would just overdose. And this Alexander guy, he was like, well, maybe it's because they hate their lives. I mean, that's not how he approached it. But he's like, perhaps there are environmental conditions. And so he built cages that were 200 times bigger and filled it with things that rats, like tunnels and other rats so that they could socialize with them. You know, the lighting environment's different.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[Nick]

They were 19 times less likely to even consume the drug. They just preferred water.

So.

I believe that shift is not the solution. Shift is 50% of the solution and it reveals 100% of the problem, which is we live in hell.

Our existence is intolerable. There's. I mean, not to get like doomer on you, but like, it's.

Why would you stop scrolling? Seriously, what do you have to live for? Not you, Matt. You have a lot to live for. But like the kid who saw porn at 8 and has been addicted for 7 years.

And the value of the dollar is 1/3 of what it was. And he lives in a world that hates him. And anything good that he would ever pursue this world wants him to not have that, like, actual objective good.

Why would he ever stop scrolling?

No reason to.

[Matt Fradd]

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[Nick]

And this is what's so insidious about the ability to delete a screen time blocker or delete a porn blocker or stop paying for it. The moment that you start to get that withdrawal that you're just like sitting in quiet and you're like, wow, I kind of hate everything about my life.

There's no beautiful places in nature to walk around in. I don't want to get a degree to get a job that I hate.

I kind of don't have friends. One in five millennials don't have any friends.

I've spent the last 3100 hours per year of my life looking at other people's lives on Instagram.

And I kind of don't measure up to any of this stuff.

I guess I'll just sit here and keep scrolling. And the moment you feel that pain, if a company lets you go back on that, you'll never leave. You'll never leave the Matrix if it lets you.

[Matt Fradd]

Say that again. When you feel the pain.

[Nick]

Yeah, that's when you feel the pain. That's your first bit of awareness that you live in hell. And you have two options. You sleepwalk toward Armageddon.

Or you try to do something about it. And those are our two options. So if an 18 year old lives to 75, they'll spend 19 years looking at their phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Holy crap. What? Say that again, sorry.

[Nick]

If an 18 year old today, they just got a phone today, by the way, disregarding the fact that they get phones in fourth grade, third grade, second grade, forget the first 10 years of their life.

From 18 to 75, they spend an average of eight and a half hours a day on their phone. A third of their Life. So by 75, they'll spend about 19 years looking at their phone. 3,100 hours a year, five and a half hours a day of which is typically social media. The other three hours is going to be online shopping, pornography, YouTube videos.

Now, every year that passes, you didn't dedicate time to creating a life of any kind of meaning whatsoever. And so it gets harder and harder to find a reason to stop scrolling, to stop watching Netflix.

Why would you.

So if you're going to offer somebody a way out, you have to do two things and you have to be very certain about them first. You can't let them go back.

Because it'll break their heart. It will destroy their inner child. Because they weren't parented, right? Their parents didn't protect them from porn. I was talking to a lady a couple years ago. This is one of the most disgusting things I've ever heard. It's not explicit. It was just disgusting. Her son was 17.

And she was in her late 40s, divorced.

And I had. I had had the idea for escape and I was trying to workshop it with somebody at this gathering.

Her son's right there. And I bring up something about porn. She's, like, kind of tipsy on a glass of wine. She goes, oh, he's been watching porn since he was 11.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you. I would have struggled to not push her over.

[Nick]

That's why I see escape as violent.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, explain that. I love how you're saying it, but just so people in the back understand what you mean.

[Nick]

I don't want to be a criminal in God's eyes or man's.

And what my passions would want me. I mean, like, I think. I think all pornographers should be hung in the street. I think the fathers of pornographers, the fathers of OnlyFans models, should be incarcerated for life.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I don't agree with that. I mean, a father can't control his daughter's decisions.

[Nick]

I think a father can form her and love her.

[Matt Fradd]

Sure. And maybe some of them have. I agree with you about neglect and what that can lead to.

[Nick]

Yeah.

But the violent aspect is.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm with you on pornographers. If not hung in the streets, at least locked up forever.

[Nick]

Yeah. Why don't you think that fathers should be incarcerated for. If their daughter.

Is forging an ID so that she can get on OnlyFans at age 13, how much neglect must be there?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, that's a different thing than you said earlier. I mean, earlier I got the impression that you're talking about someone choosing to destroy their life at the age of 20 or 25 by going on OnlyFans.

[Nick]

No, I mean.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, we all know good parents whose children decide to be disgusting. And we also know.

[Nick]

Is that. Is that cope?

[Matt Fradd]

No, I don't think it's cope.

[Nick]

I don't think.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I think Adam and Eve.

[Nick]

For 15 minutes, I think Adam and.

[Matt Fradd]

Eve had the perfect parent and decided to destroy the world. Yeah. So I just think it can be more complicated. I agree. You know, I think I could agree with you at some point.

Well, but then the other thing is. So. Yeah, so that's my statement. No, I think the parents can be neglectful and could be held responsible. But.

A daughter could have a good father and choose to destroy her life and that not be the father's fault, I think.

[Nick]

Don't you think I struggle to figure out how?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, No, I. Well, that's my opinion, but.

[Nick]

Well, don't worry, I have zero political influence.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, but. But I am increasingly the opinion that. Well, I mean, I've been of this opinion for a long time that pornography destroys people's. Lives and families. And I do not understand those who would say we shouldn't criminalize it. Right.

[Nick]

Well, and that's another aspect of my phrasing of this being a violent political act to release escape for free.

Because.

I don't have political power in the system. I also believe in subsidiarity. And so I'm not trying to lobby for. I mean, maybe it should, maybe it shouldn't. That's a question for smarter people who actually have college degrees to answer. Whether or not that should be illegal and why it was made legal with the Obergefell decision and the separation of churches, all that stuff. People smarter than me understand that what I can do is make a zero friction solution that does aggress pornographers. It aggresses their bottom line.

Because I think there's very, very few people who experience shame who don't. I'm sorry, who do not experience shame after consuming pornography. And in that moment, I could capitalize on it. I think justly, I think morally I could capitalize on it and say, give me $99 or give me $13 a.

[Matt Fradd]

Month and I'll take porn off your phone forever.

[Nick]

Right?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

But instead, what if I said, here, it's free. You'll never go back to it either. They just lost a customer.

[Matt Fradd]

I love that. That.

[Nick]

And like, that's, you know, free market violence or, you know, whatever. Like, vote with your dollar. Like, that's what I'm able to do with that. And I think that the tech minimalism world, this idea of limiting screen time, is at least 40% a cover for porn addiction. I think it's a socially acceptable way to discuss porn addiction.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, that's good.

[Nick]

Because 30, 84% of pornography is consumed on mobile devices. That's per Pornhub, 84% is on mobile devices. It's not that it doesn't happen on the laptop. It's just, again, accessibility, anonymity, it's right there.

But if you combine the monthly visitors to Twitter, Netflix.

And Amazon, it's less than visits to porn sites. Whoa, think of how much we watch Netflix, we scroll Twitter, and we online shop. And if that's less.

Than visits to porn sites, there's a big gap in our math here. That kind of no one's talking about.

And I don't see the ascendance if that's truly a bigger problem. And that's per Forbes, if their data is correct, then it seems a little suspicious to say, hey, let's all get off Instagram. Like, okay, well, what do you Maybe Instagram is a gateway for a lot of people. And you had. What was the Magdalena.

Magdalena program? Rachel McCoo.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah. Magdalene's daughter. Something. Oh, my goodness.

[Nick]

You know what I'm talking about. Yes, yes.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm gonna look this up.

[Nick]

Yes. Great podcast that you did with. I think her name is Rachel.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

Yeah, no, no, I'm just calling it. I'm too dyslexic.

[Matt Fradd]

We're gonna get this right now. Can you look something up on your thing?

[Nick]

Yeah, yeah. Pull out the phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, let's do it. This is good, too, because it's a good advertisement for this lovely woman whose name I've forgotten because I'm a horrible person.

[Nick]

The reason I bring them up.

[Matt Fradd]

She got married too.

[Nick]

So her name change be to God. Is that you can't search on iPad. So she kind of blew the lid off the myth that women don't struggle with porn.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And so it's not just men.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, my gosh. Let me put her in touch with you, because that's what we want. We want you.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

We need to get her. Women trying this.

[Nick]

Yeah. Well, and again, it's for, like, there's no barrier to entry. Just like, here, everybody, like, it's free.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Nick]

So I really do think that it's a cover.

[Matt Fradd]

And awkwardly look at my phone ironically while we do this.

[Nick]

Well, good. Then I'll look at some. Some notes that I have about, because there was a 30% number that I remember.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Oh, writing Kalaki. I said Kukoli. Yeah, Kalaki.

[Nick]

Oh, 30% of all. That's where the 30%. 30% of all Internet traffic is pornography.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't surprise me at all. You may have heard me say this, but back in the day, Jordan Peterson was on stage with Dr. William Lane Craig, and they were talking about meaning or something, and he had this really meaning something trivial. And he had this great line. He said, sometimes people say, how could anybody ever do, like, hard drugs? It's like, how do you talk about.

[Nick]

How can you know?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes. He's like, that's not an interesting question. What's interesting is why people. People choose not to do drugs all the time.

[Nick]

All the time. That's interesting. All the time. Yeah. I think that's a callback to a 60s or 70s quote from somebody in, like, the Timothy Leary psychedelic world. You know, government hates us. Totally true. And saying, why doesn't everybody? The question is, why do people.

[Matt Fradd]

Magdalaministries.org everybody is a fantastic website that would Help you if you're a young woman or older woman wanting to quit porn. Check it out. They have small groups and all sorts of beautiful things.

[Nick]

Magdalaministries.org yeah, she had a fantastic interview with you and I.

I was surprised to learn that they work with ex onlyfans, models or women who are trying to get out of.

[Matt Fradd]

That's great.

[Nick]

Yeah. It's your interview.

[Matt Fradd]

She was working with them. Mm. I don't remember this conversation.

[Nick]

I mean, I watched it for them. I watched it like. You know, it's funny though.

[Matt Fradd]

It's like models meant something different for me when. Because I grew up in the 80s, you know, so like, a model used to mean something. You know, even a porn performer, let's say. Used to mean something.

[Nick]

Yeah. To earn that. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Now. Yeah. Now anyone can just decide to be gross.

[Nick]

Well, there's a. There's an interesting aspect of this. Of the democratization of sin.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Okay.

[Nick]

Sin used to be local. We need to make sin local again.

[Matt Fradd]

Right?

[Nick]

No, but.

It was. And as a result of it being local, it was not anonymous.

Yeah, well, it was harder to be anonymous. Right. And so the name of my company is Return. Return, Inc. And the thought behind that was, I just want to take us back 40 years when porn took effort to acquire. I'm not trying to take us back all the way because there's always a way and there always was a way. I just wanted it to be the people who use my products, they have to go buy a Playboy and hide it in a bush.

That's as far as I can take this.

[Matt Fradd]

That's a great tagline for your company. You want porn, you gotta find a Playboy and hide it in a bush.

[Nick]

No, no. The actual mission statement is we want to permit a generation to rise in the absence of pornography. That's our mission statement.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. That's great.

[Nick]

I'd love that to happen.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, my gosh. So you said that shift again, for those at home who are trying to keep up, is what just blocks distractions from your phone.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

That was an accident. Total accident. That's wild. I thought shift was the point and then escape was something you tacked on.

[Nick]

No, I realized about a year into development that because of what we had discovered, we had mechanisms of control over the device that created a superior screen time blocker and didn't know the whole world that existed. So the screen time API is recent. It's 2023, 2022. It was just family controls. Apple said if you're in a family, you can control the Screen time that your kids have, and that actually does give a decent level of control. But the problem with family controls, again, this is an Apple setting that you could put on your kid's phone is imessage. Allows you to open Things and watch YouTube videos and navigate to stuff through iMessage.

So there's even workaround and family controls, and it's not individualized. So, like, you can't put family controls on your own phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, yeah. You gotta ask someone else. Like a loser. Like a loser. I do that with my wife. Like, can you please just like, yeah, yeah.

[Nick]

It's sort of defeating. It's like, gosh, I just. Why? Why hasn't this been solved? Like, we can develop these extraordinary technological.

[Matt Fradd]

Cause there's no money to be made. That's why I'm less of a customer. If you can get rid of all my apps that easily.

[Nick]

Right, right. So then the Screen Time API came out, and everybody jumped on making an app. But apps can be deleted.

[Matt Fradd]

That's why that all arose around that time.

[Nick]

It was because of that Apple opened up the ability to manipulate the settings of Screen time via a user interface that you could download from the App Store. And so everybody had their own take on. Opal didn't start as an app. It started as a vpn. It's a French company. And I don't know how that has anything to do with anything, but they're French.

So now everybody has their own take on. Well, how are we gonna help our customer? You know, we'll have a different color scheme or a different activity or a different thing that pops up on screen. It's like all of them just press and hold and delete. But then there's the dumb phone world.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

And I discovered light phones, which in 2015 or 16, raised $2 million on Kickstart.

[Matt Fradd]

What does that say about our addictions, if we're willing to do that?

[Nick]

I think it's a beautiful testament, actually.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

I think the existence of this market is actually a very good signal.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I totally agree with that. But the fact that it exists at all shows that it's not just weirdos like you and me who want less time on our screen. It's everybody realizing something is wrong, and.

[Nick]

They just need, I think, a guiding hand to take them all the way to the solution. So the other half of what we're trying to do is not just make them aware that they live in hell, that they're longing for a world that's dead and the world that they live in hates them. First you have to make everybody aware of that fact. That's why you're scrolling eight and a half hours a day.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Companies. Yeah. They hate us. They hate our children. Think of Delta allowing sex scenes to be on the videos in airplanes. I can't think of another reason than Delta hates your children not to pick on Delta. It's also the other airlines as well.

[Nick]

But I mean, Southwest doesn't have TVs. Perhaps they're a more virtuous company.

[Matt Fradd]

I would rather accidentally see porn than have to stand in that line full of people and go, sorry, I'm a 32. Oh God. No, but I mean, that's horrible. Yeah, we think it's okay. We think it's okay that there should be a thousand screens in this plane right by your children showing sexually explicit imagery at a. All sorts of violence. We think that's fun.

[Nick]

They put a little warning on there. This program contains.

[Matt Fradd]

They won't even put like a visor. Yes.

[Nick]

So that you have to.

[Matt Fradd]

Or on the screen. You know what I mean? The blacks. So that people can't see it. They won't do that. That's how much they hate our children. I can't think of another reason.

[Nick]

And you have to. And that's why you have to treat it like they're aggressing you. Yeah, they are. They want your money more than they want your well being. This is what happens when you live in a society the size of planet Earth.

Where dollar is God and your soul doesn't matter. And you are reduced to do you produce or do you consume? You're valuable both ways. Consumers and producers are valuable to the egregore in both ways. And this is kind of a funny like productivity. These apps are in the app store category of productivity.

[Matt Fradd]

What a.

[Nick]

Like the screen time blocking apps which I find so funny.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes, produce more. Is that what your point?

[Nick]

Yes, that's my point. It's like, okay, we're going to block Instagram so you can make more widgets, so you can really get this Excel spreadsheet where it needs to be for the company that hates you. So you have more screen. You have less screen time so you can watch more Netflix, so you can be indoctrinated and crapped on by the world in other ways. Because your value as a unit of human capital is are you consuming the meta ads that we're producing.

And the content that our influencers are producing, or are you producing that content? Are you transporting the doordash? Are you delivering the Amazon package? Are you making the Widget.

And that's what happens when there is no virtue of Utopilia. Right? Like rightly ordered leisure. That in that space created by shift.

You awaken and you go, wow, this life is not really what I want it to be. I guess I could work more because nobody has the other tools in the tool belt of.

What is right. Leisure, right? Like, oh, I'm exhausted. I'm just going to scroll for a little bit. This is a nice hit of dopamine. I feel I just want to turn my brain off. I recently sold our tv. My wife was all for it because I was thinking, like.

Got a newborn, everyone's tired.

I'm working 10, 12, 14 hour days on shift. I work from home, praise be to God, so I can help at home. But still, I'm working a lot during the day. Nighttime comes around, my brain's spent. My wife's brain is spent from bringing this child through another day of existence. Let's just watch a show. Let's just watch a movie. I just want to watch a movie.

[Matt Fradd]

Totally.

[Nick]

I'm like, okay, so two hours every other day. Ten years. My wife's going to hate me. I'm going to hate my wife. She's not going to be my best friend. Think about, think 3,100 hours a year. A third of your life spent on the phone. Not yours, but, but, you know, the average person.

How much time does it take to build something worth living in? How much time does it take to love your wife well and treat her as a friend? Like a friend that you actually, you're excited to go talk to her at the end of the day, or vice versa, A spouse.

How much time does it take? I mean, prayer. When you told me that you were able to start praying like three rosaries a day, I was like, glory be to God. This is amazing. But.

We cannot expect as Christians, as Catholics.

To spend two to three decades of our life watching other people's lives on our phone die and meet God and him, have any idea who we are or even want to spend time with him.

[Matt Fradd]

You guys have Netflix.

[Nick]

Have you seen season five of Stranger Things? I'm ready for it. Let's all sit down. Yeah, like, he won't know you. Yeah, he won't know you. Your kids won't know you. Your spouse won't know you.

[Matt Fradd]

You said you had more statistics. Did you look some of that up or is that what you've already gone through?

[Nick]

Oh, no, there's some more.

[Matt Fradd]

Can you throw some at me?

[Nick]

Yeah, the.

The idea of have you heard of Dunbar's numbers?

[Matt Fradd]

I have no idea what it means.

[Nick]

It was.

In the early 90s, I think, 92. Robin Dunbar. It was like studying primates and how many relationships they were able to maintain. And so you had like these concentric circles of what was sustainable for primates. And then they sort of extrapolated this out to humans and found that this actually does map onto humans pretty reliably as well. Even on Twitter, the number of interactions typically is capped at 150 people in your active network. So it goes active network affinity group, which. So 150 to 50 is your affinity group. Your sympathy group, your close friends is 15. And then your support click. Very, very close friends is about five people. And this is a rough characterization of what we as a human person can sustain and find meaningful. And what I think is so disgusting about what social media has done is we have all of the proximity and none of the intimacy. We are proximal to everything. Everyone at all times. They can reach through your phone and tap you on the shoulder on a Sunday evening, like I tried to do last night. And.

They'Re like, I know you saw the message.

[Matt Fradd]

It says.

[Nick]

It says read. It says, you read the message. All of the proximity. And with this assumed intimacy that doesn't exist. But then there's also this idea that we have to care. You're obligated to care about more people than just your concentric circles, and not just them, but all of the problems, all of the world events. You must have an opinion about Israel.

[Matt Fradd]

Palestine, and you must care about it and feel deeply affected.

[Nick]

You should. This should. This should operate at the forefront of your mind. To quote my dad, he said.

When I was 19 and freaking out about everything, he said, if everything's priority number one, nothing is priority number one. And. But we feel immoral, we feel like a bad person if we are not attending to everything with just gushing energy and zeal all the time.

And you're calloused and you're cold and you're unempathetic if you don't do that. And I think people get mad if you start to live your life that way.

Oh, you're better than. Don't you care about ice? Don't you care about ice raids? Didn't you see the Pope blessed an ice cube?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. You're not angry? Why aren't you angry?

[Nick]

You need to be angry. You need to be angry with me. To quote Duncan Trussell, I think you've quoted him before. Somewhere there's a man under a Waterfall without a cell phone, not knowing how angry and afraid he should be.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

So. Yeah, that's interesting. So you're saying. Yep. Yeah. If you. If you don't care about what you shouldn't have to care about, then people get frustrated with you. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

[Nick]

Yeah. I think there's a societal expectation. Did you see.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Did you see the. You didn't see. You didn't.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I remember three years ago, I gave up the Internet for August, and it was like two weeks in and the McCarrick scandal had broke. And I'm at Divine Liturgy with my good wife, and the priest is talking about it, and I'm like, what's he talking about? She's like, oh, right.

[Nick]

So I think we should bring back peasant Catholicism.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes. Tell me about this.

[Nick]

I reverted when Francis was Pope. Didn't make a damn bit of difference what he was saying or not saying or how he said it to me. That's not how I. That's not how Christ brought me back to Holy Mother Church was not through Francis.

Now we have a Pope who I don't have to interpret, but not a long time ago, very, very short time ago, you and I could attend to our wives and our kids and receive the sacraments and pray daily and grow in holiness and serve our kids community and die and go to heaven and have no idea if the Pope was still alive.

[Matt Fradd]

Right. Or what his opinion is on something.

[Nick]

And guess what? It doesn't matter. Yeah. To you. To me, it doesn't. I don't. I. Hey, guys. I don't have to be angry about what you're angry about. Yeah, I don't. And no amount of you shaming me is going to make me.

Become an activist.

Because I don't love my wife well enough yet. I'm an impatient, uncharitable son of a. And marriage is gonna sanctify me. And the work that I'm doing is gonna sanctify me. And the sacraments and spending more time in prayer is gonna sanctify me.

We couldn't read the Bible until that jerk Gutenberg started printing it. I don't know how true that is, but we didn't need to read the Scriptures to get to heaven. For 1500 years, you could practice the virtue of religion.

And you're going to be okay.

And I think that this is, I guess, sort of a crossover of that obligatory attendance to the world and Catholicism space thing. Like, no, I don't have to.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

I said to Jacob Imam, who I had on the show recently that. Because it was the weekend and I was going home and I was leaving my phone and computer here and I said to him, and this always happens and I don't know what it says about me or if it's common with people who give up their technology, but there's this fear in me when I give it up. Don't nod too quickly because maybe you'll regret nodding because you have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe you do, though. I'll turn it off and I'll drive. I live an hour or so from here and there's nothing. And there's this like, oh gosh, don't, don't give it up. Yeah, man. But then like this whole weekend I didn't have my phone and then I picked it up Monday morning and I. But last night I was feeling great. I read so much.

Like my son wanted to wrestle me. He's got this new thing that he does. He wrestles me so he can fart on me. It's disgusting and I love it.

[Nick]

How does he have them in like in the repository to like deploy?

[Matt Fradd]

No, we're not feeding him appropriately apparently, because he's got like 10 in the bank. And I keep thinking to myself, if I had one, because I. But I don't because I just eat meat, I would rip one on you, buddy. And he's so cool. And so we were wrestling and. But he's not in the way. But I don't have my phone and my Internet. When I have my phone and my Internet, the people I'm supposed to love the most are in my way.

[Nick]

Yeah, you get st. Just a second.

[Matt Fradd]

Give me one second.

[Nick]

Just. I'm doing the thing here and there's.

[Matt Fradd]

Always a good reason.

[Nick]

Okay. But I do want to unpack this with you because this, this, this. I think it's so wrong to say that the Internet's not real. I don't like this argument that what's happening on our. That's not real life.

[Matt Fradd]

Uh huh. Okay.

[Nick]

Because I think it.

Hamstrings us from solving the problems.

It is real. But something terrible happened with the integration of the digital world with our world, such that these Dunbar circles have been infiltrated. And we do care and we do have relationships and we do have business enterprises and we do have high stakes things happening at an echelon that they shouldn't be happening. And that's stressing.

And that's why you feel fear when you drive away. It's. Yeah, but like I do consequential Things. Interacting with people who I care about, interfacing with the world. And I think, yeah, because we weren't supposed to. Ted Kazinski was kind of right about a, you know, wrong about other things. But.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, man, he's, he's. What is it? He's manifesto. Yeah, go read that.

[Nick]

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences been a disaster for the human race. Imam, I love his interview. I didn't know that the federal highway system was a late 50s invention from Eisenhower, but immediately it clicked to me. Yeah, you didn't get to drive from one state to another, from one side of the country to another to do commerce, to commute and to work.

The size of our circles exploded faster. Not. It's not even a speed question. We can't sustain it. It's not what we're built for.

[Matt Fradd]

It's not like we'll somehow evolve to be able to never.

[Nick]

And it's parabolic. It's getting, it's getting faster, it's getting more integrated. And so of course there's over compensatory mechanisms. I'm gonna buy a light phone, I'm gonna go off into the woods and build a cabin or whatever you're gonna do. Yeah, but I think it's illusory to a large degree. I think removing yourself from society in the way that these overcompensatory mechanisms do is. It's delusional and it's reserved for the wealthy.

You have to be a millionaire to fight for the standard of living and the mental and physical well being that people 125 years ago had. So my great grandfather William Adelbert and my great grandmother Catherine.

Had a farm and a farm stand and a grocery store in Ohio where we live right now.

And they would send my grandfather and his brothers down Detroit Road into the Cleveland market with a wagon full of grapes and sell them at a. At $4 a ton.

When I buy grapes, it's $9 for 2 pounds.

Okay? That world's dead and gone.

You can't even, you can't even buy the land, the house, the agricultural infrastructure, the livestock, and all the education needed to do subsistence farming without millions of dollars today, you're not getting rid of your phone.

You'Re not becoming Amish. You don't have the community, you don't have the infrastructure, you don't have the education. That world doesn't exist anymore. So when Scarlett Johansson says, oh, I don't have a phone, and Christopher Nolan says, you know the director, I don't use a smartphone. Cool. You have a Fleet of people who make your food, who drive you around places, who tell you what's on your schedule today.

And then you have, you know, ballerina farms. I don't you know who this person is? Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Good looking Mormon with a beautiful family.

[Nick]

But she was gonna be a ballerina. I think so. And she has a bunch of kids and her husband's a bajillionaire and they do the home setting thing.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

I don't watch her content, but I know what it is. And I've seen like a couple of. And. And I think people are rightly upset when they see that. Like, oh, wouldn't it be nice? Yeah, it would be nice. That's not you.

And I tell guys my age, I'm 27. And I tell anybody who will listen, who's within my generation. You have two options, I believe. You either have to get monk level, comfortable with poverty, like van by the river, eating tuna around a fire with homeless people. And cool. You gotta be cool with raising your kids in that. Or you have to be a millionaire. You have five to 10 years. Figure it out. The middle is dropping out. And if you think you're going to ditch your phone and do that, you're delusional. Like, this world is built to chew you up and spit you out. And the things that we are longing for, that we know we need because that's what was built into us. You have to be ruthlessly creative to figure out how to get those today.

And cutting off your knees just before you run this marathon is not going to help you do that.

[Matt Fradd]

And the analogy to cutting off your.

[Nick]

Knees is getting rid of the phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, Just.

[Nick]

Just check. Checking out. I'm going to unplug. Right. You need the tools. And social media is a tool.

Right. It's a dance, it's tai chi. It's other martial arts that I don't know, you know? And that's. That's how you're going to move this energy back into something that matters, something that's meaningful to you. That when your phone is off, like, cool. You have food on the table. You have a family who doesn't hate you. You have a relationship with your wife. You have neighbors who you trust that something happens. You can rely on them.

And I do think the clock's ticking on that.

[Matt Fradd]

On the middle dropping out.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So what can. Is there any solution or. No, we just have to get rich or decide to be poor or what? Yeah, one of those.

[Nick]

Maybe. I mean, I'm not a prophet.

[Matt Fradd]

It feels weird, man. Everything Feels different. Nate Bargazzi has this line where he says, I have more in common with the Pilgrims than my daughter with how, you know, fast. And I think of my childhood, it was another world away. And my father and mother's childhood looked way more like my childhood. Right. Than.

The difference. But the differences are accelerating is what I'm saying.

[Nick]

I mean, even think about travel.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Like how big the world has become. The fact that you were able to go to Ireland and then meet a girl from Texas and. And get married and now you're living in Ohio and then you're in Florida and all these like, we're not from anywhere anymore.

[Matt Fradd]

Accents are coming together. Languages are. It'll be Spanish and English within 10 minutes. Yeah.

[Nick]

We live in most Eisley Cantina. And I think that leads to suicidality and the depression and the anxiety because there is no home. Like, in the platonic sense of home. You're not home. You don't feel good. Your house isn't even your house. It's not your family's house. It's not your family's land. You went to the bank and you got a mortgage for a house that you're going to hope the market goes up so that you could sell it for a profit. And you don't get upside down in your mortgage that you'll never pay off because you don't make enough money to. And you're not going to leave it to your kids. You're not going to bring your kids into your trade. There's no home, there's no lineage, there's no heritage, there's no community. Of course you're scrolling eight hours a day. Of course you are.

But the solution is not just stop scrolling.

[Matt Fradd]

So what has your solution been?

[Nick]

Build shift.

[Matt Fradd]

Build shift. Yeah. And you use it. Yeah.

[Nick]

Yeah, I do. I haven't done a rehab yet.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, don't. I wouldn't.

[Nick]

Yeah, no, I use. I use shift. I, like I said, sold the TV recently, but really, I think that, and this is part of the reason why we can give escape away for free is I believe in the profitability of shift.

[Matt Fradd]

So when you use shift, do you. How do you stick to that? Because you can go back to your laptop or what have you and change it on shift.

[Nick]

So how. I mean, I use a schedule, so you can't. On shift during a schedule.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't know that. Oh, I'm still learning.

[Nick]

Sorry, should have put that.

[Matt Fradd]

No, you probably told me and I wasn't paying attention.

[Nick]

Yeah, I think I was a little bit interested in how you were using Shift. Because I was like, we have a couple of buttons for that. Yeah. You can put a schedule on. So mine goes on at 8pm and at 10am and unshifts.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

And I mean, like, yeah, I can get around it because, like, I created it, it's mine. But. But I almost never do because.

It is actually still somewhat of a hassle for me to do it.

[Matt Fradd]

No, but I mean, if I set, you know, 7:00am to 10:00pm yeah. Or what have you during an unshift period, I can go in and change the hours of when it's. Yeah.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

But basically what's cool, though, is by that point, you don't want to. Because, like. Well, I actually want to do this. I do want to live like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Golly.

[Nick]

And that's like a holiday. Some guy messaged us. Panicking, he texted and emailed us. He said, I accidentally sent a holiday for five years.

Ah. And part of me wishes I didn't respond. Like, would have been the best thing that's ever happened of this guy.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

I just ejected from the matrix. Let me back in. Let me back in.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. What happens if I lose? So, okay. So, sure, again, I download Shift on my computer, sync it to my phone.

[Nick]

Shift.

[Matt Fradd]

My phone.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I can only shift and unshift from my laptop. What if I. My laptop breaks?

[Nick]

You just get a different laptop or use a friend's laptop.

[Matt Fradd]

And you. Is it your username and login that.

[Nick]

It's just your email and the license key that was emailed to you.

[Matt Fradd]

And so I have to hold on to that, do I? Because I have no idea what I would.

[Nick]

Well, you know me. But, yeah, I would.

[Matt Fradd]

So when you sign up to shift, you get an email saying, here's your.

[Nick]

Here's your license key.

[Matt Fradd]

So that when you. Oh, yeah. So if you don't have that.

[Nick]

Yeah, I mean. But that's where customer support comes in.

[Matt Fradd]

I see.

[Nick]

Like, because we know, okay, this person bought on this date, we have a record of the email that was sent to them on our Gmail. So we just. Oh, here's your. Here's your thing.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[Nick]

There's another statistic, if you're interested, because we were talking about. I find the statistics that are thrown around somewhat problematic about screen time and depression and anxiety because they're very correlative and they're kind of zoomed too far out. So they'll say something like, from 2011 to 2021, suicidality in girls went up 167. This is per the CDC, Governor Youngkin quoted this in his executive order 33 for the state of Virginia. He says, you know, we gotta get phones out of schools. We gotta do something about phones in schools. Suicide is going up over the last 10 years, but that's too broad because as I just bloviated for the 10th time, there's a lot of things to be sad about in this world. And you can't just blame phones. So what you have to do is you have to come at it from the other angle and say, okay, if this is our hypothesis that phones increase depression, anxiety, suicidality, then we need to be able to a B test that. And there have been a couple of studies that have done that. The first one was in 2021 and they just ab tested more or less than three hours of screen time per day. More double the risk of what they say, severe psychological distress, categorized as anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, severe psychological distress for greater than 3 hours of screen time use per day. Put a pin in that. I'll circle back to it in just a second. Another study, February of last year, they got a cohort of people to just block mobile Internet. So this is eerily similar to what Shift does because all your tools are still there, but there's no online shopping, there's no YouTube videos, there's no pornography, there's no social media. So mobile Internet blocked. 73% of people said, we feel better in 10 days.

Our psychological well being went up, our depression went down. Somehow they expressed that being so you take both of these things together and what you realize is, well, nobody's just spending three hours on their phone.

Teenagers alone are spending five and a half hours on social media, eight and a half hours on their phone every day. So if limiting mobile Internet out competes antidepressants, drugs, I propose that the inverse is true. Using your phone to this degree is the equivalent of taking a depressive.

And we can prove that now with these studies because we're not just saying there's a correlation between people being unhappy over the last 10 years and phone use, God going up or Instagram coming out. But when we specifically limit mobile Internet access.

That'S not maps, it's not Spotify.

It'S ingestion of content within 10 days. Everyone feels like they took it in better than when they took an antidepressant. What does that tell you about.

What is it?

[Matt Fradd]

That's about the phone that's making us anxious. Probably a constellation of things.

[Nick]

Are you familiar with the Coolidge effect?

[Matt Fradd]

Explain it to me. I've Heard of it?

[Nick]

This isn't thus saith the psychiatrist, this is thus proposeth Nick. But the Coolidge effect is that novelty drives reproductive interest in rats.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah.

[Nick]

That when there's the same sexual partner for a rat.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

Their libido drops off.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

When novel partners are introduced, it's infinite functionally to the point that the rat will just exhaust itself and potentially die. This is why porn works, but it's also why social media works. Because you're. I mean, I don't like this type of materialistic language, but your brain is a novelty seeking organization.

I would say that our soul longs for that. And I think God, who is infinitely complex and magical and majestic will fulfill that for us. But that, I think that is an innate desire for us to be learning, to be seeing new and exciting things, to be shown aspects of the world. But it can't just be pleasure. And this is why porn consumption always derails into more and more corrupt things. But social media does this as well. Because not only will you accidentally see porn sometimes, but you're also going to see a heinous act of violence happen on a street. Then you're going to see children somewhere in the world starving or dying or being blown to pieces. Then you're going to see a hilarious tweet from the President of the United States. Wow, I can't believe the President of my country just said this. And then you're going to see a hot take from somebody that you know, and it's just going to go through 25, 50, 100 different kinds of stimulus. Not uniformly pleasurable.

And that is endless. Endlessly satisfying to whatever that little thing is that we need.

Endlessly satisfying. And I think it.

Now, you know, our attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. Human attention span is now eight seconds.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

How can you have a coherent relationship with people in your life? How can you ever build something? How could you write a book? How could you care about Your life if 8 seconds is about all you got in the tank for anything?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And so once again, like the. The path opens up. Which way, Western man? You can either turn it off and confront the abyss.

Or never turn it off.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And I think most people are going to be like Cypher in the Matrix.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

You know, he's cutting the steak, he says, I know this is. I know this isn't real. I know the Matrix is telling my brain that this is a delicious juicy steak. And he takes a bite and goes, ignorance is bliss.

And I think that's why we get some aggression around. Shift too have you take it, but don't take it. Ah, wake me up, but don't wake me up. Okay, but I want you to wake me up in this way. Can I keep this?

Just.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And that's where we've. We've kind of just been. No.

[Matt Fradd]

Nope.

[Nick]

Here you go. You don't have to. You don't have to, but I'm gonna tell you what's. I'm gonna tell you what's best for you.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

We're gonna play the role of patriarch. We're gonna play the role of society. We're gonna play the role of benevolent authority. We're going to love you the way that society should have. Society should have said, no, we're not having porn.

Society, your town, your whatever, however many concentric circles you want to take this to.

Should have protected you. Your parents should have protected you. Maybe they were ignorant. Maybe they didn't care. Maybe they didn't love you enough. Delta Airlines should have protected you.

[Matt Fradd]

Will there ever be anything like this for the computer?

[Nick]

Yeah. Early 26.

[Matt Fradd]

What?

[Nick]

So. Yeah, same thing. Same thing. Shift and escape. Dude, you're kidding.

[Matt Fradd]

Really? Yeah.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. I was nervous to ask that because I didn't want you to be like, no, never.

[Nick]

No, no. We just. It's a two. Two man team.

[Matt Fradd]

How on earth are you doing this?

[Nick]

I mean, I found an unbelievably brilliant young man who has been.

[Matt Fradd]

Big balls.

[Nick]

A huge.

[Matt Fradd]

You know that reference, right?

[Nick]

No, I don't. So now I just feel awkward.

[Matt Fradd]

Elon Musk had someone working with him to cut waste at the government level. And his nickname was Big Balls. Sorry, you feel awkward. I just looked at you in the eye and said, big Balls. For no discernible reason.

[Nick]

We're over here just, like, pontificating about pornography. Big balls.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Okay. A brilliant young man, not Big Balls.

[Nick]

Also. Also named Nick. Actually, we only hire people named Nick at my company.

And. And he. He's just a. A real wonderkind. And he has, like, the spirit that we needed of. I propose a magic trick. I propose a miracle. He's like, yeah, we'll figure it out. There was no precedent for what we did.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow.

[Nick]

Which is why it doesn't exist until now.

[Matt Fradd]

That's what blows me away. You've got these, presumably, I don't know, multimillion dollar companies running Brick and Opal and what have you. And yet you're a two man team who's able to do something that they haven't, from what I can tell.

[Nick]

Yeah. I mean, praise be to God. We're just.

[Matt Fradd]

Is there any legality around what you're doing? Like, I know. Do you remember Vidangel tried to, like, filter movies? Yeah. Sued them.

[Nick]

Yeah. Destroyed. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Are you able to. What you're doing, is it legal?

[Nick]

Yeah, totally.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, it does.

[Nick]

I mean, it's not a jailbreak. It doesn't violate Apple's terms of service, it doesn't violate Google Play's terms of service. There's no breach of. Of anything. Excuse me. And there's nothing. I mean, again with the filtration stuff. There's nothing new that we're doing on the filtration front. We are going to be limiting ads.

When you use Escape, you won't have ads on your phone. Nice little perk.

But I don't think there's any. I mean, ad blockers are legal. All of it's legal. So.

[Matt Fradd]

How is it going to become. What's your next thing? How is shift about to get better? Or what are you working on to make it?

[Nick]

Yeah, great question. So.

Right now, I mean, probably at the, at the point of people watching this, this might already be resolved, but you'll be able to curate what your app apps look like in the shifted state in two ways. So you can organize them. Right now, they're just. They're just there, which I think there's an advantage to because we have a reflex of going to where the addictive apps were. And I think it's nice to just see the tools that you have at your disposal. But some people say no, that's overwhelming. I want to be able to organize them. Okay. So we're working on that. And then you can also further limit. So we did. The decision of these will not be used. You will never. People love it. Ask, can I have YouTube?

[Matt Fradd]

No. Good for you. Thank you for doing that.

[Nick]

No, you can't. Well, I don't get distracted by. I don't care. Did I ask my product that I'm selling to you that you don't have to buy limits all distracting apps that you can entertain yourself and waste time on. If that's not for you, please see Opal, please see Brick.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, thank you.

[Nick]

But the apps that we do allow, for example, email or Slack or Spotify, sometimes people might say, like, I don't want those either. We're going to let them even further deselect those.

[Matt Fradd]

So you can be more hardcore.

[Nick]

You can be more hardcore. Yes. And I personally need that because there's a couple apps that, like Telegram, that's a messaging app. But it kind of touches social media a little bit. People can post on Telegram, and in the absence of all the really good ones, I go to Telegram. And so for me, as soon as that's available, I'm going to get rid of Telegram on my phone and a couple other things. So that's kind of short term.

[Matt Fradd]

So how would that work on the interface? How do you say when I shift my phone, I also want these not.

[Nick]

Seriously problematic apps blocked on our desktop application. There'll be an app list, and you just simply uncheck the ones that you don't want present on the app. So there's that. Geofences are coming soon. You can pick. I always study in this library on my university, or I go to this coffee shop or I'm having friends over and I want to geofence my house. So, you know, whatever it is, you can pick those sorts of things.

[Matt Fradd]

So what does that mean? So when you geofence a location, just your device will shift when you're in that location.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So it's not like other people come into your house and they don't have their apps unless.

[Nick]

Yeah, I wish. That'd be too totalitarian. I'd probably get some heat for that one.

[Matt Fradd]

Nick owns my phone. Who is Nick?

[Nick]

I didn't agree to this. Yeah. But we did actually run a promotional for a while and we might do this again as well. So we don't have to ask for permission to geofence a place because it's kind of just an imaginary Dumbledore's age line around the Goblet of Fire. We can just pick a place and do it. And unless the user opts in to that protocol, their phone is unaffected as they enter. But what we started to do is we actually did this with Steubenville's library and Ave Maria.

[Matt Fradd]

And you've done this? You've been hired by them to do this?

[Nick]

No, we just did it.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I see what you mean. And so the members, people who have shift, if somebody.

[Nick]

Then we advertise to the students. Would you like to have your library distraction free?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

Now just download Shift and when you enroll in that. Then again, didn't have to ask the university because it's not a. It's not even real. Like it's an imaginary line of code. Then when they walk in, boom, their phone shifts and now they can study. Right. And they don't get to like, oh, but I just want to check out, you know?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

So.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Nick]

We might bring that back you know.

[Matt Fradd]

It'S brought up other things for me as well. So I. I like Spotify like everybody else. And that's one of the apps that you permit in shift mode, right? Yes, but I don't like it because I do find it too distracting. Like, I'll go on, and I'll just piss around. So what are you.

[Nick]

What are you doing on Spotify?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I guess just. I listen to podcasts. Yeah, that's it.

So I. Look, it depends on the day, right? Some. Some weekends I want it when I go to the gym. I'm totally accustomed to listening to music.

[Nick]

Okay.

[Matt Fradd]

But here's the simple point. What I've been doing sometimes is I'll go home for the weekend. You know what? I don't even want to be listening to podcasts. So I'll delete Spotify and then I'll shift my phone. Right.

[Nick]

Oh, that works, by the way.

[Matt Fradd]

What?

[Nick]

You delete it, and then when you shift, it's not there.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Nick]

I've never tried that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's great. Same thing with my email. Sometimes I'll delete my email, shift my phone, and then.

[Nick]

That's clever. We're gonna integrate that. But that's a great. I didn't even think to do that.

[Matt Fradd]

That's amazing. Sorry.

[Nick]

Please don't.

[Matt Fradd]

It's all right. But you know what I've realized is. And then what I'll do is I'll say, well, I'm going to the gym and I don't have Spotify, so what am I gonna do? So I'll go to YouTube. I'll download through an illegal app, presumably on Minecraft. Not in real life. I would never do this in real life. I'll download an album, email that to myself, and then it's in my drive. So this morning, my phone was shifted and I was at the gym. So I have this, like, Metallica workout list.

And I listened to that through my drive. That's amazing.

[Nick]

Yeah, but that totally speaks to this idea that, like, we are an octopus going through a keyhole. Like, we will get the thing that we want. And that is why I refuse. I refuse the avenues of particularity that our customers request. And you can hate me for it, and that's fine. I'm offering a different service then.

[Matt Fradd]

That's terrific. Yeah.

[Nick]

Because people will Dropbox themselves. Metallica.

[Matt Fradd]

That's genius.

[Nick]

That's so funny.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. That's what I did. That is. That's it. That's one of the themes of this podcast. Right. If you can and you want to you will find a way.

[Nick]

So Tim Ferriss, I think it was in four hour work week. He was kind of on this early, early, early. The idea that we should meticulously craft our environment so that doing the right thing is the path of least resistance. And this kind of goes back to my proposition that, like, a lot of us are pretty arrogant about our level of virtue.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

And it's like, you need to. So when I am exhausted, we don't have a tv. When I do want more social media, I can't delete the app on my phone. I can't help but make the decision that the better version of me identified as the good decision.

And I think we have to viciously craft that environment.

[Matt Fradd]

So Jordan Peterson, one of his rules is treat yourself like someone you're in charge of caring for.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Another rule might be like, treat yourself like the idiot you actually are. You're not good at things. You make resolutions, you break them all the time.

[Nick]

And that's why I see it as a retreat to prayer. When people try to stop porn with just prayer. It's like, yes, pray, pray unceasingly. But it's arrogance to think that you're gonna do a 33 day consecration to St. Joseph. And that's. I mean, it may be.

[Matt Fradd]

It's not his fault. So you went back to porn.

[Nick]

No. But, like, you've habituated this for years. And you're standing, like I said, you're standing in the shower soaking wet with a towel.

[Matt Fradd]

I love that analogy.

[Nick]

Thinking, like, you're gonna solve the problem here, and we don't have the humility to say, I need help.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's awesome. Have you got any feedback from. I'm sure you have. Not just from angry people who would like YouTube, but have you got feedback from people who found it helpful? I mean, I've been telling you all.

[Nick]

The time, but yeah. And the feedback that we get, it's so. It's so touching because the Internet's an ugly place full of disinhibited people with keyboards. And we get.

I didn't. I confess, I didn't have shift on Instagram for the first several months because I didn't want to deal with that. I was afraid to deal with people just like, crapping on because I saw it happen to Brick. I saw it happen to Opal. I can just do this. This is just the solution. Just use self control. This is stupid. And I was terrified that we were never gonna take off if I had that public presence. So I just didn't do Anything but now, man, the stuff that we hear, people are saying things like, I'm joyfully frustrated at this, or my screen time's down 50% or this is helping with my family so much, or the only way I was gonna let my son have a phone is if he had shift on it. And I'm like.

I wish I had shift on my phone when I was 16.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I mean, and here's another glorious story, as we used to call them for you, is that we homeschool and my kids are getting older, and my daughter, my eldest, is 16. She doesn't have a phone. But I'm not saying you have to not let your 16 year old have a phone, but we're glad that we made that decision, but. So my wife wanted an iPad so they could do zoom calls with thing, you know, tutors or whatever. And you know what's funny? I actually, I don't mean to. Well, here we go.

[Nick]

I love it.

[Matt Fradd]

I was really hoping Covenant Eyes would be the answer because I. I have a great deal of respect for Ronda Hawes, who started Covenant, God bless him, when everybody else.

Yeah. I mean, he was one of the pioneers here. And I still have a lot of respect for Covenant Eyes does, but it was just too complicated. And then I think I reached out to you. I'm like, is shift on the iPad? Yeah, of course. I'm like, oh, my gosh. So I just shifted my kid's iPad here. Here's an iPad.

[Nick]

And praise be to God, man. Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

It was the only thing that gave me peace of mind to be able to give them. Yeah, of course you can use the iPad, because what can you do on it? You can text, you can zoom. That's about it.

[Nick]

Yeah. Yeah. In the shift, it's. The shifted state, by the way, is the most strict. If somebody's interested. If somebody wanted like a hardcore mode.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

They could just shift their phone for five years or 10 years, 100 years, it doesn't matter. Just, like set it on the computer. Tell us that you're doing that, we'll never release you. And if there's ever a productivity app that you need, we'll make sure it shows up on your phone. You'll never be without the thing that you needed.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

But we will honor that if you want just a shifted phone. And that, to me, is the, like, full porn solution. Because escape is. It's like a. Like I said, a living, learning thing. And unfortunately, porn is like an infinitely evolving hydra, so that will be a lifelong journey. But if you want just like, okay, cut it off. And you know, I don't want social media because I just don't even want it. Then you can do that.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

You were asking about other things that are coming down the pike here.

When I realized what I'm about to share, that was when I felt like. I mean, I hate to ascribe things to God telling me things. That's.

[Matt Fradd]

You can say, I think he did.

[Nick]

I think he may have put on my heart in the moment when I discovered this. That I should make escape free is when I started to realize what the education market is. So right now, in education, there are two solutions. A yonder pouch. Put your phone in a pouch. You know, when you buy clothes, there's like the little magnetic thing that they have to click off that ink. That magnet is at the top of yonder pouch. And when you. When the kids walk into school, they put their phone in a pouch and they click it on the kiosk and at the end of the day they can unclick it or whatever. And it's a Faraday pouch. So nothing goes in, nothing comes out. So they get to keep their personal property. But it's effectively nuked during the day. It's about 25 to $30 per pouch for the school. And you can open it with a mechanical pencil.

[Matt Fradd]

Didn't realize that.

[Nick]

Or a magnet. That's option A. Option B, which a lot of states are trying to push for right now, is no phones in school. None. Which I go back to the. You're delusional. We live in a very different world.

You know, so and so has a peanut allergy. God forbid there's a school shooting. I need to pick you up at this time instead of this time. You're going to want to be able to communicate with parents. There are apps that facilitate learning, but you don't need TikTok shop while you're at school. So we geofence the school, geofence the school administration. Or the parents put shift on the kid's phone. The kid can't take it off. Now their phones are shifted during school.

In addition to that. So that's called school mode. We also have drive mode. You start driving your car, your phone shifts and it shifts beyond the consumer shift. There's no texting.

In addition to all the other stuff. There's a lot less. It's literally just like maps, music, carplay, whatever it is. And we have sort of an insurance angle to that whole thing.

[Matt Fradd]

So have you worked with any schools to get this?

[Nick]

I can't report who. Exactly. But we're in the great state that is most. Considering the implementation. We have some. Some pretty interesting.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I hope so.

[Nick]

Intent from some big districts.

[Matt Fradd]

Wow. Fantastic.

[Nick]

On the east coast right now.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

So that would be our. Our attempt to say it's a false dichotomy. You don't have to, you know, put the phones in a pouch or get rid of them completely because parents don't like that either.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Parents are pushing back really hard against taking phones away from kids. Obviously, they spent twelve hundred dollars on a device to be able to communicate with their kids.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And most parents. I don't know, actually, this might be. I never attribute to ignorance what I can attribute to malice. Maybe. Maybe parents do. I think it's supposed to be the opposite. But I. I'm cynical. Good.

I don't think parents are thinking about the effects of social media and pornography. I think they're thinking, I want to be able to call my kid whenever I want to call my kid.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So you have an iPad there and you have statistics. What else you got?

[Nick]

Shift is on the iPad too.

[Matt Fradd]

I notice you have to download an application for the iPad. Is that right? The Shift app, but not for the phone.

[Nick]

No. So the app is a companion.

[Matt Fradd]

No, you've got that completely wrong.

[Nick]

Okay, so you haven't been paying attention. I have said no. The app. The app is kind of superfluous.

[Matt Fradd]

On the iPad, I don't need.

[Nick]

And on the phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

It's. If you wanted to set a geofence or start a focus session.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

But other than that, you don't need it for anything. No, I just. I think. I think statistics don't change behavior when we hear them, because I think if they did, for example, like, smoking wouldn't be a thing.

And the only reason to bring this up is kind of all of the marketing around screen time blockers or whatever is about time that you're wasting. And I don't think that's a meaningful value proposition to people because people are enjoying the time that they're wasting and they don't have something better to do, as we've kind of already shared about. So saying, like 3,100 hours a year is gonna be spent. Like, okay, what else was I going to be doing? Like building a table.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. That's amazing. I'm going to tweet about this, put more stuff online about that.

[Nick]

You know, like, I started smoking cigarettes on purpose 20 years after the smoking ban and like 75 years after everybody in a white lab coat said that that's a bad idea. And I don't regret a single one I ever smoked. Wish I still were.

Every time someone smokes, my. You know, sure, if I hadn't consecrated it, I would be smoking right now. Like it.

[Matt Fradd]

Have we had this conversation? I know you told me that this morning, but have we had that conversation before? Did I offer you a cigar once and you said, you can't, that's why.

[Nick]

And.

Good for you. And I just think that hearing stats about screen time or about smoking or about things that we like to do is meaningless, you know?

[Matt Fradd]

Do you know that? Just real quick. Elizabeth Anscombe, who was a professor at Oxford, I think, and debated C.S. lewis and famously beat him. She promised God if such and such happened, she would give up smoking cigarettes. And so it happened. And then she started smoking cigars. That's a true story.

[Nick]

Oh, that's.

[Matt Fradd]

So you could do that?

[Nick]

No, I gave up tobacco.

[Matt Fradd]

Bummer.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

All right.

[Nick]

Yeah, tobacco.

[Matt Fradd]

Think about it like a girlfriend. I used to be with tobacco.

But, yeah, statistics. Fair enough. It's sort of. Yeah, it's almost like they're too big to care about and too distant. So it's like, same thing when people talk about how many abortions take place every year. You know, you have this momentary shock and all right, what do you mean? What are you going to do about that?

[Nick]

But if you. But if your friend said, you know, so and so in our friend group just had an abortion, like, you would weep, you know, it would break your heart.

And I think the same thing's true with the screen time stuff. And, like, the reason I stopped watching pornography had nothing to do with statistics and it had nothing to do with software. It was because at a certain point in my very early twenties, I somehow, by God's grace, had a very clear.

Awareness.

Of the life that I wanted, the marriage that I wanted, the sex life that I wanted. And I knew that that was in complete antithesis to continuing with pornography. And it wasn't, like, easy, but it was way easier after I had, like, a full awareness of the life that I wanted. And I knew that pornography excluded that reality. Never watched it again. And if you just tell people, like, you're going to waste 19 years of your life over the next 35. Yeah. But you didn't tell them that they're going to gain something good. And the other hard part about this is it's also going to require a lot of effort, which is, I think, a decent segue into the prayer conversation. Like why prayer is hard.

Because Shift gives you no excuse as a Catholic anymore to not pray. Like, if your screen time went from eight and a half hours down to 90 minutes a day and you still haven't prayed, like, you're just a terrible person.

Yeah. But it speaks to, like, prayer.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Prayer is a.

An energetic output. It's an application of the will. It's an orientation toward the divine. This takes effort. This takes consideration. It takes attention that we don't have. Because now we're all goldfish. We're dumber than goldfish. And.

I think there's something quite convenient.

I don't know that it was architected to make us bad at praying, but I think there's something quite convenient about.

Fragmenting our attention span such that we cannot contemplate the things that we're supposed to.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Satan has decided to sift you as wheat is what I think of. Yeah. Our interior life is scattered like coins dropped in the middle of the street. Yeah.

[Nick]

Like, how can you expect to have an interior life.

When your mode is. I love what Jacob B. Mum said about, like, a screen is designed to change based on the imposition of your will.

[Matt Fradd]

Almost no output. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No effort. Very little effort.

[Nick]

And like. Well, a spiritual life, like, you're supposed to be receptive. You're supposed to be quiet.

And then I'm. I would imagine it adds to the frustration that, like, the vending machine God that you worship isn't giving you the same stuff when you're, like, pushing the prayer button.

But I want to hear you. You told me that you started praying. More rosaries.

Was three a day. I'm feeling really bad about myself.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I mean, first of all, I'm not prescribing that for everybody, nor am I committing to it for my life. I'm just saying that. Yeah. For the last several, probably last couple of months, I've been praying three rosaries a day, I think yesterday. And I got two in, sir, but I don't. People said, what do you want to know about it?

[Nick]

Well, you. You associated it with some liberation that that shift allowed. Or at least that's how I. I interpreted it. I don't want stolen valor here.

[Matt Fradd]

No, I mean, I. I still do it, whether my phone is shifted or not. So maybe this is a separate discussion, but maybe we can bring them together. I think that. I think the reason we don't like prayer is that we're not good at it. And we don't like doing things we're not good at because it exposes us and makes us Feel impotent.

Netflix doesn't make me feel that way. It makes me feel pacified, entertained, TikTok or whatever. I don't use that. But those sorts of things do the same thing. They give a quick response. Prayer doesn't do that. I said my prayers this morning, you know, but I get up, I'm groggy, I'm exhausted, I'm kind of, you know, I'm saying my prayers, but I'm not feeling anything. I'm not feeling any pious feeling. I'm before my icons. I'm doing the stuff that I do.

But it's not nearly as fun as. Or meaningful. It doesn't even feel as meaningful. That's a strange thing to say, isn't it? Because we know objectively it's more meaningful. But often prayer doesn't feel that way, nor does reading scripture. You might pick it up and go, yeah, okay, I feel guilty that I don't feel as inspired as I should be as I read this. So I think that's a lot of the reason we give up on things that we know we should do. But my point is, I think once we decide to do something, it turns out it's way easier to do. It's in that intermittent state or that prior state where you're like, I should maybe work out three times a week. I should maybe eat well, I should maybe pray. Then it's impossible. But once you go, I'm gonna bloody well do it. You realize how easy it is to do, but it means things have to give. And I.

[Nick]

So anyway, can I ask a somewhat glib sounding question? You ever smoked marijuana?

[Matt Fradd]

Yep.

[Nick]

And are you. Can you recall how profound it made the mundane?

[Matt Fradd]

Ah, yeah.

[Nick]

I think that that's similar to how social media works, because I feel like when I open Twitter, I feel importance immediately.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

I feel. I feel the gravity of the information that I'm consuming. The world affairs, the comments of the people who. I've intentionally follow the movement of the markets. This feels very important. And that is almost completely illusory. We know it's illusory because in the absence of it, everything's fine. And this is different than maybe running a business or whatever. But I think there's somewhat of an intoxicating effect similar to marijuana, where it's like you feel a profundity that's not quite there. And prayer, in contrast to this, it's very different.

And I think we're seeking intoxication with prayer. We're seeking euphoria, consolation.

[Matt Fradd]

Everyone would pray if that's what it was. Yeah. This is this thing. You pray, you say three Hail Marys and you fall into ecstasy.

[Nick]

Oh, my.

[Matt Fradd]

Everyone. No one would be at the coffee shop. No one would be on the roads. We'd all be at home.

[Nick]

And it's. I hate the David Goggins, Jocko Willink. Discipline. Good. You know, like that kind of perspective. Like do hard things.

[Matt Fradd]

I think I do too. But tell me why. I always thought it was because I was weak.

[Nick]

It might be that because it's.

[Matt Fradd]

What is it about?

[Nick]

It's confused, it's anti human, it lacks charity.

And it's prideful. I think it's very workspace. It's not relational at all. I think if you.

If you have a relationship with somebody, it's not work to talk to them. I think if you're passionate about something, you do it. It's very Protestant, Right. When you've dispensed with the sacraments, then you sacramentalize work and output and productivity and the sweat on your brow.

It's against grace, right? Like, grace is something that you didn't earn, you couldn't have ever earned it.

[Matt Fradd]

You.

[Nick]

And yet it's given to you and you're better for it. You're a better person for it. But if you don't believe in that, if you think you have to earn everything.

Then it's like a cult of self, Right? Look what I did. I have the flu. I slept for two hours.

[Matt Fradd]

My femur is broken.

[Nick]

But I woke up and I got after it. Good. I'm running a 200 mile marathon on two broken tibias. Good.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. You know, I mean, there's something about that that's virtuous, isn't there? It. Getting up and going after it and, and, and choose. Because we have that part in us that just wants to take the easy way out. And sometimes maybe that's a good thing.

[Nick]

Yeah, but there's surrogate activities to. Again quote Ted Kaczynski, like, the gym is lame. The gym is.

[Matt Fradd]

Is that why you smiled when I said went to the gym earlier?

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

You were just judging me secretly.

[Nick]

Well, no, I'm. I'm waiting for, like, Mike Pantelia to drop from the, the rafters and, like, hit me with a barbell. I think the. I think the gym is stupid.

[Matt Fradd]

All right?

[Nick]

And that's coming from somebody who did Olympic weightlifting and powerlifting.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, what do you do now? Do you do. Do you do anything? I mean, I don't live on a farm, so I can't just carry.

[Nick]

I walk With. I walk outside with my wife and my daughter.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I do that as well. Do you want to build muscle, too?

[Nick]

I got. No, I got. I. I can do it. I can. I can carry my wife. I can do pull ups. I can do push ups. Like, I don't.

[Matt Fradd]

But do you do those things to stay in shape?

[Nick]

Yeah, sometimes.

[Matt Fradd]

Build muscle. I think as you get older, it's helpful to.

[Nick]

Yeah, I think people should be fit. But I think there's a difference between wellness in the body, fitness, athleticism, and going to the gym and training. What are you training for?

[Matt Fradd]

Have you heard Seinfeld's joke about this?

[Nick]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

It's like, we're all going to the gym so that we can be better at going to the gym.

[Nick]

That's it.

[Matt Fradd]

That's the only reason I.

[Nick]

You told. I told Pantelia, I was like, number go up. So that number can go up. This is a surrogate activity. You have no meaning in your life. You know, like, seriously, if that's. If that's your thing that you're doing. And I'm not saying. Gotta give caveats to everything. I'm not saying it's bad to be fit. I'm not saying it's bad to build muscle. I'm not saying it's bad to be strong or to lift weights, but all of that is, like 60 years old.

[Matt Fradd]

All of. Yeah, yeah.

[Nick]

Like, Joe Weider took Arnold Schwarzenegger and put him on stage and greased him up in underwear with a bunch of other dudes who were taking steroids. And then, like, the exercise industry blew up and you have like, these, like, videos at home and like these ab machines or whatever, and you start going to the gym and then Nautilus is invented, and for thousands of years, none of this was relevant.

[Matt Fradd]

Sure, I get that. It's. What's the word you use? I like that word. Compensatory.

[Nick]

Compensatory.

[Matt Fradd]

I haven't used that word before. Compensatory. I'm going to use that now. Compensatory. And by using the word compensatory, I'm probably compensating for something, but compensatory. But I mean, what's the alternative then?

[Nick]

If you.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, I get that the compensatory behaviors exist because we started acting less like humans, so less natural, maybe, but I mean, what would you have people do? Not engage in those activities? Because if they didn't do that and still live the lifestyle that they lived, wouldn't they just.

[Nick]

Yeah, well, the answer to eating poison isn't A Planet Fitness membership. No, I don't think the answer to.

[Matt Fradd]

I agree with that.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Like.

But the, but the answer to being like weak physically might be.

[Nick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Again, if you don't live on a farm or if you're not engaging in manual labor.

[Nick]

Agreed. I think though, because we're all competing with the world now because of social media, because of the Internet.

It is immediately a disoriented project.

[Matt Fradd]

Disoriented. I'm laughing. Here's why I'm laughing. I'm gonna put this very delicately.

[Nick]

Oh, no.

[Matt Fradd]

One of our family members was posting an image of themselves at the gym and we knew that if my wife and I were to say to this person, don't, don't. It's very vain.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

We knew. He wouldn't, he wouldn't listen. So instead, both my wife and I were like, it's kind of gay. And he stopped. So that was good.

[Nick]

Okay, okay. But it is. But, but the fitness industry. Yeah, the fitness industry. This is not. People separate physical well being and the fitness industry.

Contrast. My favorite example of this contrast.

Sean Connery as Bond and Daniel Craig as Bond. Daniel Craig looks like a rotisserie chicken.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Sean Connery looks like a man.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Sean Connery weighed probably about the same despite being taller. Right. Less muscle.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. All right.

[Nick]

Just, just a trim, well defined man.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And now we've got the most roided out people as superheroes. And it's not, I mean, it's not just Daniel Craig. Like, look at Creed, the movie Creed with Michael B. Jordan. From Creed 1 to Creed 3. Look at any superhero. Man of Steel. Yeah, right.

[Matt Fradd]

Like I don't know enough about fitness and, and, and, and as you Roids as the they call them. But can you see that, like when you see someone like that, do you know instantly?

[Nick]

Oh, I didn't know instantly. Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, I figured if people were massive. Come on, what are you doing?

[Nick]

Yeah, well, I mean, just look historically at it. And so it's like, well, what are you, what are you doing? What are you training for? Why are you trying to look this way? I, I once compared it to the difference between agriculture and gardening. Like, gardening is what you do to beautify some nice plants. That's the fitness industry. Agriculture is, I think, what you're advocating for. It's like, let's nourish our people. Let's be strong men. Let's be fit men who can wrestle with their kids and get farted on. You know, let's be strong enough for that and not Be tired and fat and lazy.

[Matt Fradd]

Yes.

[Nick]

Okay, signed off. Brilliant. But stop preening.

[Matt Fradd]

And what does that mean? Oh, what are you doing?

[Nick]

Who for whom? What are you training? Why? You want your deltoids to get why? Yeah, so that they're.

So. So that what? Yeah, I don't get it. And, like, this is just one of a million surrogate activity.

[Matt Fradd]

You said you used to be a bodybuilder.

[Nick]

Well, I used to. I used to power lift.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, sorry. Power lift.

[Nick]

Yeah. Okay.

[Matt Fradd]

We. We get.

[Nick]

Power lifters get fat. Bodybuilders look good.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Power lifters get.

[Matt Fradd]

So why did you do it? I'm not saying you haven't learned body dysphorphia. Okay.

[Nick]

Yeah, I hated myself, and I did do. I did do a lot of bodybuilding.

[Matt Fradd]

What does Mike think about these conversations?

[Nick]

I think, you know, it was actually one of the first conversations we had when I interviewed him in person in Canada. We were driving around, and I was, like, somewhat of a Jim Gaffigan point. I was like, dude, you made it. You did it like you won the gym.

Stop. What else are you doing this for? And we had a really good conversation about, like. Like, fears and insecurities and desires and stuff like that. And.

I really think that it's a. It's a.

It can easily become very vain and. Oh. Kind of the reason any of this came up was this idea about discipline. I don't think that the discipline associated with the gym maps on. Barely to the spiritual life. Barely. And Mike might kill me for that one.

[Matt Fradd]

And he'd be able to because he's.

[Nick]

Really buff, and he can because he's strong. Maybe that's the virtue in it, is killing your enemies.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, let me ask you something else that's going to sound out of left field, but I don't think it is. Whenever I see these new fads pop up in culture that immediately seem like, oh, that's a great thing that people are doing. Yeah. I am now old enough and cynical enough to pause and go, is it? So here's the thing. I'm wondering about the whole we're giving up alcohol that everyone's doing. What's. Yeah, tell me, why do you not like that? Well, because I'd also like to not like it, but it's hard for me not to be, like, good for you. I mean, how could that not be bad?

[Nick]

No, no, don't buy into that problem.

So, yeah, the new thing to say is that, no, no amount of alcohol is safe. I don't know. Have you seen that? Phrasing?

[Matt Fradd]

No, but the safest.

[Nick]

The safest amount of alcohol to drink per week is none. That's like what the health people are saying, you know, the Rhonda Patrick's, the Andrew Hubermans, the Brian Johnson's of the world.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

And I would contextualize this in the same place that I would smoking, which is that tobacco and alcohol are eternal. They've been here by our side to bring joy and delight into our lives, with good reason since we've been around.

But that's contextualized by everything else that's going on in your environment. And I don't think that people are healthy enough for tobacco and alcohol today.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

I think there's about a thousand other things that are burdening. I just.

[Matt Fradd]

So, you know, I feel great, and I do tobacco every day.

[Nick]

Do tobacco.

[Matt Fradd]

I do, yeah. You sure you're healthy? I do. I do it so bad.

[Nick]

You do it.

[Matt Fradd]

And then I usually do a whiskey.

[Nick]

Yeah, I feel great. You do alcohol. You think doing alcohol is cool?

[Matt Fradd]

Kind of. There was this comedian, she once said that her kid was in the backseat and the mother was having a smoke, and she went, I'm never going to smoke when I grow old. What am I gonna say to that? So I just looked at her and I went, well, you'll never be cool then, will you? That was great.

[Nick]

Yeah. I mean, that's another huge lie. Like, yeah, cigarettes make you cool. Yes, it is.

[Matt Fradd]

I had a friend say to me that cigarettes accentuate. This is Josiah, my old producer. They accentuate whatever you're doing at that moment.

[Nick]

Hilarious.

[Matt Fradd]

So if you're angry, it accentuates it. If you're happy, if you're philosophical. All right, so it sounded like. Like you were saying you don't like the new don't drink alcohol thing. But then it sounded. Then it. I think you said that people shouldn't be. Because they're unhealthy.

[Nick]

Yeah. I think people should get healthy so they can drink more.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay, there you go.

[Nick]

I think how much you can drink is a metric of your health, actually. And that's. That's true with respect to the liver, like the seed oil.

[Matt Fradd]

We're not encouraging drunkenness.

[Nick]

No, no, no. Don't drink to the point of hilarity. But you can be funny. The liver is very sensitive to what you eat and what you do to your body. And if you can't handle alcohol, it's a very good indicator of health.

[Matt Fradd]

It's funny you say that. My wife gave up alcohol years ago because she's Been sick as a dog.

[Nick]

Yeah. No, it's. I mean, that's where it hits first. The American used to drink, like, colonial America. I think it was something around four and a half gallons of ethanol per year distributed throughout beer and mead and wine and all these things. And now we're like, under, like, a gallon and a half per American per capita.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, interesting.

[Nick]

We're all drinking way, way less. But even the little bit that we do drink, everyone's like, oh, I just can't even drink anymore. I feel so terrible. And so instead, I'm gonna smoke weed.

[Matt Fradd]

That's it. I know. That's the other thing I've noticed. People, like, I haven't been drinking alcohol, but I've been drinking my THC drinks or whatever.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Is that what they're called? Thc. Dhc.

[Nick]

Thc.

[Matt Fradd]

Thc. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's funny. So you think. Okay, interesting. Do you drink alcohol?

[Nick]

Rarely. Rarely. I see.

Every, like, three months, my stress will peak and I'll have, like, a glass of wine and go, oh, alcohol is incredible. Yeah, I get it. Everyone should drink all the time. I'm gonna drink every day, and then I, like, don't for another three months. That's kind of my.

[Matt Fradd]

That's really. That's nice. I usually have a couple of fingers of whiskey. Enough. I just love it. Yeah. I just dip my fingers in and then I look at my wife while I. Anyway, this is going out of control. We should bring this back.

[Nick]

Yeah. We came up here with the intent to talk about holiness.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. No, but that's interesting. And I wonder, like, it makes you cynical of any new move in culture that seems positive. So now I'm like, well, what about what we're doing? They're getting people together off the.

[Nick]

So, yeah. To bring it. To bring it back to that. We are not a. We're actually anti discipline because we did all the work for you. That's kind of. The point is you're barking up the wrong tree if you're just going to white knuckle it. That the best man is the man who. And. And I. Okay, so I wanted to actually ask you about this. This is. This is the. The dichotomy between, I guess, like, appetites and virtue. And I have an answer. And I want to see if you agree with me or disagree with me on this one. So Dr. John Cute from Christendom has an analogy. I guess my wife shared this with me.

Which is the more moral? Man.

Two men walk into a store. We'll say, like, Cabela's and there's a beautiful knife on display. And they both observe the knife, see that it is good and pleasurable, and it would be amazing to have this knife.

And one of them thinks to himself, I could just steal it.

But I shouldn't. And he doesn't. And the other guy, it never occurs to him to steal it. Which man is more moral? The man Who.

[Matt Fradd]

To whom would be, I would think. I'm thinking of Aristotle's vicious to virtuous man. Right. The virtuous man is not only the man who does the good, but wants to do the good.

[Nick]

Yeah, so the stages of continents.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, exactly.

[Nick]

So am I wrong? No, no, I think you're correct.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. But I mean, there's certainly a sense in which the first man was tested and overcome and so good for him. But, yeah, like, I've never had a desire to climb a clock tower and shoot people with an Uzi. And I don't think I'd be more virtuous if I wanted to do that, but repressed it.

[Nick]

So the question, and I guess the dichotomy that is being debated here is, is it immoral to use a porn blocker? Are you a better man when you have free access to pornography and you simply white knuckle it, David Goggins it? And you're like, I'm not gonna do this until you beat yourself into submission. And now you're the type of man who doesn't want it. Right. You get to the first level of continence that your appetites and the good are aligned.

And I think that the conversation right now around alcohol, around fitness, around productivity, is very much in favor of be.

Unavoidably saturated with all of the temptations and just don't do it. And they look down on the people who need, whatever that means, some assist, some grace. Right. And I've been wrestling with that. Are we serving the virtuous development of people or are we inhibiting it? I think I have an answer, but I'm curious what you.

[Matt Fradd]

I guess I'm missing the question. It would seem to me that there isn't a clean cut answer. I mean, do you want to ask.

[Nick]

The question again or do you think that man should employ tools to assist in doing the right thing or should man simply, yeah, internally develop?

[Matt Fradd]

I don't think there's anything wrong with tools that assist you in doing something that you feel like you can't do.

[Nick]

Are you less of a virtuous man that you needed the tools or that you used the tools?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I Mean, surely if there's, if there's a man who doesn't look at pornography because he has a porn blocker and there's a man who doesn't look at pornography and doesn't have a porn blocker, clearly the second person is better off. Is that not what you're asking? But I don't think that the first man. I think a lot of the temptations that we experience are sometimes out of our control. They have a lot to do, maybe with our history. We talked about being exposed to porn at a young age. So if the second man wasn't exposed to porn until he was 25, he's far less likely, I think, for this to have a grip on him in the way that someone who was exposed to it when he was 11.

[Nick]

I think, I think I realized what I'm failing to ask here. It's about the vehicle by which you increase your continence is what would be the better way, the better way to do it. Yes, I agree that the man who already desires the good is a better man. I don't disagree with that. I'm saying if you're taking two people and you're setting them toward the path of becoming more continent.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Both are equally tempted.

[Nick]

Yes. Should you, as a person striving for holiness and continence and virtue, employ tools, training wheels, whatever you want to call it, assists? Or are you a more moral person? Are you a man of greater character, of greater willpower? Is there something there that makes you better for just saying, no, I'm going to white knuckle this. I'm going to do it alone, so to speak?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, I would think, though maybe I'm missing the point, but I think shift is a tool. Shift is training wheels. Or it could be accused of being all those things.

[Nick]

It is. And as a result of, of, of developing this, I've asked the question, am I hamstringing?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, I get you. No, I don't think I, I think it takes courage to look at yourself and say, I need this thing, you know, and it would be great if I didn't. I'd be a better man if I didn't. I hope to one day be the kind of man who doesn't. But self knowledge, which is vital, is telling me that I, I need it. I mean.

That clearly seems to be the case. I mean, you wouldn't go to a porn convention to show yourself just how capable you are of resisting temptation. Some people do that. There was this old thing called xxxchurch.com back in the day. I don't know if you remember it, but they were actually. Yeah, they were one of the first groups out there that were trying to get people to quit porn.

[Nick]

Oh, okay. It sounded like a religion of pornography.

[Matt Fradd]

And that's why they did it. Right. They were trying to be provocative, but they would go to these porn conventions and chat with porn performers. And I just think unless you have the purity of St. Joseph, that seems like the stupidest idea in the world.

[Nick]

We're supposed to flee.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

From it.

[Matt Fradd]

Exactly. So I. Yeah, because I think in some ways, like the online world can be like a porn convention. And so the man who says, yeah, I don't. I want to. Yeah, what is it? St. Paul, don't let there be a hint of impurity among you, not just within you, but what you're spending time with. So, no, I don't know how. I mean, it sounds like a cool novel idea to say that the man who chooses not to use Shift or caramelize is gonna be far better off in the future. So I'm tempted to adopt that idea just cause it's novel. But on the face of it, it seems like, no, that doesn't seem like a good idea.

[Nick]

Well, it's not just novel. It seems to be the milieu right now to say, you know, of your own willpower that. That the better man, better men across the board are men who, without dopamine, without.

Motivation, without external validation, without any assists whatsoever or graces.

Do what is what is best. But it's tip funny because it's typically limited to things like working out or waking up early or like, like starting a company. I don't know, just like kind of more surrogate activities as opposed to.

You know, being exhausted and treating your family well when it's hard.

[Matt Fradd]

Right.

[Nick]

And stuff like that. And your, Your thing about the porn convention, it was actually the analogy that kind of got me to my answer, which is the same answer that you arrived at, which is like, no, you wouldn't go to a strip club to.

[Matt Fradd]

Show what a man you are and.

[Nick]

Be like, no, it doesn't bother me. I don't even think about, you know, I don't care.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't even.

[Nick]

I don't even care.

[Matt Fradd]

Not even look at it.

[Nick]

And then it struck me, I was like, yeah, actually the answer is the same answer as infant baptism. Because if we really believe that we should do everything of our own power, we should raise our kids outside of the faith, teach them all of the different world religions, expose them to drugs, expose them to pornography. And then when they're old enough, say, figure it out.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

What do you think is the best? And I realized, like, oh, it's a very Protestant idea to not be led by a benevolent moral authority that says, I don't really care what you think, you know, or want. Like, I know what's best for you. Trust me and do what I'm saying.

You only kind of. You only like, have to 50% understand. Yeah, he. Yeah, they probably know best. Dad knows best, the church knows best, My priest knows best.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Christ knows best. I guess I'll just, you know, submit to that. And then as you become holier, then, like, your intellect becomes less darkened and you're.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah.

I was thinking recently about how the. And I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this insight, but the Israelites in Exodus.

Were under slave drivers appointed to them by Pharaoh. And I feel like those. That Pharaoh is Satan and the slave drivers are our passions and they keep us exhausted. And. Yeah, passions for pleasure, passions for self esteem, for power, for wealth. Just my irascible anger towards things that happen or my irritation at things or. Yeah. My irrational irritation or my irrational impatience. Yeah. That it's like I'm under the. The. The tyranny of these passions that the Lord Jesus wants to heal me from.

[Nick]

When he says his. His burden is easy.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Funnily enough, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Choose the burden you want. Yeah, it's like, choose the God you want. Pharaoh or the God of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. Because, I mean, that's what's interesting, actually. Hey. Because God sends Moses to confront a false God, telling him that he wants to liberate the Israelites to worship a true God. Which is interesting. Right? Because you might think, well, what's the difference? They're serving a false God and you are inviting them to go serve another God. What's the difference? And the answer is, like, all the difference ever.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. Because one loves me and one wants. Right. One is. Doesn't hate me and one.

[Nick]

But that does reveal that there is. There's. I think there's work in both. Or maybe work's not the right word. There's sacrifice in both, whichever one you serve. And you know, don't get me wrong, if you shift your phone.

Or I don't even care if you use this or any other service or you just throw your phone away. Like, relationships take effort. They're hard. This is something that my 15 seconds of marriages have been teaching me is like, okay, so this is how I'm going to be sanctified, is by relating to this person. Doing close quarters combat with my own vices every single day, getting immediate feedback about how much of a awesome person I am and iterating on that until the day I die. So hopefully that when I die, Christ says, I recognize you. Yeah, you're familiar. And I just think that like the battle for our souls, the battlefield I guess, is attention.

And we have a finite amount of time.

We have a even more finite amount of energy.

Eight hours a day, five hours a day, three hours a day on the phone probably.

I think you're taking a big gamble about getting into heaven with that.

[Matt Fradd]

Shift is the only thing that's worked for me. I've. I've bought two dumb. Two dumb phones, three dumb phones. You know, I've tried to get rid of my phone. I've. I've tried using Apple time, whatever that's called. Apple Time, Apple Time. I've tried using all of them. It, this is the one thing that has worked for me. If people are interested, why shiftyourphone.com right?

[Nick]

Yep.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, because it gives me enough. That's the thing. It's like unrealistic. Maybe it's not unrealistic. Maybe I'm just not as good as other people. And then clearly that's true. But I mean, I remember. Well, it gives me just enough. It gives me my Uber app, so when I'm out of town, I can get an Uber. It gives me my Delta app so that I can check in and get an alert when my plane is boarding. I remember one time I was going around with a dumb phone and I missed the flight.

[Nick]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

And at leader, you can't tell if you've been. All right.

[Nick]

No, no, no, no. That was. I mean, it was a little.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, you know what? I showed up. I thought the boarding time was the takeoff time or something. And then again it's because it has two factor verification, which I need running a YouTube channel, it has maps, it has my bank stuff, it has like. So there's just enough that if I shift my phone, just to be clear, so everyone knows there's no Internet, no distracting apps, but I can actually do it. It's annoying because I want more dopamine. I don't know, I want more entertainment. But that's the only reason. It's annoying. It's not annoying because, oh my gosh, I can't actually function in society now in the way it was. And don't get me wrong, I mean, I Love dumb phones. I love that people get light phones and wise phones. Good for them. But I just. This is the one thing that's worked. That's why gives me enough.

[Nick]

Have you ever seen.

[Matt Fradd]

Which is wild because I'm sure there are people pumping millions of dollars into the latest, greatest dumb phone right now. But your thing is better, I think. I mean, I haven't seen the latest thing, but have I seen what.

[Nick]

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007. Have you watched that?

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah.

[Nick]

I mean, just magnificent. I have so much respect for what he did and for him as a visionary, as a tech founder. I think every tech founder wants to see a little bit of themselves in and a little bit of Henry Ford. You know, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna listen to feedback, right? I mean, we listen to feedback, but I'm gonna tell you what's good for you and try to be a visionary and all this stuff. And, and when he comes out and he explains that phones at that point in time were insufficient because they had fixed buttons, how do we solve that? Well, we do what we did with computers and we have a display that changes according to need. Okay, so the whole phone now is going to be a screen. Well, then how are we going to interact with it with a computer? We have a mouse. Well, maybe we should use a stylus. No, we don't want styluses. What if we used our fingers? Like, wow, that's amazing. You know, and he just starts iterating through the. This vision. And I think that he made the most perfect technological companion to the human person this side of the 20th century. I don't think he made a mistake. I don't think he was wrong about his assumptions. I think he saw 30 years into the future, and.

It'S everything that was built on top of that that was exploitative.

And so what SHIFT is doing is give. It's just bringing back to 2007, 2008, and it's pure assist. Let me serve you. Let me be part of your life and make your life less difficult in all of the ways that you need.

[Matt Fradd]

Once you realize that your life will become better like this, maybe that's when you don't need SHIFT anymore. Because that's what I'm learning. I mean, I've learned this for a long time, but I mean, I mean, I just, you know, like, here's something I'm kind of proud of, if I'm allowed to be proud of things. I wanted to read Plato's Phaedo and I Woke up last week and just every morning had me coffee, said me prayers and read the phaedo and just finished that. And you know, and it was great. A few days and then I knew that I wouldn't have done that though if my phone was there. And so now I'm like, well, that's really cool. So this week I'm reading.

Veritata Splendor by John Paul ii. You know, and it's not actually hard because I don't have my annoying friend who I, for whatever reason, I want to keep looking at my phone.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So it's actually making my life better. And so this is just to your point about needing assistance versus no longer needing it. I think once you see. Because your point is why would anyone stop scrolling? But if you can find a reason, then it becomes easier.

[Nick]

My second favorite book of all time is this is how by Augustin Burroughs.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

Have you heard of it?

[Matt Fradd]

No, never. Tell me about it if you want.

[Nick]

Yeah, it's a self help book that makes fun of self help books.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

That's very pithy.

[Matt Fradd]

And is it directed at the self, at the person?

[Nick]

Yeah. Basically it's chapters labeled how to whatever and.

How to take your own life. How to smile, how to be courageous, how to lose weight, how to be fat. It's a great book. And one of the chapters in it is how to finish your drink. So Augustine Burroughs was. Found out years after reading the book that he's gay. And I think it was. He doesn't specify and this is how, but he specifies in a different book that his partner died and I think of aids and it just like destroyed him. And he spent the next several months in his apartment almost drinking himself to death every day. And the only reason he would leave the apartment is to go and get more alcohol, come back to the apartment and drink it.

And he's a writer and.

One day just had an idea for a television script and he sat down at his computer and seven days later he finished the script and forgot to drink and did not experience withdrawals.

And it occurred to him that.

He just needed to find something that he liked more than drinking.

[Matt Fradd]

This is like the rat experiment.

[Nick]

Precisely.

And in this chapter he says, we just need to be brutally honest with ourselves that we don't have something that we like more than intoxication, whatever your intoxication is.

And he.

At a book signing, a woman comes up to him afterward and says, you know, like, how dare you say this? It's a disease. Alcoholism is a disease. My son drank himself to Death.

[Matt Fradd]

He.

[Nick]

Said, ma', am, I hate to tell you this. Your son died doing what he loved.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm sure that made her happy.

[Nick]

We want to want things, but we don't want the things.

[Matt Fradd]

Thousand percent preach.

[Nick]

We want to. Want to be a person who prays. We don't want to pray.

And we're too prideful to admit that we're just that type of person.

I don't. I actually. Guys, everybody watching. I don't want to pray. I'm not a good enough man yet. I find it burdensome. I find it boring. I get distracted when I pray.

[Matt Fradd]

Can I tell you something really beautiful?

[Nick]

I love praying.

[Matt Fradd]

I'm not saying that to shame you or to brag. I'm saying that because I remember not wanting to pray. I remember what that was like.

[Nick]

But you didn't get there without creating the space to allow for that.

Would you agree that. That that progress from stage two to stage one of continence. Do the good and it feels bad. Do the good and it feels good. That that was a process of drawing closer to Christ?

[Matt Fradd]

Yes, of course.

[Nick]

And how long did that take?

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know. But the. I don't know. But I guess what I'm thinking of is, like, first few years in my conversion.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

If you said to me, like, you should pray the. Like, pray a rosary or pray 10 minutes, I'd be like, oh, my gosh.

[Nick]

Right.

[Matt Fradd]

You know, Whereas now I just want to sit in his presence and praise God. I love it. Yeah. And that'll fluctuate.

[Nick]

I'm feeling tickles of that now. Like, I don't want to, but then when I'm there, I'll go, wow. I really liked contemplating God. And not because I'm getting euphoria, but just because I got delight out of attending to things that were good and beautiful.

[Matt Fradd]

But even as I say that I love to pray, I want to pray. It's still true that. Scrolling through, let's say, Netflix. I don't know. I don't use that. But would be more exciting.

[Nick]

Yes.

[Matt Fradd]

Obviously, in some way or what have you.

[Nick]

There was a. What Rat park showed. And this is pretty damning in my opinion, Rat park showed that substances are not inherently addictive.

[Matt Fradd]

I'd love to talk to you about that. I think it depends on what you mean by addictive, doesn't it?

[Nick]

Yeah. And that's a big.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. There's a psychological definition, there's a neurological definition, There's a spiritual definition.

[Nick]

But if it's the case that you can change environmental conditions, and by environmental, I also mean psychological, I mean interpersonal. It could be the weather, it could be how much food you ate that day. If it's true that if you change those conditions, people spontaneously either use less of a substance, a categorically addictive substance, or cannot be held by that categorically addictive substance, then it must be the case that that substance does not produce a reliably addictive result. Must be the case.

If it otherwise. And this is something that Peter Hitchens was saying, if it's the case that the drug has the power.

We'Re screwed. Like one exposure, it's over.

It has to be a both, and there has to be a collaboration between the will, the body, and the environment. The environmental conditions otherwise, like formation wouldn't matter. Right. Let's form our people so they have good appetites and they do good things and they're repulsed by evil things.

So I don't. I don't think it's as productive to say social media is addictive.

I think that's.

Limiting our progress on the subject. To say social media is inherently. Don't even open it, don't even know. Because if you had a screenplay, you would stop drinking. If you had just like a beautiful home life or a book you just like, I can't wait to get back to reading this book or researching this thing or playing with my kids or going on this trip, whatever it is. Instagram, who gives a crap?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

Yeah, you'd forget about it.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And so it's. I think it's a question of. Of.

Juxtaposition more than anything. And for the.

[Matt Fradd]

The only. It sounds like you're saying the only thing that can conquer a desire is a stronger one. Yes. So when I remember I used to go surfing early in the morning in San Diego and I'd wake up with my alarm sometimes. And if my desire to stay warm in my bed while I'm tired was greater than to get up and strap a board to my roof and go into the cold water, then I would stay in my bed. But it was the opposite, which got me out.

[Nick]

Well, and.

I don't want to make it seem like self control or discipline or fortitude.

Are superfluous or aren't virtues that we should have because we should have them. And when the environmental conditions are not in our favor, we should, no matter what, do the right thing.

But the limiting reagent there is willpower. It's virtue.

Stop thinking we're infinite creatures. We're not. We need grace. Even without grace, we couldn't even keep the natural law. So why do we think that we could just grit our teeth and do everything, everything perfectly? And isn't it better if we're assuming the knife analogy to be true? Isn't it better to rig the game in our favor so that we always want and do the good? And eventually, I think, I mean, think about like a child who's uncorrupted. They can't conceive of the evils that you and I can.

So should we corrupt them to challenge them to do what is right in the face of that corruption, or should we preserve that innocence? Should we rig the game in their favor so that they make it to the ends of their lives without even considering the evils that you and I are capable of?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, that's right.

[Nick]

I would argue for that.

[Matt Fradd]

I remember I was reading the Lord of the Rings to my son and daughter when they were much younger and I had thought about should I show them the movie? And my wife's like, don't, don't show them. And we did eventually, because they're excellent, obviously. But my kids were quite young and my wife's point was he's got no conception of what those orcs look like on the Lord of the Rings. When you talk about these scary monster. He's got some vague, ominous understanding. That's scary, no doubt. But he hasn't come into his mind something that ugly or grotesque. And then of course you bring pornography into the equation.

[Nick]

Yeah. And I think those, those changes are somewhat irrevocable. I think you can reclaim appetites, but they, the. I, I don't think you can unring the bell completely.

[Matt Fradd]

No.

This is great. Everyone should go to shifty phone.com, do a sales pitch for it real quick. Like just sum it up.

[Nick]

It's the only one really. If, if you think that, and I don't know that anybody doesn't think that the relationship with the phone has become one sided, that boundaries, important boundaries have been.

Breached. I guess if you feel that way and even if you haven't tried anything else but you're skeptical about something that's going to work.

To give you back the attention so you can dedicate it to things that, that you wish you've been doing for years, we will give you the opportunity.

To become the type of person to want those things.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

That's the most complicated sales pitch in the world.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, yeah. So we have shift and we have Escape. Escape gets rid of your. Gets rid of porn on your phone or iPad forever. No, no. What's no going back. And then Shift blocks distracting apps. And you can, as you say, set a timer. You'll have to show me how to set the timer. Oh, we didn't plug in my computer, did we? Oh, that's a bummer. Now we'll have to do that. But yeah, thank you for the work that you've done on this. I really appreciate it. What a gift. Hey. That you're going to get to be to so many folks.

[Nick]

Praise be to God. It's been a heck of an adventure.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. What if. I mean, is there anything else you want to tell people about? Like if people want to get in touch with you to invest? I don't know if you're looking for that or if people want to reach out to you about other things. Are there ways to do that?

[Nick]

Yeah, just the customer support line goes right to me.

[Matt Fradd]

That might change after this.

[Nick]

And then the Instagram also goes to me and our very small team. So yeah, we're definitely accessible.

I think the thing that I find to be the most apostolic or like ministerial is Escape Shift is.

Needed. Something like it is needed. I think we did.

Can't be absorbed by Google or Apple. They can't do what we do. It would be a massive breach of security. Thankfully, it'd be a massive breach of security for them to try to incorporate what we've done into the features of the iPhone.

They can't adopt that.

Which is good.

[Matt Fradd]

Another question about Escape, you said that it works on third party apps like Instagram. People might be shocked to realize that, oh wow, I thought that would just work with a browser. Are there any other sort of shocking things that you learned that Escape was able to do? Like shocking in the sense of, oh, it even does this.

[Nick]

The third party apps thing was pretty, pretty shocking. Oh yeah, here's one. This is actually the very first thing that I invented with Escape was.

And I think it'll be a companion service, again free. I don't know where it will fit into this, but.

People. So the reason why you have to curate third party apps is because even though so on something like Instagram you cannot access pornography. You can on Reddit, you can on Twitter, you can on Telegram, but Instagram, they don't allow explicit pornography on there. It goes right up to the line and you have onlyfans models who have their personal presence on there.

But.

It'S obviously a source of starting the addiction cycle for somebody who's trying to exercise self control and they go on Instagram and then they're bombarded with Sexual content, and then they fall into pornography again. So very early on I realized, well, we gotta do something about that person's algorithm. So I actually developed a sort of a cleansing script that you log in your Instagram to our service and in about 10 hours you have like a 95% reduction and sexual content on your Explore page. So it basically goes through for you and identifies sexual content and then says, I don't ever want to see this again. And it pivots your algorithm towards something else. And then this is a sustained effect because when you have Escape on your phone, let's say you go to your Explore page and you're like, hey, where's the stuff that I wanted to see? Where's the smut? It's not there anymore. I'm going to search it. You search it and then it pings a 404. You're not actually getting that result back. So it stops both the temptation and then the actualization of that. And I think that's something that we're probably going to package in the near future as well.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, there are many ways to skin a cat. And so at the end of the day, no matter what help you're using, you're going to have to make a decision. Right, but I mean, what about things like sexualized stories, which is also pornography and things like that? I mean, there are a million different ways to access pornographic content.

[Nick]

Well, there's. So there's two ways to access pornographic content. Accidentally and on purpose. Accidentally would be algorithmically, and we're taking steps to help with that. Categorize the Internet well enough that those things don't show up on your algorithm accidentally.

[Matt Fradd]

But if someone types in like porn.

[Nick]

Stories, I don't know, but that's the on purpose one. So.

[Matt Fradd]

And that's no images. I mean, it's just. Yeah, yeah.

[Nick]

So because everything is.

Categorizable.

By the mere input of the user into a search mechanism for that type of result, it's already been identified. It doesn't have to be images. It could be anything in that space.

[Matt Fradd]

And it'll block that.

[Nick]

Yes, because in order to.

[Matt Fradd]

Does Spotify have porn? Don't.

[Nick]

I don't know if it, you know, somebody was just telling us that they were using Spotify.

As some mechanism of temptation. I don't know what they were referring to. So in that sense, I guess my broader.

[Matt Fradd]

Sorry, continue. I cut you off.

[Nick]

Well, yeah, I know what you're asking, like, is there like erotic content or something like that?

[Matt Fradd]

Well, in those third party apps, I Guess more generally, are there certain ones that you can. You can't get into to block, like, it sounds like on Instagram. You've got that covered.

[Nick]

Yeah, I think Snapchat's gonna be gone completely. Snapchat's one of the worst offenders, actually.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it.

[Nick]

Snapchat is really bad.

[Matt Fradd]

What is Snapchat you take. I'm an old man, dude. What is Snapchat? I don't know. Is that that yellow logo?

[Nick]

It's the yellow app.

[Matt Fradd]

I didn't know that was still social media. So it's still a thing.

[Nick]

Yeah, that one's a pretty big offender, I guess. Yes. Because it also opens a browser within Snapchat, but there's also, like, a lot, I guess, a lot of porn stars on Snapchat itself.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, please delete that.

[Nick]

But in order to filter, we have to have what's called a progressive web app, and they don't have one for it. So we are just gonna. We're just gonna block it. Good.

[Matt Fradd]

You'll be fine. You'll be fine.

[Nick]

You'll be okay. If somebody's, like, lifetime of porn addiction or, like, have to give up my Snapchat, I'm like, all right.

[Matt Fradd]

Easy for me to decide. I still don't know what it is. It's the yellow one.

[Nick]

One?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, the yellow one. It's all I know. That's. I. I couldn't tell you what it is. Is it all. I don't know, is it social media or is it how people talk?

[Nick]

Yeah, it's. It's a mess. I don't know.

[Matt Fradd]

It was like, my wife was here the other day. I love her so much. She didn't know who. Check this out. She didn't know what. Only fans was amazing. And she didn't know who.

Oh, who's the. And she didn't know who Andrew Tate was.

[Nick]

I mean, bless her.

[Matt Fradd]

She'd know those things. And I. Bless her heart. And she's like, who are they? I'm like, I will never tell you.

[Nick]

No.

[Matt Fradd]

And, yeah, I was like, what a beautiful, pure. You.

[Nick]

Pure flower.

[Matt Fradd]

I don't know. Who's that?

[Nick]

Yeah. That's hilarious.

[Matt Fradd]

So, yeah, I'm glad in the.

[Nick]

I mean, I don't know if you want to get into this. I don't even know if you have time to do it, because I know you got a meeting, but question of modesty has been something that I've been thinking about for, like, seven years leading up to this, because is when you're creating a porn blocker, you have to Ask the question. Well, what's porn?

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, I've got all the. I'd love to. I've written books on pornography. Doesn't mean I'm an expert, but I have thought about this as well.

[Nick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

So I. I think my definition. Right. Is that what you're after? You weren't asking, but here we go.

[Nick]

No, please.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. I think that pornography is. So the word pornography into the English language in the 19th century, mid 19th century. Isn't that interesting? First of all comes from two Greek words, as you probably know, pornegraphane, the writing of the prostitutes or the drawing of the prostitutes. Pornography was always meant to serve an erotic function. It was meant to be an extension of prostitution, to do what a prostitute did, as it were.

So I think you can think of pornography objectively, subjectively, of course. But of course, if it's subjectively, I don't think it's objective, but I think it's something like material which depicts erotic behavior and is intended to sexually arouse or it has that effect. By and large. It's a very difficult thing to nail down. I don't like the catechism's definition of pornography. I don't think that works.

[Nick]

Yeah, they limit it to just the depiction of sex acts.

[Matt Fradd]

I mean, here's why I don't like that. I think depictions of sex acts don't have to be pornographic.

And think of it. I don't know, Think about this. Suppose you're a missionary, a missionary 200 years ago or something, and you're talking to these native people about their dignity and maybe encouraging them to engage in a sex act that's more befitting to two souls uniting, say. And so you might say, well, isn't this how they got the word missionary position? I don't know. But you might depict that. No, I'm not even joking. I think that's why.

[Nick]

Is that really what.

[Matt Fradd]

I think that's what the idea was. Because, I mean, people mock that. And I'm not saying that you can't engage in the sexual act in different ways. That's not the point. The point is that, like, if you want to, like, treat your wife or your husband like a human being, like, here's one way you might come together and you could imagine depicting that.

[Nick]

Right. Well, there are manualists in images or something. There are moral manualists who have described licit and illicit sex acts.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. So that might be. And my point is, you could depict the sexual act in a way that's not pornographic because it's not Material which depicts erotic behavior intended to sexually arouse. So I think it's pornography, something like that.

[Nick]

You did make a point to Andrew Clavin that pornography is something that can't help but be consumed, or at least by men. It's sort of can't help but if a sex scene on Game of Thrones, I think you guys were talking about, appears on screen.

[Matt Fradd]

My point is it's more of a. Like, it's easier to engage in a sexual sin through fantasy or through imagination than murder. Yeah. If I watch a movie and someone murders another person, it's a lot more difficult to commit an interior sin.

[Nick]

It doesn't have to do with the difference between the irascible and the concupiscible appetites of like. Like, one of them concupiscible would be sins of the flesh, whereas, like, irascible. You kind of have to be egged into a state of murderous rage to even desire that sort of thing. Whereas.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah, maybe that's right.

[Nick]

Like, of the flesh. It's like, well, there it is. And that's where, you know, greater risk might be.

[Matt Fradd]

Like, one way to say it is like, if you took a Jane Austen movie and left it alone, except you inserted a sex act that was pornographic in the middle, it wouldn't make that movie pornographic. It would make it a great movie with an awful, unfortunate pornographic act within it. You know, And I think that was my point to Klavan, that I'm. I wouldn't call Game of Thrones pornographic. I think it's. Apparently, I've never watched it or read it. I hear it's a decent story or what have you, but it clearly involves pornography in it.

So what's the point? And so maybe the point is, you could imagine, like, think of the Brothers Karamazov, in which patricide exists.

It's not like patricidalography. It's not the equivalent. But you could imagine someone who hates their father so much and thinks all fathers are the problems of all evil. Maybe the feminists, I don't know, and they write a book and the primary point of the book is the continual death of different fathers. And the reason you're reading those books or watching those movies is to see fathers be killed. That seems to me to be a. A different thing. I don't know what I'm saying anymore.

[Nick]

Well, this started because of modesty, because if you're going to claim to restrict porn or sexual content, if you're going to claim to be an authority on that, that it's Good to know. Well, what are we referring to here? And like, I originally and still intend to develop this to the point that videos of women exercising in the gym in athletic wear are not present.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

[Nick]

And I think that that should be obvious to anybody who pays attention to, like, what has happened. Because I think, yeah, there's two things that hap. Unfortunately, immodesty actually desexualizes the human body because you have two options. I'm speaking from a man's perspective, but I think the same thing's true in reference to somebody like Andrew Tate. Or men who wear immodest clothing, which we can do. Men can do.

Any intentional dress that that's designed to inspire lust from a woman would be considered immodest. And that's different man to man. Just like clothing on women is different woman to woman. The same dress on two different women. One might be modest, one might be immodest. It's just very contextual, which is why it's kind of a trad illusion to impose specific clothing on women and say it's immodest for you to wear this or not wear this. It's very contextual. But modesty is objective. And if you, for example.

Going into a coffee shop or a restaurant or a Chipotle or something, and like a woman ordering is in a sports bra and leggings.

You have two options as a man over the course of time. You can either stop seeing her body as something that has sexuality and eroticism in it, or you can be publicly aroused by this woman. And because of the Coolidge effect and because of social decorum, the former happens. And now women are more and more asexual unless they are depicted in more and more gratuitously sexual categories and situations. Which is why we get like this insanity that is pornography. And so if you want to elevate female sexuality, you have modesty 100%.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah.

[Nick]

And once again, if that's. I mean, that can be taken at least at face value of some sort of patriarchal, tyrannical, authoritative, you're trying to restrain, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it's like, do you want to be a valued sexual creature?

[Matt Fradd]

I would highly recommend people check out Brian Holdsworth's video on modesty.

[Nick]

Okay, I haven't seen it.

[Matt Fradd]

Brian is so brilliant. He's like low key brilliant. Like, he doesn't let it out all at once. You start watching and being like, man, this guy is great. You know who I'm talking about? He's got a video on modesty and he Talked about, like, what about my rights? Like what if I just wanted to come and buy some guacamole without having to be assaulted with your like skin tight leggings? And now what? Like, and one of his points was, you know, it's immodest because if I was to say stare at that area, you'd be offended. So now you're imposing upon me and now I have to change how I walk through this checkout where my only options is to look ahead.

[Nick]

Yeah, well, and there will always be opportunities. This is I guess going back to the self control point. There will always be opportunities to exercise self control and custody of the eyes and chastity internally. Like it's not true that if porn didn't exist, men wouldn't cheat. If porn didn't exist, men wouldn't lust after other women. That's not true because novelty drives sexual appetite. There's always going to be a place for the virtue of chastity within marriage, without marriage, all these. But there is an inflation that happens with the currency of our sexual attention when every woman is sexualized.

[Matt Fradd]

I like how you put that inflation.

[Nick]

And I think it's, it's really, really tragic what happens in marriage when you have a kid who from ages 8 to 25 or 17 to 30 or whatever his age range of exposure is.

In 1955, the population in the world was 2.2 billion people. So if you and I were alive then we might encounter 75% fewer human persons that we would see. It wasn't until 58 that the highway system was invented where we could commute into work and be around other people. Women didn't enter the workforce until the early 60s, late 70s. And then the Internet happens. You go back 75 years, you and I would have seen absorbed into our retinas probably a millionth of the human forms that we have just encountered. Not even sexually just seen. Think about the inflation, like the comparison to the data set that we have in our minds that when we look at our wives we've also seen millions of women and again non sexually just seen them. And whether they like it or not, we are ranked among all the men they've seen. They are ranked among all the women that we've seen. Then throw porn on top of that and try to have a healthy sexuality in society. Good luck. So with escape and with shift, I think it's like, like if you want to have any semblance of healthy sexuality even remotely approaching what was there a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, honestly, fifty years Ago, you have to immediately reduce the data input and start forgetting as much as you possibly can, everything you've seen. So that like, think about if we, you know, Ireland. I don't know why I pick Ireland when I think about this analogy.

[Matt Fradd]

We're.

[Nick]

We're two 20 year old guys in Ireland and it's 1850, whatever, and there's like 90 people in the town and there's like a couple of women who are our age. We care. First, is she a good woman? Right. She gonna.

[Matt Fradd]

Well, maybe not first, second, and more.

[Nick]

More importantly, long term, we would say think we might be advised. Maybe we don't think this at 20, but we might be advised by our. By our priest or by our parents or friends or whatever. You should go with so and so. She's a good woman. And then if she had a phenotypic property that we liked. I love her ears, beautiful face, love the hourglass figure, whatever it is, we would be like, we won the lottery. Good woman. And I'm attracted to like this thing about her. The idea of like preferences.

Like hair color preferences, body shape preferences, to even have the data set to compare.

I think has done incalculable damage. And I don't know that that genie can ever be put back in the bottle.

But like, no offense to St. Anthony Desert Hermit, it's a different game.

Like we are called to a level of virtue. We require a level of virtue today.

That has been grossly inflated.

And I just think that you need nuclear weapons to fight back against it.

[Matt Fradd]

That's very well put. That's very insightful. Shiftyourphone.com Shiftyourphone.com. is that where people get escaped as well?

[Nick]

Yeah, it's in the. It's just a. In. In Shift. So you never, you never have to pay for Escape. You download Shift and it's an option inside of there can.

[Matt Fradd]

What's the beta version like? Cause I might try it on my phone.

[Nick]

Of Escape.

[Matt Fradd]

Yeah. If you'd let me. Or is it not available to.

[Nick]

No, yeah, I totally let you try.

[Matt Fradd]

Did you? I've totally forgot that you told me that.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Good.

[Nick]

I think we put it on your phone. Oh, it is on your phone.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it?

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Cool.

I mean, how would I figure that out unless I was looking at it? Let me try.

That's great. Well, that's funny because I haven't noticed. You know, my question to you earlier was, well, what if I. What if it blocks things that it shouldn't block? Right. So that's funny. Okay, so what do I What could I type in?

[Nick]

I mean, if you go to Google right now, have. Is your phone unshifted?

[Matt Fradd]

It's unshifted.

[Nick]

Go to chrome.

[Matt Fradd]

Okay.

Maybe playboy.com.

[Nick]

That sounds.

[Matt Fradd]

Is it a thing? I don't know.

[Nick]

Just pornhub.com.

[Matt Fradd]

Oh, yeah. All right. Pornhub.com.

[Nick]

Apologies if it's not actually on your phone right now.

[Matt Fradd]

I'll turn my. I'll turn everything away if it is.

Let me. This is wild, you know. Yep. This site can't be reached. So you did do it.

[Nick]

I want to show it up to the camera.

[Matt Fradd]

Sure. I don't know if they can see it, but imagine if it just turned on.

[Nick]

Yeah. So pornhub.com. it's just like. It loads right away.

[Matt Fradd]

That's wonderful.

[Nick]

Yeah.

[Matt Fradd]

Hey, good job.

[Nick]

Hey, thanks.

[Matt Fradd]

What if I went to. I won't do this now because I'm afraid it'll be more likely the case. But Instagram, say. And try something like that.

[Nick]

So you have the beta. So we don't have the progressive web app versions on your phone yet for the third party applications. Yeah, we would have to enroll you for that.

[Matt Fradd]

That's fantastic, dude. Thank you.

[Nick]

But yeah, if you went to Instagram with that same, same, same thing, you know, you go into the search bar, you type in something and.

[Matt Fradd]

Wonderful. All right. God bless you. Thank you for coming on my show. Travel is awful. I hate it. And so thank you for making the sacrifice. And let's hope. And we ask you, you guys who are still watching at the end of this show, I don't know how many there are of you, but get this and tell everybody you know about it.

[Nick]

Escapefromporn.com ESC not the forward E-S-C- from porn.com free forever in perpetuity. Permanent porn blocking on your mobile devices. Coming to computers early 2026.

[Matt Fradd]

Thank you.

[Nick]

Shiftyourphone.com coming to computers 2026. But your phone will be shifted today if you want.

[Matt Fradd]

All right, thanks.

[Nick]

Thank you, Matt.