Episode Highlights

• Distraction addiction and the ways that screen time sneaks up on you
• How much time are we really spending on our phones?
• Kevin’s journey to developing the app millions of people didn’t know they needed
• How moment is like MyFitnessPal or Fitbit but for phone usage
• Why boredom is essential for a fruitful, creative life
• The strange preconceptions that people have of productivity app designers
• Do you know what percentage of your life you are spending looking at your phone?
• Most frequently used apps are all social media related, not productivity based
• How’s your phone hygiene? (and yes, it’s a real thing)

Useful Links

• Focus Driving App
• Moment Screen Awareness App
• Move App for Office Movement

About Guest

Kevin Holesh is an app developer and the creator of Moment.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Kevin Holesh, who is an app designer of such apps as Moment, Move, and Focus. And for anybody that knows a little bit about my programs, you know why I am so crazy excited to have found you and have you on the show today. So I really, really appreciate you taking the time.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Zack.

Zack Arnold: So the story about how I found you is a little ironic because we’re going to talk a lot today about distractions and focus and lack of focus. And it was through discovering your app Moment that I decided to contact you. But the reason that I found Moment was because I was on my phone going down the rabbit hole, reading articles about being distracted while being on your phone reading articles. So it was it was a very meta experience where I had read an article recently, and off the top of my head, I can’t remember who wrote it, but it was basically about this idea that app designers are now specifically trying to make their apps as addictive as possible to steal as much of your attention as they can, and I realized, wow, they’re doing that right now as I’m reading this article. And I went down the rabbit hole of links, and I just randomly found a link to your app, and I was like, oh, okay, what’s this thing? And I started reading more about it, and I said, wow, this is as close to a panacea to getting off of my phone as I’ve ever seen before, so I installed the free version, and I think within 24 hours I was like, “Oh, I’m paying for all the premium services because this thing is making a huge difference for me. So I want to talk more about the app, how it works, how you design it. We’ll get into all the nuts and bolts a little bit later, but first, because I just kind of found you randomly, I want to understand a little bit more about you and your journey and your background, so then we can understand how you came to design this.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, sure. So I’m a 28 year old United States citizen. I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is kind of on the East Coast, and I grew up. You know, I kind of fell in love with website development and coding and all kind of nerdy stuff when I was 15. Started making websites, and you know, when the iPhone came out, I realized, you know, even as a younger person, I realized that you know this thing is going to be a huge, you know, in terms of my industry. So I immediately shifted towards app design and app development, but then in a on a personal level, I knew that sort of once I got this, you know, always connected smartphone, even you know the first version of the iPhone, which was fairly rudimentary compared to what we have now, I knew I was there’s no like going back from this like there’s no being less connected once I sort of start carrying around this phone, so even at an early age, I was kind of headed in this direction that I eventually got to with Moment and a few other apps. But I kind of started off as a nerd, and I guess I’m still a nerd. But yeah, that that’s the nut of it.

Zack Arnold: Got it. Well, one thing that I want to make sure that people know that may not know my story too much or just kind of know about this program. I don’t know anything about apps. I am not a tech person. Like, if you said anything about coding, you would lose me. I have no idea how any of this works. So this is not going to be discussion of, well, you know, did you use this coding or C plus plus or like? I can’t even make a joke about it because I don’t even know the right words.

Kevin Holesh: No, C plus plus is pretty good. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Whatever it is, but so this isn’t about how to make apps, how to design apps. It’s about what this program or this app does, and it’s it’s amazing to me that you had seen the the usefulness of an app like this so early on, especially being younger, because everybody always complains about oh well, millennials are just sucked into social media and their technology, and they don’t understand what it’s like to socialize with real human beings. And the more that I read about this, the more that I see that there’s a lot of millennials that are the ones fighting back against technology. It’s just not the the old codgers like me.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly. I mean, this this whole like you know moment as an app thing gets pretty meta pretty quickly. You know, the the biggest distraction you know I have from sort of you know living in the moment and being present with my family is working on moment itself. So you know, it gets pretty pretty meta, like you mentioned earlier, pretty quickly. But just in general, I mean, I kind of design moment. To not be a typical app, you know, you install it as an app on your phone, but it’s really meant not to be used. You know, you can use the app without actually opening up the app. So that that’s been sort of the design philosophy behind it. But yeah, I definitely hear what you’re saying.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So what I want to do is let’s just dive right into what the app does first, and then what we can do is reverse engineer all of the things that it is undoing because I could go on a rant forever about smartphones and distractions, but I think it’s really important before we go any further for people to just be able to visualize what the Moment app actually does. Then I want to talk about some of the statistics behind the the things that it’s reversing, so can you just give me kind of a a boilerplate overview for somebody that’s obviously listening and they can’t look at it? What is Moment and how does it work?

Kevin Holesh: Sure. So Moment is an app that you install on your iPhone and iPad, and it runs in the background and tracks how much you’re using your phone, basically your screen time. So it counts if you’re inside an app, tapping around, reading a news article, checking your email, checking your social media feeds. But it doesn’t count things like listening to music or actually being on a phone call. So it’s it’s really a tool just to track what I call screen time. Just you know, sort of distracted, looking at a screen, and the the basic part basically just tracks how much per day you’re on your phone, on your phone screen, I should say. And the sort of premium features, which you mentioned earlier, are tools to help you sort of set limits on yourself if your goal is to use your phone less, so you know a lot of people when they first install Moment are surprised at how much time they’re spending on their phone. It turns out it’s pretty hard to estimate that yourself without installing a tool like Moment. So a lot of people’s goal is to use their phone less, you know, be more present, hence the name Moment, and that’s that’s sort of where I’m I’m putting a lot of my energy in design and development. Is just how how do I help people with a tool to use their phone less? When you know I’m battling kind of all the you know companies and apps you mentioned earlier that are trying to capture attention. I’m sort of the opposite of that. I’m trying to help you focus your attention where you want.

Zack Arnold: Well, if it’s a smartphone, why would I want to spend less time on it? If it’s making me smarter and more productive and connecting me with the world, why would I want to reduce my time on such an amazing device?

Kevin Holesh: Well, you know, it’s it’s different for everyone. I think there’s there’s definitely a happy medium. So my goal with Moment is to not get people to throw their cell phone into the lake and never use it again, and you know, go back to like a dumb phone or a feature phone. It’s to find the balance of the helpful things that smartphones bring to your life, and contended against sort of the rabbit holes or the unproductive uses of time, however you define that, you know it could be in terms of what apps you’re using. But for me, it’s it’s sort of a measure of how long I’m spending on my phone per day. You know, it turns out I’m happiest right around you know 30 or 40 minutes per day on my phone, and that that might include things like checking a few emails, or using Google Maps, or something. But you know, I I know that I kind of feel like a unproductive hangover after I spend you know three hours on my phone a day. I just I’m less happy. I’m I feel less productive. I’m just you know generally in a worse mood after that long. So moment kind of the goal is to find what amount of time or what apps work for you, and then help sort of form the habits to you know get that on a on a fairly daily basis.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and what I’ve found that’s so incredibly useful about this is the same thing that I found when I was first when I just started my journey for learning how to eat better, and I learned that the most important step to be able to make changes is that you have to measure your improvements. So one of the things that I always say in my programs is that what you measure, you can improve upon. And to me, this was like my fitness pal, but for my phone, because when I started tracking my calories and my food and my macronutrients, like I was appalled at what I thought was a decent diet, and then once I saw the numbers, I was like, “Oh my god, I eat like crap! And it was the same thing with my phone, where I started to actually break down the the app usage by minute because that’s one of the great premium features. Is that every morning I can wake up, you take a quick screenshot of your battery usage by app, and I’m like, “Oh my God! I spent how much time in Chrome or in whatever other app it is, and as soon as I had that awareness, I started to reduce it. So for me, this is basically like MyFitnessPal, but for tech usage.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly. And it’s funny you mentioned that app. The idea came to me from a similar app, Fitbit. So. I rewind five years, and I was, you know, a full-time app developer, spending a ton of time on my phone. I just moved in my with my fiance at the time, and we were just, you know, working all day, and then we’d come home and sort of just spend the rest of the evenings on our phone. So I was out for a run one day, looking at my Fitbit, and I was like, man, I wish I had a Fitbit for how much time I’m spending on my phone or spending on my computer, just distracted. And I looked around, of course, in the App Store at least, and didn’t find anything. So, you know, being an app developer, I kind of hacked something together, installed it on my phone, and kind of the the rest grew from there. But it definitely started out as a. I need to measure this before I can, you know, even know a if I’m doing well or how how poorly I am doing.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and there’s nothing that I love more than hearing the story of somebody building something awesome just because they wanted it themselves. Like you didn’t say, oh, I see a market opportunity, or the stats say that I could make X number of dollars by creating this. It was just, hey, I would love to have this. I’m just going to build it for myself, and then all of a sudden things take off because if you want it, that means that there are millions of people that probably want it and they don’t even know it.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly.

Zack Arnold: Well, one of the things that finding your app led me to, and I still want to dig even deeper into it, but one of the the things that you have on there is this little mini course that you can take that’s called the Board and Brilliant Challenge, and that actually led me to the book Board and Brilliant, and I’m actually hoping to have Manush on the the podcast as well. Okay, but one of the the most amazing insights that she mentions that I want to talk more about because I’m sure that you have plenty of statistics behind this, but she had mentioned that there are only two industries that call customers users. That’s the tech industry and drug dealers. Yeah. And as soon as I heard that, I said, “Wow! Like that just blew my mind. And it’s so true that it really has become an addiction. So given that you have all of these crazy app dashboards and statistics, I would love to know what you’ve learned about phone usage from now having this app for several years.

Kevin Holesh: Definitely. So, yeah, it’s definitely interesting the whole users mentality. It’s you know, if you just the simple fact of you know sort of knowing that when you’re using Facebook, you’re not the customer of Facebook. Like Facebook, you know, cares about you know you getting onto the site, but you’re not paying Facebook anything. You’re you’re essentially, or I should say, they’re selling your attention. So you’re not the customer. You’re the product. And a lot of people, you know, it’s a pretty easy equation to make once you sit down and think about it, but if you’re just using Facebook, you’re not thinking about Facebook’s incentives for certain things necessarily. So that’s kind of what I want to bring attention to with the courses inside of Moment, like the Borden Brilliant course, and just the the Borden Brilliant course specifically was it kind of came out of a project we did with the Note to Self podcast with Manouche hosting a couple years ago, and it was, you know, kind of in the same vein. It was like, okay, we’re going to do this challenge, we’re going to do it all together, and we’re going to see how much we can reduce our phone usage. And it turns out like that’s a really difficult thing to do. I think the average person who did that project, you know, a couple years ago, you know, dropped their daily phone usage by seven minutes, you know, out of an average of you know three hours a day. So it’s something, you know, some small percentage, and it it it just turns out that, you know, even seeing and being surprised by how much time you’re spending on your phone? It’s really hard to make the positive habit changes to use your phone less.

Zack Arnold: Well, based on all the information that you have on the back end, and I just recently learned that there’s like some app or system or program or something that actually tells you about daily users, how active they are with it. What kind of statistics, either from the dashboard stats that you have are just from general knowledge. Have you learned about how much people are actually using their phones nowadays?

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, so you know every stat inside a Moment I consider somewhat biased because you know you’re you’re downloading an app for tracking your phone use and using your phone less in the first place, so it might skew a little bit higher. But you know Moment probably has enough active users or active customers. I should say I shouldn’t say users. The app has enough active customers that it’s probably fairly representative. But the average person using Moment spends just about four hours a day on their phone screen and picks it up 50-two separate times. And I would say, you know, kind of unsurprisingly, younger people tend to use it a little bit more. You know, younger people, the average, you know, millennials, the average might be, I think it’s about four hours and 20 minutes per day, whereas someone in their 50s or 60s uses their phone for maybe around three hours a day. So, it’s kind of unsurprising in that way. But I guess the most. Part that I’ve seen looking at just these sort of average global use statistics is, you know, the the difference between a millennial, you know, who is stereotypically kind of always on their phone versus someone who’s 50 or 60. the The difference in average uses really isn’t that much. You know, it’s it’s 20 25% or something, but you you would think it would be twice that you know a millennial would use their phone twice as much as like a baby boomer or something, but that that definitely isn’t the case.

Zack Arnold: Well, when you say four hours a day, just to put that into perspective, that’s a part time job. Yeah, exactly. That’s 20 hours a week staring at a screen, and there are so many other things that you could be doing when you’re not staring at that screen, like I don’t know, talking to people, looking at things, like experiencing life. But when I bring this up to people, all of a sudden I become a luddite to them, and they think that I’m completely anti-technology, and I’m not. But I’m a big believer that if you’re going to be on technology, you should be on it for as little time as possible to get the job done, and if that means that you’re going to be on a computer for 10 hours, which I am, I’m on a computer for 10 to 12 hours a day just by trade, like almost everybody is now. But I’m very intentional about what I’m doing, so when it comes to the phone, I’m the same way. Where I used to just indiscriminately pick up the phone and be like, “Oh, you know what? Looks like I’ve got an email, or it looks like I’ve got a text, or I’m just going to scan for five minutes while I’m standing in line, or you know, I’m doing this or that thing. So I want to fill that time and quote unquote get more stuff done. And I didn’t realize how detrimental doing so was to my creativity, which is something that I know that Minouche talks about in the Board and brilliant program, but also that something that you’ve created this app specifically for is to actually allow people to be bored and not constantly have this addiction to well, I have three seconds of time that is not filled, therefore I shall pick up my phone.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly, and and that kind of thinking or just wanting to be entertained or distracted instead of bored, you know, leads to a really short attention span. You know, even in my own life, since getting an iPhone, I got my first iPhone in college when I was, I think, 20, and I’m 28 now, so I’ve had it about eight years, and my attention span has gotten considerably worse. You know, I used to love to just sit down and listen to music. Like I’d listen to a whole, you know, album from one of my favorite artists. But nowadays, I can’t even listen to music while I work. It’s it’s almost like I need something like a higher level, like listening to a podcast and working. I just need to be, you know, constantly entertained. So it’s something I’m struggling with in my own personal life too, and you know I’m trying to work on Moment to help other people, but I’m also trying to figure out what works for me and my family too.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that that’s a really good distinction to let people know. And I’ve I’ve done the same thing as well, where people think, oh well, you’ve designed the Moment app, so you are an absolute angel when it comes to tech usage, and you have perfect attention span, and you have cracked the code and figured all this out. And it’s really, really helpful to know that oh, you’re struggling with all the same things, and this is a tool that you want, so you have time with your family just as much as anybody else would.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And that’s that’s something I agree. I think it is helpful to see you know people write into my you know contact form all the time, you know what, you know. Give me your secrets. Like, what’s what’s the secrets? And it’s like, you know, if I figure it out, I’ll build it in a moment, and you’ll have it too. But as of right now, I haven’t figured out, you know, the the one true thing that works. It’s it’s a lot of little tweaks to your habits, and it’s wanting to sort of be uncomfortable or bored, or you know, put down your phone, or realize that it’s okay to be disconnected at at some point. Like even for a couple days at a time, like nothing bad is going to happen. The world’s not going to end. And I think for some people, it’s it’s sort of uncomfortable even to be disconnected. You know, in this day and age with cell phones. Now my Apple Watch has basically a cell phone built in, so getting truly disconnected is and focused on you know whatever what you want to focus on is is getting harder and harder you know as technology advances.

Zack Arnold: Well, and it’s basically just the FOMO epidemic. I mean, I’m maybe I’m just like you know again an old Luddite, but I remember seeing the term FOMO like six months or a year ago, and I’m like, what the hell is FOMO? What does that mean? Like I was just you know an old codger, and then I started reading about it. I’m like, wait, this is an actual epidemic where people are like worried about missing the next news story in three minutes. Like this is a thing, but then it turns out it’s a giant thing, which is why people will not allow themselves to be disconnected because it’s a genuine addiction to getting more information and fear that you’re going to be missing it.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And an excuse I hear a lot is, “Oh, I need my phone for emergencies, and that that’s fine. You might you know have kids that are you know out and about and you want to keep tabs on them, but that doesn’t. Excuse you from being in the grocery line for you know four seconds, and there’s one person in front of you, and then you have to you know pick up your phone and and do something productive, like you’re saying. So I think you know the smartphone kind of wiggles its way into your life, you know, touting the benefits, but then it it sort of sucks your attention in with with some of these apps how they’re designed.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that one of the the key words there that you said is pickup. That’s actually another one of the things we haven’t mentioned yet. That the moment app tracks is pickups, because I think it would be easy for somebody listening to say, “Oh well, I like three hours. Like I don’t spend three or four hours a day on my phone. I’m barely looking at it here or there. Like I don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole of links in YouTube. But the pickups are just as or more important, and that was one of the things that I found is that I’ve prided myself on removing myself from a lot of those distractions. Where on my phone, probably on and off for the last two or three years, I don’t have an email app. I don’t have any social media apps. I have a minimal amount of like news apps, most of which I’ve deleted at this point, just because the news is just so depressing and ridiculous, so I’ve just frankly deleted all of them. So I was thinking, oh, there’s no way I spend that much time on my phone, and I’ve gotten rid of all these distractions. Then I was like, oh my god, I pick up my phone 50 times a day, like that’s pathetic. And I’ve now gotten it down to my average is 19 a day, thanks to this ad. That’s great. So it’s made a huge difference. But those pickups really made a big difference in my lack of ability to be creative and focus and get into the zone. And as I started learning more about the science behind this, it takes a good amount of time to kind of get to that default mode in your brain where you start to synthesize new ideas. So every time you pick up your phone, even if it’s just for 60 seconds, you start over that clock before you can let your brain relax and actually start to generate creative thought.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, definitely. And you know, there are kind of two separate types of phone users that I’ve found. There’s the ones that you know use their phone for like long sessions. You know, watching a movie or reading a lot of news articles or something. Then there’s kind of the the quick checkers. You know, the the people that pick up their phone, answer a text, and then put their phone back down. So yeah, the pickups is is definitely an interesting measure for certain people. I’m more of a you know a long term user. You know, if I pick up my phone, I might be probably around 20 pickups per day, but my pickups probably average you know five minutes instead of 15 seconds. But it’s amazing how quickly, you know, little interactions on your phone can add up to either time or pickups. You know, four-person group conversation over the course of two hours can probably easily result in picking up your phone 60 times. You know, that’s that’s every two minutes or something and there’s definitely no way you can focus on work or the people around you if you’re if you’re picking up your phone every you know couple minutes.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and one of the really cool things that I like about the app as well is that it doesn’t just tell you how many times you picked up your phone. You get this pretty little graph that tells you exactly at what time you picked up your phone and how many minutes you used it, and if you just picked it up and you didn’t use it for more than I don’t know what the exact amount is, maybe it’s a minute or two minutes. You can tell me, but there are these little dots. So that’s even further insight and information into your habits, because I would venture to guess that the vast majority of pickups throughout the day are not intentional; they’re habitual. It’s oh wait, this trigger has happened, which is most generally for most people going to be boredom. Okay, I’m bored, so I’m going to pick up my phone. And when I started to look at the graph and see all the dots stacked up over and over and over, I was like, what am I doing? Like I didn’t even realize that I was doing this, and just that that awareness completely changed it, but having that visual graph made such a huge difference for me beyond just the numbers.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, I totally agree, and it’s it’s one thing. You know, Moment’s a very sort of utilitarian app. It tells you a lot of numbers and statistics and graphs based on your your phone usage, but the kind of visual representation of that can help. And there’s there’s one stat that is probably about a year old inside a moment, and we kind of alluded to it earlier. It’s percentage of your waking life on your phone, and you know seeing four hours a day, you know, might not seem that bad. It’s like oh, I use it for work, I use it for email or something. But if you see that in terms of you know I’m awake for 16 hours. I use my phone for four hours. That’s that’s 25% of my life, you know, on my phone essentially, not counting sleeping. So that can be, you know, kind of eye opening too. It’s like, man, like, what else do I spend 25% of my time doing? Sleeping, maybe, but other than that, probably nothing. It’s probably, you know, your phone is probably where you spend more time than with your family in the evening, and that visualization or that just sort of different frame of reference can can help motivate people to use their phone less as well.

Zack Arnold: I’m so glad you clarified that because I didn’t even know what waking life was. I thought maybe it had something to do with like battery usage or something like. That so I always kind of skipped over, but now that you mention it to me, this is going to become my new favorite statistic because I love the comparison to all right. Well, of the time that I’m awake during the day, how much am I actually on my phone? And it’s when you start to accumulate all the numbers, and it’s not just oh, well, I was just on my phone for two minutes or four minutes, but wait, 25% of my day, my face is in a screen. Like that’s I’m hoping for some people going to be kind of embarrassing.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly. And the embarrassment part is you know kind of an approach I’m I’m playing with inside a moment. You know, moment. The goal of it is my goal is to help myself use my phone less, but also help other people use their phone less, and shame or embarrassment can be an effective, you know, motivator. But that doesn’t work for everyone. So I’m trying to, you know, make it less embarrassing, but still equally as kind of impactful.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, there’s no question about that. That you know, the embarrassment factor works for some people, and the positive reinforcement approach works for others, but you know if you want a fun feature request for the future, if you put a social embarrassment feature into this, where you can you know connect with your friends and see their usage and share somebody else’s usage on Facebook, I bet that would cut down your usage statistics even more.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, it probably would, and it might be good marketing for a moment too.

Zack Arnold: Well, there you go. You can. I’ll throw in that free feature request for you.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, I like it.

Zack Arnold: So, what I would love to know next, and I know that there are stats about this online, but the the stats that you have are from the people that are more conscious of what they’re doing because we can’t really have decent statistics about those that don’t care, other than the you know the private statistics that the the app companies have, but the people that are using your app are obviously the ones that are more conscious of what they’re doing on their phone, which is why they installed the app. But what are the apps that are sucking people in the most?

Kevin Holesh: Sure. So you know I’ll list kind of the the top five or six or seven, and it’s kind of going to be no surprise. Usually, Facebook is the most used iOS app, racking up you know roughly 30 minutes a day, and then after that, it’s probably Snapchat, you know, 25 minutes a day, Instagram, let’s see, WhatsApp is a popular one, WeChat, you know, sort of different markets other than the United States, and YouTube. So it’s all the sort of apps that are, you know, all as I mentioned earlier, all selling your attention. So the more time you spend on Facebook, the more Facebook is going to show you ads, and the more money they’re going to make. So they have a direct incentive to get you into Facebook and spend as much time on Facebook as as really humanly possible. And same with Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Netflix, even all those kind of apps are definitely the the most used, the most sort of time suck apps.

Zack Arnold: Well, and obviously that would come as no surprise to most people. But the real reason I wanted to bring that up because I knew that it was going to be things like Facebook and Instagram, and I didn’t know all five of them, but I figured those would be in the top three. Is that a common excuse that I hear people say when I start talking about phone usage and app usage and how it’s detrimental to focus and you know mental health and connecting with people? They say, “Yeah, but my phone is my work. Like this is my office, so I need to get things done. But I didn’t hear you saying, “Well, Google Drive is one of the top five apps used by people.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s it’s sort of what I mentioned earlier. Like the smartphone wiggles its way in, touting, you know, oh, look at how much better this this will mark make your work life. It’ll make you more productive. You can do stuff on the go while you’re on the subway in a cab, but you know that that does account for probably a significant portion of some people’s usage, but it’s it’s really not the majority. And once once they see that inside of moment, you know, see how much time you’re spending, you know, after 5p.m on your phone, you know, with that that little visualization timeline, and then see how much you’re spending on Facebook versus you know email or Google Drive or something. It’s it’s kind of a truth that you you can’t deny at that point.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and really the I think what it all comes down to is so many people think that the reason it’s important to be on their phone is because they want to quote unquote connect people or they want to get things done when, in fact, the number one reason that most people are using a phone is because they want to escape.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, exactly, and that’s that’s something you know I’m working on in my own personal life too. I I always say my goal with Moment, if if I could accomplish anything with Moment, it would be that people who install it and you know use the various tools, if they pick up their phone, they have a conscious thought like, okay, what am I going to do here? Do I really need to use my phone right this second? And if I do, what am I going to do? And then put my phone down. Just just to have that, you know, split second. You know, thought of what am I really doing here, or you know, what am I sort of being, you know, tricked into doing almost. So that that’s sort of my overall arching goal. If if every moment user, I mean, I guess my my goal is to not have people use moment. You know, use it, realize how much time they’re spending on their phone, change some of their habits, and then not need moment, you know. That’s that’s kind of my end goal, which is probably one of the only apps I can think of whose goal is to like eventually have the person uninstall it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean, obviously that’s not what Facebook wants. They don’t want you to say, “Well, I’ve used Facebook enough and I’ve connected with people enough, so I don’t need it anymore. Right? Exactly. But you’re right. Like you’re with your app, the business model is such that oh wait, the more people are going to use my app, the less they’re going to want to use it, huh? So I would guess that you know that that can make for for some interesting conversations when it comes down to figuring out how to make a living off of doing it. But you’ve obviously done well because I’ve seen this app everywhere, and I know that you have a lot of users, so obviously you’re doing something right. So I think that’s fantastic.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah. Well, thanks. And that’s you know, as as like Moment’s been easily the most successful app or website or product I’ve worked on in my career. But Moment’s been downloaded on the Apple App Store, you know, four and a half million times as of you know last week, and that that’s a ton. But you know probably you know by 6p.m today, Apple will have sold more iPhones than four and a half million. Like today alone, like they sell you know around the holiday season, they sell you know five or 10 million iPhones a day. So the market is expanding much faster than than I can even keep up with, so you know it’s it’s good for business in a way. But yeah, I mean, if if I could you know reach a majority of iPhone users and eventually have the Muse moment and then uninstall it, I think I’d be I’d be very happy with that.

Zack Arnold: Well, I’m sure there are a lot of app designers and companies that don’t want people to install your app. I’m sure, right? I mean, I would guess that if Mark Zuckerberg were listening, because I’m sure he listens to my podcast, he’d be like, “Wait, he’s trying to get people to be on Facebook less. Hmm, what can I do about that? So, I mean, I could I could talk a lot more about the detriments of using a phone and distraction, and I think that we’ve covered a fair amount of that. But I don’t always like to talk about just the problems. I like to talk about the solutions as well. And obviously, moment is one of those solutions. But given that you spend most of your waking life, and you have the the statistics for your waking life on your phone as well, but given that you spend most of it either designing apps or understanding app usage, app behavior, what are some solutions beyond installing your app? Like, let’s just talk a little bit about general phone hygiene, which is a word I’d never heard of until recently. And like, phone hygiene is a thing, but it’s totally a thing now. So, what are just some general things that we can talk about to help people that know they have this problem with their phone, but they actually want to do something about

Kevin Holesh: It. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, kind of a literal interpretation of phone hygiene is, you know, one habit that is sort of embarrassing to admit you do, but is is using your phone in the bathroom. You know, every morning I used to, and I still do more than I care to admit, but you know, I grab my phone and just go into the bathroom. You know, first thing I’m I’m sitting on the toilet and using my phone. You know, I can’t stand the you know five minutes I’m in the bathroom and I just need to be occupied first thing in the morning. So I think you know, from a hygiene perspective, that’s that’s probably not healthy or a good thing. But you know, starting my day off with, you know, immediately jumping into my phone, checking whatever I need to check, you know, Twitter or Instagram or email or, you know, servers or anything to do with moment, you know, I find is as an unhealthy thing. So a good first step is to not use your phone in the bathroom and also totally ban your smartphone from your bedroom. So, you know, when I first installed Moment, that that was definitely a bad habit of mine. I would use my phone as my alarm clock, so it’d be, you know, 20 minutes right before I go fall asleep on my phone, and then my alarm would go off, and then it’d be 20 more minutes just on my phone right away. You know, and that that right away was 45 minutes on my phone, you know, per day. Which just keeping my phone charging, you know, in the kitchen has really helped. It’s an easy, it’s a kind of easy first step. Just putting some physical distance between you and your phone, especially like in the bedroom where you’re you’re supposed to be sleeping and resting, not you know distracted.

Zack Arnold: Unfortunately, my wife doesn’t listen to this podcast, and if she heard this, she would just be shaking her head vehemently, like I am never taking the phone out of the bedroom. But that’s that’s a personal challenge that I have that we don’t need to go too deep into. But this is an exploration that I went. Through myself, where I was the same as everybody else, where you know it was the the phone at night. It was like my quote unquote reading before I went to bed, not understanding how detrimental those blue lights were to reducing my melatonin production and the quality of my sleep. All of which I go super super deep into in a couple of podcasts specifically about sleep hygiene, and I can put links to those in the show notes, so I won’t go into that too deeply because I’ve spoken about it for hours. But that was the first thing, and the other thing was that I was using my phone to track my sleep and also to create binaural waves to help me get into deeper states of sleep by modifying the the frequency of my brain waves. So that to me was like, oh well, this is definitely a reason I should have my phone in my bed because it’s helping me be healthier and helping me track my sleep. But then I thought to myself, well, number one, I can track my sleep with my Fitbit, and number two, I’ve created a dependency on these sounds just to be able to fall asleep, and I had to take them everywhere. So I thought, well, even if my phone’s in airplane mode, what if I got it out of my room? Because the EMF that you get from your phone being in your room when it’s not in airplane mode destroys your sleep, no matter how often or how little you’re using it. Those are horrible for you. But beyond that, just the the tendency to say it’s on the nightstand and I’m going to pick it up, that’s a horrible habit as well. So I just said I’m going to put it literally. It’s at the opposite end of the house. It couldn’t be any further away from where my bedroom is, and I have a charging station there at night. And when I wake up in the morning, I use my phone for you know like gentle music because I wake up and do yoga and meditation and stuff in the morning. That’s part of my routine. But my phone no longer goes in my bedroom at all, ever. Like there’s no charging station. It never sees the bedroom, and it has made a huge difference in my well-being.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. You know, all the the EMF and the kind of the the physical downsides of having a connected device in your bedroom definitely can lead to poor sleep. Yeah, that that’s a great habit to be in, and I think you think about this these sort of personal habits more than most. And it was even difficult for you to get your phone out of your bedroom. It was difficult for me to do it, but I definitely see the long term benefits of it. You know, I sleep a lot better now just not staring at a screen last thing and first thing right after I and before I go to sleep.

Zack Arnold: Well, if you could design another app that could convince my wife that the phone doesn’t belong in the bedroom, I would pay like $1,000 for it.

Kevin Holesh: As as as would I. You know that that’s you know I I think a lot about these issues, but my wife is definitely less so. So it’s it’s definitely a battle I’m fighting as well.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and you know I I love her to death, and I understand why she uses it. But it’s kind of one of those things where once you discover the other side and realize that there’s, it can be better. It’s it’s frustrating, but at the same time, it’s it’s it’s something that I’m just going to go with the flow and just gently, gently nudge from time to time.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, that’s that’s smart, and that’s something that my you know my wife has had to listen to me for you know four and a half years at this point you know talking about moment and the benefits of using your phone less and all that stuff and she only just recently came to me a couple weeks ago and said you know I’d I’d really like to actually use Instagram less Instagram is sort of her like drug of choice I guess you know that’s where she spends a lot of her time on her phone in the app she uses a lot, and she came to me and she’s like, you know, I really I’ve sort of realized that you know too much Instagram usage is making me unhappy. Like, how do I get this down? I’m like, oh, okay. So I just immediately started taking notes. I’m like, how did you come to this decision? You know, I was treating her like a subject almost than a than a wife. But yeah, it’s it’s definitely an interesting thing, and I think it it literally takes you know years for some people, or you know a very long amount of time to sort of realize that some phone usage over a certain point is is too much.

Zack Arnold: Well, in one area that I want to go to that’s similar to the idea of getting it out of the bedroom, is I made the same revelation fairly recently, actually, about my usage of my phone while working, and what I learned, and it’s such a so simple thing. But if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. So I thought to myself, well, it’s not a big deal. I’m not like just sitting there staring at the screen, but I had it within arm’s reach. So that meant that habitually, probably every minute or two minutes, and I have all the little dots when I started using the app to prove it. I would just pick it up, check something real quick. Nope, no text messages. Here’s the time. Here’s the date. Here’s the weather. Whatever it is, and I would put it back down. And I couldn’t stop doing that. But then, as soon as I put it on the other end of the room, it’s I didn’t miss it. I was fine.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, definitely. That that’s something I’ve seen echoed in my own work as well. You know, if I’m approaching a difficult technical or programming problem, and I, you know, I really have to focus on it and think about it, my, you know, brain’s like gut reaction almost that that doesn’t really make sense. But my brain’s gut instinct is to just pick up a phone. And do something easy or funny or entertaining instead of approaching this this hard problem. So my phone use combats boredom, but it also combats sort of difficult problems that I really need to focus on.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean it’s it’s an absolute crutch for procrastination, where you just start to get into something. It’s like oh this is going to be a hard, creative decision, and I’m going to go to Facebook. But it’s unconscious, and you don’t realize for those that are dealing with procrastination and attention issues that if you just don’t have it there, it’s not like you’re still going to crave that over and over and over. Because if you know that you can’t reach it and it’s out of sight and it’s on the other end of the room, you’ve created just enough of a barrier that you’re not going to say, “Well, do I really want to check the time on my phone bad enough that I’m going to walk to the other end of the room, disconnected from the charger, and turn it over? Probably not. So it’s a tiny barrier, but it’s enough to help you get over procrastination. And I found I started going way deeper into my creative work and being able to problem solve just by getting the phone out of arm’s reach.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. You know, the the physical distance of 12 feet across the room could make the whatever you’re you should be working on easier than you know standing up and and walking over to get your iPhone. Yeah, that that’s a good point.

Zack Arnold: Well, the next piece of phone hygiene, and by the way, is a tangent. The fact that you’re connecting literal phone hygiene with the bathroom, I’m totally stealing that because that’s brilliant. I never heard that, but that’s I love that love that connection. So I’m totally going to steal that from you. But the the next piece of phone hygiene that’s not only detrimental to things like productivity and focus, but also to your safety and your health, is going to lead us into your next app, which is Focus, and that’s phone hygiene while driving. So let’s talk a little bit about that app, which obviously works very much in tandem with Moment.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s the same. It’s I came out with Focus after you know a year or two after Moment, and I do a lot of driving, and I was seeing you know I was living in the city, and it was just appalling how many people were on their smartphones while they’re driving. You know, with pedestrians walking around and near schools, and it’s just absurd, really. And I think most people don’t even realize they do it. You know, it’s it’s a similar trajectory to me building focus. So I had no idea how much I was using my phone while driving. So you know, I built this app, I hacked it together, and turns out I was using my phone like I used my phone for six minutes while driving in one month, which you know isn’t a ton of time in terms of percentage, you know, because I do a lot of driving, but that’s you know many many miles on on a highway that I just was focused on my phone and not at all paying attention to what I was doing, so that’s that’s an app that I take a harder line with. You know, focused allows phone use while you’re driving, but it it really discourages you from doing it. And that that’s the idea is to, you know, kind of give people an awareness of how much they’re using your phone, but also taking a very hard line and saying, you know, absolutely no screen time during driving is is safe.

Zack Arnold: Well, and when you say it helps to discourage you, that’s not just a matter of awareness and looking at the app later in the day. You actually have mechanisms in place. So, can you talk a little bit more about how focus is different than just an awareness tool like Moment?

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, definitely. So, Focus, the base the basics of it are it tracks if you’re on your phone and it’ll track if you’re driving. And if you’re on your phone while driving, a voiceover will come over your speaker system or on your phone speaker to tell you to put you on down your phone. And it’s actually my my voice, you know, my best dad voice possible. You know, it starts out kind of easy and says like, hey, put your phone down. Like it’s not safe to do that. But you know, after 30 seconds of using your phone, it it’ll get pretty angry and just try to shame you, try to embarrass you to put down your phone. And just you know, if you’re on your phone for more than more than 60 seconds, it’ll actually try to kick you off. You know, just almost berating you to put down your phone. It’s definitely a stick approach, and it seems to work for a lot of people. But that’s you know, it’s hard to change your phone habits in general, and especially while you’re driving, apparently. So that that’s a battle I’m I’m still fighting.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that that’s another one that just drives me crazy. Is it’s not just a matter of picking up or checking your phone. It’s actually scrolling through feeds. It’s reading emails. It’s like that stuff isn’t going away. That’s not my phone is my office, or I need my phone in case of an emergency. That’s a completely different level of addiction.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, if you think about you know boring things you do throughout the day, driving your commute. If you if you have a job, you know, in a city, it’s probably a pretty boring drive. It’s a drive you’ve made hundreds of times. There’s traffic and it’s a highway, and you know there’s probably no more boring thing to be doing. So you know your instinct is to pick up the phone, and you know it’s once you get kind of sucked into the phone too. It’s it’s hard to realize you know from a safety perspective what’s around you, but you actually you. So don’t even realize you’re using your phone while driving too. That’s I’ve had a similar experience. You know, people at Install Focus had had absolutely no idea they were spending so much time on their phone while driving.

Zack Arnold: Well, and maybe this is something you can speak to, and maybe you don’t know because I don’t have any of the stats in front of me. I’m just going off the top of my head, but the amount of time that it takes between looking at your phone, not looking at the road, and then looking up and stopping if there were an emergency, is a lot longer than most people think. So it’s not just a matter of oh, it’s really bad to be in my phone. Like I think we’ve all heard at this point that it can literally kill you if something were to happen in front of you. You can’t react to it.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s it’s kind of the the like myth of multitasking too. Like if you ask people, you know, I think most people would say, you know, I think I’m pretty good at multitasking. But then you, you know, do an experiment, you know, like a driving simulator or something, and it’s, you know, they do very poorly. So it definitely there is a switching to, you know, looking at your phone. You know, your eyes have to focus on the phone instead of you know focus 100 yards ahead of you, and switching just your eyes can take a few seconds. But then I think the harder part is sort of switching your mind. Even after you put down your phone or you answer a text and hit send, you know you’re still thinking about what they’re going to reply, or you’re still your mind is still on the the task you were doing on your phone, not the road. Even if your eyes are physically on the road.

Zack Arnold: Well, let me ask you this, then, since you’re the guy that has the dad voice that will yell at me because I don’t have focus installed, and maybe I should have it installed. But I don’t do any reading or scrolling. I don’t pick up for text messages unless I’m at a complete stop, which I know technically you’re not even supposed to do. But I will never read anything unless I’m at a complete stop. I will only make phone calls. I don’t. I don’t even have email or social media on my phone, so I can’t do it while I’m driving. But what I do use the phone for very much as a tool when I’m commuting because I live in Los Angeles, so I live on the freeways. So what I did was instead of just being angry and deal with road rage every day, I decided a few years ago I’m going to turn this into productive time. So how can I do that? So I do one of two things: I either listen to audio books. I’ve become obsessed with Audible, and I listen to books all the time, which means that it’s you know the phone is turned off, but I’m listening to an audio book. So I don’t know if Focus would yell at me even for doing that, but then the other thing that I do is I collect brainstorms and I outline things because obviously I can’t write, but what I can do is I can dictate. So I can think to myself, you know what? I want to be bored today, so I don’t listen to anything. I make it a habit now. About 50-50 of 50% of my time when I’m driving is learning, and that 50% is nothing is on. I’m not listening to anything, and I just let ideas come. But then if I get a good one, I’m like, ooh, I got to get this one down. So I’ll use Siri and I’ll say, you know, open the voice memo app or open the drafts app, and I’ll just dictate whatever my idea is. So would you yell at me for that too?

Kevin Holesh: You know, if I yelled at you for that, I would I would have to yell at myself because that exactly echoes what I do while I drive. I listen to a lot of podcasts or audio books, and if I think of a good idea, I’ll I’ll do exactly that. I’ll say, “Hey Siri, you know, remind me to you know write down this idea or whatever. So I do the exact same thing inside of focus. It doesn’t count things like listening to an audio book or music or even you know phone calls are kind of a gray area too. You know your mind is distracted when you’re on a phone call, but you’re not physically staring at a screen, so it’s a little safer. You know it’s not as black and white as texting while driving, and including the things you know, like we were talking about, like listening to spoken word audio books, and also dictating the Siri. Your mind isn’t completely focused on driving, but I’m sure in LA you’re not, you’re probably not driving 70 miles an hour a lot.

Zack Arnold: No, I never go more than 10 miles an hour, so it really doesn’t matter. I could read a book on my commute safely.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, exactly. So it’s different in everyone’s situation, but you know, it’s definitely a gray area. You know, using your phone and and thinking about you know brainstorming or outlining, like you’re saying while driving. But you know, the reality is you don’t have to focus on driving 100% of the time. You don’t. You can listen to music and have a conversation with someone in the front seat and not be unsafe necessarily. It’s not 100% safe, but it’s probably 96% safe. You know, so it’s it’s definitely not the kind of target I’m I’m taking aim at with focus.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and if you’re somebody that’s going to be a stickler about using statistics to prove what should be safe or not safe or illegal when driving, then eating while driving would be illegal, and putting on makeup and doing your hair would be illegal. So it’s there’s a whole lot of gray areas, but I think that the obvious one is just don’t stare physically at a screen and type while you’re in. Motion, you know.

Kevin Holesh: Yep, yep. I I couldn’t agree more.

Zack Arnold: Well, we’re running out of time, but I want to make sure that during these last few minutes, I do mention my latest discovery, which happened not all of five minutes before we got on the podcast, because I wanted to make sure that I had all the information about you in front of me, and I saw that you have another app, and not only is it just another app, but it’s the app that if I had the time or the ability, I would have created myself, and that’s called Move. And anybody that’s listened to this podcast knows how obsessed I am about movement during your workday. So much so that I created an entire online learning program and video library called Move Yourself. But the one thing that I don’t have is an app, and I found this, and I’m like, oh, this is the app that I’ve had in my head for two years. Now I don’t have to make it anymore. So, so talk to me a little bit more about this app, because I, as soon as I have the time, we’ll be incorporating this as the number one app recommendation for my Move Yourself program.

Kevin Holesh: Awesome. Well, I definitely appreciate that. Move is, you know, in the same vein as my other apps, it’s just to make yourself a little better throughout the day. And move reminds you every 40-five minutes or so to stand up from your desk and just do a quick exercise. Something simple like 10 push-ups or walk around the block, just to a get your blood flowing, get your muscles active, and also you know, give your chance for your mind to take a break. You know, again, I built this for myself. You know, I was I was sitting at the time at a desk for you know eight hours a day or something, or seven and a half hours a day. So I would find myself, you know, three hours would go by, and I would stand up and kind of be like sore or something, you know, from sitting on a probably not the best chair, not in the best position, and I would be sore. And you know, I’m in my 20s. I was, you know, 23 at the time or something. And you know, there’s no reason I should be doing this. And I found that just standing up, doing a couple quick exercises, really helped sort of change my feeling after a long workday, sitting and essentially just staring at a screen. So I definitely built that for myself, you know, and you know, squeeze in a little workout throughout the day. You know, every 40-five minutes, if you do 20 push-ups, you know, that adds up to you know 160 a day or something. So it’s helped me be more active and less sedentary.

Zack Arnold: Well, the one thing I want to point out about this app that’s very, very different than most or all the others that are out there, because I have spent a ton of time really researching what are all the apps that are out there, like the seven-minute workout apps and the office exercise apps and the standing reminder apps. They’re usually one or the other. It’s either the app that you just say remind me every 50 minutes to stand up, and then after two hours you ignore it and you do nothing, or and that’s the what everybody does, including myself, because I was like I want I need to start moving more because it was the same for me. Where 25 years old, I had extreme lower back pain. I’m like I am not 70. What is this all about? So that was kind of where my journey began, and now I have a standing desk and all kinds of other crazy contraptions, and like people just look at me with these crazy eyes when they see my office because I have trampoline and kettlebells and all kinds of stuff. But anyway, ever any anybody that knows about the program knows about that stuff. But what I realized was that with those apps, you ignore them. But then there are the seven minute apps or the 10 minute apps or whatever it is, but the barrier for entry for those is too high because you say, “Well, I have this app, but I just I can’t get around using it today. I’m really busy, or I’m in the zone right now. And yours combines both, so yours isn’t just, “Hey, I need a reminder to stand up. It’s a reminder to stand up, and then you have a list of all of these exercises that it chooses randomly, but you can do them in like 30 seconds. So to me, that was always kind of the holy grail: was is there a way to get the reminder and the exercise built into the same place where you really don’t have the excuses that you do either with just the reminder app or just the exercise app? So this was the best of both worlds, and just the the simplicity of it and the cleanness of it is exactly the same esthetic that I have. So I’ve I’m totally sold on this. I’m going to start using it today.

Kevin Holesh: No, yeah, well that’s great, and that’s that’s definitely how I designed it. You know the the seven minute apps are great, and the the standing reminders are great. But you know by definition, those you know stand up reminders are easily ignored. You’re in the middle of something, and you know might not have the wherewithal to stand up and you know disconnect from the task you’re focused on. You know, your focused attention on something. You know, don’t break it. But then the the seven minute apps, it’s it’s great, but you know you have to kind of plan it as a workout. You know, you have to, you know, change into workout clothes and then shower afterwards, and you know, seven minutes turns into 25 pretty quickly, you know, all in. But you know, with move, it’s these kind of low impact, you know, they’re not going to make you sweat. You know, 20 push ups might make you break a little bit of a sweat, but you’re not going to sweat through your your dress shirt at work. But. A lot of the the exercises I suggest are you know very low impact. It could be just stretching too. You know, a couple yoga positions or you know some just walking, just walking, getting a drink of water. You know, very low impact thing. So it’s great to hear. I’m glad you you like the idea behind the app.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the the one other feature that I really want to point out that’s also a game changer. That seems so simple, but in years of studying habits and the way the brain works and why we choose not to do things, you actually allow people to customize which exercises pop up and which don’t. Because another barrier of entry is, oh, I got this reminder and oh, I want to move, but I’m not doing burpees. Are you kidding? Done. App goes away. You never listen to it again because it gave you a stupid suggestion. So you can actually choose which simple exercises it tells you to do, which eliminates that barrier.

Kevin Holesh: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So inside of Move, I sell these kind of little workout packs. Some are yoga, some are office, you know, workout packs. But the most popular one easily is the beginner workout pack, and it’s a lot of you know just stretching or arm circles or you know very very easy stuff, almost too easy to ever make an excuse for. You know, I can make a pretty easy excuse not for doing a seven minute workout. You know, and that’s you know only seven minutes, but it’s it’s pretty hard to make an excuse for not standing up and and doing like 10 wall push ups, or you know walking around the the walking to the office cooler and back.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and for anybody listening that’s thinking, well, no real difference can be made if I just stand up, circle my arms, and get back down, I will put a link in the show notes to my recent interview that I released with Dr. Joan Vernikos, who was the former director of the life sciences division at NASA? She was the one that discovered that sitting is killing all of us, and we talk about the biology behind why literally just standing and doing nothing else every 20 to 30 minutes can add years to your life. So an app like this is not just a fun little thing to do push-ups or squats here and there. It can make a huge, huge difference in the quality of your life and the your life expectancy. So it makes a big difference.

Kevin Holesh: Wow, that’s amazing. Yeah, I’ll definitely listen to that, and I’ll definitely echo the the standing desk idea. Kind of, you know, a year or two after I came out with Move, I switched to a stand-up desk, and you know that’s been life-changing as as much as it can be. You know, it was a little exhausting at first to stand up for six or eight hours a day, but definitely used to it now. And I feel great after I shut my laptop for the day instead of feeling kind of achy and and the you know muscle aches or lower back aches. So I definitely think you know a standup desk is definitely a good solution for a lot of people. I haven’t I haven’t figured out a way to make an app for a standup desk, but if I do, I’ll release it.

Zack Arnold: Well, then you and I can definitely maybe brainstorm more offline because the I have all these ideas and no expertise or ability to do any of it. And the like I said, the piece of the puzzle I’ve always been missing is apps, and people are always saying, “Are you going to get an app for your program? I’m like, “I don’t know anything about apps, so who knows? There, there might be a future collaboration here.

Kevin Holesh: That’d be definitely open to it.

Zack Arnold: But on that note, I want to be respectful of your time because we’ve already gone a hair over. But I just, I really geek out on this stuff, and I really, really appreciate you taking the time out of your day and away from your phone to chat with me. And I want to make sure before we go that people can find you and also very easily find your app. So how do we make sure to to plug you?

Kevin Holesh: Sure. So my app, my main app, and and my focus, sort of ironically, is Moment. You can find that at InTheMoment.io. We don’t have a Twitter or anything. My email is on there if you want, you have an idea or a suggestion, and yeah, thanks thanks for having me on. This was a great conversation, Zack.

Episode Credits

This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared and published by Jakin Rintelman. Special thanks to Krystle Penhall and Sarah Furie for helping to spread the love!

The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).