Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about how you

can use simple math to turn the table on addictive apps with help from author David Sumter.

You'll also learn about how black holes can make us see multiple versions of the same thing.

Let's satisfy some curiosity. From what we see on social media to how mobile phone games keep us playing,

it seems like algorithms run our lives.

But today's guest says there's a way we can turn the tables on them and we can do it with mathematics.

David Sumter is a professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala in Sweden and the author of multiple books, including

his latest, the 10 equations that rule the world and how you can use them too.

And he told us about how math can make us happier people.

We hear about math, you know, this game theory and trying to sort of get one over other people.

But think about it just for your own life. You want to be more confident in the decisions you make. You want to find ways of rewarding yourself in different ways. So another example I have in the book and this one is actually quite personal to me because my wife plays a lot of Pokemon go and she does it partly because she has chronic pain so she's had pain for a long period of time, and it just sort of takes her mind off the chronic pain when she has it.

And I thought about this, and it's like a stable reward, and there's equations for describing reward and they're used on you by

Instagram, they're used on you by Twitter in order to engage you. They see what you get reward from and they give you more of it. But what I saw is you can actually take those equations that they use for rewarding people and you can reverse engineer them both so you can sort of find ways where you get the rewards you want and also to sort of balance all the noise that's coming in all the time.

There's you know going in Instagram going into Twitter, reading your email,

all this stuff is coming in.

You can use the reward equation to sort of filter out

the things that you don't want to hear.

So that's the key there. I'm kind of taking these algorithms

people are using on you and I'm trying to let them help you deal with all the sort of stuff that's

coming into you. Can you explain a little further?

How do I, how do I reverse engineer all these powerful apps?

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