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June 19, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
47:31
SCREEN TIME IS DESTROYING OUR KIDS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 857
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Hi everyone, I'm Danielle D'Souza Gill, and I am hosting Dinesh's podcast while he is away in Australia this week.
He is with Tucker Carlson doing some very interesting things, so I'm very jealous that he's down there.
If you're a regular Dinesh D'Souza listener, you have probably heard me on here before.
Substituting for him in the past, I am frequently busy being a mom to my daughter, Marigold, and I also am the author of two books, Why God?
An Intelligent Discussion on the Relevance of Faith, as well as The Choice, The Abortion Divide in America, which debunks the left's pro-choice arguments.
Well, the best way you can find me is to follow me on social media.
I'm on Facebook, Instagram, True Social, X, all those places.
That's where you can find my thoughts, videos, all those things.
Well, today we have a lot of content to get to.
We are going to be diving into the harmfulness of screen time.
We're going to be speaking with Spencer Clavin.
He's the Associate Editor of the Claremont Review of Books, and he's an editor-at-large at the American Mind.
We're going to be talking all about AI.
We're going to be talking about how society has changed over time, what we can do to combat screen addiction.
So before we get into all of that, I am going to be sounding the alarm bells on this.
So stay with us.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Recently, a little-known podcaster, Lao Wai, who specializes in modern Chinese politics and culture, published a video about the rise in military training for Chinese children.
share.
The kids practice stabbing straw figures with bayonets and other drills like obstacle courses.
Their imaginary enemies in these training scenarios are, of course, Americans.
Chinese parents are sending their kids to junior military training camps, and when they come back, those same children talk casually about the necessity to kill every last living man, woman, and child in America and Japan.
Among the alarming clips in the podcast is a scene where a mother and father are practically assaulted by a party official for allowing their child to spend too much time online.
The child is then forced to shout at the top of his lungs that he promises to never play another video game ever again.
What set the Apartheid official off is the fact that Junior spent a total of four hours a day playing these games.
In some American homes, that's considered normal.
And while it's clear that this Chinese youth is being subjected to an old-fashioned form of brainwashing that involves fear, coercion, public humiliation, and threats against his family, at the very least, you can say that he has a brain to wash in the first place.
Not like the four plucky boaters in Alabama who decided to accept a TikTok challenge to jump off the back of a speeding boat only to break their necks and drown.
What country serves as the headquarters for TikTok again?
That's right, China.
You may have heard that there's a huge difference between how the app operates in China and how it operates in the US.
Now, I'm not going to go into whether TikTok should be banned or not, but the point here is that in China, the content is strictly controlled and users can engage for more than 40 minutes a day or at all during night.
This is part of a broader push in China to limit children's access to social media and video games.
In 2021, the government limited gaming for children under 18 to between the hours of 8 p.m.
and 9 p.m.
on weekends and holidays only.
State-run media referred to the technology as a social scourge, likening it to spiritual opium, which is a reference to the drug addiction epidemic that weakened the country when it was under imperialist Europe.
State right or not, the characterization seems appropriate.
Look at all the fatal TikTok challenges like NyQuil Chicken, which involves marinating chicken in the drug and then cooking it.
The process creates a drug-infused cloud, all while concentrating the powerful sleep aid in the meat by boiling it down.
Or what about the Benadryl Challenge, which involves ingesting the cough medicine until it produces hallucinations.
Or the Fire Challenge, which asks users to pour flammable liquid on their bodies and set themselves on fire.
Keep in mind, mostly young people are using this app.
There's the Blackout Challenge, which is nothing more than choking yourself until you blackout.
That took one young girl's life in Italy.
These challenges show how brain-dead this technology can make us.
These social media apps can lead users to the veritable cliff, and those same users will happily cast themselves over the ledge.
So yes, there is a real problem here.
Because this is not normal.
Is this the responsibility of TikTok alone?
Not really.
In 2007, a teenager who had his gaming privileges revoked took a shotgun to the backs of both of his parents.
Luckily, his father survived.
In 2022, a 10-year-old shot and killed his mother for refusing to purchase him a virtual headset.
It seems that the virtual world of the internet and video games are once again walking hand-in-hand with that old nemesis, Bad Choices.
And until we find a better way of managing the issue, things are only going to get worse.
Or haven't you noticed, while grocery shopping these days, how many kids are sitting in the shopping cart, zoned out, watching some movie or playing a game on a tiny screen?
Or maybe you've seen this at a restaurant or on an airplane.
Maybe you remember the days when children having fits in the store aisle was a common occurrence and they'd be running around, but it's not so common anymore, is it?
If a child's merely walking, you're shocked.
Now that parents have that easy button of screen time, they just virtually zonk out their kids and poof!
Suddenly they're quieter, they're more compliant, they're almost acting like adults when they're children.
No fuss, no mess.
Not many adults these days can claim to have had similar experiences in the supermarket when they were kids, so we don't really know what kind of lasting effects this form of childcare will end up having in the long run.
But we do know about some short-term effects, and the data is not good.
According to New York Presbyterian Hospital, nearly half of children under the age of 8 have their own tablets and spend an average of 2.5 hours a day on their digital screens.
Research from the NIH shows that spending more than 2 hours of screen time a day is correlated with lower language skills and thinking and test scores.
For younger children around the age of 3, this is 3, 3 years old, Excess screen time can lead to a form of tunnel vision, where they lose the capacity to observe and adequately process information around them and new experiences.
The bright colors, the fast-paced images on the screen, they're very captivating for babies, and especially toddlers as well.
And the early years of life are important formative years for taking in the world around you, for language development, for these basic skills.
Before they had the capacity for language, babies can only communicate through human interaction by watching and imitating faces, listening to voice tones, which is why they're so taken in by human faces.
This is also one of the ways children develop the capacity for empathy.
Screens are so powerful that they can impair the vital stage of development in these babies.
That's why doctors recommend zero screen time for any child under the age of two.
What's worse is that screens rob children of the essential experience of being bored.
I know, this seems like torture, but according to researcher and documentarian Carlota Nelson, this impairs impulse control.
Boredom is a common form of frustration for all of us, and learning to properly deal with that when you're a child, learning that frustration, is how you learn to control your impulses and develop imagination.
In both previously mentioned instances of child violence against parents, an inability to deal with disappointment and frustration is what set these kids over the edge.
It's clear that screen time, especially for young children, is very harmful, but it gets worse.
Spending more than seven hours a day in front of a screen is associated with the thinning of the brain's cortex.
What kind of conditions are associated with cortical thinning, you might ask?
How about frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's, depression, or even schizophrenia?
Cortical thinning is actually part of the aging process.
It begins around the age of six, so the idea of accelerating that process when you are so young, before brains even finish developing, is bound to have massive impact on one's brain and mental capacities for life.
In one collaborative study spanning five countries, the rate of cortical thinning is directly related to either the growth or decrease of the IQ of children and adolescents.
But simply, the faster it deteriorates, the dumber you actually become.
So while youth in China are being brainwashed into becoming anti-American, Han supremacist super warriors, which I'm not saying is a good thing, The youth in America are being turned into the equivalent of cognitively incapable zombies.
At the very least, China has acknowledged that there is a problem to be dealt with with these screens.
While obviously government is not the solution and brainwashing should be considered out of bounds as what they're doing there, the West and we need to wake up to the dangers presented by this hyper-stimulating world of online, of the internet.
The internet need not be a drug in the same physical sense as opium is, but that doesn't mean it lacks similar damaging effects on the human brain.
Add to this the disturbing trend of encouraging the abuse of commonly available drugs like NyQuil, Benadryl, the problem is compounded, and those are just a few examples.
We need a cultural response to the epidemic of small children zoned out on tiny screens.
Even if it's as simple as taking that tablet out of their hands and letting them be frustrated for a few moments.
As parents, this can seem very difficult for us to do, but in the long run, it is far more worth it.
And later on, these kids will grow up and be much more capable of entertaining themselves and be able to take in information and the world around them.
And so while this may seem like very upsetting information, the good thing is that as parents, we actually have the power to influence these young kids more than anyone else in their lives.
And so it's up to us to change the future of the next generation when it comes to screens.
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I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Spencer Clavin.
He is the author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World, How New Science is Illuminating Ancient Truths About God.
Spencer, did I get that correctly?
You did!
Congratulations, you did better than I did at first.
Thank you.
It's very good.
Good, very good.
So, yeah, maybe before we dive into other things, you can tell us a little bit about kind of what inspired you to write this book.
Were you kind of on a spiritual journey, or do you feel like it came from more of a science perspective?
What was kind of leading you to explore these topics?
Yeah, well thanks for asking.
And I will certainly say off the bat that I am not a scientist, so this is not a book where you're going to learn, you know, the answer to the current problems that are facing cosmologists.
But what I've come to think of this book as is it's a book about the history of science and the future of faith.
I really felt more and more strongly as I You know, talk to people, podcast it, listen to people's anxieties and concerns, that we've reached kind of a turning point in our way of thinking about our science and technology.
Obviously, tech has rocketed forward in our lifetimes.
But what's really remarkable to me is the way that we think and talk about tech as if it were inherently anti-science and anti-human, that there is something Just inevitable about the eclipse of the human race by robots because all we really are is primitive machines and so soon will be replaced by our machines.
And the point of the book is simply to say, not only is that an evil way of looking at things, it's also incredibly outdated scientifically that even the things that have happened over the last hundred years in quantum physics, especially.
But in the study of consciousness, we're starting to reveal to us a world that actually, I argue, looks a lot more like the one described in chapter one of the book of Genesis.
And so this is a story about how we came to think of ourselves as machines and how we might find our way after and beyond that into a future that includes and celebrates our humanity.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
So maybe you can unpack a little bit of this in regards to AI.
What does that look like?
Because I almost feel like it's It's scary.
It's crazy to think that we could be replaced, or not even replaced, but even in the sense of what if you're taking in information, you think to yourself, well, is this even true?
Was this AI generated?
I mean, we're kind of separating ourselves from humanity, from the world around us.
I guess it's kind of dehumanizing.
So how do you make sense of AI in light of your Yeah, that's an excellent question.
One of the things that's really striking about the way we seem to be treating these new large language models and the image generators and some of the chatbots that are kind of built around LLMs Is that we come to them wondering whether they are conscious or whether they're thinking or whether they're going to replace us.
Having already decided that what we're doing when we think is basically just a primitive version of computer code.
Which is really not true.
There's all sorts of ways in which what the mind does and the way the mind seems to emerge out of the brain is radically different from what AI does.
AI is able to give a kind of imitation of the products of thought.
It's not doing anything like what's going on when you and I have thoughts or moreover when we have experiences of the world.
And this is because for 50 years and more, you know, from Alan Turing and going back before him, there's this idea that what's going on internally, the inward experience, is actually irrelevant to this conversation.
The human vision of the world is just an evolutionary accident that we just got kind of coughed up out of this cosmic soup and we're chemical scum on the face of the earth.
And so the fact that these machines can basically make the art that looks like the art we make or produce poetry that sounds like poetry we make, this immediately feels like a threat of replacement to us because we see the outside Evidence of things, and we don't think that the inner life matters.
And one of the things we're being forced to realize again is that actually the inner life is everything.
The fact that we are not just producing sonnets and writing poetry, but actually having the experiences that generate that communication is what's essential to our humanity.
And this goes very, very deep into actually the scriptural way of looking at God and mankind, that it's our conscious experience of the world that makes the world what it is.
Without that, without somebody to see the rainbow, there is no rainbow.
Without somebody to taste flavors and feel love, these things are basically words that don't And so when we're looking at a machine that supposedly threatens to replace us or to trick us into thinking that it's human, what we're really looking at is the horror of the materialist way of understanding our own selves, our own humanity.
And learning to tell the difference, I think, has to do with insisting on the primacy of human experience, first and foremost, and asking why we're even interested in building these machines at all.
There's a great meme going around online that I really love that says, I want AI to do my laundry and shop for my groceries so that I can write poetry and make art.
I don't want our AI to make art and poetry so that I can do its laundry and shop for groceries.
And I think putting humanity back at the center of that equation and then building our machines and indeed our laws and our regulations around our machines from there is the approach we have to take.
And that is in some sense a fundamentally humanist and I think ultimately a Christian approach.
Yeah, yeah, that makes me think of two things.
One is, do you feel like, I guess with what you just said about the making sure that these kind of machines and technology is serving us as opposed to the other way around, do you feel like our parents' generation or maybe generation before that, they kind of experienced, I don't want to say like the peak of technology, but in the sense where maybe they had a washing machine or something and it was serving them.
And technology hadn't gotten to the point of being, you know, as smart or whatever as it is today.
And now it almost seems like, do we really need more technology?
I've seen some articles recently saying that people actually want to buy used cars that are older because they don't want new technology in their car.
They actually want a car that maybe has some technology, but it's not like, oh, you know, like, like today it's just, it becomes unnecessary.
I mean, there are so many regulations passed now where you have to have all these crazy things in your car.
That's, that's just a random example, but it almost just seems like everything is, is becoming so technology based and it's like, you can't even function.
It's really interesting.
I mean, Zoomer hipsterism is absolutely a trend that I've noticed.
You're starting to see people in Gen Z and younger, I think, really attaching to these analog forms of interaction, communication, and also just, you know, getting life done.
But this goes back to before our present moment also, right?
I mean, the You know, love of, say, record players among, like, millennials was another version, I think, of this reaction.
And I would say that we're certainly reaching a point of hypersaturation where people are starting to ask, well, who cares?
Who cares if a machine can write the most beautiful sonnet in the world?
Who cares if we make robots that can, you know, create symphonies that are better than anything you or I could make?
The machine can't appreciate that symphony.
The machine doesn't want to create that symphony.
This is an object that we've made effectively for our own entertainment and serves entirely at our pleasure.
So if it's not serving us, why would we care about the creation that it can make that sort of tricks us into thinking it's alive, right?
So there is this weird logic that seems to take hold.
Where people think, yeah, just more machinery is better, more technology is better, and if it can replace us, it should.
And my feeling is no.
Humanity is unique and distinctive, not because, you know, we can do math super well, but because we're the creatures of God, and because we actually have a unique role to play in creation.
Our machines are our own Things that we make for our benefit and if they harm us then yeah, like why shouldn't we throw them out?
I will say though that it's it's possible.
We're forgetting here in this conversation the extent to which all technology does come along with these trade-offs and these threats to our natural humanity that we have to learn to manage.
And I'm thinking here about the really interesting set of conversations that started around birth control in the last, say, maybe 10 years that people are starting to ask, not like, you know, Catholics who have always had Reservations about this, not just religious people, but people of all walks of life are starting to ask, you know, okay, we got a certain amount of control over our sexual interactions by using birth control, but what did we lose?
There was actually some trade-off that we made when we gained this convenience, when we gained this Control and I think it might take us a while with each new technology to metabolize to get over our excitement at the shiny new thing and to realize that every development comes with a trade-off.
And it's actually up to us to set the priorities of how we want to govern our lives.
So with birth control, I think people are like, you know, pulling back a little bit from that.
I think you'll probably see that with AI as well.
Once people start to get over The hype and the excitement of what this stuff can do, they'll start to ask, OK, well, then what what should it do?
And without getting alarmist about like, oh, it's going to turn us all into paperclips or it's going to take over the world and cause the heat death of the universe or whatever, you know, we should, I think, be asking.
At the outset, what's the point of this technology?
Why exactly does it serve us?
And there are a lot of good answers to that question.
I mean, I know creatives who use AI as a way of kind of developing a sounding board, generating initial ideas, and then kind of Racing ahead of it to try to create something better than what it can create.
And all of this, I think, is wholly salutary as long as we remember that, like, we're the point of the thing.
The machine's not the point.
We're the point.
And I think that's something we're now having to recall because, as you say, for a long time, machinery was just understood to be sort of a good and useful, helpful thing.
Now, suddenly, we have to realize, like, you know, we are the point of all this stuff, not the machine.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Yeah, it's interesting that you bring up birth control in that sense because I feel like there is, of course, a loss there in the sense that it's like you've removed a major component of sex in that sense.
And similarly, I think with AI, you've removed a major component of maybe creativity as an example.
Or, you know, you've just removed a lot from something that has, I think, a human foundation.
And I think the more that we're relying on these other things, kind of the humanity is removed.
And you were saying that We are different from these machines in the sense that I think we clearly are because we have souls.
These machines don't have souls.
And so we shouldn't just be serving these machines.
And similarly, I think with lies sold to women, they shouldn't just be, you know, like turning themselves into machines.
It's almost like the outside, you're taking it in because you want this other shiny thing, like you were saying.
But It's stripping us of our souls, of the meaning behind things.
And so when you look at, I think you were explaining, when you look at this technology, and maybe for some people it's kind of useful, I feel like that's a similar argument used for some people within like an exception or something.
They'll say, oh, well, it's used for this particular kind of case.
But overall, do you think in the long run, it will also change us in the sense that if Everybody's relying on AI.
I mean, would your friends be able to then say, I'm going to run past the AI and I'm going to think of more things because I'm just using this in this instance.
It's like a jumping off point.
Well, if we're so reliant on it, our brains get changed.
I mean, they're not going to be the same.
We're not going to be as creative to be able to do that.
So in some sense, I almost feel like it's a vicious circle.
Yeah, no, it's interesting.
Marshall McLuhan, one of the great theorists of media and communications technology, said, we shape our tools and then our tools shape us.
I think it was that's how he put it.
And that's kind of what you're saying, I think.
And one thing that might help to recognize in this capacity, is that this is a very, very old dynamic.
It might be the oldest dynamic in the human technology conversation, because if you go back to Plato and you read what he has to say about the invention of writing technology, he has exactly this concern.
He says, you're going to start out, you're going to write down some speech, some conversation that you have.
And then that conversation instead of becoming part of your memory instead of integrating into your self is just going to live on this piece of paper and now your memory is going to decay and atrophy and you are going to be changed by the tool that you're using to write stuff down.
Now, of course, Plato is saying this in a written dialogue, so he's aware that in some way this kind of back and forth is inescapable.
And I think the same thing happened, you know, when we invented the printing press, that not only did we become able to You know, spread these new ideas all over the world and, you know, bring literacy to many more people.
But that those ideas and that literacy helped to shape the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and all of these develop historical developments.
Inevitably, I think the same thing is happening with the Internet and is going to happen with AI.
I actually don't think that part of it can be Escaped.
But one thing that we will often hear when we start to get into these conversations about, you know, how can we manage that transition seriously is, oh, this is all just like whistling in the dark because you really can't stop the rising tide of technology.
And it's inevitable that, you know, 10 years from now, we're going to be brains in jars, you know, and that I don't buy.
I don't think that's true at all.
I think it's precisely in these sorts of Reflections that people like Plato had about writing and that, you know, people like Axton and the Protestant reformers and Milton had about printing press and that we can have about AI, that you start to manage these transitions more in a more sophisticated way.
You can't, I don't think, stop these developments from going on altogether.
But you can put yourself, put humanity front and center and ask, in what way can this serve us?
And in what way can this development increase rather than decrease or eclipse our humanity?
So the last thing I would say is like, I'm noticing even myself as we have this conversation, I've slipped a couple times into saying things like, well, what if AI can write a better poem than a human can?
And I'm not sure that it currently can, but I just caught myself and thought, well, in what way do I mean the word better?
Right.
I said better a couple of times, but really, I'm just suggesting that it might have some kind of superficial outward sophistication or elegance or charm.
But in fact, when I really think about the point of poetry, I realize that it's to communicate One human soul to another and so in that sense a poem written by a I actually has no value to me no matter how sophisticated and elegant and lovely it maybe but what does have value is the.
Communication that another human being might be able to make to me using AI and there there are all sorts of things that you can imagine that.
Kind of dialogue going on the way that I described but you're right there is no escaping the fact that our tools shape us we shape our tools and the only thing you can really do I think is get out ahead of the technology in a sort of platonic kind of way that you're not only.
Raising concerns about the technology of writing, but you're also doing it in written form with this kind of highly sophisticated and very human way of engaging with your tools.
And I think you're going to see people start to do that.
You already are.
But you're also seeing a lot of gunk that people have just fed into the machine and churned out whatever the machine gave them and passed it off as their own creation.
I see that already online.
And I think we're going to have to learn also as critics, as, you know, aesthetic Readers and thinkers, we're going to have to learn to tell the difference between a humane and interesting use of artificial intelligence and just a kind of replacement of artificial intelligence, a substitution of artificial intelligence for actual human creativity.
Right.
Yeah.
And you talked about kind of managing it.
So there's like the one sense of AI is writing poems and maybe those are better poems.
But in the other sense, AI is being used to create, you know, fake porn of kids, like crazy, horrible things.
And so how do we manage this?
Let's say we're not talking about beautiful things.
We're not talking about AI used in that way.
How do we manage it?
How do we keep it out of classrooms?
How do we keep it out of affecting young kids?
Because I think this technology is really affecting the young people a lot.
Because older people, I mean, even us, I didn't grow up, like, on a phone.
I didn't have a phone when I was a kid.
So it's like, we're kind of maybe the last generation of those people.
But how do we manage it?
We say, okay, this is going to happen, or, you know, AI is happening, but How do you, how do you manage it?
Yeah.
I mean, somebody told me the other day about a phrase I'd never heard before, iPad baby brain.
And he said, I've got iPad baby brain.
I said, what are you talking about?
And he said, I've got the brain of a person that was raised as a baby with an iPad.
And you think of those YouTube videos of kids flipping through magazines and trying to scroll because they think they've only ever encountered a screen.
And so this is holding a paper magazine and they want to scroll on the paper.
Yes.
Oh, yeah, I can send you one of these if you want.
I mean, they've been around for a while.
Babies will take these paper objects and they'll try to scroll because they only know magazines that they've seen through some kind of touch screen, essentially.
And there's an example of the sort of conditioning that you are describing, which, as you rightly know, goes very, very deep.
I don't think that—I mean, I think we're actually several generations into this problem.
When you mentioned pornography, I was just watching Billie Eilish, the pop star, talking about how porn had damaged her and rewired her brain.
And you're starting to hear from Kids that are now perfectly cogent adults saying this like boomer permissiveness that we were raised on did not work for us.
And we believed it until we didn't, you know, until we realized.
And for somebody as famous and respected and beloved of her generation as Billie Eilish, To be talking about that really does represent, I think, a sea change in sexual morality and in ideas about morality more generally.
That, you know, it has some potential dangers and pitfalls, but it also has some real promise.
You know, it's actually the first time in my lifetime that we've seen, like, young hip kids Not thinking that the hippest, coolest thing is to do whatever you want all the time, right?
That was kind of the hangover from the 70s that we grew up around, I think.
It's like you can't touch any kind of rule about morality.
You can't legislate anything that even remotely touches on people's, you know, personal choices because that will infringe on civil liberties or something.
And I think we've taken that narrative way, way too far to the point that we can't even think seriously about what we should really be talking about here, which is regulation and legislation, right?
Like to conservatives for a long time, this has been a dirty word because the, you know, sort of hyper libertarian streak of Reaganism.
Has prevented us from asking whether children should have access to these sorts of things.
But of course, of course, we should be able to write laws.
I mean, I am not personally a legislator, so I'm not going to be able to write the one that that will work here.
But a few ideas off the top of my head are, you know.
Would it be possible to legally mandate that you are transparent about which parts of your product are AI?
I mean, it seems like obviously there should be rules about what you can and can't pass off as the product of mere human creativity, and you should have to append some kind of note.
I mean, if we can put nutrition facts onto products in our grocery stores, surely we can put AI labels onto movies that get released in theaters these sorts of things right onto onto sources of information and news.
Obviously there is absolutely no reason why a child you know should be handed a device that connects them instantly to the like full scope of human.
Depravity, no growing mind is sophisticated enough to withstand that kind of barrage and that kind of onslaught.
And I think that as zoomers and younger people who grew up with this stuff start to come of age, you're going to see a lot more openness and sympathy toward the idea of, you know, at least in schools and local communities and associations, if not at larger legislative levels, regulating what kids can get their hands on.
You're going to hear people say it's impossible, but I just don't think that that means we Can't do anything at all about it.
There may be things that we can't avoid, but there are also absolutely rules that we can draw, especially when it comes to kids, and we should be.
Yeah, we should be for sure.
And you mentioned the boomers.
I mean, I think the boomers, not only did they give their kids unfettered access to, let's just say TV, um, they also themselves would watch TV a lot.
Right.
So, um, I guess I think of like stereotypes or like jokes of, of older people doing that.
But, but yeah, I mean, I think to them it was like, Oh, you know, this is, this is fun.
This is a way to, to wind down or whatever.
And, um, as you said, millennials and other You maybe Gen X have realized, wait, this was horrible.
This is harmful to our brains.
And now I think with younger kids today, maybe parents are saying, oh, well, they don't have access to everything there is on the internet, but I'm still gonna give them a screen all the time.
But even that is harmful because within a lot of apps, within video games, other things, there's a lot in there that you probably haven't seen.
And even just being on a screen itself all the time is harmful.
Even separate from the content, assuming all the content is appropriate.
Even then, you mentioned you're addicted to the scrolling, so it's kind of like there are so many different levels of it.
But I think that parents themselves have to just step in, and we do have to do the legislation, because we can't just say, okay, we're just going to have a defeatist attitude now.
This is how everything has changed, and now we're all just going to be zombie people.
And that's fine if we're going to start this indoctrination when you're one years old, you know, because even as an adult, if you spend a lot of time on a screen, even for myself, I notice that it affects me.
I will, if I'm on my phone, I'll say like, okay, I'll just keep scrolling something.
And then I'm thinking to myself, this is so mindless.
So this is an adult, theoretically, who has free will.
What do we think kids are going to feel like?
They're just going to get that dopamine rush and just keep on wanting to be on the screen.
And then they don't know what to do when they don't have it.
It's so funny to me, like, Jonathan Haidt has come out with his new book, I think it's called The Anxious Generation, and it is about the effects of screen time on kids, but especially social media connectivity, and just generally the sort of psychological deformities that you are describing that arise out of constant scrolling and constant screen time.
And it's been amazing to me to just see the way people nitpick at his data as if you needed a study to show you this like we do have this weird addiction to numbers where we think that unless we can quantify something in a double blind study it's not actually going on.
And people have been raising all these things about, hey, it's just alarmism and the kids are actually all right.
And of course, as you and I are discussing, like, you can just feel it.
You don't need somebody to, like, write a book about it.
It's manifestly clear, especially to somebody like myself, who's grown up with books, you know, who loves still now to sit for a long time with a paper object and read it.
And then you notice the way that your mind is deformed by going into this tiny screen and constantly refreshing and just getting acts to basically seek that dopamine all the time.
You know, unfortunately, there's no escaping some degree of parental responsibility here.
I think that there are some things that we can legislate as we were just discussing.
And I think there's areas where that are clearly promising for that.
But then, you know, another thing is that every crisis is really a family crisis, is really a fatherlessness crisis, is really somewhere rooted in the fact that America has this abominably high divorce rate and that we are so...
Wildly beyond what would count as like a civilized nation when it comes to keeping families together.
Because there, of course, like there's no real substitute for the discipline that parents can impose.
And I do know families, especially younger families, that are really smart and hyper aware about how to manage this kind of thing in kids.
And again, those families are not saying you will never have a cell phone.
Like, you'll never look at a screen.
These are just impossible things to say, and they wouldn't, I don't think, reflect the reality of what these machines have done to help us.
That, you know, the internet is not simply a demonic monster.
It is capable of exerting diabolical influence, but that doesn't mean that, like, What we should all do is become the Neo-Luddites.
What you're really seeing instead is exactly this, I would call it, attention to quality of consciousness that people are really starting to prize again and to seek ways of extending their attention spans, like sitting with books and even movies for uninterrupted Phone free periods of time.
At the extreme of this, you have like Faraday cages that people will put their phones in and meetings that will just totally block away any possibility of connectivity for that hour or whatever.
And this is where my like classicist mindset does kind of kick in is, you know, not all problems are new.
And just because something is very hard doesn't mean that discipline isn't a major component of fixing it.
And I would say that for myself, and as you indicate, like this is something adults have to think about in their own lives too, there's actually – you really can set certain hard and fast rules for yourself.
Personally, I spend about four hours in the morning just reading or just writing.
And there is no screen except for perhaps my laptop if I'm typing something up, you know, that is connected to the internet.
And so I think because this is a society-wide set of issues that we're now talking about, this question of how phones have hacked our brains, there isn't going to be a one-pill solution that, oh, the government just has to step in and fix it, or, oh, your parents just have to bring down the hammer.
And all of those things are going to, I think, have to be at play.
And the guiding light behind each of them is going to be that our machines serve us, that we're the point of all this.
And what we're not doing, as some tech mavens say that we are, is we're not aiming at some future where we're going to get beyond our humanity and the cyborg life of our machines is going to transcend or surpass us.
Somehow, we're the point and we've got to figure out how to start acting like it in a world that poses legitimately new challenges.
It's not like this stuff is easy.
It's hard, but that doesn't mean we don't have to wrap our brains around it.
Yeah, for sure.
And yeah, we're we have a lot ahead of us.
So we have a lot we have a lot to tackle there.
But Spencer, thank you so much for your insight and for joining me.
I appreciate it.
It was a delight.
Thank you for having me.
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Well that wraps up today's show.
If you enjoyed the show, make sure to find me on social media.
I'm at Danielle D'Souza Gill on all the platforms.
I'm on True Social, X, Facebook, Instagram.
That's where you can find my thoughts, photos, videos, things like that.
So make sure to come back tomorrow where we will have another great show.
So I'll see you then.
Magga.
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