Jedediah Bila Reveals Her Internet Addiction and How You Can Overcome Yours Too
While the advancement that technology and social media has offered great advancements in our society, we have to stop and ask: how much, is too much? Our ties to tech are transforming our brains, creativity, and most importantly - our relationships. But, when does it reach the level of addiction? And how can you find a healthy balance? Journalist, Jedidiah Bila sits down with Dr. Oz with an important wakeup call in her brand new book, "#Do Not Disturb: How I Ghosted My Cell Phone to Take Back my Life.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Because Mehmet just walks around with his computer open and does the exact same thing everyone else is doing on his cell phone on his computer.
It's so true.
No, no, no.
Oh my God.
There'll be ten of us preparing some giant feast and he'll be sitting in the kitchen with his computer emailing just so he has the feeling of being with people but he's still doing email.
Oh, people do that.
That's bad too.
That's not what I'm saying.
That's bad too.
That's bad too.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
How many of you right now are strolling through your phones while listening to this podcast?
Be honest, you're bouncing from Instagram to Twitter to Facebook, your email, the cycle continues, it goes on and on and on.
And while I respect and appreciate the advancement that technology and social media has offered our society...
I've got to stop myself and ask, and you should too, how much is too much?
Our ties to tech are transforming our brains, creativity, and most importantly, our relationships.
We've done research studies on this.
I mean, science is talking about this, but when does it reach the level of addiction?
And how can you find a healthy balance?
Journalist Jedediah Bila is here today with an important wake-up call in her brand-new book, Hashtag Do Not Disturb, How I Ghosted My Cell Phone to Take Back My Life, which I love that concept, ghosting a cell phone.
So you've diagnosed yourself with obsessive-compulsive technology disorder.
Yeah, OCTD. I mean, I definitely had it.
Who doesn't?
I know.
It's crazy in these times.
Basically, I found myself completely immersed in my devices.
My cell phone, my iPad, social media was the biggest culprit.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter.
And I was constantly living in those mediums.
And my real life, my real relationships, my friendships were suffering.
And so there were two things actually that happened that spurred me to write this book.
One was that, that I felt like I was missing moments.
And I talk about these in the book, these stories where I'm on a Ferris wheel and I'm having a text fight with an old boyfriend and I miss the whole thing.
I miss the beautiful horizon.
I miss everything.
I'm on a pier and I'm trying to take a picture of a sunset.
And instead, I become obsessed with what filter to put on it.
And I miss the actual sunset.
And instead, my only view of the sunset was through the rectangle of my phone and stories about being out with friends and not spending any real quality time with them.
And then one story in particular where I dated a guy who a mutual acquaintance had said to me, have you ever looked at his phone?
And I thought that was an odd thing.
I said, no.
And then one night, he passed out.
He had been drinking too much.
And the phone was buzzing and buzzing and buzzing.
And I opened the phone.
And he had a whole separate life in this device.
I mean, he was doing drugs.
He was selling drugs.
He was selling drugs.
He was sleeping around.
He was sleeping around.
He was having all-night house parties in his apartment after he was telling me he was going to bed.
He was having all night house parties in his apartment after he was telling me he was going to bed.
And I mean, the story, I tell it, it's embarrassing.
And I mean, the story, I tell it, it's embarrassing.
I feel like, wow, I might look stupid to some people because I miss so many signs.
I feel like, wow, I might look stupid to some people because I miss so many signs.
But the combination of realizing that these phones in the wrong hands were winding up being these secret portals to God knows what and what they were encouraging in people and how people were losing all sense of appropriateness in how they talked in these mediums.
And you'd say things you'd never say in person.
Combine that with the fact that I was missing my real life and I was having conversations with friends where I wasn't even paying attention to them anymore.
I had no eye contact.
I had forgotten myself.
Those two things kind of merged.
And I said, you know what?
I got to do something about this.
I got to fix this problem.
And I have to somehow create an awareness that we're losing ourselves in these machines.
And I talk in this book about everything from sex robots, which is happening, and people are purchasing them.
What are sex robots?
Oh, I didn't watch that episode.
Yeah, they're these life-sized sex dolls that can be made to feel warm with battery packs that respond to you, that can talk to you, that you can be intimate with, that now can operate on family mode in some cases, and people are having to talk to their kids and become part of the family.
And I actually talk about a particular interview in the book where a guy is sitting on the couch with his invention, this sex robot, and his actual real-life wife is off to the side, just kind of watching and sort of, you know, reluctantly condoning what's happening.
In my view, that's how I viewed it.
And I talk about all this.
And it's basically, you know, people, when I first pitched this book to my editor, he said, you know, you have to be careful because people are going to think you're saying throw the phone away.
It's actually quite the opposite.
I have social media still.
I have a cell phone.
I may be interested in doing a digital show at some point.
I wanted people to just have an awareness, just to look at the medium and the technology in their lives and ask important questions, like humans always used to do.
We used to challenge the next supposedly greatest thing, and we'd say, is this good for my life?
What do I want it to play?
What role do I want it to play in my family?
How would this potentially get in the way of my relationship?
Maybe I get the phone off the couch when I'm having dinner with my partner or my best friend.
And I just wanted people to start thinking again and figure out what role it should play.
The part about this whole story of technology in our brains that interests me the most is how it's actually changing our brains.
You mentioned in Hashtag Do Not Disturb that the attention span, which, believe it or not, is only about 12 seconds historically, It's now down to 8 seconds.
Yeah.
Which is a dramatic reduction.
Yeah.
Do you think that's being caused by this technology?
And if so, why?
Yeah, it's actually less than the goldfish is the comparison I made.
They study a goldfish.
Yeah, of course.
They don't have cell phones.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you never know.
In the future, they might.
Little tiny cell phones for the goldfish.
But of course, and it's starting young.
You know, I was in a store the other day.
I think it was yesterday, actually.
And I happened to be looking around and there was a baby in a carriage.
And I mean a baby.
This baby had to be less than one year old.
And all I see is this kid glued to a cell phone before they even realize what a cell phone is or they're glued to it and they're used to pressing the buttons.
And yeah, what I found is that because we're plugged into so many things at once, I mean, think about your day.
When you pick up the phone and somebody calls you, odds are you're talking to them.
You're simultaneously reading an email on your computer.
You're simultaneously getting a notification to check and see, oh, somebody sent me a text.
Oh, look, social media.
I got, oh, I got to do this.
You're never in one place at one time anymore, ever.
So because of that and because of this distraction, we're all over the place all the time.
So we're losing our ability to just do one task, do it efficiently, focus, attention.
You know, I talk about when I was in grade school.
I used to take handwritten notes in these composition notebooks.
You guys remember those?
Black and white.
I still have some in closets somewhere in our house.
Right.
And there was PTSD from those.
Yes, but there was the diligence about it.
You would sit, you would just focus on the task at hand.
People can't do that anymore.
And the unfortunate part is you're raising kids.
I used to be a teacher also.
I was a teacher.
Now, I mean, you're kidding me.
But I used to.
Do you host TV shows?
I was a teacher of middle school, high school, and I taught a college seminar.
And I was an academic dean, a high school academic dean in Manhattan.
Can you meet me and go to CJ? Come right in here, ma'am.
Right.
And that experience was, I can't tell you how many phones we confiscated.
And I can't tell you how hard it was getting to teach kids who were used to doing 100 things at once because they don't realize what it is to just sit and pay attention to a lesson.
Because at home, when they're doing their homework, they're not just doing their homework.
They're doing their homework.
They're checking a text.
They have the TV on in the background and emails coming through.
So that idea of fixed attention, it's dying.
And it's really, really, really scary when I think of young kids.
Technology has been designed to do this.
And we're more and more understanding that it's not an accident.
There have been some defectors from our tech companies who've gotten concerned.
Not just about privacy issues, by the way, which is a whole separate area, because you're putting your life at risk for that reason, but they're actually technologically designed and content is created in order to be able to pull you in.
What have you learned about that?
Yeah, I talk about that too, about how they use behavioral science.
These tech giants use this behavioral science to create a compulsion loop, essentially, where they figure out, particularly game designers, if you're talking about video games, they figure out How humans in general will respond to stimulus, for example, and how many times they have to click on something or how many times they have to do something to get addicted and to get looped in.
And what behavioral science taught them is that all humans respond the same way, to stimuli.
So if you figured out how one person could respond, you'd figure out how all people could respond and you'd be able to tailor the video games and social media and whatever it is to the way people respond.
And that's what's happening.
You're stuck in this compulsion loop.
All of a sudden you're addicted.
You're addicted before you even realize it.
And then it becomes this creeping normality of this is just what life is.
OK, this is life in 2018.
So I guess I have to go along to get along.
I guess this is how I get promoted at my job is that I have to be plugged in all the time.
And you get used to it.
And that chip of resistance that used to exist in human beings, it dies.
And you don't ask those tough questions.
It used to be that when someone came up with something, television, for example, people asked hard questions.
Is this going to turn us into a bunch of, you know, our brains soft or, you know, headphones?
Is it good to have music, you know, screaming into your ears all the time?
People ask questions.
With technology, it's coming out so fast, and people's lives are just, they're just embracing it.
And they're, oh, this is the next shiny thing.
And, oh, I have to have the new iPhone.
And, oh, this new app.
And this is going to make me more popular at work.
And, oh, this is going to raise my status in television.
Let me just do it all.
And they wake up one day, and they're like, what happened to my life?
You know, what happened to my marriage?
What happened to my marriage?
Up next, how Jedediah dealt with her internet trolls and how we can all use technology the right way.
Jedediah, so we have four kids.
Yeah.
If you told our kids to stop using their cell phones...
And we've passed several rules.
You can't use cell phones at dinner.
That's one of the most important ones.
You mentioned it in your book as well, which I was proud of you for doing.
And it's hard.
But at least it's a finite amount of time.
For half an hour, you're not using it.
If you want to dinner, you put the phone away.
I don't want it on the table even.
Well, two of our kids.
Actually, I think all three of the girls.
Oliver's not...
I mean, he texts all the time, but he's not on social media.
He's an adolescent boy, so he's not...
Yeah, but he's got his own...
I guess he does scroll through Instagram, but it's not the same kind of obsession.
But the girls have all voluntarily taken themselves unplugged, like left their phone in a drawer, or not gone onto Instagram for a week at a time.
That's fantastic, actually.
It was not fantastic because they did it because they were so consumed.
They were finding themselves down the rabbit hole.
Yeah, but that's a good sign, is that just the ability to recognize that, especially for a young person, to be able to say, wait a minute...
What am I doing?
That's step one, right?
Because if you don't do that, you're never going to make progress.
You're never going to be able to make change.
And what studies have found, interestingly enough, is that even if you're not on the phone, if the phone is around, if the phone is on the table or the nightstand, just the mere presence of the phone sitting there, even if you're not using it, is a distraction.
It inhibits your sleep.
It inhibits your ability to focus on whatever other task you're doing.
So the idea of putting it in a drawer or even, you know, I don't keep my phone in my bedroom anymore at all.
I don't charge it in the bedroom.
The charging station is in the living room.
And the reason for that was that I used to wake up in the middle of the night, even for a bathroom break, and I would check the phone.
And then you're in the rabbit hole of, oh, somebody sent me an email.
I've learned that because I charge my phone in a different room as well at night when I'm sleeping.
My big mistake is right before bedtime.
I'll take one last look.
Oh yeah, bedtime's two hours later.
An email came in and that stimulates four emails on his part and by the time he's finished those four emails, then someone's written back and it's a vicious cycle.
Which again, I'm trying to leave people with concrete steps, but is there a deadline, a curfew on when you check your phone last before bedtime?
How much of a gap is there?
Yeah, I call it the cell phone curfew.
And it's different for everyone because everyone has different work hours.
You know, everyone has a different schedule.
And, you know, once again, in this book, I wanted to be clear that I wasn't telling people what to do.
What I was telling them is what I did.
You know, I'm a libertarian, so I'm very into, you know, live your own life, make your own choices.
But I wanted to show them that it's pretty easy, actually, to make some changes.
And the changes that I made and that I did actually completely transformed my life.
For me, at 10 p.m., The phone goes into the charger and I don't look at it.
That's it.
I'm done.
I go to sleep around, you know, 12 or 1230 at night.
So for me, that leaves a couple of hours at the end of the day for me and my husband to joke around, for me to, you know, toss on, you know, whatever, a movie that I want to watch and just hang out with him to have some conversation to whatever it is, is not the content of my devices can wait till the morning.
That's my cutoff for my own sanity.
And everybody has to decide what it is for them.
One of the reasons that you got moving in this path was because you were being trolled.
Anyone on television who has opinions is going to be trolled.
So you're hosting The View and making comments that are, you mentioned libertarian comments, I'd say, and people don't agree with them.
Which is, by the way, if you're going to change people, you have to, once in a while, tell people things they don't want to hear, and then they'll get mad about it.
So how did that catalyze this process?
Yeah, so what's interesting about me, I come from politics.
I worked at Fox News first.
I used to host a bunch of shows there, and then I went to The View.
And I'm a libertarian conservative, but I'm not affiliated with a party.
I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
And my brand is that I'm an equal opportunity critic.
So if you are involved in corruption or you're involved in displaying a lack of transparency or whatever it is, I'm going to call you out.
So what that leads to, of course, is you make a lot of enemies because, you know, Republican loyalists say, oh, she's a conservative.
She should be defending us.
And Democrats say, well, you know, I don't like what she stands for.
She's talking about limited government.
So everybody has a bone to pick with you all the time, pretty much.
When I went to The View, you know, as the sole libertarian conservative on that panel at the time, I was used to reading my Instagram and my Twitter at the time and my Facebook religiously.
That was a time period when I first started where I was still very plugged in.
And because I had come from Fox News, where majority of the audience I was used
to a lot of positive feedback.
It was shocking at first.
I was taken aback.
It was some people could be cruel.
And in the book, I actually share some of the tweets that people said.
I mean, you know, curses and insults.
Some of them can't be shared.
They can't be shared.
It's always personal.
It's personal.
It's never like, oh, I disagree with her policy on blank.
Right.
It's always, you know, she's a...
It's hard to defend yourself against a slur.
How do you argue back against the story?
Right, right.
And because of that, two things happen.
One, I decided for Facebook in particular, because the trolls love Facebook, I decided I wasn't going to read the comments there anymore.
For Twitter, I was going to try to duck in and out more.
I do sometimes do a Q&A there with readers, with supporters, where I answer some of their questions, and I like that ability to engage.
But I figured out a way to not be stuck on it all day, not reading the at column all day, not always interested in what everybody has to say about me.
Instagram, too, for the most part, I'll just avoid the comments altogether.
And that was a way that I was able to still exist in those mediums, which I think can have valuable components to them, but not...
Be addicted to it and be so plugged into what everybody else thought about me.
The thing I'm most focused on though is the fact that it probably catalyzed you to realize the destructive effect.
It wasn't just our attention.
That's it.
Yeah.
That was the thing.
That was the realization was that something was happening to people in these mediums that wasn't good.
Yes.
Which was that it was bringing out the worst.
You had people tweeting from behind.
Anonymous photos oftentimes.
They don't use their own actual name.
They're saying whatever.
And it was bringing out this side of people's personalities that, quite frankly, what was scary for me as working in television is that People were saying things in these mediums, you know, knee-jerk reactions, personal insults, and that attitude was carrying over to television.
So that now, because they were so used to being nasty and, oh, let me get out that sarcastic comment, and let me forget the fact that they're all people that I'm talking about.
We're still all humans.
We're still in this collective society together.
Let me forget that and just, you know, see what it can get the most retweets.
Then I would turn on the TV and watch political commentary.
And it was like the Wild West.
I was saying, what's happening?
And it was just because people were so used to behaving badly in social media mediums that now they took that.
And that was their behavior on television.
So that people who were interested in nuanced, real debate, who wanted to have an actual conversation, who wanted to be respectful, they didn't have place to go anymore.
That didn't exist because TV was saying, well, this is what's popular.
And it just made me think about all the years that we told our kids, our grandkids not to behave that way on the playground.
And now you had grown adults, politicians, and it goes straight up to the top, straight up to the president, tweeting things that you were like, are you crazy?
Like, what's happening?
Are we a bunch of high school mean girls now that this is how we behave?
So it was awakening.
And I decided that I wanted to say something about it.
Let's talk about what you personally do, since that's why you wrote the book, Lessons That Have Worked for Jedediah.
So let me start with the concept of FOMO. You actually redefined FOMO, which I'm a huge fan of, of course, fear of missing out.
You rename it FOMOS, which is Focus on Making Occasions Special.
So what does that mean?
How do you actually use that to change the way we use our phones?
You know, you go from fear of missing out, which is FOMO, which a lot of millennials have right now, and it becomes this, oh my god, I have to be every place, everywhere, all the time.
I have to be on social media.
I have to be doing this.
I have to be doing that.
And it leads you to be kind of spread thin.
which is why, you know, we have all these LinkedIn and in quotes connections that aren't really connected to us.
You have 965 Facebook friends, you know, like 12 of them.
And instead, what I wanted was for people to, A, nurture the actual relationships they have in their life.
So if you're paying attention to a bunch of LinkedIn connections or a bunch of, you know, people that you don't know online and you're obsessed with that, you might be ignoring the person sitting on the couch right next to you, which is your husband, your wife, your child, whatever it may be.
And also just taking a minute to just be in the moment that you're in.
No one is ever doing that anymore.
So if you're at a cafe, and I have a story from the book where I'm in this cafe, and I go there to just relax and to have a minute just to think after a TV appearance, and what do I do?
The second I get there, I take out my cell phone.
I take out, you know, whatever it is that's going to distract me, and I catch myself, and I say, no, this is about the moment.
And it's actually a really interesting story because...
I noticed two couples that are on a date, a young couple and an older couple.
And the young couple is completely immersed in their devices.
You can barely tell they're on a date.
They're making no eye contact.
It's a cold, detached, alarming feeling.
And right by them, I don't know if the universe sent me this just for me to have an awakening moment.
There's an older couple that is completely engaged with each other, that's making eye contact.
They're sharing a piece of pastry between them.
And it was such an awakening moment for me of not only seeing that contrast of what was happening time-wise and what was disintegrating and what we were losing, but also just myself and calling myself out and my inability to just be in one place and enjoy that moment and enjoy those people and not have but also just myself and calling myself out and my inability to just be in one place and enjoy that moment and enjoy those people and not have a And also another thing that's interesting, just to say this, because I know you're a parent, you guys are parents.
and what was disintegrating and what we were losing, but also just myself and calling myself out and my inability to just be in one place and enjoy that moment and enjoy those people and not have a phone or a device out to take me out of that moment and into whatever that sphere was.
And also another thing that's interesting just to say this, because I know you're a parent, you guys are parents, and I don't know if you have this experience where you go to an event for your kids and you see all of the parents with the phones out and then they're embedded in the phones.
I don't know if you have this experience where you go to an event for your kids and you see all of the parents with the phones out and then they're embedded in the phones.
You go to a school play and the phone is out.
You go to a school play and the phone is out.
I would just remind parents, too, that your kids see you.
I would just remind parents, too, that your kids see you.
They really see you when they pay attention to what you're doing.
So if you say to them, and I've had friends tell me this a lot, if you say to them, put your phone away at the dinner table, but then they see that when they're trying to have a conversation with you, you've got the phone and you're distracted, they're not going to listen at all.
So, and I know that from being a teacher and just having, you know, being an advisor to students and listening, I would have students come into my room and say, well, my mom wants me to get off my cell phone, but she's on her cell phone all the time.
And I'd say, uh-oh.
And I'd call the mom and say, look, this is what's going on.
You know, this is why you might want to have a conversation about this.
So just to say to parents, they see and they learn.
They're quick.
We've got a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
Give me two seconds on how you go from being a teacher, an academic advisor, to realizing people wanted to hear what you had to say outside the classroom, outside the school.
It was by accident, actually.
I was a teacher and dean at a school called Birch, Wath& Lennox on the Upper East Side, and I started writing.
First, I always loved to write, and I started writing columns, and I always say to people that that day I could have written about dogs, who I also love.
I happen to write about politics.
I started getting noticed and people said, hey, do you want to write something here?
There were these blogs that were just starting to form around.
I wrote some commentary on these blogs and I happened to review Mark Levin, the radio host's book, Liberty and Tyranny, which I don't usually read political books, but that one kind of struck me and I decided to read it.
Are you a big reader?
You know, it depends on the time.
Right now, I'm not reading anything amazing because I'm writing and because I've been...
But yeah, I do like to read.
Do you read paper or on digital platforms?
Nope, I read paper.
Paper.
I like books.
I like to feel a book.
I like to turn the pages.
I love libraries, so sometimes I'll go sit in the library and I'll thumb through a bunch of books.
But yeah, I would say, I mean, I read.
I'm rereading Ayn Rand's stuff right now.
I go back and read the old stuff a lot of times that I love.
But I reviewed Levin's book and he...
A friend of mine had sent the review to him and he read it on air to millions of members of his audience.
And my dad was driving home from work that day and said, called me, oh my God, Mark Levin's reading your review.
And I was like, no way.
And I heard it.
And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool.
And from that, Sean Hannity called and asked me to do the Great American Panel on TV. And I said, all right, I don't know what I'm going to say, but sure.
And I went and we did Politics of the Day and A couple of weeks later, they called me to fill in for Dana Perino, and I was like, the former press secretary?
I was like, what?
You know, in a segment with Stuart Varney talking about politics.
And I was always kind of political.
I was always the type of person who had an opinion, who I had a very diverse family with a lot of different political opinions.
So I always found a way to have a debate, and it just blew up.
So at dinner time when you were growing up, the dad that you just mentioned called you when he was, because he obviously is leaving, he's listening to political radio on the way home.
Yes, he's a conservative, my dad, a big conservative.
So when you would debate, you obviously didn't have cell phones in your hands, or did you double-checking what one of you were saying?
No, we didn't.
I actually didn't.
Cell phones didn't come into my life until the end of college.
So I was fortunate in that most of my formative years existed without that.
So in a child today who's just like you, they're probably not going to grow up in a home where people are debating without pulling out their phones.
In our home, when we debate stuff, you know, the kids immediately are Googling.
Well, they just want to fact check.
Yeah, they're fact checking.
People will say, yeah.
But while they're fact checking, they could be checking their Instagram too, I can't tell.
I just want to clarify something for you.
Hear computer every time she says phone.
Because Mehmet just walks around with his computer open and does the exact same thing everyone else is doing on his cell phone on his computer.
It's so true.
Oh my god.
First of all, I don't sit there and scroll through Instagram.
I never look at negative comments.
Because I know I can't respond to slurs.
So I can't engage you in a debate about real stuff because you're not going to probably ask me that on Twitter.
It doesn't make it any better just because it's not Instagram.
I'm reading articles.
You're not.
I am.
You know what you're not doing is doing what everyone else is doing.
So literally, there'll be 10 of us in the kitchen preparing some giant feast, and he'll be sitting in the kitchen with his computer, emailing, just so he has the feeling of being with people, but he's still doing emails.
Oh, people do that.
That's bad, too.
I'm not saying emails.
I'm reading something for conversation.
But back to the point I was...
I just want you to know, it's not just cell phones.
It's computers.
Jenna Daya's being interviewed here, not me.
I'm enjoying this thing quite a bit, actually.
When the next generation in your family, which is probably already around coming to the big dinner tables at the Italian household, when they're listening to political debate at the table, are they honing their skills?
Listening to sharp-witted...
Relatives?
Or are they online trying to catch up using technology as they think they can?
You know, when things happen in my parents' house, it's very old school.
My parents are not tech savvy at all.
In fact, I talk about my dad in the book.
It's actually one of the funniest parts of the book.
He is the least likely person to ever get an addiction.
And he got addicted to Super Mario Brothers, the video game when I was a kid.
You've got to be kidding me.
And I talk about it.
It's hysterical, the story.
Super Mario Brothers?
Yeah.
Of all the games.
And he actually, like, you know, this is a guy who's never sent a text message, who doesn't have a smartphone, who really, you know, walks outside on these long walks with an old school stopwatch.
I mean, this is the anti-tech guy.
So I say if he could get addicted, anybody could.
But when conversations happen in my house, I feel like you're almost in a time warp, like we've hopped in a DeLorean and gone back in time.
And we manage, even with younger generations or cousins that come in, we manage to have that conversation in a cell-free zone still.
And that was actually really important, actually, for me growing up because I had so many people in my family that saw things differently that I got used to being around diversity of thought.
I got used to being able to have these conversations in a way that social media can't do now, where you're not at everybody's throat, where you're able to talk things out, where you're able to have a real conversation.
So I feel like if more households remove the technology from some of those spaces and had conversations in a face to face setting the way we used to, I'm
not blaming Silicon Valley.
And I'm not blaming the machines.
You know, I'm a personal responsibility girl.
So these things only have the power that you give them.
They could create, you know, 500 apps tomorrow.
But if you're in the driver's seat, you're still able to say, you know what, these two work for me and the rest I don't need.
The rest are going to get money.
We're rewarding the bad guys by not being more disciplined about this or that question.
And you know, why would you hinder people who are doing their job, which is to get you to use their technology from doing that unless you're smart enough to figure it out.
