Speaker 1: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask
Speaker 1: what you can do for your country. Mister Gerba show
Speaker 1: Tear down this Wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter
Speaker 1: Robinson and Charles C. W.
Speaker 2: Cook.
Speaker 1: I'm James Alex and today we talked to Christine Rosen
Speaker 1: about the extinction of experience. I know it sounds horrible,
Speaker 1: but she's talking about being human in a disembodied world.
Speaker 1: So let's tell us that's a podcast.
Speaker 3: My fellow New york Is it is now my belief
Speaker 3: that the federal government intends to charge me with crimes.
Speaker 3: If so, these charges will be entirely false based on lives.
Speaker 3: I always knew that if I stood my ground all of.
Speaker 1: You, that I would be a topic. Well, hi there,
Speaker 1: this is the Ricochet Podcast. And if you're wondering how
Speaker 1: many we've done, we've done seven hundred and ten. What up, No,
Speaker 1: we've done seven hundred to nine. When this is thank you,
Speaker 1: we will have done seven and there are protesting times.
Speaker 4: Winger Cheriot is.
Speaker 1: Peter Robinson with us again, Thank Evans and Charles A
Speaker 1: Cook in Florida. And before we get to the news
Speaker 1: of the day, well it is the news of the day. Frankly,
Speaker 1: how are you faring in the latest onslaught of Mother Nature?
Speaker 4: Charlie.
Speaker 1: We're good, We're good.
Speaker 5: We're not in the same position as those who are hit.
Speaker 5: It really does look very bad, so thoughts to them.
Speaker 5: But we did have a lot of rain and wind,
Speaker 5: and furniture went into the pool, and the doors were
Speaker 5: slamming all night, and the lightning alarm was going off
Speaker 5: and the kids kept waking up, so we were aware
Speaker 5: of it. But fortunately, as far as I can see,
Speaker 5: there's no damage.
Speaker 1: How far are you from the beach, Very.
Speaker 5: Close to the beach, but on the east coast.
Speaker 1: If I may ask the lightning detector.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so there are lightning alarms in the town and
Speaker 5: they go off.
Speaker 1: To tell you that, to tell you there has been lightning.
Speaker 5: Wow, to tell you there's lightning within five miles in
Speaker 5: case you're playing golf or tennis, or you're outside holding
Speaker 5: that I'm made of steel.
Speaker 1: There's something completely unknown to those of us here who
Speaker 1: just simply enjoy the arc across the sky and give
Speaker 1: it no more thought. But we have tennis, and we
Speaker 1: have golf and the rest of it. A lightning alarm
Speaker 1: that's fascinating. We'll glad you're say, yes, you are on
Speaker 1: the east coast. You know, I always tell my wife
Speaker 1: that I want to move to the west. I want
Speaker 1: to be near palm trees and warm breezes and the sea.
Speaker 1: And then she's looking at this and cooking and crocking
Speaker 1: an eyebrow, cocking an eyebrow at Well, if we followed
Speaker 1: your advice, of course we would be either a out
Speaker 1: of a house or you know, be paying Usurus insurance rates,
Speaker 1: which I understand is part of a problem. Ah difficult
Speaker 1: to ensure houses down there, and you can sort of
Speaker 1: kind of see why.
Speaker 6: But yes, may I pile in on that very moment,
Speaker 6: at every point, I want to see what Charlie does
Speaker 6: to slap me down on this one. Hurricane season in
Speaker 6: Florida raises each year the only imperfection that I can
Speaker 6: find in Florida political culture, and it is this people
Speaker 6: who are eleven months a year stout conservative supporters of
Speaker 6: Rond descentis wishing in every regard to roll back the
Speaker 6: government and get it out of our lives. In hurricane month,
Speaker 6: say oh, yes, but of course the government must subsidize
Speaker 6: all our insurance. Charlie, would you care to defend your
Speaker 6: fellow Floridians.
Speaker 5: No, I'm not greatly in favor of subsidies. I think
Speaker 5: it's probably a little more complicated because there are already subsidies.
Speaker 5: So we're talking about requests within a system that already
Speaker 5: objers the free market. But no, I thought you were
Speaker 5: going to say that when the hurricanes come, people say
Speaker 5: the government must save us, and I was going to say,
Speaker 5: ish it. That is what we have a government for, yes,
Speaker 5: going out and saving people in natural disasters. But now
Speaker 5: I think that the free market instinct should be universal,
Speaker 5: and there's no reason others should pay to ensure my
Speaker 5: house because I want to live near the beach. So
Speaker 5: I'm with you.
Speaker 6: Well, right, all right, Sorry, James, that went nowhere. That
Speaker 6: was a conversational non starter. I thought I could get
Speaker 6: a rise.
Speaker 4: Out of it.
Speaker 1: Well, he is unflappable in English. There are some I
Speaker 1: mean in his origin story. He's an America now as
Speaker 1: much as any of us.
Speaker 5: But so maybe like Batman.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of Gotham City, the mayor Eric Adams has
Speaker 1: been first mayor and one hundred and ten or something.
Speaker 4: To be slapped with a bunch of charges.
Speaker 1: And people are saying, well, he's saying that the reason
Speaker 1: they're coming after him is because he has criticized the
Speaker 1: immigration policies of the administration. I don't think that's it.
Speaker 1: I think it might have to do something with taking
Speaker 1: money from a foreign government, specifically Turkey.
Speaker 4: Peter.
Speaker 1: I know that, you know, it may not seem like
Speaker 1: a big deal to the rest of the country, because
Speaker 1: no mayor from New York is, aside from Giuliani who failed,
Speaker 1: has had much of a national political impact. But if
Speaker 1: he does go down, there is a man standing behind
Speaker 1: him who will take the job, who is of the
Speaker 1: most radical bent you can imagine, and might further Well,
Speaker 1: let me put it this way, is New York almost
Speaker 1: impervious to the death blow? Is there just something in there?
Speaker 1: It's raw, that's the spirit that will keep it going
Speaker 1: so that it matter know what, it doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: sort of idiot gets in, It will still continue to
Speaker 1: burn bright and throw off a bunch of money. Or
Speaker 1: is the problem that plays a lot of American city's
Speaker 1: about to get worse for New York And I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: New York does matter. It matters a lot to the
Speaker 1: sense of this country, to its national identity, to its
Speaker 1: conception of itself. It is the Empire State Building. It
Speaker 1: is the brawny city of the forties that we saw,
Speaker 1: that you've see in the old newsreels, the glory of
Speaker 1: I mean, I love New York.
Speaker 4: Can't stay there more than three days, but I love
Speaker 4: New York. So what's your thought on this?
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, Charlie will chime in on this because as
Speaker 6: a National reviewman, he knows New York well. Has figured
Speaker 6: out very happily a way not to have to live there,
Speaker 6: but he knows New York well. So I grew up
Speaker 6: in upstate New York, and for me, the city was
Speaker 6: the great and glittering Oz. It was where I got
Speaker 6: to go on a field trip with a theater club,
Speaker 6: where we would go see two or three Broadway shows
Speaker 6: matinees which were cheap tickets, and where my parents a
Speaker 6: couple of times they did well on report cards, and
Speaker 6: my reward was a weekend family trip down.
Speaker 4: To the city.
Speaker 6: So for me, it is just fixed as a kind
Speaker 6: of mythical It's where the action was, It's where all
Speaker 6: the sophistication was. Okay, those were the days when New
Speaker 6: York as a state functioned pretty well, when upstate towns
Speaker 6: the mid sized towns, the sort of American answer to Bavaria, Binghamton,
Speaker 6: outside of which I grew up, Utica, Rochester, Schenectady. All
Speaker 6: of these towns were still functioning relatively healthy. Schenectady was
Speaker 6: General Electric, Rochester was eastman Kodak Binghamton, and Johnson City,
Speaker 6: where I grew.
Speaker 1: Up was IBM.
Speaker 6: That part of the state has essentially collapsed, and the
Speaker 6: city itself has about the same population today that it
Speaker 6: had when I was a kid. So what does that
Speaker 6: mean that it hasn't grown with the rest of the country.
Speaker 6: The imperviousness, and it does seem to be impervious, is
Speaker 6: all now narrowed down to financial services, where there are
Speaker 6: I don't know what one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand
Speaker 6: people in Manhattan who receive annual incomes every single year
Speaker 6: of well in excessive a million dollars and keep that
Speaker 6: whole town going. But for the as a place that
Speaker 6: was open to the middle class, as a place where
Speaker 6: when I was a kid, when we went to college
Speaker 6: in those days, the Ivy League was quite regional. It
Speaker 6: was an East Coast institution, and if like me, you
Speaker 6: were interested in journalism, you dreamed of going to New York.
Speaker 6: There were still publishing houses in New York where the published.
Speaker 6: I visit did Scribner's Scripner's wonderful building on Fifth Avenue,
Speaker 6: which I think now is a is a Sephora makeup
Speaker 6: shop or something of that nature. Charles Scribner the third
Speaker 6: sat at a desk and chatted with me and pulled
Speaker 6: out a manuscript that he had discovered stuffed way in
Speaker 6: the back of the desk that Max, who was the
Speaker 6: great editor.
Speaker 4: It was a It was a Max Perkins.
Speaker 6: Max Perkins exactly. Max Perkins had sat at that desk
Speaker 6: and had begun marking up a Hemingway manuscript and gone
Speaker 6: out for a Boloney sandwich at lunch or something like that,
Speaker 6: and shoved them and it had gotten jammed in the
Speaker 6: drawer at the back of the desk, and Charlie Scribner
Speaker 6: had discovered it. Okay, all of that was the mythical
Speaker 6: New York that seems to be gone. Now you're Bill
Speaker 6: Ackman and a billionaire, and the many people at or
Speaker 6: Ken Griffin and Citadel, and you're hiring extremely braake kids,
Speaker 6: and that little cone of finance does extremely well, and
Speaker 6: everything else is half what it was. Moving elsewhere. So
Speaker 6: there is a kind of very narrow sphere of activity
Speaker 6: that is impervious, but the rest of the city it
Speaker 6: doesn't feel that way to me.
Speaker 1: Charlie correct me, Well.
Speaker 5: I don't disagree with all that you said. I just
Speaker 5: still think that it's a truly great city. We were
Speaker 5: just having this conversation on the Editor's podcast as to
Speaker 5: whether or not New York is the greatest city in
Speaker 5: the world, and I said that, although it's not my
Speaker 5: favorite city in the world, I think it is the
Speaker 5: greatest city in the world in the same way as
Speaker 5: London was the greatest city in the world one hundred
Speaker 5: and fifty years ago. Whether or not people preferred it
Speaker 5: to Paris or Berlin or what you will, New York
Speaker 5: just seems to me to be the center of the universe,
Speaker 5: the capital of the West, and it makes it more
Speaker 5: baffling than I can describe that. Having worked out what
Speaker 5: it needs to do to run itself, well, it's declined
Speaker 5: to do that for now thirteen fourteen years. I mean,
Speaker 5: we know what to do to make New York run.
Speaker 5: What you need is a centrist or center right social
Speaker 5: liberal who does not agree with National Review on most
Speaker 5: things except crime right, and who make sure that the
Speaker 5: city doesn't plunge itself into unmanageable debt, and that deploys
Speaker 5: police around in the places that they're needed, and cleans
Speaker 5: up homeless encampments, and then New York works. I was
Speaker 5: lucky I moved to New York in twenty eleven. My
Speaker 5: parents back in England still had a conception of New
Speaker 5: York as it was in the nineteen eighties and early
Speaker 5: nineteen nineties. It's a very dangerous place, and they kept
Speaker 5: saying to me be careful.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 5: I didn't in any way resent that, but I did
Speaker 5: have to update them and say, did you know that
Speaker 5: it is more dangerous to live in London than it
Speaker 5: is to live in Manhattan? Right now, Well, that's no
Speaker 5: longer true. Unfortunately, it's not as bad as Seapple or
Speaker 5: San Francisco, but it's no longer true. When I lived
Speaker 5: there from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen, I worked there
Speaker 5: from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, it was paradise and
Speaker 5: you could walk her out in the middle of the
Speaker 5: night and you could have shouted, I've got lots of
Speaker 5: valuables in my bag. At one o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 5: and no one would have touched you. The subway was
Speaker 5: clean and safe. It was great.
Speaker 6: Actually, you make an extremely important point. New York attracts
Speaker 6: so much talent and so much capital that all the
Speaker 6: government of the city needs to do is two things,
Speaker 6: only two. Give the city safe streets and make sure
Speaker 6: as the subways run correct. That's all, that's all. And
Speaker 6: they those two things. You do, those two things, and
Speaker 6: you do have the capital of the world.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: The last time I was in New York City, I
Speaker 1: was awakened early, early, early in the morning by the
Speaker 1: symphony of jackhammers going on outside across the street, where
Speaker 1: they were building a sixty story tower called the Flame,
Speaker 1: which will have a roller coaster at the top of it.
Speaker 1: I made my way down a creaking, shuddering elevator from
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties into the lobby of the Paramount Hotel,
Speaker 1: which has been updated since it was redone in the nineties.
Speaker 1: It looks like there should be a copy of Madonna's
Speaker 1: sex books sitting in the lobby somewhere outside.
Speaker 4: Take a left.
Speaker 1: You instantly are hit by the sounds of the cacaphony,
Speaker 1: the noise of everything. You jostle against people as you walk.
Speaker 1: When you get to Times Square, a couple of blocks later,
Speaker 1: you pass the Kababs, you pass the place the roama
Speaker 1: has come flowing up, the Sabarett's hot dogs, and then
Speaker 1: as you wend your way through Times Square, you feel
Speaker 1: the rumble of the subways beneath you as you pass
Speaker 1: a grate, and you can sense the whole arteries that
Speaker 1: stretch through the entire city. I moved about ten blocks
Speaker 1: to the north and made my way to Central Park,
Speaker 1: and then I was in a green and verdant paradise.
Speaker 1: It was a delight to the eyes and smelled beautiful
Speaker 1: and fresh and crisp, and the rest of it from
Speaker 1: there to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I beheld
Speaker 1: with my own eyes, thanks to the light bouncing off
Speaker 1: them and going into my retinas, the sights of art
Speaker 1: of which I had never seen, and all of it
Speaker 1: was the soundtrack of the noise of the people enjoying
Speaker 1: and the hundreds of people in the lobby and the
Speaker 1: rest of it. It was a completely and utterly human experience.
Speaker 1: It was what it meant to be human. And if
Speaker 1: you want to feel embodied, there is no better place
Speaker 1: to go.
Speaker 4: Than New York City, which.
Speaker 1: Brings us to our guest, Christine rot Rosen, has written
Speaker 1: the extinction of experience being human in a disembodied world.
Speaker 1: It's a very simple concept. It's a very complex concept.
Speaker 4: Christine.
Speaker 7: Welcome, Thank you for having me. It's good to be here.
Speaker 1: So here's the deal. We've sort of made this bargain
Speaker 1: with technology that all of these things that our little
Speaker 1: glowing rectangles are portable.
Speaker 4: Supercomputers are going to be able to do.
Speaker 1: Was provide all of these adjuncts and add ons and
Speaker 1: improvements to life in which our physical selves would dissolve
Speaker 1: almost in a rapturous sense, with this metaverse of possibilities.
Speaker 1: And how's that working out for us? Let's just start there.
Speaker 7: Well, not so well.
Speaker 2: I'm sure your listeners have all seen the sort of
Speaker 2: dramatic stories about teen mental health crises and you know,
Speaker 2: particularly depression, anxiety. Those are all big concerns, as is
Speaker 2: what social media has done to our politics. But I
Speaker 2: actually was looking at more of a baseline individual level,
Speaker 2: at how it's changed our daily interactions and our daily behavior,
Speaker 2: because I think that often gets overlooked because you can
Speaker 2: easily dismiss the extreme stories and say, oh, well, that's
Speaker 2: up to parents to figure that out, or oh, it's
Speaker 2: not as bad as people say. And everyone always is
Speaker 2: worried about new technology, but I think it's actually really
Speaker 2: interposed itself on the way we treat each other in
Speaker 2: daily life. And I mean the strangers in public space
Speaker 2: we come into contact with, I mean our most intimate
Speaker 2: relations with our family members and our loved ones. And
Speaker 2: I worry that we've allowed certain behaviors to become habits
Speaker 2: and habits of mind and ways of thinking about the
Speaker 2: world without really pausing to consider if that's the direction
Speaker 2: we want to go. We've had these technologies for a
Speaker 2: while now we think we've adapted to them, but I
Speaker 2: think in some ways we're becoming machine like rather than
Speaker 2: making the machines more human.
Speaker 6: So, Christine, I can think of one example, and it's
Speaker 6: too trivial for you to have written a book about it,
Speaker 6: but I'll give you the example, and then you give
Speaker 6: me something more meaningful. I just got back from a
Speaker 6: trip to Europe and we took friends. We didn't know
Speaker 6: these people, but the friends of friends, and we went
Speaker 6: to dinner with some europe some Europeans, and I thought
Speaker 6: that in Europe, of all places, there would still be
Speaker 6: some sense of protocol, of the protocols of courtesy, and
Speaker 6: then at dinner we would all talk to each other
Speaker 6: and lo and behold. Even Europeans felt totally free and
Speaker 6: un self conscious about plucking out their phones in the
Speaker 6: middle of conversation and just dropping out of the conversation
Speaker 6: until they had answered their emails. Okay, so that's one
Speaker 6: thing I don't twenty years ago that would have been
Speaker 6: unthink any place in America or Europe. I have the
Speaker 6: feeling that it has become common place. Certainly here in
Speaker 6: Silicon Valley it's commonplace. But okay, but that's not enough
Speaker 6: to write a book about.
Speaker 2: No, although I could write many rants about just that practice.
Speaker 2: But that is one example among many of the way
Speaker 2: this technology and our use of it has come between
Speaker 2: us and some basic human pleasures. So I do have
Speaker 2: a chapter about human pleasures, whether that's food, hanging out
Speaker 2: with friends, going to life, music, going to a museum, travel.
Speaker 2: In every single realm of our private experience of pleasure,
Speaker 2: we have allowed technology to interpose itself between us and
Speaker 2: the experience. Now, some of that's fine. You want to
Speaker 2: take a picture of something you see. But the research
Speaker 2: is really interesting on that people take pictures of things,
Speaker 2: of experiences, particularly pleasurable experiences, thinking this will help me
Speaker 2: remember this experience. But in fact, the way our weird
Speaker 2: brains are wired, if you take a picture of something,
Speaker 2: you're less likely to remember it because there's some part
Speaker 2: of your brain that registers that you've externalized the memory
Speaker 2: function there. You've got a picture of it, you don't
Speaker 2: have to remember quite as much. So when we go
Speaker 2: on vacations, when we go to art museums and we
Speaker 2: sit around with friends, if we are putting a screen
Speaker 2: between us and that experience, we will have a different
Speaker 2: qualitative experience obviously, which is what you're describing, but we'll
Speaker 2: also have a different memory of that experience. And I
Speaker 2: think again that's one of those things where because our
Speaker 2: phones are so powerful and they can take these amazing
Speaker 2: pictures and it's so easy to do, we think that's
Speaker 2: all a positive, that's a net positive for society. But
Speaker 2: how many times do people sit down and go through
Speaker 2: their phones and scroll through it the way people used
Speaker 2: to sit down and go through a photo album when
Speaker 2: photos were harder to take in more precious objects and
Speaker 2: tangible objects. There's all kind of interesting new research that
Speaker 2: shows that some of our memory formation of really deep
Speaker 2: important human experiences is being altered by our constant mediation
Speaker 2: and use of technology. As for the Europeans, I do
Speaker 2: find that shocking, and I have noticed that as well
Speaker 2: when I was in London and Paris. Is surprising, yes,
Speaker 2: but again these are norms that have shifted with time.
Speaker 2: Some people will look at that and say, oh, that's
Speaker 2: just technology, we're adapting to it. But that is technology
Speaker 2: in a deeply personal space right where you're sitting down
Speaker 2: across the table enjoying a meal with friends. Television people
Speaker 2: used to rant about, you know, all kinds of things computers,
Speaker 2: even people would rant about. But in this case, again
Speaker 2: very private personal moments all being fed through a screen
Speaker 2: or allowing a person it's a real power move still
Speaker 2: actually to pull out your phone and to remove yourself
Speaker 2: from a social situation. But it's accepted, and I'm not
Speaker 2: sure we should accept that.
Speaker 6: So, Christine, you are a person of such good cheer
Speaker 6: and such a transparently good heart that you can propose
Speaker 6: the most draconian reforms you want to and people will
Speaker 6: still say to themselves, well, you know, listening to from
Speaker 6: Christine Rosen, I could just about take it. So what
Speaker 6: how draconian are the reforms or the readjustments to our
Speaker 6: norms and protocols are What are you suggesting?
Speaker 2: Well, these are the kinds of things that you can't
Speaker 2: really legislate. I mean, there's some things you can do
Speaker 2: to protect kids, and I've written about that, But in the.
Speaker 6: Folks, have you done with your own kids? If I may, well,
Speaker 6: I listened to enough of the commentary podcast to know
Speaker 6: that you're very good and extremely attentive, and, like many
Speaker 6: of us, a tortured parent.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, my kids are now both freshmen in college.
Speaker 2: But zero to five I was pretty draconian.
Speaker 7: Zero to five. They had no screens, no television, no movies,
Speaker 7: zero computers.
Speaker 2: Zero from zero to five because my feeling was that
Speaker 2: they needed to learn to read before they were captured
Speaker 2: by the image. The image is a much more powerful thing.
Speaker 2: It's much more entrancing, especially for kids. So I was
Speaker 2: pretty hardcore. I don't think all parents need to do that.
Speaker 2: That was just my choice. As they got older, they
Speaker 2: didn't get a cell phone untill they were in high school.
Speaker 6: They were a lot.
Speaker 2: I think they were the last kids, and again they
Speaker 2: complained bitterly about it. Now, however, they of on a
Speaker 2: couple of occasions said, you know what, it's easy for
Speaker 2: me to put down my phone. It's easy for me
Speaker 2: to block Snapchat for a couple of weeks because I'm
Speaker 2: doing it too much.
Speaker 7: They have some.
Speaker 6: Self discas you serve the Nobel Prize for mother.
Speaker 2: You know, the verdicts still out. They're only eighteen, their
Speaker 2: brains are not fully developed yet. But I was tough
Speaker 2: with that because I worried early on about some of
Speaker 2: the impacts and I saw it. I saw when they
Speaker 2: would go to a friend's house.
Speaker 6: And Christina, if I may, I just can't. I should remember,
Speaker 6: I just don't. Are your kids boys or you have
Speaker 6: one of each?
Speaker 2: No, they're boys. So they're twin fraternal twin boys. And
Speaker 2: this is different than I probably would have been even
Speaker 2: more strict with social media if I had girls, honestly,
Speaker 2: because we know that it's social media, particularly in that
Speaker 2: tween in high school years.
Speaker 7: It's much more risky for girls.
Speaker 2: We just we know this now in terms of developmental
Speaker 2: and emotional attachment and how friend groups work. So I
Speaker 2: would have probably been even tougher with that, but yeah,
Speaker 2: I was kind of hardcore.
Speaker 1: Okay, So for the rest of us, what are you propose?
Speaker 2: And for the rest of us, you know what, I'm
Speaker 2: not For all my scolding, I don't really have a
Speaker 2: policy plan, but I would tell people to do this
Speaker 2: as an experiment. In those interstitial moments of your day
Speaker 2: when you would usually reach for your phone, don't go
Speaker 2: for a day where when you're waiting in traffic, or
Speaker 2: you're waiting for you know, for someone to pick you up,
Speaker 2: or you have a minute between you know, the tasks
Speaker 2: at work, don't look at your phone. Let your mind wander.
Speaker 2: Try that for twenty four hours, I think. And I
Speaker 2: forced myself to do this too, because it's difficult to do.
Speaker 2: Not filling that interstitial time with entertainment or communication or
Speaker 2: whatever it is your phone gives you and you use.
Speaker 7: It for does allow for a totally.
Speaker 2: Different experience of mind wandering, and it's kind of great.
Speaker 2: Like you might start worrying about your grocery list. That's
Speaker 2: what I did one time. But another time I had
Speaker 2: an idea for a peace I wanted to write, and
Speaker 2: I jotted it down and that became something I could
Speaker 2: work on. So your mind does need that. We are
Speaker 2: wired to let our minds wander in ways that take
Speaker 2: us down paths that lead to creativity and productivity.
Speaker 1: I have one more question.
Speaker 6: I'm going to hog you for one more moment and
Speaker 6: then I can see James is getting James is really ready.
Speaker 7: Okay, So here's his facial expressions.
Speaker 6: Yes, here's the last question. My last question. I recall
Speaker 6: reading ages and ages ago that we now know, we
Speaker 6: now understand in some ways that at least approaches the
Speaker 6: scientific that the oral tradition is incompatible with the ability
Speaker 6: to read. So we wonder how on earth were these
Speaker 6: people able to transmit Homer across the centuries before it
Speaker 6: became written down. And it turns out that into the
Speaker 6: twentieth century there were still societies where oral traditions remained,
Speaker 6: but the moment literacy became widespread in those societies. Funnily,
Speaker 6: I think there were actually YouTube videos recorded just when
Speaker 6: recordings first became possible, of Irish people, often the poorer
Speaker 6: parts of Ireland, who.
Speaker 1: Are still illiterate.
Speaker 6: But could we're still able to recite the great epics
Speaker 6: that somehow or other literacy blocks out some piece of
Speaker 6: the brain that made this oral tradition, these long acts
Speaker 6: of memorization possible. Okay, So with that in mind, do
Speaker 6: we really know what this object we hold in our hands,
Speaker 6: what this phone is doing to change our fundamental abilities
Speaker 6: as human beings? Is the research addequate? Do you have
Speaker 6: the feeling that, although research is beginning to come in
Speaker 6: Abigail Schreyer's written a book, Jonathan Height's written a book,
Speaker 6: do you have the feeling that we know enough?
Speaker 7: Not yet? No, because the research really is in its
Speaker 7: early stages.
Speaker 2: We've been conducting a massive social experiment for more than
Speaker 2: really about two decades now, but I think we have hints.
Speaker 2: And the challenge always with this sort of work is
Speaker 2: that some of the we do have some quantity data
Speaker 2: that can tell us certain things, but a lot of
Speaker 2: what this is is a difference in qualitative experience, differences
Speaker 2: choices that lead to opportunity costs, particularly for children. If
Speaker 2: you're staring at a screen seven hours a day, you're
Speaker 2: not doing other things, and those other things turn out
Speaker 2: to be very important free play, stuff that like John.
Speaker 7: And Abigail have written about very well for us.
Speaker 2: For those of us who are hybrids, didn't we weren't
Speaker 2: raised with this stuff, but we embraced it as you
Speaker 2: know adults, and think that we have a little more
Speaker 2: savvy with it. It's the habits of mind and how
Speaker 2: quickly they formed that I think we need to think about.
Speaker 2: And the qualitative part there is really important we have.
Speaker 2: I have lots of good friends who who I met
Speaker 2: either via online email, you know, we text each other.
Speaker 2: We don't see each other in person that much. My
Speaker 2: qualitatively deepest relationships are with people I regularly see in person.
Speaker 2: That my face to face interactions, the people who will
Speaker 2: show up for me when I need to ride to
Speaker 2: the airport or I'm sick. So those sorts of communities
Speaker 2: are becoming I think for a lot of people weaker.
Speaker 2: Those ties are becoming weaker because the trade off is
Speaker 2: we're spending so much time in mediated relationships. So it's
Speaker 2: not that we have to get rid of all of
Speaker 2: our mediated communication.
Speaker 7: We can't do that.
Speaker 2: We wouldn't be having this conversation without the technology that
Speaker 2: allows that. But if I choose this way of talking
Speaker 2: to you rather than seeing you face to face, if
Speaker 2: I have that option because this way is easier, that
Speaker 2: starts to undermine the quality of our connections and then
Speaker 2: we see this culturally and socially, we become more impatient
Speaker 2: with each other. We don't know how to get along
Speaker 2: as well. There are all kinds of things like road
Speaker 2: rage rates and other things that suggest we are becoming
Speaker 2: less patient, less accepting, less able to get along even
Speaker 2: when we disagree, and not just politically but socially.
Speaker 5: I wonder, Christine George extent, you're essentially playing anthropologists here
Speaker 5: in a world that now exists like this. I mean
Speaker 5: a lot of book subtitles have and here's what we
Speaker 5: can do about it. But you said you don't necessarily know.
Speaker 5: We have this world in which the phone is at
Speaker 5: the center. And if you look, if I pick up
Speaker 5: my phone right now, if I do what you told
Speaker 5: me not to do, and I pick up my phone
Speaker 5: right now, and I look at the front, so I
Speaker 5: have email which has replaced letters, and I have a
Speaker 5: phone on it obviously, and then I have a photos
Speaker 5: app which has replaced my camera. And then I have
Speaker 5: all sorts of work stuff slack that we use so
Speaker 5: I can be ping ale the time, and I have Dropbox.
Speaker 5: But what I also have is things like remote controls
Speaker 5: for the lights in my kitchen and from my Apple
Speaker 5: TV and for Sona, so I play music through. And
Speaker 5: somebody pointed out to me the other day that she
Speaker 5: has started to be more what she called intentional with
Speaker 5: her kids, because in the past, if you were watching TV,
Speaker 5: you would walk over and you would use a remote control,
Speaker 5: or if you were communicating with someone, you would pick
Speaker 5: up the phone, or you would write a letter. Or
Speaker 5: if she were working, she would be in her office,
Speaker 5: or if she were putting on music, she would go
Speaker 5: over and put on a vinyl record or whatever. But
Speaker 5: now to her children who are standing in the distance,
Speaker 5: she's always doing this, even though she's doing lots of
Speaker 5: different things on the phone, completely different things. Maybe to
Speaker 5: them it all looks the same. So is that just
Speaker 5: what we have done with the world?
Speaker 1: Now?
Speaker 5: I agree with you that I sometimes sit at dinner
Speaker 5: and I pick up my phone and I think, don't
Speaker 5: do that because I'm going to check Twitter or do
Speaker 5: something pointless. But is there a point to which we
Speaker 5: have made this road for our back and we're just
Speaker 5: going to have to suck it up?
Speaker 7: Yes and no.
Speaker 2: Yes, we have turned it into a Swiss army knife
Speaker 2: for life.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 7: It has everything on it and in fact you need
Speaker 7: to use it.
Speaker 2: You can't live without it in certain fields of work
Speaker 2: because there's a lot of work stuff on there that
Speaker 2: people need to unlock access to documents or to actual buildings.
Speaker 2: You can't park in many cities without having the app
Speaker 2: because there's no place to actually do that except on
Speaker 2: the phone. So and I had a friend who struggled
Speaker 2: mightily with He went to a concert and he needed
Speaker 2: to put everything in a locker, and he had to
Speaker 2: download the app, and he has a very old phone,
Speaker 2: and the phone was like not happening, so we couldn't
Speaker 2: put his belongings there. And he was very frustrated by
Speaker 2: this idea that the technology it's supposed to make his
Speaker 2: life easier has just made it more difficult. So in
Speaker 2: that sense, I think our overreliance on it is of concern.
Speaker 2: It certainly should be of concern if you're an employee
Speaker 2: in a large company that has you wear a badge
Speaker 2: with sensors that monitor lots of things about your day
Speaker 2: that maybe you don't want your employer to know as well.
Speaker 2: So from a privacy standpoint, my deepest concern though, is
Speaker 2: how readily and easily and unthinkingly we've brought it into
Speaker 2: our private sphere. So as you said, your friend could
Speaker 2: go to the office and do her work and then
Speaker 2: come home. But now everything travels with you. And the
Speaker 2: sophistication of this technology, particular in the future with the
Speaker 2: patents that are pending for all kinds of sensors that
Speaker 2: can be embedded in your phone. Most of us carry
Speaker 2: our phones with us all the time on our bodies.
Speaker 2: It's the first thing people reach for in the morning.
Speaker 2: It's the last thing so many people touch before they
Speaker 2: go to bed. This device is now in your private space,
Speaker 2: and it can hear you, It can report to all
Speaker 2: kinds of people and entities. You might not be aware
Speaker 2: of what you're doing, what you're saying. Soon it'll be
Speaker 2: able to measure your heart rate, all these things. This
Speaker 2: is a very intimate device, and I think we still
Speaker 2: think of it as a Swiss army knife could set
Speaker 2: aside and go about our day. That the intentions of
Speaker 2: the people in Silicon Valley who design many of these
Speaker 2: technologies and the platforms and software that fuel them, is
Speaker 2: to become even more intimate and turn so much of
Speaker 2: our private experience into data into information for others to use.
Speaker 2: My question is, do you want your relationship with your kids,
Speaker 2: the way the tone of voice you use when you
Speaker 2: speak to your spouse to be turned into data that
Speaker 2: someone else can have access to and use, because that's
Speaker 2: the direction that I think a lot of these platforms
Speaker 2: want us to have.
Speaker 5: Right, So how do I stop that? Because if I
Speaker 5: have a phone and it's near me, and it has
Speaker 5: a microphone, and it has the capacity to broadcast, then
Speaker 5: I only have two ways of stopping that. One is
Speaker 5: to stop using the phone or turn it off or
Speaker 5: throw it away, and the other is to pass laws
Speaker 5: that says to those companies, you are not allowed to
Speaker 5: process this information.
Speaker 2: Right, So the law is the is the probably the
Speaker 2: least effective tool here because we and we've tried that.
Speaker 2: Like again, a lot of these people, a lot of
Speaker 2: people would be happy to say, oh I don't care
Speaker 2: what people here, I have nothing to hide. That attitude
Speaker 2: worries me. But there is a minority people who feel
Speaker 2: that way. I actually think it's in this case, turn
Speaker 2: it off at night, like power it down or put
Speaker 2: it in another room. But I turned my phone off
Speaker 2: at night and then I use an old fashioned alarm clock.
Speaker 2: And I made that choice a few years ago because
Speaker 2: I found I was looking at that phone right before
Speaker 2: bed and looking at it first thing in the morning,
Speaker 2: and it changed the way I began and ended my day,
Speaker 2: and I didn't like it. So I do think that
Speaker 2: again awareness of it. And I know for years people
Speaker 2: have been saying, take a digital sabbath, you know, get
Speaker 2: a meditation app. All of that's fine and good, but
Speaker 2: we need to actually spend twenty four hours thinking about
Speaker 2: how often you mediate an experience, and how often you
Speaker 2: mediate experience is in your private home and in your
Speaker 2: private relationships. I think you'd be shocked how often it
Speaker 2: happens now without us really registering it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1: Christine.
Speaker 6: Is this just exactly as I pictured her listening to
Speaker 6: her on Common. She is this woman of wonderful good
Speaker 6: will and could, but she's also a little bit of
Speaker 6: a nag, isn't it.
Speaker 1: I am?
Speaker 7: I am, I'm a total skold. It's my role in life.
Speaker 1: Well to that point, I would actually like the conversations
Speaker 1: between myself and my wife to be transcribed and sent
Speaker 1: to some third party so that I can empirically show
Speaker 1: her that to judge Judy, that her tone of voice
Speaker 1: is actually.
Speaker 4: A little bit more sharp and hectoring them. Then she
Speaker 4: may think it may be I would like to hear that, Christine.
Speaker 1: There's so many things to talk about here.
Speaker 4: There's so so many aspects. You know.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I don't like about the
Speaker 1: ubiquity of the phone is when you walk away, walk
Speaker 1: into a public area, into a lobby for example, or
Speaker 1: even on the street, you see all these heads bent
Speaker 1: over their devices in private communion with them. And you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes I think if it was a book, nobody would
Speaker 1: be nobody would care, nobody would think anything of it.
Speaker 1: If if you walked into a place and everybody was
Speaker 1: looking down at a book, you would think this is
Speaker 1: the most literous society ever. And so, you know, we
Speaker 1: don't know what exactly people are looking at. We're just
Speaker 1: sort of unnerved by the fact that everybody seems in
Speaker 1: a demonstrably obvious public or private place, in a public smoth.
Speaker 1: There's no communal aspect of this. And they were complaining
Speaker 1: about that when the Walkman first came out. They said,
Speaker 1: here are all these people walking around big cities with
Speaker 1: these headphones in their private little world and their private
Speaker 1: little soundtracks, and they have no I mean, so this
Speaker 1: has been boiling for an awful long time. The problem,
Speaker 1: as you point out, is that it's so attractive to
Speaker 1: be able to get whatever you want. But when you
Speaker 1: mentioned the photographs that I found fascinating, this may sound
Speaker 1: really boring, but I make a point of taking a
Speaker 1: video every single day. I've been doing this for two
Speaker 1: years now, and I have this sort of daily record
Speaker 1: that reminds me of the utter banality of my existence.
Speaker 7: Is it the same thing that you video every day?
Speaker 7: Or is it something different every day?
Speaker 1: No, it's something different. It's work, it's the supermarket, it's
Speaker 1: walking the dog, it's this that or the other. It's
Speaker 1: but it's just sort of it's like taking a leaf
Speaker 1: that may otherwise fall from the tree and disintegrate and
Speaker 1: and coding it with lacquer and putting it in a book.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just somehow a way of making time.
Speaker 1: It's incorporeal, but just sort of at the end of
Speaker 1: the year, I've got this year, in addition to my
Speaker 1: travel videos and my travel photos, the photos that I
Speaker 1: take on travel, I remember every single one where I was,
Speaker 1: what I did, what I felt, who I was with.
Speaker 1: Because you mentioned before the photos that you would you
Speaker 1: have in your phone.
Speaker 4: Nobody looks at them.
Speaker 1: But you know what did they do before they would
Speaker 1: the father would take out the shimmering screen for the
Speaker 1: carousel projector the slides right, and everybody would yeah with
Speaker 1: that sort of the clicker and endures of.
Speaker 6: Suicide would cross everyone else's mind.
Speaker 1: Grainy coda, chromes of this or that, and it's a ship.
Speaker 4: And oh, it's the ocean and the rest of it.
Speaker 4: And it was.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it was still a social,
Speaker 1: communal thing where everybody got together and participated in this
Speaker 1: projection of what the reality that the people had spent.
Speaker 1: Now that has something to go for it, because everyone's
Speaker 1: sitting around the TV dinner tray and they're having their
Speaker 1: TV Swanson's and they're having a beer and it's you know,
Speaker 1: they're now company comes over. That's what you do. And
Speaker 1: I think that is a preferable model. But what we
Speaker 1: have today nobody gets together and shows pictures in cyberspace.
Speaker 1: I've just used a term that dates me, but there
Speaker 1: are other analogs. You mentioned the metaverse in the description
Speaker 1: of your book, which I think is a fascinating failure.
Speaker 4: It is a repellent.
Speaker 1: Place that is so anti human and anti and strikes
Speaker 1: you as wrong on atomic level that it failed. Nobody's
Speaker 1: talking about it anymore. Why do you think that was
Speaker 1: the case? And why does the metaverse and the Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: e siderations of it fail? But yet the young men
Speaker 1: getting together in call of duty and great groups to
Speaker 1: wage cyber digital mayhem is so amazingly popular in such
Speaker 1: a bonding experience for them.
Speaker 2: Well, the metaverse failed in part because the first avatars
Speaker 2: had no lower bodies. You remember that there were like
Speaker 2: these weird torsos that would very creepy. I don't understand
Speaker 2: what Zuckerberg was thinking. Interestingly, though, you know what Zuckerberg
Speaker 2: is embracing now. Are the glasses a new form of
Speaker 2: sort of augmented reality not virtual reality?
Speaker 7: Because the idea is you would have.
Speaker 2: An overlay at all times over your face as you
Speaker 2: go about your day, giving you all kinds of information,
Speaker 2: but also potentially, for example, say you don't like how
Speaker 2: your neighbor's yard looks, you could just you know, erase
Speaker 2: that from your view so that when you walk down
Speaker 2: the block you don't have to see things you don't
Speaker 2: want to see.
Speaker 7: That worries me quite a bit, but.
Speaker 1: Let me just jump in there for a second, because
Speaker 1: you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this a long time.
Speaker 1: Augmented reality means that the world will be tailored to
Speaker 1: my expectations, my desires, and my needs. So what I'm
Speaker 1: wearing the glasses and I walk by, and the sensor
Speaker 1: says it's me, and it sends the signal, It communicates
Speaker 1: and says, well, mister Lylax likes advertisements about this, and
Speaker 1: I see these ads, and then the next block the
Speaker 1: same thing happens. What this means, if it's ubiquitous enough,
Speaker 1: is that the physical reality is no longer a shared reality.
Speaker 7: Exactly that.
Speaker 1: And that I don't like that building, I can tap
Speaker 1: it and I can say change that travertine marble to
Speaker 1: a pinkish hue. So I mean, if you can customize
Speaker 1: and skin everything in the world, then nobody is physically
Speaker 1: inhabiting the same place, which is a whole different level
Speaker 1: of wrong from everybody just being bent down into this
Speaker 1: little personal computers go on.
Speaker 2: Well, and that actually is the vision of a lot
Speaker 2: of the Silicon Valley theorists. Mark Dreesen described just that
Speaker 2: world when he talked about reality privilege. He says it's
Speaker 2: a privilege that for most people reality is terrible, Like
Speaker 2: their lives are miserable, they don't have to make enough money,
Speaker 2: they don't like where they live.
Speaker 7: That you know, he listed all these things.
Speaker 2: But then for a few, you know, they enjoy their realities,
Speaker 2: but they're they're engaging in reality privilege by denying a
Speaker 2: virtual reality that would be perfect and tailored and wonderful
Speaker 2: for the people whose actual physical reality is nuts or bad.
Speaker 2: And so he says, Oh, I know people will think
Speaker 2: this is dystopian. I mean it literally is a dystopian
Speaker 2: science fiction novel called Ready Player one. But he thinks
Speaker 2: the solution to the world's problems is to slap virtual
Speaker 2: reality goggles on people whose lives are kind of miserable
Speaker 2: and let them live in a different world. And look,
Speaker 2: the reason all those guys like to play Call of
Speaker 2: Duty together is that you have a real emotional experience
Speaker 2: when you do that.
Speaker 7: You're talking to people.
Speaker 2: But you're sitting completely alone playing. You're not usually playing
Speaker 2: on the couch next to someone else. You are in
Speaker 2: your own space and you're having conversations while you play.
Speaker 2: So it feels social, but in a way, it's kind
Speaker 2: of a simulacrum of sociability compared to everybody. I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm from the Atari years, the first person whose parents
Speaker 2: could afford Atari, like we were all over in their basement,
Speaker 2: like taking turns playing it and talking to her. That actually,
Speaker 2: in a weird way, was a more sociable experience than
Speaker 2: how a lot of gamers play today. So I think
Speaker 2: again the opportunity cost. Like if you're spending four hours
Speaker 2: playing Call of Duty with your friends but no time
Speaker 2: during the week seeing them in person, which is the
Speaker 2: reality for a lot of young men these days, you're
Speaker 2: not building the same sorts of bonds that previous generations
Speaker 2: could take.
Speaker 1: For granted, absolutely the bowling team used to get together
Speaker 1: and hurl the spheres at the pins a great noise,
Speaker 1: and all the rest of it news a communal thing.
Speaker 1: When Doom first came out and before it was network,
Speaker 1: my friends and I would get together and take turns
Speaker 1: playing levels we would take and we watch the other
Speaker 1: and we would participate in that. And it's better, I guess,
Speaker 1: when it's online a network, and it's more dynamic and
Speaker 1: it's much more immersive than the rest of it.
Speaker 4: But you're absolutely right.
Speaker 1: At the same time, though, the emotion is genuine because
Speaker 1: it's a bunch of dudes who are yelling at each
Speaker 1: other and busting each other's believes and the rest of it.
Speaker 1: And it's real and it's the way guys are. But
Speaker 1: emotion outside of land parties, emotion on the mediator devices,
Speaker 1: on the social media is different. And your book talks
Speaker 1: about this, about how the reality of emotion that we
Speaker 1: have face to face is we have to wrap it
Speaker 1: back we or with others we are free to let
Speaker 1: it go and the rest of it. It's a whole
Speaker 1: different performative thing in the real world. But online emotion
Speaker 1: is is is shaped and twisted and contorted and perverted
Speaker 1: by a sort of online way of managing the discourse
Speaker 1: that has done something to emotion that's made people tell
Speaker 1: me if I'm wrong, made people almost weary, ashamed, cringey
Speaker 1: about actual emotion.
Speaker 7: Right well there.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like the way when the early filters
Speaker 2: on Instagram came in and everyone's like, oh, people are
Speaker 2: going to make themselves look like you know, robots.
Speaker 7: It's terrible. Actually, people did all try.
Speaker 2: To find an unfiltered photo on Instagram, even the ones
Speaker 2: that claim to be.
Speaker 7: You know unfiltered, still have a filter. And what has
Speaker 7: this led to.
Speaker 2: This has led to a lot of certainly young people
Speaker 2: having unreasonable expectations of what they should look like. And
Speaker 2: when they look in an actual mirror and see their
Speaker 2: own faces unfiltered, they're sort of horrified.
Speaker 7: There's something similar that goes on with emotion, right.
Speaker 2: We can these these platforms reward strong human emotions fear, anger, anxiety.
Speaker 2: They don't really reward happiness. They don't reward generosity in
Speaker 2: quite the same way, right, because it's the more powerful
Speaker 2: human emotions that will get you coming back and yelling
Speaker 2: and screaming at people. You know, the emoticons we use,
Speaker 2: the memes we send around, they do all communicate a feeling.
Speaker 2: But when we're in person, we actually it's harder to
Speaker 2: deceive each other. It's harder to be self deceptive. You
Speaker 2: reveal a great deal more. There's a whole unspoken language
Speaker 2: that our physical bodies information our physical bodies give off,
Speaker 2: not using words, but simply using gestures. And when you're
Speaker 2: very young and you're learning how to read people's faces
Speaker 2: and understand that a furrow brow could be concern, it
Speaker 2: could be anger, it could be you know, anxiety. You
Speaker 2: learn to read others emotions because you're staring at other
Speaker 2: human beings most of your time. Well, that's not true
Speaker 2: for people nowadays. We do a lot of stuff through
Speaker 2: filtering devices, and there've been interesting studies of lying, for example,
Speaker 2: lying through video conferencing versus lying in person versus lying
Speaker 2: over phone conversation. And it's just much easier to fool
Speaker 2: people when you have the technological mediation going on.
Speaker 7: And so again concerns for you. Think about AI.
Speaker 2: You could have real time political ads being sent to
Speaker 2: people's phones that feature a candidate who maybe lacks charisma
Speaker 2: or seems a little shifty, and the AI can in
Speaker 2: real time transform their voice, their mannerisms, knowing what people
Speaker 2: respond to evolutionarily, because we're hardwired, you know, creatures what
Speaker 2: they will respond to. So the level of manipulation that
Speaker 2: we can do also worries me down the line for
Speaker 2: trusting our own ability to read each other's intentions. And
Speaker 2: again to the point you made earlier about social space,
Speaker 2: that's why it's important to be look have more look
Speaker 2: up experiences in public space, not look down experiences.
Speaker 7: You to even go to a museum these.
Speaker 2: Days, everybody's taking pictures of the art rather than just
Speaker 2: sitting there and looking at it for me nuts, See,
Speaker 2: I am a scoldin I told you, Peter, So Christine,
Speaker 2: I am wondering.
Speaker 6: Oh, by the way, Charlie, make a note, all depositions
Speaker 6: take place by zoom from now on exactly. So Christine,
Speaker 6: here's what's in my little head. This is I'll fumble
Speaker 6: through this because it's a thought that's just occurring to
Speaker 6: me now. But I had a chat just yesterday, as
Speaker 6: it happened, with an old friend of mine, Peter tele
Speaker 6: And Peter Teel is one of these people who's a
Speaker 6: great seer of technology and trends and constantly searching for
Speaker 6: the meaning of history. And he's so smart that he
Speaker 6: actually sort of pulls it off.
Speaker 1: And his view is.
Speaker 6: That what happened with the Manhattan Project in nineteen forty
Speaker 6: five is now being replicated and in public psyche in
Speaker 6: the following sense, technology was good, good, good, good good
Speaker 6: until we produce nuclear weapons and suddenly it became scary.
Speaker 1: Add to that the prospects.
Speaker 6: I think everyone on this podcast agrees that ninety percent
Speaker 6: of this is nonsense, but it's still in people's heads.
Speaker 6: Climate change, that because of our technology. We're damaging the
Speaker 6: very planet, the very air that we are at, very environments,
Speaker 6: and now here comes this technology, the phone Tesla. As
Speaker 6: I understand it, Lord knows, I'm not an investor at
Speaker 6: a level where I could make this kind of decision.
Speaker 6: But as I understand it, nobody thinks Tesla is worth
Speaker 6: as much as its current market cap purely as a
Speaker 6: car company. This is a data play that Elon has constructed,
Speaker 6: this environment which knows where you travel, what telephone conversations
Speaker 6: you're having, what music you're listening to. He has created
Speaker 6: a vehicle that will capture data about tens of millions
Speaker 6: of people. And so I put it to you, Christine,
Speaker 6: that you're too.
Speaker 7: Cheerful now that no one's ever told me.
Speaker 6: That that what we need in this moment is not Christine,
Speaker 6: cheerfully by your by your by your sheer, goodwill and cheerfulness.
Speaker 6: You imply that we make a few adjustments and we'll
Speaker 6: get through this.
Speaker 4: We need we need.
Speaker 6: The prophet Jeremiah. We need Jonah walking through nineveh saying repent.
Speaker 6: This is all that that we live in. It actually
Speaker 6: at quite a dark moment. People are actually really quite
Speaker 6: scared and somehow or other, we need to pull ourselves
Speaker 6: together and somehow get a handle on our fears. And
Speaker 6: this device that we hold in our hand is more
Speaker 6: and more one of the one of the factors that
Speaker 6: makes us frightened in some at some level.
Speaker 2: All right, well, I would, I would say, and I
Speaker 2: might say it cheerfully, but I do mean it, and
Speaker 2: I and I do get into some trouble with my
Speaker 2: more libertarian economics.
Speaker 7: Colleagues at AI.
Speaker 2: But we have to actively defend the human things because
Speaker 2: right now it's a phone, but eventually it'll be a
Speaker 2: censor or a device you wear on your face or
Speaker 2: contact lens. It'll be something you wear on your physical
Speaker 2: body all the time. That is much less cumbersome than
Speaker 2: holding this phone, which we drop and stick in our
Speaker 2: pockets and you know, lose. We have to defend the
Speaker 2: human things, and that means coming to some agreement about
Speaker 2: what are the valuable human experiences that are missing or.
Speaker 7: Disappearing.
Speaker 2: Face to face human interaction for me is the number
Speaker 2: one thing, and that means actively throughout the day making
Speaker 2: those choices, and actually in our educational institutions, in our
Speaker 2: political institutions, in our legal institutions, insisting people get to
Speaker 2: look at each other when they when serious moments are happening, right,
Speaker 2: whether that's, you know, an important piece of legislation being debated,
Speaker 2: whether that's a judge handing down a sentence, all of
Speaker 2: these things should stay human. Same with education. So we
Speaker 2: have to make those sorts of choices. But then we
Speaker 2: also need to resist these poles to allow it.
Speaker 6: Brilliant, that's brilliant. No, defending the human things you can divide.
Speaker 6: I mean, if we had a candidate who had any
Speaker 6: wits about him or her, we'd be hearing that kind
Speaker 6: of comment right now. I mean, for that matter, at AEI,
Speaker 6: they can go raise one hundred million dollars to put
Speaker 6: Christine in charge of the Human Things initiative. But I
Speaker 6: like this, But no, I truly, truly, I think you
Speaker 6: really that's beautifully put.
Speaker 4: You're really onto something.
Speaker 2: Well, that's the challenge is then, to people is not
Speaker 2: it's the condemnation. Isn't of the technology per se. It's
Speaker 2: what we're choosing to alter the human things with the
Speaker 2: technology and particularly the Silicon Valley ethos of humans are
Speaker 2: the problems that need to be fixed. I think humans
Speaker 2: are the solution to the problems we've created with some
Speaker 2: of this technology.
Speaker 1: Well, this has been absolutely marvelous. I could go on
Speaker 1: for another two hours and well I just got a notification.
Speaker 1: It's uh from Norton, the publisher. It says Christine is
Speaker 1: under the weather, unable to make it. Can we are
Speaker 1: sending an AI version?
Speaker 4: Riz up.
Speaker 1: Oh it could be.
Speaker 4: You're as human as they come.
Speaker 1: Thanks.
Speaker 4: Good luck with the book.
Speaker 1: The book as everybody should run out and buy and
Speaker 1: read and love. Is the extinction of experience being human
Speaker 1: in a disembodied world. Possibly the most relevant topic that
Speaker 1: I can think of today because it.
Speaker 4: Affects where we all go.
Speaker 1: In the words of Kriswell, we are all interested in
Speaker 1: the future because the future.
Speaker 4: Is where we will spend our time.
Speaker 1: Never quoted Plan nine from Outer Space at the end
Speaker 1: of a podcast before Christine.
Speaker 4: Thanks an awful lot.
Speaker 1: Thank Christine, thank you, thank you so much to go there.
Speaker 1: You know so much. I could just go on and
Speaker 1: on about this. I with my own daughter, I mean
Speaker 1: my daughter. We communicate primarily by text these days, you know,
Speaker 1: and because she's a writer, and I love the fact
Speaker 1: that I can just absolutely I can pick up this
Speaker 1: thing and enter a commerce It's just like this, you know,
Speaker 1: fast paced snapping back and forth, meeting of the minds.
Speaker 1: And we wouldn't have had that. What what I would
Speaker 1: have done twenty thirty years ago? Telegraph carry your pigeons anyway,
Speaker 1: So that yes, yes.
Speaker 5: Charles, I left that feeling optimistic.
Speaker 4: You did.
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you why, because I do probably use my
Speaker 5: phone too much. I'm a big technofile, but I spend
Speaker 5: a lot of time in bars with people, or at
Speaker 5: the beach bar with people, or in restaurants with people,
Speaker 5: or at various homes of our friends with people.
Speaker 6: It really is missus cook who raises your children, isn't it, Charlie.
Speaker 5: No, No, she's often there too often, and it's you know,
Speaker 5: it's a beach town. And most of the time we
Speaker 5: spend there, we are drinking wine. And when I tell
Speaker 5: my doctor this, I get scolded, you see, because I
Speaker 5: drink too much.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 5: I don't drink crazy amount of wine, but I drink
Speaker 5: too much wine. So for once, for once, instead of
Speaker 5: being scolded for spending too much time in bars and
Speaker 5: restaurants and at home drinking wine, I was being told
Speaker 5: that is the human ideal. That instead of staring at
Speaker 5: my phone all of the time. I'm actually doing the
Speaker 5: right thing, which is hanging out with human beings in places,
Speaker 5: even if at the time I'm drinking fermented grapes. So
Speaker 5: I'm optimistic and place next time my doctor because I
Speaker 5: always answer the question. Honestly, I don't know why everyone
Speaker 5: tells me I shouldn't, but I think I should, because
Speaker 5: what's the point going to the doctor and she says,
Speaker 5: how many glass of wine you have a week? And
Speaker 5: I tell her and then she says, well, it's too many.
Speaker 5: I'm going to say, ah, but but at least I'm
Speaker 5: not a robot. At least I'm not sitting in my
Speaker 5: house on my own doing nothing.
Speaker 1: There you go, excellent idea, and maybe it is a
Speaker 1: bit overblown too. I mean, post Corona places that I
Speaker 1: go to in the weekends and they are packed. There's
Speaker 1: lots of people, and there are people talking, and there
Speaker 1: are people actually having, you know, gesturing in conversations. There
Speaker 1: are people, you know, the Bowling Alleys are back. I mean,
Speaker 1: so the idea that we are all just these drones
Speaker 1: walking around bent with our heads cript down is unnerving
Speaker 1: and seems to be the future. But then again, you
Speaker 1: go out into the real world and it's full full
Speaker 1: of people being people and doing wonderful people things.
Speaker 6: So yeah, man, on this question of defending the things
Speaker 6: that are human, we don't have time to go into
Speaker 6: it right now. We're coming to the end, I know.
Speaker 6: But isn't one of the first battles going to be
Speaker 6: over the right to drive where you wish?
Speaker 5: Thank you?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 6: Is that not coming at us very fast?
Speaker 5: I've written a piece about this a while back which
Speaker 5: I said we might need an amendment to the Constitution
Speaker 5: to protect this because really, yeah, because I Charlie, I
Speaker 5: forgive me.
Speaker 6: Let's just stipulate right now. You write more, You write
Speaker 6: faster than I can read, so there will be work
Speaker 6: of yours that I've missed.
Speaker 5: It's coming. Well, first off, the technology is coming. They
Speaker 5: are huge privacy implications because by definition, the car that
Speaker 5: can drive itself is a card that has to be
Speaker 5: connected to a satellite and tracked. You can't have a
Speaker 5: self driving car without having some form of tracking. But
Speaker 5: leaving that aside, it is very obviously going to be
Speaker 5: a point of contention when self driving cars are safer than.
Speaker 4: People.
Speaker 6: And here's where it's here's where it'll start it'll start
Speaker 6: in Los Angeles, or it'll start well, we were talking
Speaker 6: about New York.
Speaker 4: There will be so.
Speaker 1: The the the the New.
Speaker 6: York New Jersey Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the people who run
Speaker 6: the tunnels now will say, listen, we can see to
Speaker 6: it that there is never again a traffic jam in Manhattan.
Speaker 6: You will never again have to wait an hour to
Speaker 6: get down the helix into the Lincoln Tunnel. We can
Speaker 6: stop at the port authority that just came to me,
Speaker 6: the port Authority, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority.
Speaker 6: But here's how we're going to do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: People will plot in their location or the plot in
Speaker 6: their destination. They'll climb into their cars, and we, the
Speaker 6: big computer in the sky, will drive them to their destination,
Speaker 6: drop them off. We'll go park the car in Queens.
Speaker 6: It'll come back to Manhattan to pick them. We can
Speaker 6: arrange it all. But we can only do this if
Speaker 6: everyone submits to the new system. Right, won't it take
Speaker 6: some form like that?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: But that also shame us. I mean, every single line
Speaker 5: that is used in favor of, say, gun control, is
Speaker 5: eventually going to be used against people who choose to drive.
Speaker 5: And all of the same emotional black mail, and they're
Speaker 5: going to say that the victim of a traffic accident
Speaker 5: had this bright future ahead of them. And because there's
Speaker 5: sort of selfish, anti Deiluvian types who want to make
Speaker 5: up for their lack of manhood by driving their car themselves,
Speaker 5: then it's just I could just see it coming. It's
Speaker 5: absolutely inevitable, and I have great faith in the American
Speaker 5: people to repel it. But I think they're going to
Speaker 5: have to be clever in the way they do it.
Speaker 6: Okay, more to come or more already written in your
Speaker 6: piece in a r on this, So give me is
Speaker 6: this than the last month of the last three years
Speaker 6: or Weland didn't I think?
Speaker 1: Oh really, Okay, we were talking about fifteen minute cities
Speaker 1: a while ago, a couple of podcasts back. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, Charlie, you were there, I believe it was,
Speaker 1: And there's somebody on Twitter said, yeah, it was interesting.
Speaker 1: There were saying Loto was talking about fifteen minute cities,
Speaker 1: but then started going off into crazy talk about, you know,
Speaker 1: forbidding usage of cars during certain times and all that.
Speaker 1: I wanted to No, it's it's not ridiculous conspiracy stuff
Speaker 1: at all. So it's actually being advocated by people as
Speaker 1: it means, as Peter just said, of alleviating traffic congestion
Speaker 1: and the rest of it. And again Charlie's right, the
Speaker 1: gun control arguments will be used. So you seriously think
Speaker 1: you should have the rights to just get in your
Speaker 1: car and sit in tunnel traffic for an hour and
Speaker 1: a half. Is that really what you're defending? The right
Speaker 1: of you to just mulishly go there and sit in traffic.
Speaker 5: Cause of weapons?
Speaker 1: Yes, weapon, Yes it is. I will defend that.
Speaker 4: Boy.
Speaker 1: That's a whole other note to Perry. Get somebody on
Speaker 1: here soon to talk about urban traffic management, because even
Speaker 1: though that's not a really boring thing, it's fascinating. It
Speaker 1: ties into the mass transit And I mean, we have
Speaker 1: a mass transit system around here that people decline to
Speaker 1: use in great numbers because it has been overrun by
Speaker 1: vagrants and people who are using drugs, and people who
Speaker 1: are coming on with boomboxes and smoking odoriferous weed and
Speaker 1: glaring at everybody, and because they didn't have the police
Speaker 1: or the will or the police and the will to
Speaker 1: send somebody through to sweep them out for non payment
Speaker 1: of tickets or just gross general behavior. They became untenable,
Speaker 1: and in the winter time, of course, the people will say, well,
Speaker 1: you can't throw them off because they will freeze, and
Speaker 1: so they become rolling homeless shelters, and nobody wants to
Speaker 1: use them. And we've spent billions and billions of dollars
Speaker 1: on this and will continue to do so. Speaking of transportation, though,
Speaker 1: before we leave, I understand that Peter has a question
Speaker 1: for Charlie about roller coasters.
Speaker 6: Oh, yes, Charlie, Charlie whom I file on X, I
Speaker 6: finally trained myself. Here we have this whole show. We've
Speaker 6: devoted an entire show to saying we spend too much
Speaker 6: time with the phone in our hands. And here I
Speaker 6: am in a closing segment saying, well, of course they
Speaker 6: followed Charlie on X. I do follow Charlie on X.
Speaker 6: And he just took a trip with a kid or
Speaker 6: all his children. I can't quite remember it. And it
Speaker 6: was a roller Charlie, just tell us what you were
Speaker 6: up to.
Speaker 5: It was, but no children. Luther ray Abel, who's a
Speaker 5: fellow writer at National Review. He's only ten years younger
Speaker 5: than me. He's not quite young enough to be my kid.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry to me. That makes you both children.
Speaker 5: Yeah, i'd be proud of him if you're my kid.
Speaker 5: But yeah, we took a road trip across America with
Speaker 5: the purpose of riding roller coasters and maybe this actually
Speaker 5: is a good place to finish the podcast because we
Speaker 5: set certain rules for ourselves on this road trip. So
Speaker 5: these rules were as far as First off, we did
Speaker 5: use only paper maps from TRIPAA, no satellite navigation. Second,
Speaker 5: we weren't allowed to look up anywhere that we were
Speaker 5: going ahead of time. We weren't allowed to book anywhere.
Speaker 5: We weren't allowed to reserve anything. Third, we weren't allowed
Speaker 5: to use any chains for lodging or food. You can't
Speaker 5: really do that with gas stations, it'd be very difficult,
Speaker 5: but we did do it with food and lodging. We
Speaker 5: were not allowed to stream anything, so all playlists had
Speaker 5: to be compiled ahead of time or we used local radio.
Speaker 5: And in a moment of great genius from Lutha, to
Speaker 5: add some eccentricity, we wore Hawaiian shirts the whole time.
Speaker 5: We drove from Well, we were supposed to drive from
Speaker 5: New York, but we ended up driving from Richmond, which
Speaker 5: was between where he was in New York and where
Speaker 5: I was in Jacksonville because my flight got canceled. We
Speaker 5: went to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. We went up to
Speaker 5: see the Point Sandusky, Ohio, six Flags Great America in Gurney, Illinois,
Speaker 5: then to Chicago. Then we flew unfortunately because the drive
Speaker 5: was too long for the time, we had to California
Speaker 5: and we drove down the coast. We went to Magic
Speaker 5: Mountain in Santa Clarita, ended up in Anaheim, at Disneyland
Speaker 5: in Los Angeles, and then went home and we rode
Speaker 5: roller coaster after roller coaster after roller coaster. It was
Speaker 5: it was a gonzo road trip. Peter, I loved it.
Speaker 6: How does disney Land stand up to disney World.
Speaker 5: Well, it's much, much, much smaller, but it still has
Speaker 5: a charm of the original nineteen fifty five parks. So
Speaker 5: we had a great time. But disney World is the
Speaker 5: size of San Francisco. I mean, it's just absolutely enormous.
Speaker 1: Is the favorite roller coaster?
Speaker 5: I would say either Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point or
Speaker 5: give us a stage. It's in Sandusky, Ohio.
Speaker 1: Got it, got it all Wildcats.
Speaker 5: Revenge at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 6: Okay, and last question from me, because James is our
Speaker 6: pop culture maven, but I'm going to get this one in.
Speaker 1: Did you feel this is a very fast trip and
Speaker 1: you were going to theme parks?
Speaker 6: Were you still able to feel regional? It's the term
Speaker 6: everybody's using these days, vibe shifts. Did the Midwest feel
Speaker 6: different from the East Coast? And did California still feel
Speaker 6: different from everywhere else in America?
Speaker 5: Hugely? And one of the reasons for that is that
Speaker 5: we weren't able to just stay on the freeway and
Speaker 5: go one mile east to west of it. We had
Speaker 5: to go into towns because that's where independently owned motels
Speaker 5: and restaurants and bars and such are right and so
Speaker 5: you know, you don't just feel like you're driving up
Speaker 5: ninety five, which is very boring. You actually do see
Speaker 5: different architecture and people and cultures and hear different accents,
Speaker 5: but you don't do if you just drive, stop at
Speaker 5: the best Western and eat It's ruby Tuesdays.
Speaker 4: Fair enough.
Speaker 1: You didn't wear animal skin prints during this whole thing
Speaker 1: any curve?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 5: Why?
Speaker 4: Why?
Speaker 1: Well, it's sort of like the underfrozen Caveman coming out.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's so archaic and it's wonderful. I admire
Speaker 1: all of this, and I wish you'd taken a fifty
Speaker 1: seven belair to do the trip. I mean part of
Speaker 1: when you don't stream, you have to rely on what
Speaker 1: the airways provide you when it comes to music. And
Speaker 1: I'm old enough to remember driving around and not you know,
Speaker 1: FM radio wasn't in your car yet, so you're completely
Speaker 1: dependent on what correctly them radio station you can find.
Speaker 1: And it would mean, of course that the hip important
Speaker 1: music of your youth might be rare to find in
Speaker 1: the middle of a state somewhere, And so you would
Speaker 1: come across the station that was doing the you know,
Speaker 1: the the agg report at noon, hogs and barrels standing steady,
Speaker 1: followed by a swap meet, and then you might hear
Speaker 1: woofy John's whoopy John's will Fard's polka band or something,
Speaker 1: and you hear that upa oompa for a while until
Speaker 1: it finally faded away behind you, like you'd outrun the signal,
Speaker 1: and then you'd pick up something from the next town.
Speaker 1: And it was great, It was wonderful. And if you
Speaker 1: were on the road, you know, traveling doing town totown
Speaker 1: jobs like I was back in seventy nine when I
Speaker 1: was an itinerant seed salesman for North of king Yes,
Speaker 1: you would try to find those little motels that you
Speaker 1: could get into cheap, and you realize the importance of
Speaker 1: the ne unsigned as an enticement, and you find, I mean,
Speaker 1: that much sign means it's probably out of my price range.
Speaker 1: This much sign means it fits in the per diem.
Speaker 1: You hope for the one where it's his vacancy, and
Speaker 1: that the no hasn't been illuminated. It's a whole different thing.
Speaker 1: And the art of the motel sign is something gone lost, bandoned.
Speaker 1: We just threw it away and now it's nothing but
Speaker 1: a series of interchangeable corporate plates that even Holiday Inn,
Speaker 1: for God's sake, Holiday Inn had one of the most recognizable,
Speaker 1: fantastic googie pieces of abstract sculpture ever to dot the
Speaker 1: side of the country, the great sign of Holiday Inn.
Speaker 1: When you look at it, it's absurd.
Speaker 4: It's got this arrow.
Speaker 1: That points this way. It's got this chimney that comes
Speaker 1: up with a star at the top of it, and
Speaker 1: this wonderful unique script and then a space for words
Speaker 1: which is inevitably telling you that the elks are meeting
Speaker 1: there on Tuesday morning.
Speaker 4: It was beautiful.
Speaker 1: The Howard Johnson iconography. Would I mean this color of
Speaker 1: this combination color of orange and turquoise, which would go
Speaker 1: back to thirty eight, thirty nine, to the World's Fairs
Speaker 1: of the thirties, brought into the sixties with some space
Speaker 1: age styling and the rest of it the roadside architectural
Speaker 1: visual vernacular of America before the chains completely homogenized. It
Speaker 1: was a thing of absolute chaotic, wonderful beauty. And we
Speaker 1: just got rid of it because the chains marched over
Speaker 1: absolutely everything. Andy s Holiday Inn was a chain, but
Speaker 1: they still had some verb and pash when they did it. Charles,
Speaker 1: great idea, This should be a movie, like you know,
Speaker 1: like Steve Coogan driving around the countryside, arguing and doing
Speaker 1: impressions in the sort. So you can't wait to read
Speaker 1: that piece, Peter, can't wait to read what you are
Speaker 1: working on?
Speaker 4: What are you working on? Before we leave?
Speaker 6: I'm working on digging out.
Speaker 1: I was away.
Speaker 6: That trip to Europe lasted so long that I came
Speaker 6: back to a veritable everest of stuff. I still have
Speaker 6: thirty emails to reply to. I'll start working on something
Speaker 6: on Mondays. Thirty emails to reply to. Well, no but thirty,
Speaker 6: Oh no, no, I've weeded out the hundreds of nonsense.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, thirty things I.
Speaker 6: Really need to think about and maybe even drag it replies.
Speaker 4: To for us.
Speaker 1: My email box, instead of having numbers, just has a
Speaker 1: little infinity sign on it.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 6: Oh, by the way, I have a correction to a
Speaker 6: note from Sun Nico, who is in the Navy, and
Speaker 6: in the last podcast, I think I'm mouthed off about
Speaker 6: how the United States Navy has been running nuclear reactors
Speaker 6: safely for six decades, and Nico says, and why can't
Speaker 6: we study up on them when we need nuclear energy?
Speaker 6: Nico reminds me overall valid argument, but on a naval
Speaker 6: vessel it can move away from bad weather. Fine, I
Speaker 6: take the correction. I salute Ensign Nico Robinson, thank you
Speaker 6: for permitting me to correct the record. Go ahead, James,
Speaker 6: wrap it up.
Speaker 1: While the number of tornado strikes and a nuclear reactor
Speaker 1: around here at ben zero doesn't mean it's not going
Speaker 1: to happen, but I'm not particularly worried about our own
Speaker 1: one going up. I am, however, worried about the people
Speaker 1: who will listen to this podcast and not go to
Speaker 1: Apple and.
Speaker 4: Give us five stars. What's the matter with you?
Speaker 1: I would like to thank everybody for listening and going
Speaker 1: to Ricochet and up saying where's this place been all
Speaker 1: my life? Well, it's been waiting for you. And after
Speaker 1: seven hundred and ten episodes, if you can't go and
Speaker 1: phone me up and join the member side, I don't
Speaker 1: know what I can do except come.
Speaker 4: Back for number seven eleven and try it all again.
Speaker 1: It's been fun, gentlemen. Can't wait to do it next week.
Speaker 1: Have a great weekend, everybody, and we'll see you all
Speaker 1: in the comments at Ricochet four point zero next week. Boys,