Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon
to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you
want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream,
my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron,
go to vpekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the
subscribe button. Get every episode for free, write to your
smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for
your support. Last hour started talking about a couple of
AI related stories. Jim Acosta interviewing an AI generation of
a victim of the Parkland High School shooting. Completely unethical
in my view as a journalist, completely unethical. You shouldn't
do that. And then there was a woman who uses
an AI chatbot. She's elderly, she's homebound, and she uses
this for interaction. John wrote me an email up in
New Jersey says the homebound woman who prefers the bot
to her daughter is scary. AI to me is just frightening.
The art imagery is bizarre at best, and it's now
coming to like that people who use it to do
their writing for them are showing decreased brain activity. I
did see that study as well. People who rely on
these AI models, these you know, to write stuff for them,
their brain like goes out to lunch because it's unneeded.
It doesn't need to function. It's like it's like writing cursive.
You know, the less you use it, the less you
remember how to use it. He says, I don't know
what the answer is, but for me, I'll steal steer,
I'll steer clear of it.
Speaker 2: There you go.
Speaker 1: That just reminded me of the story I think WBTV
did the other day that our Charlotte City councilwoman Tijuana Brown,
the indicted one that apparently like she's using AI to
send replies to constituents and which, yeah, like I don't know, Like,
how would you detect the decreased brain activity. I'm kidding,
I'm kidding. It's just a joke, okay. Anyway, Joseph says
on the text line, loneliness exploded because of the lockdowns. Well,
it did, but it was also this has been growing
for the years prior to as well. This has been
a long trend since the seventies, and it's getting worse.
I will never forget what they did to us because
they didn't like how we and most of the world
was getting uppity and voting for stuff they didn't like.
Speaker 2: I e.
Speaker 1: Brexit and Trump and Bolsonaro and Front Nacional. I welcome
the emp that sends us back to the days of
filing cabinets and carburetors. Well, I mean, that's that's a
nice that's a nice thought. Let's hope you don't starve
to death while working on that carburetor. Jeff says, this
guy is totally correct. I would much rather send a
text to a talk radio host than pick up the
phone and call it. That's fair. Totally fair. Another Jeff says,
I would have guessed video games, but automobiles and TVs
makes sense. This was again starting in the nineteen seventies.
This era of withdrawal began. According to Robert Putnam in
the book Bowling Alone, released in two thousand and he
associated it, or tracked it too, the rise of the
automobile and the television set. And look, you can see
this in our building patterns right here in Charlotte too,
go down Independence Boulevard, right they're still trying to fix
that bad planning right where they ran seventy four right through,
you know, and they made, and they made it multi lanes.
They put strip malls everywhere, thanks to the urban planners, right,
the central planners who knew everything there was to know
about how to build good communities, and then of course
turned out, no, that's actually not very good. And so like,
that's the automobile centric development that grew up when more
people could buy cars. And this is not an anti
car thing. I'm pro car. I'm also pro options if
I want to live in an urban environment or a
village environment or a suburban cul de sac whatever, like,
I want more options, right, options for everybody. I don't
want to restrict other people from having what they want.
You might say, I'm pro choice in that regard. But television,
the rise of TV transformed Americans interior decorating and that
continues to this day. By the way, in this article
in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson called the Anti Social Century,
he has a whole section and they're talking about the
architecture of all new builds. And I can confirm this
as one who has moved around, if I do say
so myself quite a bit, even though I've only worked
at two radio stations in the same state. Christy and
I moved five times in two years. Okay, So we
saw a lot of apartments and a lot of different
houses and stuff. And the new builds are all focused
around a mounted flat screen TV. So you have the
TV in the car. That exacerbates the you know, the solitude.
But it's still kind of family oriented, right, Everybody's still
gathering in their homes and such. And you know, this
stuff doesn't happen all at once. But I've talked on
this program many times about the lack of civic participation
in groups like the Rotary Club or the Lions Club. Right,
just these these philanthropic groups and such, they have a
hard time getting people to volunteer, the decline in the
church going population and such. And then of course you
add in the new technology, the smartphone. The typical person
is awake for nine hundred minutes a day, okay, typically
nine hundred minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend
on average about two hundred and seventy minutes a day
on the weekday on their phones looking into the screens
two hundred and seventy weekdays, three hundred and eighty minutes
a day on the weekends. So Saturdays and Sundays, about
half of their waking time is spent on their phones.
That's according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. Young people are
less likely than in previous decades to even get a
driver's license, go on a date, or to have more
than one close friend, or even to hang out with
their friends at all. And that's important. Hanging out with
your friends is important. Okay. This is not like something
similar to preference for bell bottoms over skinny genes. Okay.
Human childhood, including adolescents, is a uniquely sensitive period in
the whole of the animal kingdom. The psychologist Jonathan Height writes,
I quoted Jonathan Height many times over the years. He
wrote a book called The Anxious Generation. Although the human
brain grows to ninety percent of its full size by
age five, it's neural circuitry takes a long time to mature.
Our lengthy childhood might be evolution's way of scheduling and
extended apprenticeship, basically an apprenticeship in social learning. And you
do this through play. The psychologist Jordan Peterson talks about this,
encouraging kids to have free play, unstructured free play. Height
also says this the best kind of play is physical
outdoors and with other kids and unsupervised. It allows kids
to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out
how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young
people's attention is funneled into devices that take them out
of their body, denying them the physical world education they need.
Have you heard this expression, touch grass? It's real, it's
good to do. This is why I mow the yard
in my bare feet. No, don't do that. You step
on a yellow jacket's nest and that's it, you know,
But touching grass, feeling grass, And there's a whole movement
call I think it's called grounding, you know, like, well,
the earth is made up of these magnets and rocks
and minerals and whatever, and you walk around barefoot and
it grounds you right, being able to be out in
I've said this for decades, which is, you know, you
take man out of nature and he forgets who God
is pretty quick. You stick them in a city someplace,
and all of his needs and wants are catered to
in this urban environment, and it's it's quite easy to
think that they're the center of the universe. Stick somebody
out on the side of a mountain, someplace with a
campfire and a tent. Yeah, you start realizing how insignificant
you really are in the grand scheme of things. You know, Like,
just from a size scale, here's a great idea. How
about making an escape to a really special and secluded
getaway in western North Carolina. Just a quick drive up
the mountain and Cabins of Asheville is your connection. Whether
you're celebrating an anniversary, a honeymoon, maybe you want to
plan a memorable proposal, or get family and friends together
for a big old reunion, Cabins of Asheville has the
ideal spot for you where you can reconnect with your
loved ones and the things that truly matter. Nestled within
the breath taking fourteen one thousand acres of the Pisga
National Forest, their cabins offer a serene escape in the
heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Centrally located between Ashville
and the entrance of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.
It's the perfect balance of seclusion and proximity to all
the local attractions, with hot tubs, fireplaces, air conditioning, smart TVs,
Wi Fi grills, outdoor tables, and your own private covered porch.
Choose from thirteen cabins, six cottages, two villas, and a
great lodge with eleven king sized bedrooms. Cabins of Ashville
has the ideal spot for you for any occasion, and
they have pet friendly accommodations. Call or text eight two eight,
three six seven seventy sixty eight or check out all
there is to offer at Cabins Offashville dot com and
make memories that'll last a lifetime. This is from Bain,
who says in Neil Postman's book Technopoly, he writes that
when you do something in technology, you simultaneously undo something,
and in our zeal for the latest, most innovative approach,
we forfeit something often unforeseen and very hard to find
to undo. Postman also wrote a nineteen eighties classic called
Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Derek Thompson writes a similar thing.
He quotes a media theorist named Marshall mclewin who once
said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation.
We chose our digitally enhanced world, we did not realize
the significance of what was being amputated Like this was
just saying during the break, like we are living through
an experiment on the impact of this technology on our brains,
our behaviors, our entire society. It is a real time experiment.
I guess most of life is right, but in the
technology realm like this is having profound effects on the
way people think, how we whether we think at all.
So what's the line from Jurassic Park, that documentary about
the dinosaurs where Jeff Goldbloom, I believe, said, you spend
so much time thinking how to do it, you never
stopped to think whether you should do it right. Here's
here's a text smartphones creating dumb people since nineteen ninety four.
I don't know is it ninety four? This from Chris
who says, my mother, who lives alone, bought an AI
connected smart device in her apartment. Now twelve months in
she has said she loved her and trusted her more
than people. Also, it or whoever programmed the AI, is
shaping her worldview. Formerly she was fairly centrist and a
political she is now very fixated about supporting Ukraine and
stopping Trump. Finally, remember that just because AI does a
certain thing today, they can until we're dependent upon it,
only to change the algorithms later to shape what they want,
and Ian says, we misanthropes relish our solitude. It spares
us from constant irritation and discussed with humans. That's fair.
That's fair. If young adults feel overwhelmed by the emotional
costs of physical world togetherness and prone to keeping even
close friends at a physical distance, that suggests that phones
aren't just rewiring adolescence, they are upending the psychology of
friendship as well. Socially underdeveloped kids leads to socially stunted adulthood.
That's what they're going to be. Friends require boundaries as
much as they require closeness. Thompson writes time alone so
you can recharge. That's essential for maintaining healthy relationships. Uns
mean that solitude is actually more crowded than it used
to be, and crowds are more solitary. This is a
brilliant observation. When you're alone, you're not really alone, right,
You're on your phone. You're getting text messages and stuff,
tweets and posts and TikTok videos from friends and such
people you follow or Facebook friends. And then when you're
out and about and you're in the crowds, everybody's on
their phone. It's like one of the most lonely experiences
walking down a crowded street. Now bright lines. This is
from Nicholas Carr, the author of a book called super Bloom,
How technologies of connection tear us apart. He said, bright
lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd.
Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends
and then reflective in your downtime. But now our social
time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting
is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by
the streams and the posts and the texts of friends
and colleagues and strangers and frenemies. And if Car is right,
modern technologies always open window to the outside world makes
recharging much harder, leaves many people chronically depleted. Basically, you're
a walking battery that's always stuck in the red zone.
In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time
alone would feel the urge like I'm alone, I'm feeling sad.
I need to make some plans, I need to get
out and do something. But we live in a sideways world. Look,
I am and people are surprised at this, but I
am an introvert. Generally, I am totally fine being alone
until I'm not, and then I need to go out
and talk with people and hang out with people and
do stuff. But I might like to fill my bucket up,
like I need a lot of time alone, and that's
when I do my reading and I show prep and
all of that stuff. But other people extroverts, they get
energy when they go out and hang out. My wife
is an extrovert. I am an introvert, and so she
drags me two places, and I probably truth be told
force her to stay home sometimes, not that I force
her to, but I'm like, I don't want to do
anything this weekend. We don't have any plans. I don't
want to do anything. And now that we've been married
for as many years as we have been, it's like
I don't have to tell her these things. She knows
these things. And now she spends more time at home now,
i'd say, than she did when we first met. And
I think that's good to recharge. All right, If you're
listening to this show, you know I try to keep
up with all sorts of current events, and I know
you do too, and you've probably heard me say, get
your news from multiple sources. Why. Well, because it's how
you detect media bias, which is why I've been so
impressed with ground News. It's an app, and it's a website,
and it combines news from around the world in one
place so you can compare coverage and verify information. You
can check it out at check dot ground, dot news
slash pete. I put the link in the podcast description too.
I started using ground News a few months ago and
more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate
because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered
and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which
stories get ignored by the left and the right. See
for yourself. Check dot ground, dot news slash pete. Subscribe
through that link and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription.
I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to
every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast,
but it also supports ground News as they make the
media landscape more transparent. Let's head over to the WBT
phone lines here and talk to Stan.
Speaker 2: Hello, Stan, Hi, Pete, how are you doing.
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm good. What's going on?
Speaker 2: Okay? I want to go back and tell you this
is probably somewhere around the beginning before this all start
in America, and it has to do with public education. Basically,
public education is just a censorship model so that you
can create the society that you want. When I started
to elementary school back in nineteen sixty three, it was
still taught in the textbooks that God created the world
in seven days. I still remember the little graph that
it showed the giraffes and all the animals like being created.
All I was to remember that from the textbooks. But
when I got to Central Piedmont Community College in nineteen
seventy seven, I was again class colle zoology, and I'd
read the introduction to the textbook where it talked about
all the various theories about life and how life began,
the Big Bang theory, and you know, all that stuff,
and it covered intelligent design and all of that. So
we went into class, and when we went into the classroom,
the professor started right into Cromaine and Man and started
talking about five hundred million years, four hundred million, all
that stuff. And after about a week he said, there
any questions. I raised my hand and I said, look,
I said, I looked in the beginning of the textbook,
and there were self theories and it didn't specific if
we say that one theory had more credits than the other.
I said, so are we not going to discuss first
why this theory was decided on as the way? And
he said, I remember he put his hand down and
he said, okay. He said, basically, this is quote unquote
the accepted way, the Big Bang theory and the evolutionary theory.
And because that's the accepted way, that is the only
way we're going to study. So that was the beginning
of teaching people what to think, not how to think.
And the whole goal was to remove.
Speaker 1: Stand What is the what is the tie in here? Too?
Speaker 2: Okay? So when whenever you remove whenever you teach people
that they're just a mathematical chance and a mass and
that there is no purpose, and you removed God, like
when the public schools they took they took Easter and Christmas,
which are our biggest holidays, and made them winter breaking,
spring break. The tie in here is this is when
you remove God in religion from a society, which is
the only way you can have communism. This is the
actual progress of for you, mind up where we are.
Speaker 1: I don't think that the the atomization of people is
tied to the taking of the is or is a
result of that. I would say that you've got different
pressures that are that are on the society. You got Marxists, yes,
that took over the schools, and you know this, you
know the the New World liberalism after World War II,
and this this kind of trajectory. Sure, but I think
like the constant turning inward toward the individual, I don't
think that is actually that's not I don't I don't
find that to be a cause or a result of
the cause that you're describing, like the atomization of our
society and all of us breaking apart into individuals and
not associating with other people. Like I don't see how that.
I don't see how that connects except insofar as you've
got a declining church participation nor the population of people
going to church has been declining, and insomuch as maybe
that that is influenced by the teaching of the schools
or in the schools, then maybe so. But I don't
know if I don't know if it proves the theory.
But I appreciate the call stand thank you. I got
to get to a couple more points here from this
piece again, Derek Thompson at Theatlantic dot com called the
anti social century. He writes about in the nineteen seventies,
the typical household entertained more than once a month had
people over. I grew up in this kind of an
environment as well. We had people over regularly. But from
the late seventies to the late nineties, the frequency of
hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined
by forty five percent. I will tell you one of
the things that Christy and I did we made a
point to meet and to socialize with all of our
neighbors when we moved back to Charlotte, introduced ourselves, went
over to them. Now, part of it was security, obviously,
you want to know who's living around you. But also
we had been burglarized at our house years ago, and
we had just moved in, didn't know any of the neighbors,
so they didn't see anything out of the ordinary that
warranted them to call police, even though they all kind
of had a suspicion something was going on. And so
you go out and you meet your neighbors, socialize with
your neighbors, get to know your neighbors. It's important. All
of this time alone at home on the phone, it's
not just affecting us as individuals, he says, it's making
society weaker, meaner, and more delusional. Mark Dunkelman, an author
and a research fellow at Brown University, says that to
see how chosen solitude is warping society at large, we
must first acknowledge something a little counterintuitive. That many of
our bonds are actually getting stronger. Parents are spending more
time with their children than they did several decades ago,
and many couples and families maintain an unbroken flow of
communication because you're on the text, the group chats, the
group text messages stuff. Home based phone based culture has
solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring
of family and best friends, bound by blood and intimacy,
and then you've got the outer ring of tribe, linked
by shared affinities and stuff. But what it's doing is
wreaking havoc on that middle ring of people who we
are familiar with but not intimate, right, people who live
around us what Dunkleman called the village. These are your neighbors,
the people in your town. We used to know them well,
but now we don't. The middle ring is the key
to social cohesion. Families teach us love. Tribes the outer
reach teach us loyalty. The village teaches us tolerance. The
village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise.
So it's no surprise that the erosion of the village
has coincided with the emergence of a grotesque style of politics,
in which every election is the existential quest to vanquish
an intramural enemy. For the past fifty years, the American
National Election Study surveys have asked Democrats and Republicans to
rate the opposing party on a feeling thermometer they called
it goes from zero to one hundred, one hundred being
very warm, zero being very cold. Twenty five years ago,
eight percent of these partisans gave the other party a zero,
just eight percent. Fast forward to twenty twenty and now
the figure is forty percent give the opposing party, and
it's way more pronounced among Democrats. Democrats rate Republicans zeros
way more than vice versa. Practicing politics alone on the
internet rather than in a community. It's not just making
us more likely to demonize and alienate opponents. Though that
would be bad enough, it's also encouraging nihilism. I talk
about people warning people against don't go don't go blackpilled,
don't become a nihilist. There's research twenty eighteen group of
researchers led by Michael bang Peterson. He says, when I
think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help
thinking just let them all burn. That's what one of
the respondents said. That's nihilism. They called this cohort's motivation
the need for chaos. Now, there is some benefits to solitude,
so we've got to be fair about this. You know,
stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things,
to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of
our past while transcending generations. They help us process the
meaning of life, and our stories are told through images
and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video. Started in
nineteen ninety seven in mint Hill, North Carolina. It was
the first company to provide this valuable service, converting image,
photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos
and albums. The trusted, talented, and dedicated team at Creative
Video will go over all of the details with you
to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off
in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a
week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos
for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or
just your family stories, all told through images. That's what
your photos and videos are. They are your life told
through the eyes of everyone around you and all who
came before you, and they will tell others to come
who you are. Visit creative video dot com. Bang texts
in that the profit Yogi bearra saw it coming of
his favorite restaurant. He said, no one goes there anymore,
it's too crowded, so to be fair too solitude. Sometimes
isolation is the best way to restore inner equilibrium, but
the dose matters. People who spend more time alone year
after year after year become meaningfully less happy over time. Nonetheless,
a lot of people keep choosing to spend free time
alone in their home, away from other people. Maybe you
might think they're making the right choice, after all, you
know yourself best, right, But actually, time and again, what
we expect to bring us peace a bigger house, a
luxury car job with twice the pay but half the leisure.
It actually just creates more anxiety, which brings us back
to AI. The collective detachment that we see in our
society could still get worse because of AI. Once AI
can talk to you, it's going to feel extremely real. Right,
Once they get the inflection patterns down and all of
that stuff, once they get the video stuff down, it's
going to seem really real. People are freely choosing to
enter relationships with artificial partners, and they're getting deeply attached
because of the emotional capabilities of these systems. If you
find this creepy, consider that a lot of your friends
and family members who exist in your life mainly as
words on a screen too, with your text messages. Digital
communications has already prepared us for AI companionship because it
transforms many of our physical world relationships into a sequence
of text chimes and little blue bubbles on the screen. Right,
you can set these things up to never criticize you,
never cheat on you, never have a bad day, never
insult you, always be interested in everything you have to say.
Unlike the most patient of spouses, they could tell you
that you're always right unlike the world's best friend. They
could instantly respond to your needs without the all too
human distraction of having to lead their own life. Now,
people born before like twenty ten, right, this is probably
going to seem much more weird than people who are
born in the twenty tens, twenty twenties. Right, these generations
may discover what they want most from their relationships is
not a set of people who might challenge them, but
rather a set of feelings, sympathy, humor, validation that could
be more reliably drawn out from silicon than from carbon
based life forms. You've got degraded public spaces, degraded public life,
and these are in some ways the other side of
all of our investments and video games and phones and bigger,
better private spaces and such I mentioned earlier, like the
way we build homes now, like the when they sit
around and start like designing new apartment buildings. Stuff they're
always talking about. Okay, you got to have a flat
screen TV. There's another way to go here. It's called
uh amis sticks or amistics amis tics, and it's a
reference to the Amish who generally shun many modern innovations,
including cars and television. But they sometimes do adopt some technologies,
but if they say the technology is hurting the community,
then they don't adopt it. A seemingly straightforward prescription, as
teenagers should choose to spend less time on their phone,
parents should choose to invite more friends over for dinner.
But in a way, these are collective action problems, because
you know, if all the other teenagers are at home
on their phones, like who you're going to hang out with?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: You got to make it a habit. But like all habits,
the more you do it, the more you do it.
There is a word, he says, for such deeply etched
communal habits. That word is ritual. And one reason, perhaps
that the decline of socializing has synchronized with the decline
of religion is that nothing has proved to be as
good as adept at inscribing ritual into our calendars as
faith does. And finally, he says, our smallest actions create norms,
the norms create values, the values drive behavior, and our
behaviors then cascade. The antisocial century is the result of
one such cascade of chosen solitude. It's been accelerated by
digital world progress and physical world regress. But if one
cascade brought us to this point. Another can bring about
a social century. New norms are possible. They're actually being
created all the time. All right, that'll do it for
this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could
not do the show without your support and the support
of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if
you'd like, please support them too and tell them you
heard it here. You can also become a patron at
my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.