Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 941: Technology and Loneliness

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

This was recorded with Tom from 9/11, when he was around before the second hospital stay. Opinion | Stop Googling. Let's Talk. - The New York Times How Technology and Loneliness are Interlinked - The New York Times

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissanance. Every episode, we will ask anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes it big, makes the news. and makes us mad. I don't know which order to those go in. I don't normally say this.

It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at, hi, I'm Cecil. You know who I am. I am not joined by Tom. He is still in the hospital. And I'm going to give you guys a very short Tom update before I play what we would

what we recorded a couple weeks ago. So Tom had to, I mentioned before that Tom had sepsis. he had an infection. They had to go back in. They had to cut him back open and go in and clean out that surgical site. And so they did.

And he seemed to be getting a little better. I went visiting him two or two days after his surgery. And then things fell off a cliff and he got really bad again. Essentially, he had to like lay motionless for a while to try to make sure that this, this surgical site didn't reopen. I guess some of the pieces around his spinal cord didn't reopen. I'll tell you all about this in the future. I'm just trying to keep it brief.

But in any case, he was in a very difficult place, a lot of pain, a lot of immobility for many days. And I went to see him yesterday, and he really felt like he had started to turn a corner. So I'm not saying he did. I'm not going to, I don't believe in jingsing. I don't believe that that's a real thing, but I also am being very cautious right now

because I just, I don't know, we don't know what the next day looks like for him. I mean, at some days, he seems like everything's going much better. Other days are setbacks. So to not try to make it seem like there isn't that things are on the up and up when they might not be, I'm not going to make any claims that things are getting, better or worse or whatever. I will say

observationaly yesterday, he seemed much better than I have seen him in a long time. I spent a couple hours with him yesterday and we ordered pizza and we ate, we hung out and we just talked and we had a great time. But he was much better than

I had seen him. And then yesterday night I got a message from him that said that they found blood clots in his lungs because of his immobility. He's going to again, there's more treatment that he's going to have to go through some sort of pills to make sure that that doesn't hurt him in any way. He's going to have to stay on these thinners for a while.

It's yet another, you know, stack another piece of wood on the fire, essentially. But it's my great hope that he's on the mend. He was moving around yesterday, albeit slowly, but, you know, able to move. So, which is a much better position than he's been in in a while. It's, you know, my great hope that he's starting to turn a corner on this. I can't tell you that definitively, but it feels much better than it has in a while. So he has read all your messages.

He wants to thank you all. I'm sure we'll get a full-on update like all the ins and outs of everything that happened to him when he comes back. I'm hoping that he's going to be released from the hospital in the next week. I have no idea if there's going to be a show next week. I'm not sure. But in any case,

I just wanted to put in a little beginning to let you know that, you know, fingers crossed. whatever knock on wood luck thing you do hopefully he's going to be feeling better soon. That being said, this show was recorded on September 11th. We recorded it when we were talking about

a couple articles. Normally those would be long from articles. Those articles Tom would read to people and we would put that on our Patreon. However, Tom's not here. And so we're not going to read those articles. And in fact, this is just going to be like a Monday episode,

essentially. But we will link the articles in the show notes. The two articles are relatively short. They're only, you know, there may be like, you know, seven pages long apiece or something like that relatively. They're not like big, big, big long form articles, but they're both really interesting. One from 2015, I believe, and then the other one more recently, 2024. They talk about essentially how technology is affecting our relationship. And so that's what we talk about today. I think it turned out to be a very interesting talk. It's my great hope that Tom will be back soon.

I don't know when that's going to be. But in any case, we have a show this week. It is with Tom. And hopefully there will be a show very soon with Tom after all the things that have happened to him in the last several weeks. All right. Here's the show. Recording live from Gloryhole Studios in Chicago and Beyond. This is cognitive dissonance.

Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence. To any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is still Friday, September the 11th, but you're listening to this on Thursday. Guessing it's about six days from now, that would put us on the 17th.

And today is Long Form Day, Cecil. We got a couple of articles from the New York Times, but I want to tell a quick story to start us off. So, because these stories are going to have connection in common with one another and some of the problems with it. So I had this experience recently. I know I shared in the show about my hospital experience. One of the nurses that took care of me there while I was hurting pretty good

was this guy named Jason, a nurse named Jason. And when I was in the hospital, I made it a point of very, intentional point from the moment I got there to try as hard as I could to remember everybody's name, meet everybody, say their name, refer back to them, get to know people a little bit, the people that were going to be there and taking care of me. So I wanted to do that, one, because selfishly I understand, I guess, that like if you connect with people, then they connect back and you get a little bit better care. And that's just true. That's true. And then, you know, once you realize you're going to be someplace for a little while, you may as well get to know the

people that are taking care of you, you know, and it's a pretty intimate and vulnerable experience to be in. And so I thought, like, I'm going to make this a kind of human experience for everybody involved, as much as people are willing. So one of the nurses that took care of me there was this guy named Jason. And he took excellent care of me. And then I started, I got to know his, like, his life story at one point. He just hung out with me for about 25, 30 minutes. And he told me his story. And he's a guy, Cecil, that, like, in all the rest of my life, is somebody that I would not know, not spend time with, probably think maybe not so highly of. He's a guy's got seven kids. And I laughed and I was like, oh, you're starting a cult. And then I find out, like,

he is actually very religious. He has a degree in, as he put it, Bible before he went, he went to to like one of these religious schools. He has a college degree in Bible before he went and got his master's in nursing. But then he also has a degree in education. He's actually turned out to be a really interesting and fascinating person. And more than that, he turned out to be somebody that I realized as I was talking to is somebody I otherwise would not have anything in common with unless I met him in person. If I met him in any space online, we would never have an opportunity to meet. We would never have had an opportunity to share stories. We never would have had an opportunity for me to experience this person who his level of care and like connection was such that like when I got

readmitted to the hospital and I was on a different floor, he saw that I was back and came down after work to see how I was doing. He didn't have to do that. Sure. And I've been thinking about that experience because that's somebody that if I was living a entirely or mostly online life, If that's somebody that on paper, I don't like that guy very much. I probably don't share some really important values with that guy. And I probably would not even run in any kind of a circle with that person where he and I would connect with one another. And if we did, we probably would argue about some stupid shit, right? And maybe important shit.

But what we actually had because we were forced to confront each other in person was a really nice connection and a really human experience. and that's somebody that cared enough to take time he wasn't being hurt when I was vulnerable. And that has stuck with me since I got home. And I've been thinking about that since I got home because that's impossible outside of the physicality of the world. And I want to use that story to kind of jump off and talk about this first story from 2015, New York Times. Stop Googling. Let's talk. This is from September 26 to 2015. And Cecil, you found these stories after you and I were chitch chatting a little bit over text messages.

And the crux of this story, which is now 11 years old, is about the ways that our ability to see and connect and experience not just each other, but honestly to even experience ourselves fully, becomes deluded because, like we are inserting this like electronic falsity and this fake, this medium into our connection spaces, our phones, the internet, etc. And it's hampering our ability to build like communities that have friction in them don't exist the same way anymore.

Communities that contend with each other's like humanity at a physical level and see each other as fully there. Our ability even to think, our ability to even like have quiet moments where we're comfortable in our own quiet are all affected by like this insistence to sort of funnel every experience through a device. And I've been just thinking about my experience where the last thing I cared about was my devices and all I cared about was this like moment of humanity and how there's this guy out there in this world named Jason who in a hundred communities on

I probably have nothing in common with him. And like when he came to visit me, I was moved to tears. And I think the second experience trumps all of the first experiences for me. And I just, I just can't get that out of my head. And so it's just, it's funny how impactful this kind of thing has been like recently for me. And I think it's just worth talking through together. Yeah. When you were talking, the first thing that came to my mind when you said that there's,

less friction, I wonder if it's more like before there was a personality to it, like a personhood that you could put behind the person. It's almost like hand-to-hand combat versus nukes, right?

So I think that the same amount of like friction there, right? There's still a same amount of like people don't like each other, people get in it. But when you're face-to-face, there's less of a chance that it's going to get out of hand

than if you're far away from each other. we talk about how it is in our cars, when we're in our cars and how we're in these insulated bubbles and how angry we get and how road rage sort of spills out and there's all this sort of real difference between who you are walking down the street

versus who you are in your car. And it's a parallel to who you are in a public space with a bunch of other people versus who you are online. Like the amount of, there's still the same silos of people that might get together or whatever and be as angry at the other side as possible. But now there's sort of a lot of more reinforcement

to be in that silo. And then that sort of gets people in this sort of doom loop where there's a, you know, like this constant berating of the other side so that you're constantly on edge in this little tiny space. But when we're together, when you're in a public space with someone,

it's such a different feeling. It's such a different feeling of being with somebody else. Because, and it's, and one of these articles very much, specifically this first one, it talks about empathy, right? It talks about how,

how you can be empathetic to somebody else and how that is so much more reinforced in a in-person context versus a context where you're removing people from it. There's a part of this article where they say 40%, they found a 40% decline in empathy among college students take it which took place

sort of before 2000 and it was sort of when our media was changing pretty rapidly it was a 40% decrease in empathy and I looked up the study

because I was curious what they talked about and I want to read part of what the study was about when they're talking about a 40% decrease in empathy

this study says we found that the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000 college kids today are about 40%

lower in empathy than their counterponts 20 or 30 years ago as measured by standard tests of this personality trait. Compared to college students in the late 70s, the study found that college students are less likely to agree with the statements such as

I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective and I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me. So, in that 20 to 30 years

of time, those responses became less, right? They became less specifically. And I can't imagine, because this was a meta-study that took place from the 70s to like the early 2000s, I can't imagine that that

study, if it were to take all of that into account, would be even more because in this specific article, they talk about how these students don't feel the same ways that other that people used to feel for each other. And we do think, and there is some evidence that it is because of the technologies that we

use and it takes away that empathy for each other. There's a tension. And I think it's worth calling out because so many people, especially listen to this show, are from communities which have been historically and are historically marginalized. And they are parts of, you know, communities of color and communities of sexuality or orientation where their ability to move freely within our society and be comfortable and accepted is often not good, right? Many of our listeners find themselves in those positions.

And I think that's, they often will rightfully say, well, but the place that I find my found family, the place that I find community is online, is through my phone, is through these technological portals. And I don't want to shit on that. I want to embrace that and say, that's great. The problem is we don't have our cake and we're not having our cake and eating it too. We think we are, but we're not. There are people, for sure, that are benefiting from these things.

But we are also watching the disintegration, I think, of our ability to meet each other where we're at and to, like, see the shared, like, humanity that we possess with one another. And there's so many studies that show this from this article. It's not like it's not one or two or three. There's a study that they point to in this article where just the presence of a telephone, of a phone on a desk or on a table while two people are talking reduces the intimacy of the conversation people are willing to have with another. There's a sense that that is an escape hatch.

In the opening lines of this article, it's referred to as like, well, it's great because I can always be somewhere else. So I can always be elsewhere when I want to. When I'm talking about like our ability to manage friction, what I mean is like we have a constant ability to decide not to be uncomfortable. We can always just not be uncomfortable right now. We can not be bored. We can not be, you know, I cannot listen to that guy who's got seven kids and has a degree in Bible.

And I could very easily do that because that's somebody that like most of the time I don't want to listen to. If I'm being honest about myself and how I want to spend my time, Most of time, I don't want to listen to that guy. But then I would have missed out on all the other parts of his story where I realized how much this man wanted and dedicated his life to the service of other people. And maybe we don't agree always on what that service looks like or who needs to be served. But like, that's a man who dedicated his and is dedicating every day of his life in service of other people. And I saw something there that I wouldn't have seen if I chose something simpler and something easier. because like when we are when we are not managing the physical community,

when we're not out like amongst one another and we're not meeting people who don't share all of our values, and we're not like choosing all the time, or allowing machines to choose for us all the time, what we like, what we like being outraged by, what we like being, you know, complaining about, what we enjoy connecting to. When we're instead just organically a part of the world,

I think the studies continue to show time and time again, it actually makes us better, stronger, more empathetic. If we want to fix the marginalization problem, we're not going to do that by siloing people off. That's not going to get more people, like that's not going to get somebody to rent you a house that wasn't going to rent you a house before, right? Like what it's going to mean is that you have some place

where you can feel safe complaining or asking for advice, and that is really important. But, like, it's not going to, it's not going to, like, let somebody see you as human, as fully human in the same way that, like, reducing our, like, connection through this medium would do. And I don't know that, like, we're going to do it. I think we're not going to do it because we're going to talk about a 2024 article where, because of 2015, this author is like, hey, here's, like five studies about how this is hurting us. And then, you know, fast forward 11 years. and we're like, yep, we accelerated a lot of it. Well, I mean, even the beginning of the article,

they say there's a piece where it says in 2015, a Pew Study Research Center said 89% of cell phone owners said they had used their phones in the last social gathering that they attended, but they weren't happy about it. 82% of adults felt the way they had used their phones in social settings hurt the conversation. So this is like what an addict says, right? I know I'm doing something bad,

but I'm going to keep doing it. And as you can see from the, you know, like we suggest, the 2024 article, we never stopped doing it, right? We always kept doing it. We kept doing it over and over and over again. I want to roll back to something you said, because I wonder, too, how much of our own experience is coloring our experience, too.

We're both cis white guys, right? We're both cis white dudes. It's not hard for me to enter the physical world and be a cis white guy. The world's made for me. The world exists for me. It was made by guys like me for guys like me. That's what it was, it was literally, it's been handcrafted.

I cannot get a more comfortable chair than this than what has been given to me. So I wonder if our experiences and our gripes and our feelings about this are very, very slanted by the experience that we have every time we dip our toe into something that is. that can be for other people a very difficult place to be, but for us is also just a second home. Yeah, well, and I think I agree with that. And I think, like, what I would say is that, for me, what that means is that I have a greater responsibility to do the work of community building at the physical level.

And somebody who has less privileges has less responsibility to do that. When I think about, like, what should this mean for me? and I've been thinking about that. Like, what should this mean for me? Well, every part of the world, to your point, is built for me. So, like, if I want to build a world where more people are connected and we're building bridges and we're helping people understand, like, my job then is to take that privilege and to get the fuck offline and go meet people like Jason and let Jason see what somebody like me

feels like and talks like and thinks like because I'm not in any danger if he doesn't like me. But I might be somebody that can change his mind about some things. You know what I mean? Like that responsibility then becomes mine. It doesn't, it's not everybody. I think like one thing that I want to make clear is we don't all share the same responsibility because we all share the same problem. The problem, the solution set falls always, I think, on people who have like the most

ability to act with the most impunity. And like, to your point, that's me and you. That's absolutely me and you. And like it's not, you know, a trans kid in Arkansas. So I want to be really clear about that. Like that trans kid in Arkansas like fucking stay safe. I don't know what else to say. Like stay safe.

You have no responsibility here to do the work of like helping people see your humanity. But I'm saying like we're not going to see each other's humanity through our phones. We know it because we haven't done it. It's not working. And it's been tested by a fucking 70 fucking studies at this point. And it's not it. And it's getting worse. And it's getting worse.

Like that's the thing is like even if it was just like status quo, that would be different. Right. But seeing that it's actually getting worse and that how we're treating each other is worse and how our outcomes about ourselves and about our development as children, there's a part of this where they're talking about how like people that are 12 are now sort of emotionally eight. You know what I mean? Like that's a real important piece. Yeah, that's crazy.

Let me read a couple more things from this article. at a retreat, the dean described how a seventh grader had tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event. It's an age-old problem, except at this time when the student was asked about her behavior, the dean reported that the girl didn't have much to say. She was almost robotic in her response. She said, I don't have feelings about this. She couldn't read the signals that the other student was hurt. Now, that's an end of one.

I get that. But I do think that there's a point to making that commentary. Teachers, people that are in schools, people in educational settings, but also, like, we do this thing. I think with social media, with phones, etc. Where we do, we like to think about the kids. We're going to talk about how this is impacting children. But it's impacting all of us. It's not, this is not a kid's problem.

I'm 48 years old. I carry my phone, I carry my phone from room to room in my house. And I even have a smart watch. I am not immune to any of this. A lot of this is like habituated from my work. I'm just like an on-call person for my work. But like, that's not all of it. I'm not going to lie about it.

That's not all of it. I was thinking about like we go and like you pick up your phone and you go online and you look at something. And like if I go out and I sit at the fucking diner and I sit next to somebody and I strike up a conversation with them, which isn't a real thing, right? This is a made up scenario because there's no such thing as a diner anymore where you sit up and strike up a conversation. But in a world where that was how communities were built together, the goal. the goal of that conversation would be to see where we connect and try to like talk about that. Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's how good the pie is, right?

But like there's an understanding there that gets built that maybe we don't have more than one thing in common, but we're going to try to find it in order to have a civil exchange. When you go online very often, the goal is to find something you enjoy being mad about. And the algorithm that you have says, I know Tom. Tom is actually really motivated by these kinds of things. It's like even the things that upset us have been fed back into the system so that we're not even seeing friction in our own outrage. We're actually getting frictionless outrage. So it's making us dumber and less like it's making us our ability to think about other

issues like just we're corsoned, you know? Like we're not as good at just being thought. because we don't know how to be bored anymore either. We don't know how to sit and just be still and quiet. In this article, they talk about how they did an experiment where they said, okay, you're going to, they put students in a room and they're like, you're not going to have like a phone or anything, you know, and you're going to sit quietly from like six to 15 minutes. And like some students chose to just give themselves electrical shocks rather than to sit quietly for six to 15 minutes. And I thought about it. And I thought, when was the last time I was quiet for 15 minutes?

And that's a hard, it's hard to realize that, like, most of my life before a cell phone that would have been like, I don't know, like 10 times today. And now it's like, I don't know if I did that this week. Because I don't, like, I'll walk around my house with a podcast playing in my pocket while I do chores. There's never an unmediated moment. And that's not good for us. Like, I think it's just objectively, like, bad for who we are and our, I think, I think it's just objectively, like, bad for who we are and our, our ability to share a humanity. So it just, it jumps off the page to me when I read stuff like this.

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff you said there. One of the things that is interesting is that the algorithm creates, it makes it so that nothing that is not extreme. So if something is extreme, it will get picked up. If it's not extreme, it just falls to the bottom. It filters down. There's nothing there that's really getting people to click on. And I'll give you an example.

So I don't have to explain a lot about football for you to understand this, but essentially what happened is that last year in the big Super Bowl, there was these two teams. Well, they played the first game of the season this year. The same teams, first game of the season was on Wednesday. The things that I saw on the Internet afterwards were all the sort of upvoted and most shared stuff was the extreme takes about how bad one of the teams was and how bad one of the quarterbacks was.

Like, literally, it's the first game in the season. I mean, there's still 16 more games to play. Like, there's plenty of time for this person to bounce back. He's a professional athlete. It's losing one game won't lose you the season, et cetera, et cetera. But there is so much, like, hyperbole behind this event that the only things I saw about it were about how bad this performance was and how this quarterback essentially should just walk off the field and then jump off a building.

That's how bad they were treating this performance of this player. And it's so funny because that's the things you see. You don't see anymore a sort of nuanced reason take. It's like, hey, he might not have had a good preseason and, you know, maybe he's, you know, dealing with some injuries or whatever it is that, you know, like as a nuanced take on that, you don't see that. You don't hear it. You don't.

What you see is that guy's washed. He should stop playing football. And it was like one second that that happened. And think about all the other moments. And this is just a football one. But there's a million other things that get upvoted to the top. And those are the things that you see. Think about all the creators that you see that are on any of those apps or any of those

scrolling apps and all that stuff. The only people who you see real shorts of, you're not seeing people who have like a nuanced, reasoned approach that might be like taking multiple things into consideration. It's always the most harsh, most abrasive and genuinely sort of, and I don't want to call it unique because it's not a unique thought, but certainly the most harsh thought that they can have is the one that gets amplified because either you love it or you hate it or you're in the middle of it and you just want to comment on it. It's literally made for us to sort of propel into everyone else's vision.

And it's why many people who we know, like people who are creators, have been creators for decades, they're not making millions of dollars on YouTube. They're not the hottest people because they have very reasoned, nuanced takes on very difficult issues. And that's not selling anything. That's not going to get a million clicks. Nobody's going to click on that a million times because that's not the quick, like, clickbait thing that's going to get people to draw themselves in. And I think it's a detriment, obviously, to us because now suddenly all of our opinions have this sort of, there's these high peaks to them, right? Everybody's opinion is this high sort of peak instead of what could be a more reasoned, nuanced take about something.

Yeah, and there's also a, I don't know if this happens to you, because I know you're not, you're not particularly online either, like in social spaces. But there's, there's something that happens that I've been noticing because I've taken myself offline that, like, somebody will be like, oh, everybody's talking about this. Everybody online is talking about this thing. And then if you know enough people, what you learn and you're, and you're not online, what you learn is that like when, when my friend over here says everyone's been talking about this and someone else says everyone's been talking about this. And someone else says everyone's been talking about. about this, they're not talking about the same thing. Because my everyone isn't the same as your everyone. But your perception of who everyone is has been fed by your like connection into those accounts. So what that means is that we are living these wildly different experiences ourselves, but we also think everybody else is sharing an experience and sharing a space and sharing a social contract that actually isn't true because your feed and your algorithm is bespoke. It's been tailored for you. And it looks nothing like the next guy. And so you think everyone is fucking interested in the Lindsay Clancy trial. Oh my God, everybody's talking about the Lindsay Clancy

trial. Well, yeah, over here they are. But over here, everyone's talking about this other issue. And maybe I, maybe I'm not even seeing the Lindsay Clancy trial anywhere at all. And we are no longer overlapping, right? And when we stop overlapping like that, we start to believe, not just like what we're being fed, but we start to believe in what other people are thinking. And we're building, because it's part of the work of how we understand our own societies. We build these sort of mental models of what other people think too. And we start to think like, oh, well, these are the big issues of the day. Are they? I don't know. You don't know either. Not if your life is algorithmically delivered. You actually can't know because we aren't, we're intentionally

building spaces and allowing spaces to be built for us that are tailored just to you. And just because you saw a thousand of something in a world with billions of people doesn't mean anything. The amplification effect makes us think that we are living in a world with like, this is what everyone's talking about. But like, that's true for you because you're following football. But no one's talking about that for me over here. You'll never hear about it. You'll never hear about it. And like maybe you don't care about the Lindsay Clancy trial, but my wife was following it. So now I know everything about it. But like the point is that like it skews our perception, not just of like who we are and what's important to us, but it skews our

perception of what other people are thinking and what other people are thinking about and what's important to us socially. And it helps us like we're building like kind of wrongheaded narratives about like who our neighbors are. And I've been. I've been. noticing this. I've been noticing like, I can't believe you don't know this. Everybody's talking about it. And then the next guy says the same thing. And it's a different issue because their feed is different. And so their world is different. And so now we're walking around with a deal with this headspace that we don't share, that we haven't collected together. And then how do we see each other? You know, if we do that all the time, if we let ourselves fall into that, if we believe that,

like what is reflected to us from our phones is reflective of our society and it's not and we know that it's not. But if we believe it anyway by virtue of exposure, how do we, how do we understand each other's humanity and build community? Because that's my responsibility to your point before as a cis-hout white guy. I have to do that work. I have to make the world safer for those people who can't come out and who can't just like go out into the world in the same way that I do. But if I just like silo myself off into these like bespoke and tailored worlds where the only things that I ever get fed to me are the things I like being outraged by or like liking, then like I don't even know who my neighbors truly are. And I don't even know what they really think and feel. I'm worried about

that. That makes me like genuinely concerned for our ability to stop some of the madness that we're in the middle of right now and solve real problems for each other. I wonder too, because there's an interesting part of this article that touches on that where it's it's not just agreeing with other people, it's also saying, not saying things that are disagreeable, right? So it's not just, I agree with you. It's that if I don't agree with you, I don't let you know that I don't agree with you. I keep that to myself. And I want to read a tiny piece that says, we thought that online posting would make us more, make us bolder than we are in person, but a 2014 Pew Survey demonstrated that people are less likely to post

opinions on social media when they fear their followers who will disagree with them. Designing for our vulnerabilities means finding ways to talk to people online and off whose opinions differ from our own. And at first I thought to myself, I thought, well, I don't know that that's 100% true, but I've experienced something as a content creator that is very similar because there are people

who will send us messages after we say something that is trying to get us to do just this, right? If we say something that people disagree with what we'll get is a slew of DMs afterwards that say, you guys are so off base,

I'm never listening to this show again. I can't believe you guys disagree with this thing. I can't believe this is a, this is a stance you have. And they always take it to the extreme, right? Like, you guys are the worst, et cetera. So even though we agreed on, you know, 10 years of content together, this one thing is the thing that is going to throw the wrench in it. But they'll send us DMs.

And at first I thought, I was like, wait, I'm like, these people are letting their, they're willing to say something that is against the grain. But then I realized it's the DMs. It's DMs that they're sending us. Or they are using our name. to send it out to their group to get headpats to, right? So they'll tag us on a blue sky account to say, you know, I can't believe you guys don't think this exact same thought I did,

or you didn't read exactly what I wanted you to say about a certain topic and therefore you're the worst, et cetera. But they're sending it out to a group that's going to give them headpats for saying that. Not, and that's them, not them being vulnerable in that situation. that's them trying to sort of make you vulnerable in that situation, right? They're trying to create that disruption to put you back in line to believe the things that they believe, right? Because throughout the years, you and I have had takes that people have disagreed with, right? You're 100% going to do that.

If you have a take show, people are going to disagree with you. But what happens is, is what you'll get is a lot of people being like, get back in line. You need to get back. You need to agree exactly with 100. percent of what I believe or else I don't want to listen to you anymore, right? We're even starting to do that here in the online space where it's all bespoke. We're even starting to get to the point where we don't even want to listen to people who might not think every single thought we have in the same way we have them.

We're getting to the point where that person isn't somebody. That person who is 99.9% just like you isn't enough like you to keep in. your circle. Yeah, you know, I think this is like, it's funny. I think as you're talking, what I'm reminded of is how you and I became friends. Yeah. And it's, it's so funny because Cecil, you and you have been my best friend for 30 years. And you and I met and we did not like each other. We didn't like each other when we first met. And a lot of how we bonded was over trying to figure out who the fuck we were and what we believed in. And we had long. long conversations where we did not agree with each other into the night. I remember conversations

about everything from, you know, philosophy to capitalism to, you know, what a good life is, to everything. Look, we became friends not because of like we agreed with each other, but in many ways because we enjoyed disagreeing and growing together. And like conversations that would last hours and hours. They were so important to my development as a human being. And then to my development with like my actual best friend of three decades. And when we got to, when we first met, we did not like one another. And I think that that evolution that has like,

that is in many ways defined the best friendship of my life is fucking impossible today. It's impossible. It just simply wouldn't occur structurally. You and I would not be friends. There would be no cognitive dissonance. Yeah. We wouldn't have been.

in each other's orbits even, not even close to each other. We'd have been on other sides of the galaxy. Yeah, and also I think that because you and I didn't, because we would disagree about stuff as we were thinking together and growing together and like learning together, I think when we contended with one another in person,

it was the furthest thing from uncivil. It was always civil. Yeah. And it was bonding. But I think that like one of the problems of the habits of online speech is that if you say something and I disagree with it, then that's disqualifying and you are not a good person anymore. And like, maybe you're just thinking something through. Maybe you're learning. Maybe you're growing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I need to learn and grow. Maybe we should

explore this together. That's work that only gets done in a physical space with each other. I'm reminded, too, of like, when Haley and I started dating, I reached out to her on Facebook Messenger, and then I very quickly moved from texting to a phone call, and then I very much wanted to meet her in person. And there's a reason we want to get to that physicality. I think that, like, you and I are recording a part right now because I'm fucked up and I can't really drive that well. But I was thinking ahead of this,

God, I wish I could get in the car and do this in person. It would be so nice to see you. See, so I see you, but, like, I would like to see you. Sure. Because, like, we understand, I think, intrinsically the value of all of that. It defines the most intimate, important relationships that we have. So if that's true, then the inverse is necessarily also true. If it is true that the most intimate relationships that you are likely to have are most likely to have physicality as an important

element of them, then it is also the inverse is true, which is that it is very hard to build that same intimacy without it and that same empathy and that same connection and that same and it certainly doesn't broaden out well like it doesn't make us more socially broadly minded because instead we just go to our corners and we like find the people that are like us and it's even worse than that because what's happening now is our corners are now creating new corners so it's like when you take oil and you put it in a refinement process and then you sort of boil it down and the stuff that comes up is like the, like you're, you're sort of taking a thing,

a soup that we were all in, and then you're saying, well, I want to refine that into something else and that gets refined into another thing. And then, but now we want to distill it down into even something even more because now we're, like, you're creating corners of corners of corners. Like, it's not just left side politics.

It's like hyper-specific, very specific groups of people that don't want other people. Like, look at how the, we've all talked about it for years, how the left eats itself. Yeah. Right? That's because there's corners

within corners, within corners, within corners, within corners, within corners, within corners, in the left, there's people who, you cannot pass their purity test, right?

You can't pass it. In fact, even mentioning that there is a purity test, is you failing the purity test, right? That is too much for some people. So we will get an email about that comment right now.

Yeah. Yeah. Someone will say, well, how dare you say that there's a purity test? There is, there's plenty of purity tests out there. And,

What will happen is I remember so vividly, you and I were having a conversation like this right after the election. So right after Kamala Harris lost, you and I wrote a conversation, we're like, we got to stop with a purity test. And I remember us stopping, looking at the camera and being like, we're not talking about trans people. Okay, let's stop. We're not talking about that. That trans people deserve to exist. If people think trans people are bad or awful or whatever, you shouldn't be part of this group, right? That is not a purity test.

That's just basic decent humanity. If you're not a decent person, we don't want to talk to you, et cetera. So we literally stop and turn and look at the camera and say that. And I got a message, no shit. As soon as we stopped that, that was calling us anti-trans. As soon as it stopped.

I remember being like, nope, trans rights are human rights. I said it literally on the show. And they're like, nope, you guys are anti-trans. I'm like, I don't know what else to tell you. I don't know how else to say it in order for you to believe that what I'm saying is true. But like, that's the problem is that, is that if you say anything

that makes them fill in their own blank, if it makes them fill in their own blank, that's too much for them. And I think like when I, when I, the problem is, is that there is this sort of very specific hyper, sort of refining process that is going on where we're not even relating with people

who we would relate with in every single possible way. we're not relating with them. Yes. Yes. There's a part of this article. This article, by the way, I'm going to read it. I think it's like some of the writing in here is honestly beautiful writing.

Like it's just like, holy shit, beautiful. So let me read something that like is living, it's been living in my head since you sent this article. The capacity for empathetic conversation goes hand in hand with the capacity for solitude. In solitude, we find ourselves. We prepare ourselves to come to conversation with something to say that. that is authentic, ours. If we can't gather ourselves, we can't recognize other people for who they are.

If we are not content to be alone, we turn others into the people we need them to be. If we don't know how to be alone, we'll only know how to be lonely. I think that is one of the truest things that I have read in so many years. So many years. Because there is,

I'll give you another really personal example. Some listeners may know I write a blog of advice to my boys. I've been working on it for like 10 years. And sometimes it takes long, years-long breaks. I've decided that I'm going to finish that and turn it into a personal book for my kids. So I've been very like, since I got hurt, I'm like, I can't work out. I've used this time for something productive so I don't lose my mind. And I'm finishing this book.

So I've been working on these things. And it's funny because I haven't worked on it in a while. and it was like fucking kicking the dust off to sit in front of an essay, which I used to be able to just sit and write. And I haven't done it in a little while. And I'm like, okay, I just need to sit and think. And then I was like, oh, I've not just sat and thought in a while.

And it was kind of hard to do. And that was a weird experience, man. Because like sitting and thinking and then sitting in writing has been something that's been something that's like defined my whole life. It's been part of who I have been forever. But boy, I'll tell you what, you take a year or two break, and you're busy doing work and hot takes. And all of a sudden, you want to sit and just be quiet and think about,

hey, what do I think about failure? I'm going to write an essay about failure. And then there's a crickets moment. And I'm like, wait a minute, but I have a lot of thoughts about this. I have a lot of thoughts about this, but I actually forgot how to think them. And I forgot how to like make them coalesce the way that they always used to. And you get it back. You put the muscle into it.

You're right and you need to delete everything bad because it was bad and then you'd do it again. But like my point is that like if we aren't building space for our own thoughts, we don't recognize that other people have their own. And we don't appreciate what they are. Instead, we're just constantly in react mode, react mode. There's no way that's helping some trans kid in Arkansas get an apartment. You know what I mean? There's no way that that's helping some landlord see. see our shared humanity and say, hey, you know, like, I don't understand, but like, I don't need to.

You're also a person. We have a responsibility to do this differently, I think, because this is a known problem, and it's a studied problem. And I think we feel it. I believe in the loneliness problem because I feel lonely. And, like, I recognize that. I think that there's this, let's go, let's fast forward to the 2024. So the 2024 article comes out. this other article, this one is entitled, How Technology Created a Recipe for Loneliness. This is from the New York Times as well. And this article has three main points, right?

So it starts out and it basically has three main points. It says that there are, that text messaging is a problem. It's a digital communication and text messaging is actually a barrier to authentic communication. It says that social media apps like, Instagram often create sort of a trap because you compare yourself to others and it makes you feel insecure and that also leads to less interactions and things like that. And then creating and viewing things in a sort of a binge way is also a bad thing for us. They're talking about like

Netflix binging and things like that, like watching an entire series, et cetera, because it sort of creates a separation from other people for like distance and long distance of time, long pieces of time. So those are the three main pieces of this article. But I think like really genuinely each piece of this shows that we didn't learn anything from 2015 on. We didn't learn fuck all. We're just like, no man, let's just fucking, can we rev this thing up farther and faster

and create? What we did was we said, hey, social media is making us really fucking crazy. why don't we just turn our basically turn our Netflix into a forever scrolling app? Can we do that instead? That's what we've done. We've basically glued people to their Instagram and then said, well, let's do the same thing with these other apps. Yeah, and I was reading an article about AI, I think today, that was talking about there's a bunch of, like it's becoming more and more common for young people to use AI. to meet their sort of social emotional needs.

And one of the things that they say about it is like, well, you know, other people can be mean, but AI is always nice to me. It's in this article. It's in this article. Okay. It's in this article. It's in this article. Yeah.

So, and it's like, well, we should be worried about that. We shouldn't, we should be worried about only being in places where everybody is nice. We should be worried about like meeting our social emotional needs with robots. The thing is like these companies are doing this loneliness thing to you on. purpose. This is an intentional thing because it keeps you buying shit, right? Remember, like, Facebook isn't give a shit about its news feed. Facebook is an advertising company. They want you to go on there and they want to show you ads. They want you to buy shit from those ads. All of these companies exist to sell you shit, all of them, that you being lonely makes you more vulnerable

to buy stuff. You buy stuff. It keeps you on the app. It keeps you on the app, man. That's how they make their money. So like if you're happy and you had a fucking dinner party and everybody, nobody at your dinner party picked up their phone for six hours. Remember having a dinner party Cecil and you're like, we'd get together and like five, six, eight hours we'd hang

out and everybody would have a great time and laugh and talk and we'd have a story and then that dinner party would create something and then would be a story about the funny thing that happened at that dinner party. It's like, there's a whole fucking thing. Like every time you're at a dinner party, fucking Mark Zuckerberg loses a wing or something.

thing, right? They don't want you there. They don't want you to be happy and connected and socially, like, healthy. That's bad for these guys. These guys have your worst interests at heart because as as capital, as techno-capitalists, everything you do that isn't lonely hurts them. Everything. There are literally no exceptions to that rule. They want the more lonely, the more isolated, the more siloed you are, the more money Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and the rest of these fuckers make. You're nothing but a fucking loneliness dollar to these guys. So they're building this on purpose and we know it because they've studied it. It's not like their own white papers and their own documents and their own whistleblowers at Meta have not come out time and time again where they're like,

oh, that's really bad for people. We know it. And they do it anyway because that's where their dollars come from. So like when we think about this like loneliness epidemic, which is so real and we think about like, well, what the fuck do we do about it? Well, like, let's not stop playing into the hands of the people who are literally trying to hurt you for your money. Like, like, let's, to the best of our ability and our privilege, shouldn't we like say, hey, let's, let's have a fucking dinner party instead. Let's go like meet somebody. Let's like go to the library. I mean, I know this sounds like antiquated, but I do. honestly believe at this point, I believe that like antiquated things, that sounds insane.

Like being a part of your physical community, joining an organization, I'm thinking about, Haley and I've been talking about this. Like, once I'm back on my feet and she's feeling well, we really want to find some kind of way to plug into the community locally. Like, can we join like Kowanas or something? I don't even care what it is. We're not church people. But how do we meet the people who live here that I otherwise wouldn't meet?

And maybe I don't agree with him about everything. And I can't wait for that. I can't wait to meet some people that I don't agree with everything on. Because, like, when I did that in 1996, I met my best friend. There's a piece of this article, a very specific piece of the, it's the first article where they talk about like, it's real easy to change course. Like, it's like you were just saying when you're typing. Like, all I had to do is flex that muscle and I figured it out. It took a little bit, but I wasn't able to sit and think with my thoughts.

But now I am. It took a couple of minutes. They're talking them in this one article where it's like, within a couple days, people don't want to pick their phone up anymore. They're like, done. They're like, yeah, I'm good. I don't need that anymore. And it doesn't take much effort on your part to stop yourself from doing this sort of thing. I will tell you, every time I've gone to Pensick, which is a big medieval festival in Pennsylvania.

It happens every year. It's two weeks long. There's sometimes up to 15,000 people will show up in all camp and they do. do these big, all fights and stuff, and it's a hoot. It's all medieval stuff. And I go there, I would go there every year or every other year. And I would, I genuinely wasn't crazy about Penzic, but I was, I loved the community and I loved who I saw there. And I will say almost every single time I went, my phone would be with me, but I'd never check it. I would never just stop and just be like on my phone. Just like, like, like after I get done with something at home, sometimes,

like, if I'm waiting for like water to boil in the kitchen, right, I'm boiling. water. I'll just go sit down and be like, okay, that's going, I'll grab my phone, right? I'll do something to occupy myself in that moment. But when I would be fencing, I'd be like, okay, I just got done fencing. Instead of just sitting there, I'd be like, oh, well, I'm in the group of people. Let me go interact with some people. And they're sort of like this, you just forget that it exists. You just don't have it. I wouldn't even check my phone for like news or anything else. I'd leave and people would be like, did you see the news? I'm like, no, I literally never check the news all week. I didn't even look. And it's because, like, you can be occupied.

you can do this. It's so easy to forget this thing because it's not useful. It's not a super useful device. It is in some ways amazing to have at your fingertips all of the knowledge human beings have ever created. It's amazing to have sometimes, really genuinely, right? Like, amazing. But often it's for trivia, right? Often it's for trivial, non-useful stuff that I could go without knowing who ran the most yards last year as a running back. I don't need to know that. It doesn't matter. Yeah. But so like, like the idea is that this thing is hyper useful,

but also can easily be left alone. And you can get all these skills back and you can get. So it's not like a doom conversation in that sense. Because it's, there is a way to reach out. There's a way to be around other people. I wonder if, and I know that they were doing this for a while. Do you remember when they were doing like the Sunday service with like atheists were getting together and doing these Sunday?

I remember that. Yeah. getting together things. I think that those things are probably more valuable now than they ever have been, right? You know? Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Yeah, Haley and I were talking, you know, because we both are very aware of how isolated we've become.

And a lot of that is health issues. Like, so, like, just to lay that where it really belongs. A lot of that is health issues. So, but we've become really, really, really isolated. And we were really, really social people by nature. And that's been difficult for both of us. And we're both like, we both were like, I wish there was a church. church. I would go because one of the things that church does is it says like, hey, we all live

around here. And like her experiences of church, and I know lots of people have very bad ones, some people have neutral, some people have good. But some of her experiences that she was describing to me, you know, when she was growing up, like if somebody, if she needed help, you know, putting a play set together in her backyard, well, the guys from the church would come over. They just, because there were people around. You just, you knew people around you. And so there were people around to help. And there was like people, like somebody got sick and everybody just, you know, made some food and brought food to each other. And like there was a sense that we had a responsibility to each other.

And I'm very aware that we don't feel that way. We don't. And we're not going to get it back by staring at our phone and living these tailored, uh, liar's experiences that Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of these assholes want to sell you as authentic. it's not authentic. They're selling you fucking blender bottles and bullshit. That's what they're selling you. That's all they care about. The less happy you are,

the happier and richer those fuckers become. And so we were like, well, what is there? It's not church for us because we're just not religious and we couldn't take it seriously. And we might find that messaging to be annoying. But like, maybe it's some other kind of community organization or volunteering or something.

And I think like at some point when our health situations resolve. Like, I want to make it a mainstay of my life to be plugged into people. Not just my friends that I love, those people, too. I desperately miss them. But, like, also just the people I don't know. And I'll end with this. Like, one of the things that, like, actually did, it might sound super stupid.

But, like, one of the things that, like, made a huge impact on me was CrossFit. Because it is a community space. Sure. And I met a whole bunch of people that I otherwise, no world where. I would have met them. And they all lived near me. And then people would have get-togethers. And we would like, there'd be a barbecue or a volleyball game or whatever. Like somebody would be hosting something. And you would get invited to something. And most of those people fell off my radar and did not become lifelong friends. But a few of them did. A few of them have stayed friends

with me for, you know, a decade plus after I no longer was like a part of that gym or whatever. And I think about that too. And the only thing that mattered about that was that we were all doing the same thing together. Yeah, yeah. That's it. We didn't have to have anything else in common. Yeah. All right, that's going to wrap it up for our long-form show.

We're going to be back on Monday with a full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative acupunctuating pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch,

late-night info docutainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense.

Expose your signs. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonancepod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content. Find us on TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and threads, all under the handle at DissinancePod.

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