The Ricochet Podcast - Virtual Extinction

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

The mediating technologies of the new century were welcomed as wonderous life enhancers. A few decades later, we often talk about how the devices we can't put down poison our culture, politics, and relationships. Christine Rosen joins to discuss her latest book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. (Don't let the title scare you off! Christine brings good cheer and a few ideas for a "human things initiative" that can save our skin.)Plus, Peter, Charlie and James chat about the distinct experiences one has walking the streets of New York, riding out a hurricane, or road-tripping across the nation in search of America's best rollercoaster.- Sound clip from the open: Eric Adams addressing New York's citizens.

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook. I'm James Lallex, and today we talk to Christine Rosen about the extinction of experience. I know it sounds horrible, but she's talking about being human in a disembodied world. So let's have ourselves a podcast. My fellow New Yorkers, it is now my belief that the federal government intends to charge me with crimes. If so, these charges will be entirely false based on lies. I always knew that if I stood my ground for all of you,

that I would be a target. Well, hi there. This is the Ricochet Podcast. And if you're wondering how many we've done, we've done 710. Stop. What? Stop.

No, we've done 709. When this is over, we will have done 710. And there are protesting Times Winged Charity.ity is Peter Robinson with us again, thank heavens, and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. And before we get to the news of the day, well, it is the news of the day, frankly, how are you faring in the latest onslaught of Mother Nature, Charlie? We're good. We're good. We're not in the same position as those who were hit.

It really does look very bad. So thoughts to them. But we did have a lot of rain and wind and furniture went into the pool and the doors were slamming all night and the lightning alarm was going off and the kids kept waking up. So we were aware of it. But fortunately, as far as I can see, there's no damage. How far are you from the beach? Very close to the beach, but on the east coast. If I may ask, the lightning detector?

Yeah, so there are lightning alarms in the town, and they go off. To tell you that there's been lightning. Well, to tell you there's lightning within five miles, in case you're playing golf or tennis or you're outside holding things that are made of steel. Something completely unknown to those of us here who just simply enjoy the arc across the sky and give it no more thought. But we have tennis and we have golf and the rest of it.

A lightning alarm. That's fascinating. Well, glad you're safe. Yes, you are on the East Coast. You know, I always tell my wife that I want to move to the West. I want to be near palm trees and warm breezes in the and the sea and then she's looking at this and and cooking and i crocking an eyebrow cocking an eyebrow at uh well if we followed your advice of course we would be either a out of a house or you know be paying usurious insurance rates which i understand is part of a problem. It's difficult to insure houses down there, and you can sort of kind of see why. May I pile in on that very

point? I want to see what Charlie does to swat me down on this one. Hurricane season in Florida raises each year the only imperfection that I can find in Florida political culture, and it is this. People who are, 11 months a year,

stout conservatives, supporters of Ron DeSantis, wishing in every regard to roll back the government and get it out of our lives, in hurricane month, say, oh yes, but of course the government must subsidize all our insurance. Charlie, would you care to defend your fellow Floridians? No, I'm not greatly in favor of subsidies. I think it's probably a little more complicated because there are already subsidies. So we're talking about requests within a system that already abjures the free market, but but no i thought you were going to say that when the hurricanes come people say the government must save us and i was going to say it should that is what we have a government for ah yes going out and saving people in natural

disasters but no i think that the free market instinct should be universal and there's no reason others should pay to insure my house because I want to live near the beach So I'm with you Well, all right. All right. Sorry James that went nowhere. That was a conversational non-starter. I thought I could get a rise out of that Well, he is unflappable in English. There are some I mean in his origin story He's an American now as much as any of us. You make me sound like Batman. Well, speaking of Gotham City, the mayor, Eric Adams, has been the first mayor in 110 or something to be slapped with a bunch of charges.

And people are saying, well, he's saying, that the reason they're coming after him is because he has criticized the immigration policies of the administration. I don't think that's it. I think it might have to do something with taking money from a foreign government, specifically Turkey. Peter, I know that, you know, it may not seem like a big deal to the rest of the country, because no mayor from New York, aside from Giuliani, who failed, has had much of a national political impact. But if he does go down, there is a man standing behind him who will take the job,

who is of the most radical bent, you can imagine, and might further... Well, let me put it this way. Is New York almost impervious to the death blow? Is there just something in there? It's raw, it's an animal spirit that will keep it going so that it doesn't matter what sort of idiot gets in, it will still continue to burn bright and throw up a bunch of money. Or is the problem that plagues a lot of American cities about to get worse for New York? And I'm sorry, New York does matter. It matters a lot to the sense of this country, to its national identity, to its conception of itself. It is the Empire State Building. It is the brawny city of the 40s that we saw, that you see in the old newsreels, the glory. I mean, I love New York. I can't stay there more than three days, but I love New York.

So what's your thought on this? Yeah, well, Charlie will chime in on this, because as a National Review man, he knows New York well, has figured out very happily a way not to have to live there, but he knows New York well. So I grew up in upstate New York. And for me, the city was the great and glittering Oz. It was where I got to go on a field trip with a theater club, or we would go see two or three Broadway shows, matinees, which were cheap tickets. And where my parents, a couple of times, they did well on report cards, and my reward was a weekend family trip down to the city. So for me, it is just fixed as a kind of mythical, it's where the action was, it's where all the sophistication was. Okay, those were the days when New York as a state functioned pretty well, when upstate towns,

the mid-sized towns, the sort of american answer to bavaria binghamton outside of which i grew up utica rochester uh schenectady all of these towns were still functioning relatively healthy schenectady was general electric rochester was eastman kodak binghamton and Johnson City, where I grew up, was IBM. That part of the state has essentially collapsed. And the city itself has about the same population today that it had when I was a kid. So what does that mean? That it hasn't grown with the rest of the country. The imperviousness, and it does seem to be impervious, is all now narrowed down to financial services,

where there are, I don't know, what, 100,000, 200,000 people in Manhattan who receive annual incomes every single year of well in excess of a million dollars and keep that whole town going. But as a place that was open to the middle class, as a place where when I was a kid, when we went to college in those days, the Ivy League was quite regional. It was an East Coast institution. And if like me, you were interested in journalism, you dreamed of going to New York. There were still publishing houses in New York where the publisher, I visited Scribner's wonderful building on Fifth Avenue, which I think now is a Sephora makeup shop or something of that nature.

Charles Scribner III sat at a desk and chatted with me and pulled out a manuscript that he had discovered stuffed way in the back of the desk that Max, who was the great editor, it was a, it was a- Perkins, Max Perkins. Max Perkins, exactly. Max Perkins had sat at that desk and had begun marking up a Hemingway manuscript and gone out for a bologna sandwich at lunch or something like that and shoved them in and it had gotten jammed in the drawer at the back of the desk.

And Charlie Scribner had discovered it. Okay. All of that was the mythical New York. That seems to be gone. Now you're Bill Ackman and a billionaire and the many people, or Ken Griffin and Citadel, and you're hiring extremely bright kids. And that little cone of finance does extremely well and everything else is half what it was moving elsewhere. So there is a kind of very narrow sphere of activity that is impervious, but the rest of

the city, it doesn't feel that way to me. Charlie, correct me. Well, I don't disagree with all that you said. I just still think that it's a truly great city. We were just having this conversation on the editor's podcast as to whether or not New York is the greatest city in the world. And I said that although it's not my favorite city in the world, I think it is the greatest city in the world. And I said that although it's not my favorite city in the world, I think it is the greatest city in the world,

in the same way as London was the greatest city in the world 150 years ago, whether or not people preferred it to Paris or Berlin or what you will. New York just seems to me to be the center of the universe, the capital of the West. And it makes it more baffling than I can describe that having worked out what it needs to do to run itself well, it's declined to do that for now 13, 14 years. I mean, we know what to do to make New York run. What you need is a centrist or center-right social liberal who does not agree with national review on most things except crime.

Right. And who makes sure that the city doesn't plunge itself into unmanageable debt and that deploys police around in the places that they're needed and cleans up homeless encampments. And then New York works. I was lucky. I moved to New York in 2011. My parents back in England still had a conception of New York as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. It's a very dangerous place. And they kept saying to me, be careful. Now, I didn't in any way resent that, but I did have to update them and say, did you know that it is more dangerous to live in London than it is to live in Manhattan right now? Well, that's no longer true, unfortunately. It's not as bad as Seattle or San Francisco, but it's no longer true. When I lived there from 2011 to 2014 and worked there from 2011 to 2017,

it was paradise. And you could walk around in the middle of the night and you could have shouted, I've got lots of valuables in my bag at one o'clock in the morning and no one would have touched you. The subway was clean and safe. It was great. Actually, you make an extremely important point. New York attracts so much talent and so much capital that all the government of the city needs to do is two things only to give the city safe streets and make sure the subways run correct that's all that's all

and they can't do those two things you do those two things and you do have the capital of the world right the last time i was in new york, I was awakened early, early, early in the morning by the symphony of jackhammers going on outside across the street where they were building a 60-story tower called The Flame, which will have a roller coaster at the top of it. I made my way down a creaking, shuddering elevator from the 1920s into the lobby of the Paramount Hotel, which hasn't been updated since it was redone in the 90s. It looks like there should be a copy of Madonna's sex book sitting in the lobby somewhere. Outside, take a left. You instantly are hit by the sound, the cacophony, the noise of everything. You jostle against people as you walk. When you get to Times

Square a couple of blocks later, you pass the kebabs, you pass the place, the aromas come flowing up, the Sabrets, hot dogs. And then as you wend your way through Times Square, you feel the rumble of the subways beneath you as you pass a grate, and you can sense the whole arteries that stretch through the entire city. I moved about 10 blocks to the north, made my way to Central Park, and then I was in a green and verdant paradise. It was a delight to the eyes, and smelled beautiful and fresh and crisp and the rest of it. From there to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I beheld with my own eyes, thanks to the light bouncing off them and going into my retinas, the sights of art, where I beheld with my own eyes, thanks to the light bouncing off them and going into my retinas, the sights of art of which I had never seen. And all of it with the soundtrack of

the noise of the people enjoying and the hundreds of people in the lobby and the rest of it. It was a completely and utterly human experience. It was what it meant to be human. And if you want to feel embodied, there's no better place to go than New York City. Which brings us to our guest. Christine Rosen has written The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World. It's a very simple concept. It's a very complex concept. Christine, welcome. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. So here's the deal. We've sort of made this bargain with technology that all of these things that are little glowing rectangles, our portable supercomputers are going to be able to do, is provide all of these adjuncts and add-ons and improvements to life in which our physical

selves would dissolve almost in a rapturous sense with this metaverse of possibilities. And how's that working out for us? Let's just start there. Well, not so well. I'm sure your listeners have all seen the sort of dramatic stories about teen mental health crises and, you know, particularly depression, anxiety, those are all big concerns, as is what social media has done to our politics. But I actually was looking at more of a baseline individual level at how it's changed our daily interactions and our daily behavior, because I think that often gets overlooked, because you can easily dismiss the extreme stories and say, oh, well, that's up to parents to figure that out, or oh, it's not as bad as people say, and everyone always is worried about new technology. But I

think it's actually really interposed itself on the way we treat each other in daily life. And I mean, the strangers in public space we come into contact with, I mean, our most intimate relations with our family members and our loved ones. And I worry that we've allowed certain behaviors to become habits and habits of mind and ways of thinking about the world without really pausing to consider if that's the direction we want to go. We've had these technologies for a while now. We think we've adapted to them, but I think in some ways we're becoming more machine-like rather than making the machines more human. So, Christine, I can think of one example, and it's too trivial for you to have written a book about it, but I'll give you the example, and then you give me something more meaningful. I just got

back from a trip to Europe, and we took friends. We didn't know these people, but they're friends of friends, and we went to dinner with some Europeans. And I thought that in Europe of all places, there would still be some sense of protocol, of the protocols of courtesy. And then at dinner, we Europeans felt totally free and unselfconscious about plucking out their phones in the middle of conversation and just dropping out of the conversation until they had answered their emails. Okay, so that's one thing. Twenty years ago, that would have been unthinkable anyplace in America or Europe. I had the feeling that it's become commonplace. Certainly here in Silicon Valley, it's commonplace. But okay. But that's not enough to write a book about. No. Although I could write many rants about just that practice.

But that is one example among many of the way this technology and our use of it has come between us and some basic human pleasures. So I do have a chapter about human pleasures, whether that's food, hanging out with friends, going to live music, going to a museum, travel. In every single realm of our private experience of pleasure, we have allowed technology to interpose itself between us and the experience. Now, some of that's fine. You want to take a picture of something you see. But the research is really interesting on that. People take pictures of things, of experiences, particularly pleasurable experiences, thinking, this will help me remember this experience. But in fact, the way our weird brains are wired, if you take a picture of something,

you're less likely to remember it. Because there's some part of your brain that registers that you've externalized the memory function there. you've got a picture of it, you don't have to remember quite as much. So when we go on vacations, when we go to art museums, when we sit around with friends, if we are putting a screen between us and that experience, we will have a different qualitative experience, obviously, which is what you're describing, but we'll also have a different memory of that experience. And I think, again, that's one of those things where because our phones are so powerful and they can take these amazing pictures and it's so easy to do, we think that's all a positive, that's a net positive for society. But how many times do people sit down and go through their phones and scroll through it the way people used to sit down

and go through a photo album when photos were harder to take and more precious objects and tangible objects? There's all kind of interesting new research that shows that some of our memory formation of really deep, important human experiences is being altered by our constant mediation and use of technology. As for the Europeans, I do find that shocking, and I have noticed that as well when I was in London and in Paris. It's surprising. You too! Yes. but again, these are norms that have shifted with time. Some people will look at that and say, oh, that's just technology. We're adapting to it. But that is technology in a deeply personal space, right, where you're sitting down across

a table enjoying a meal with friends. Television people used to rant about, you know, all kinds of things, computers even people would rant about. But in this case, again, very private, personal moments, all being fed through a screen or allowing a person, it's a real power move still, actually, to pull out your phone and to remove yourself from a social situation. But it's accepted, and I'm not sure we should accept that. So, Christine, you are a person of such good cheer and such a transparently good heart that you can propose the most draconian reforms you want to, and people will still say to themselves, well, you know, listening to you, from Christine Rosen, I could just about take it. So, how draconian are the reforms or the readjustments to our norms and protocols are, what are you suggesting?

Well, these are the kinds of things that you can't really legislate. I mean, there's some things you can do to protect kids, and I've written about that. But in the focus- What have you done with your own kids, if I may? I listen to enough of the commentary podcast to know that you're very good and extremely attentive and, like many of us, a tortured parent. Yes. Well, my kids are now both freshmen in college, but zero to five, I was pretty draconian. Zero to five, they had no screens, no television, no movies, no computers, zero, from zero to five. Because my feeling was that they needed to learn to read before they were captured by the image. The image is a much more powerful thing. It's much more entrancing, especially for kids. So I was pretty hardcore. I don't think all parents need to do that. That

was just my choice. As they got older, they didn't get a cell phone until they were in high school. I think they were the last kids. And again, they complained bitterly about it. Now, however, they have on a couple of occasions said, you know what? It's easy for me to put down my phone. It's easy for me to block Snapchat for a couple of weeks because I'm doing it too much. They have some self-discipline. You deserve the Nobel Prize for motherhood. I don't know. The verdict's still out. They're only 18. Their brains are not fully developed yet. But I was tough with that because I worried early on about some of the impacts. And I saw it. I saw

when they would go to a friend's house. And Christine, if I may, I should remember, I just don't. Are your kids boys, or you have one of each? No, they're boys. So they're fraternal twin boys, and this is different than, I probably would have been even more strict with social media if I had had girls, honestly, because we know that social media, particularly in the tween and high school years, it's much more risky for girls. We know this now in terms of developmental and emotional attachment and how friend groups work. So I would have probably been even tougher with that. But yeah, I was kind of hardcore. Okay, so for the rest of us, what are you proposing? For the rest of us, you know what, I'm not, for all my scolding, I don't really have a policy plan, but I would tell people to do this as an experiment. In those interstitial moments of your day when you would usually reach for your phone, don't. Go for a day where when you're waiting in traffic or you're waiting for someone to pick you up or you have a minute between tasks at work, don't look at your phone. Let your mind wander.

Try that for 24 hours. I think we, and I force myself to do this too, because it's difficult to do. Not filling that interstitial time with entertainment or communication or whatever it is your phone gives you and you use it for does allow for a totally different experience of mind wandering. And it's kind of great. You might start worrying about your grocery list. That's what I did one time. But another time I had an idea for a piece I wanted to write, and I jotted it down, and that became something I could work on. So, your mind does need that. We are wired to let our minds wander in ways that take us down paths that lead to creativity and productivity. I have one more question. I'm going to hog you for one more moment, and then I can see James is getting, James is really ready. Okay, so here's my last question.

I'm reading his facial expressions, yes. that we now know, we now understand, in some ways that at least approaches the scientific, that the oral tradition is incompatible with the ability to read. So, we wonder how on earth were these people able to transmit Homer across the centuries before it became written down? And it turns out that into the 20th century, there were still societies where oral traditions remained. But the moment literacy became widespread in those societies, funnily, I think there were actually YouTube videos recorded just when recordings first became possible of Irish people, often the poorer parts of Ireland, who were still illiterate but were still able to recite the great epics, that somehow or other, literacy blocks out some

piece of the brain that made this oral tradition, these long acts of memorization possible. Okay, so with that in mind, do we really know what this object we hold in our hands, what this phone is doing to change our fundamental abilities as human beings? Is the research adequate? Do you have the feeling that although research is beginning to come in, Abigail Schreier's written a book, Jonathan Haidt's written a book, do you have the feeling that we know enough? Not yet, no, because the research really is in its early

stages. We've been conducting a massive social experiment for more than, really, about two decades now. But I think we have hints. And the challenge always with this sort of work is that some of the, we do have some quantitative data that can tell us certain things. But a lot of what this is, is a difference in qualitative experience, differences, choices that lead to opportunity costs, particularly for children. If you're staring at a screen seven hours a day, you're not doing other things. And those other things turn out to be very important, free play, stuff that like John and Abigail have written about very well. For us, for those of us who are hybrids, we weren't raised with this stuff, but we embraced it as adults and think that we have a little more savvy with it.

It's the habits of mind and how quickly they form that I think we need to think about. And the qualitative part there is really important. I have lots of good friends who I met either via online, email, you know, we text each other. We don't see each other in person that much. My qualitatively deepest relationships are with people I regularly see in person, that my face-to-face interactions, the people who will show up for me when I need a ride to the airport or I'm sick. So those sorts of communities are becoming, I think, for a lot of people, weaker. Those ties are becoming weaker because the trade-off is we're spending so much time

in mediated relationships. So it's not that we have to get rid of all of our mediated communication. We can't do that. We wouldn't be having this conversation without the technology that allows that. But if I choose this way of talking to you rather than seeing you face-to-face, if I have that option, because this way is easier, that starts to undermine the quality of our connections. And then we see this culturally and socially. We become more impatient with each other. We don't know how to get along as well. There are all kinds of things like road rage rates and other things that suggest we are becoming less patient, less accepting, less able to get along even when we disagree, and not just politically, but socially. I wonder, Christine, to what extent you're essentially playing anthropologist here in

a world that now exists like this i mean a lot of book subtitles have and here's what we can do about it but you you said you don't necessarily know we have created this world in which the phone is at the center and i mean if you look if i pick up my phone right now i have to do what you told me not to do and i pick up my phone right now and i look at the front so i have email which has replaced letters and i have a phone on it obviously and then i have a photos app which has replaced my camera and then i have all sorts of work stuff slack that we use so i can be pinged all the time and I have Dropbox. But what I also have is things like remote controls for the lights in my kitchen and for my Apple TV and for Sonos I play music through. And somebody pointed out to me the other

day that she has started to be more what she called intentional with her kids. Because in the past, if you were watching TV, you would walk over and you would use a remote control. Or if you were communicating with someone, you would pick up the phone or you would write a letter. Or if you were watching TV you would walk over and you would use a remote control or if you were Communicating with someone you would pick up the phone or you would write a letter of she were working She would be in her office or if she were putting on music She would go over and put on a vinyl record or whatever But now to her children who is standing in the distance She's always doing this even though she's doing lots of different things on the phone completely different things Maybe to them it all looks the same

Mm-hmm. So, I mean, is that just what we have done with the world now? I agree with you that I sometimes sit at dinner and I pick up my phone and I think, don't do that because I'm going to check Twitter or do something pointless. But is there a point to which we have made this rod for our back and we're just going to have to suck it up? Yes and no. Yes, we have turned it into a Swiss army knife for life, right? It has everything on it. And in fact, you need to use it. You can't live without it in certain fields of work because there's a lot of work stuff on there that people need to unlock, you know, access to documents or to actual buildings. You can't park in many cities without having the app because there's no place

to actually do that except on the phone. And I had a friend who struggled mightily with, he went to a concert and he needed to put everything in a locker and he had to download the app and he has a very old phone and the phone was like not happening. So he couldn't put his belongings there. And he was very frustrated by this idea that a technology that's supposed to make his life easier has just made it more difficult. So in that sense, I think our over-reliance on it is of concern. It certainly should be of concern if you're an employee in a large company that has you wear a badge with sensors that monitor lots of things about your day that maybe you don't

want your employer to know as well. So from a privacy standpoint. My deepest concern, though, is how readily and easily and unthinkingly we've brought it into our private sphere. So as you said, your friend could go to the office and do her work and then come home. But now everything travels with you. And the sophistication of this technology, particularly in the future with the patents that are pending for all kinds of sensors that can be embedded in your phone. Most of us carry our phones with us all the time on our

bodies. It's the first thing people reach for in the morning. It's the last thing many people touch before they go to bed. This device is now in your private space, and it can hear you. It can report to all kinds of people and entities you might not be aware of, what you're doing, what you're saying. Soon it'll be able to measure your heart rate, all these things. This is a very intimate device, and I think we still think of it as a Swiss army knife that we could set aside and go about our day. The intentions of the people in Silicon Valley who design many of these technologies and the platforms and software that fuel them is to become even more intimate and turn so much of our private experience into data,

into information for others to use. My question is, do you want your relationship with your kids, the tone of voice you use when you speak to your spouse, to be turned into data that someone else can have access to and use. Because that's the direction that I think a lot of these platforms want us to have. All right, so how do I stop that? Because if I have a phone and it's near me and it has a microphone and it has the capacity to broadcast,

then I only have two ways of stopping that. One is to stop using the phone or turn it off or throw it away. And the other is to pass laws that says to those companies, you are not allowed to process this information. Right. So the law is probably the least effective tool here

because we, and we've tried that. Like, again, a lot of these people, a lot of people would be happy to say, well, I don't care what people hear. I have nothing to hide. That attitude worries me, but there, a lot of people would be happy to say, well, I don't care what people hear. I have nothing to hide. That attitude worries me, but there is a minority of people who feel that way. I actually think it's, in this case, turn it off at night. Like, power it down or put it in another room.

But I turn my phone off at night, and then I use an old-fashioned alarm clock. And I made that choice a few years ago because I found I was looking at that phone right before bed and looking at it first thing in the morning. And it changed the way I began and ended my day, and I didn't like it. So, I do think that, again, awareness of it, and I know for years people have been saying, take a digital Sabbath, you know, get a meditation app. All of that's fine and good, but we need to actually spend 24 hours thinking about how often you mediate an experience and how often you mediate experiences in your private home and in your private relationships. I think you'd be shocked how often it happens now without us

really registering it. Yeah. That's amazing. Christine is this, just exactly as I pictured her listening to her on comp, she is this woman of wonderful goodwill and good, but she's also a little bit of a nag, isn't she? I am. I am. I'm a total scold. It's my role in life. Well, to that point, I would actually like the conversations between myself and my wife to be transcribed and sent to some third party so that I can empirically show her that her tone of voice is actually a little bit more sharp and hectoring than she may think it may be. I would like to have that. Oh, Christine, there's so many things to talk about here. There's so, so many aspects. You know, one of the things that I don't like about the ubiquity of the phone is when you walk away, you walk into a public area, into a lobby,

for example, or even on the street, you see all these heads bent over their devices in private communion with them. And, you know, sometimes I think if it was a book, nobody would be, nobody would care, nobody would think anything of it. If you walked into a place and everybody was looking down at a book, you would think, this is the most literate society ever. And so, you know, we don't know what exactly people are looking at. We're just sort of unnerved by the fact that everybody seems in a demonstrably obvious public or private place in a public space. There's no communal aspect to this. And they were complaining about that when the Walkman first came out. They said, here are all these people walking around big cities with these headphones in their private little world and their

private little soundtracks. And they have no, I mean, so this has been boiling for an awful long time. The problem, as you point out, is that it's so attractive to be able to get whatever you want. But when you mentioned the photographs, that I found fascinating. This may sound really boring, but I make a point of taking a video every single day. I've been doing this for two years now. And I have this sort of daily record that reminds me of the utter banality of my existence. Is it the same thing that you video every day, or is it something different every day? No, it's something different.

It's work. It's the supermarket. It's walking the dog. It's this, that, or the other. But it's just sort of, it's like taking a leaf that may otherwise fall from the tree and disintegrate and then coating it with lacquer and putting it in a book. I mean, it's just somehow a way of making time. It's incorporeal, but just sort of at the end of the year, I've got this year in addition to my travel videos and my travel photos, the photos that I take on travel, I remember every single one where I was, what I did, what I felt, who I was

with, because you mentioned before the photos that you have in your phone. Nobody looks at them, but what did they do before? They would, the father, would take out the shimmering screen for the carousel projector, the slides, right? Oh, we're going old school. Yeah. With the clicker.

The clicker and endure thoughts of suicide would cross everyone else's mind. Yes. Grainy Kodachromes of this or that, and it's a ship, and oh, it's the ocean, and the rest of it. But at the same time, it was still a social communal thing where everybody got together and participated in this projection of the reality that the people had spent. Now, that has something to go for it because everyone's sitting around the TV dinner tray and they're having their TV Swansons and they're having a beer. And it's, you know, the company comes over. That's what you do.

And I think that is a preferable model. But what we have today, nobody gets together and shows pictures in cyberspace. I've just used a term that dates me. But there are other analogs. You mentioned the metaverse in the description of your book, which I think is a fascinating failure. It is a repellent place that is so anti-human and strikes you as wrong on an atomic level that it failed. Nobody's talking about it anymore. Why do you think that was the case? And why does the metaverse and the Zuckerberg's iterations of it fail,

but yet the young men getting together in Call of Duty, in great groups to wage cyber-digital mayhem, is so amazingly popular and such a bonding experience for them? Well, the metaverse failed in part because the first avatars had no lower bodies. Do you remember that? They were like these weird torsos that would move around. These torsos floating around. Well, the metaverse failed in part because the first avatars had no lower bodies. Do you remember that? They were like these weird torsos that would move around. These torsos floating around. It's very creepy.

I don't understand what Zuckerberg was thinking. Interestingly, though, you know what Zuckerberg is embracing now are the glasses, a new form of sort of augmented reality, not virtual reality. Because the idea is you would have an overlay at all times over your face as you go about your day, giving you all kinds of information, but also potentially, for example, say you don't like how your neighbor's yard looks, you could just erase that from your view so that when you walk down the block, you don't have to see things you don't want to see. That worries me quite a bit, but I think... And let me just jump in there for a second, because you're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this a long time.

Augmented reality means that the world will be tailored to my expectations, my desires, my needs. So when I'm wearing the glasses and I walk by and the sensor says it's me and it sends the signal, it communicates and says, well, Mr. Lilacs likes advertisements about this, and I see these ads. And then the next block, the same thing happens. What this means, if it's ubiquitous enough, is that the physical reality is no longer a shared reality exactly and that and and that i don't like that building i can tap it and i can say change that travertine marble to a pinkish hue so i mean if you can customize and skin everything in the world, then nobody is physically inhabiting the same place,

which is a whole different level of wrong from everybody just being bent down into this little personal computers. Go on. Well, and that actually is the vision of a lot of the Silicon Valley theorists. Marc Andreessen described just that world when he talked about reality privilege. He says it's a privilege that for most people reality is terrible like their lives are miserable they don't have make enough money they don't like where they live that you know he listed all these things but then for a few you know they enjoy their realities but they're they're engaging in reality privilege by denying a virtual reality that would be perfect and tailored and wonderful for for the people whose actual physical reality is nuts or bad and so he says

oh i know people think this think this is dystopian. I mean, it literally is a dystopian science fiction novel called Ready Player One. But he thinks the solution to the world's problems is to slap virtual reality goggles on people whose lives are kind of miserable and let them live in a different world. And look, the reason all those guys like to play Call of Duty together is that you have a real emotional experience when you do that. You're talking to people, but you're sitting completely alone playing. You're not usually playing on the couch next to someone else. You are in your own space and you're having conversations while you play. So it feels social, but in a way it's kind of a simulacrum of sociability compared to everybody.

I mean, I'm from the Atari years, the first person whose parents could afford Atari. Like, we were all over in their basement, like, taking turns playing it and talking to it. That actually, in a weird way, was a more sociable experience than how a lot of gamers play today. So I think, again, the opportunity cost. Like, if you're spending four hours playing Call of Duty with your friends, but no time during the week seeing them in person, which is the reality for a lot of young men these days, you're not building the same sorts of bonds that previous generations could take for granted. Absolutely. The bowling team used to get together and hurl the spheres at the pins. Great noise and all the rest of it, and it was a communal thing.

When Doom first came out, and before it was Network, my friends and I would get together and take turns playing levels. And we'd watch the other, and we would participate in that. And it's better, I guess, when it's online and networked, and it's more dynamic, and it's much more immersive than the rest of it. But you're absolutely right. At the same time, though, the emotion is genuine. Because it's a bunch of dudes who are yelling at each other and busting each other's bleeps and the rest of it. And it it's real and it's it's the way guys are but emotion outside of land parties emotion on the mediator devices on the social media is different and if you your book talks about this about how the reality of emotion that we have face to face is that we have to we have to wrap it back we or with others we we are free to let it go, and the rest of it.

It's a whole different performative thing in the real world. But online, emotion is shaped and twisted and contorted and perverted by a sort of online way of managing the discourse that has done something to emotion, that's made people, tell me if I'm wrong, made people almost wary, ashamed, cringey about actual emotion. Right. Well, it's kind of like the way when the early filters on Instagram came in and everyone's like, oh, people are going to make themselves look like, you know, robots. It's terrible. Actually, people did all, try to find an unfiltered photo on Instagram, even the ones that claim to be, you know, unfiltered still have a filter. And what has this led to? This has led to a lot of certainly young

people having unreasonable expectations of what they should look like. And when they look in an actual mirror and see their own faces unfiltered, they're sort of horrified. There's something similar that goes on with emotion right we can these these platforms reward strong human emotions fear anger anxiety they don't really reward happiness they don't reward generosity in quite the same way right because it's the more powerful human emotions that will get you coming back and yelling and screaming at people emote you know the emoticons we use the memes we send around they do all communicate a feeling. But when we're in person, we actually, it's harder to deceive each other. It's harder to be self-deceptive.

You reveal a great deal more. There's a whole unspoken language that our physical bodies, information our physical bodies give off, not using words, but simply using gestures. And when you're very young and you're learning how to read people's faces and understand that a furrowed brow could be concern. It could be anger, it could be, you know, anxiety, you learn to read others' emotions because you're staring at other human beings most of your time. Well, that's not true for people nowadays. We do a lot of stuff through filtering devices, and there have been interesting studies of lying, for example, lying through video conferencing versus lying in person versus lying over a phone conversation. And it's just much easier to fool people when you have the technological

mediation going on. And so, again, concerns for, think about AI. You could have real-time political ads being sent to people's phones that feature a candidate who maybe lacks charisma or seems a little shifty, and the AI can, real time transform their voice, their mannerisms, knowing what people respond to evolutionarily, because we're hardwired, you know, creatures, what they will respond to. So the level of manipulation that we can do also worries me down the line for trusting our own ability to read each other's intentions. And again, to the point you made earlier about social space, that's why it's important to have more look-up experiences in public space, not look-down experiences.

You even go to a museum these days, everybody's taking pictures of the art rather than just sitting there and looking at it. Trust me, that's... See, I am a scold. I know. I told you, Peter. So, Christine, I am wondering... Oh, by the way, Charlie, make a note.

All depositions take place by Zoom from now on. Exactly. So, Christine, here's what's in my little head. I'll fumble through this because it's a thought that's just occurring to me now. But I had a chat just yesterday, as it happened, with an old friend of mine, Peter Thiel. And Peter Thiel is one of these people who's a great seer of technology and trends and is constantly searching for the meaning of history. And he's so smart that he actually sort of pulls it off. And his view is that what happened with the Manhattan Project in 1945 is now being replicated in the public psyche in the following sense. Technology was good,

good, good, good, good until we produced nuclear weapons. And suddenly it became scary. Add to that the prospects. I think everyone on this podcast agrees that 90% of this is nonsense, but it's still in people's heads. Climate change. That because of our technology, we're damaging the very planet, the very air, the very environment. And now here comes this technology, the very air and very environments. And now here comes this technology, the phone, Tesla. As I understand it, Lord knows I'm not an investor at a level where I could make this kind of decision.

But as I understand it, nobody thinks Tesla is worth as much as its current market cap purely as a car company. This is a data play that Elon has constructed this environment, which knows where you travel, what telephone conversations you're having, what music you're listening to. He has created a vehicle that will capture data about tens of millions of people. And so I put it to you, Christine, that you're too cheerful. Now, this I like. No one's ever told me that. That what we need in this moment is not, Christine, cheerfully, by your sheer goodwill and cheerfulness, you imply that we make a few adjustments and we'll get through this. We need the prophet Jeremiah. We need Jonah walking through Nineveh saying, repent. This is all that we live in actually quite a dark moment.

People are actually really quite scared and somehow or other we need to pull ourselves together and somehow get a handle on our fears. And this device that we hold in our hand is more and more one of the factors that makes us frightened at some level. All right. Well, I would say, and I might say it cheerfully, but I do mean it and I do get into some trouble with my more libertarian economics colleagues at AEI. But we have to actively defend the human things. Because right now it's a phone, but eventually it'll be a sensor or a device you wear on your face or contact lens. It'll be something you wear on your physical body all the time that is much less cumbersome than holding this phone,

which we drop and stick in our pockets and, you know, lose. We have to defend the human things. And that means coming to some agreement about what are the valuable human experiences that are missing or disappearing. Face-to-face human interaction for me is the number one thing. And that means actively throughout the day making those choices. And actually in our educational institutions, in our political institutions, in our legal institutions, insisting people get to look at each other when serious moments are happening, right? Whether that's, you know, an important piece of legislation being debated, whether that's a judge handing down a sentence,

all of these things should stay human. Same with education. So we have to make those sorts of choices. But then we also need to resist the impulse to allow it. Christine, that's brilliant. That's brilliant. No, defending the human things. You can define, I mean,

if we had a candidate who had any wits about him or her, we'd be hearing that kind of comment right now. I mean, for that matter, at AEI, they can go raise $100 million to put Christine in charge of the human things initiative. Thank you. I like this.

No, truly, I think that's beautifully put. You're really on to something. Well, the challenge is then to people. The condemnation isn't of the technology per se. It's what we're choosing to alter the human things with the technology, and particularly the Silicon Valley ethos of humans are the problems that need to be fixed. I think humans are the solution to the problems we've created with some of this technology. Well, this has been absolutely marvelous.

I could go on for another two hours and I, hold on, I just got a notification. It's from Norton, the publisher. It says, Christine is under the weather, unable to make it. We are sending an AI version. Rizda. Oh! It could be me. You're as human as they come.

Thanks. Good luck with the book. The book, as everybody should run out and buy and read and love, is The Extinction of Experience, Being Human in a Disembodied World. Possibly the most relevant topic that I can think of today because it affects where we all go. In the words of Criswell, we're all interested in the future because the future is where we will spend our time. Never quoted Plan 9 from Outer Space at the end of a podcast before.

Christine, thanks an awful lot. Thank you so much. Christine, thank you. Thank you. So much to go there, you know, so much. I could just go on and on about this i with my own daughter i mean my daughter uh we communicate primarily by text these days uh you know and because she's a writer and i love the fact that i can just absolutely i can pick up this thing and and

enter a conversation that's just like this you know know, fast-paced, snapping back and forth meeting of the minds. And we wouldn't have had that. What would I have done 20, 30 years ago? You know, telegraph, carrier pigeons? Anyway. So that, yes, Charles? I left that feeling optimistic. You did?

I did. I'll tell you why. Because I do probably use my phone too much. I'm a big technophile. But I spend a lot of time in bars with people or at the beach bar with people or in restaurants with people or various homes of our friends with people. It really is Mrs. Cook who raises your children, isn't it, Charlie? No, no. She's often there, too.

She's often there, too. And it's it's you know it's a beach town and um and most of the time we spend there we are drinking wine and when i tell my doctor this i get scolded you see because i drink too much wine i do i don't drink crazy amount of wine but i I drink too much wine. So for once, for once, instead of being scolded for spending too much time in bars and restaurants and at home drinking wine, I was being told that is the human ideal, that instead of staring at my phone all of the time, I'm actually doing the right thing, which is hanging out with human beings in places, even if at the time I'm drinking fermented grapes. So I'm optimistic. I'm pleased next time my doctor, because I always answer the question, honestly, I don't know why

everyone tells me I shouldn't, but I think I should, because what's the point in going to the doctor? And she says, how many glasses of wine do you have a week? And I tell her, and then she says, well, that's too many. I'm going to say, aha, but at least I'm not a robot. At least I'm not sitting in my house on my own doing nothing. There you go. Excellent idea. And maybe it is a bit overblown too. I mean, post-corona, places that I go to on the weekends, they're packed. There's lots of people. And there are people talking.

And there are people actually having, you know, gesturing in conversations. There are people, you know, the bowling alleys are back. I mean, so the idea that we are all just these drones walking around bent with our heads crooked down is unnerving and seems to be the future. But then again, you go out into the real world and it's full of people being people and doing wonderful people things. So, yeah, I'm optimistic.

On this question of defending the things that are human, we don't have time to go into it right now. We're coming to the end, I know. But isn't one of the first battles going to be over the right to drive where you wish? Thank you. Yes. Is that not coming at us very fast? I've written a piece about this a while back, which I said we might need an amendment to the Constitution to protect this. Really?

Yeah. Charlie, forgive me. Let's just stipulate right now you write more you write faster than i can read so there will be work of yours that i've missed well i think this is coming well first off the technology is coming there are huge privacy implications because by definition the car that can drive itself is a car that has to be connected to a satellite and tracked you can't have a self-driving car without having some form of of tracking but leaving that aside it is very obviously going to be a point of contention

when self-driving cars are safer than people and here's where it's here's where it'll start it'll start in los angeles or it'll start well we were talking about new york there will be so the the the new york new jersey metropolitan Authority, the people who run the tunnels now, will say, Listen, we can see to it that there is never again a traffic jam in Manhattan. You will never again have to wait an hour to get down the Helix into the Lincoln Tunnel. We can stop at the Port Authority. That just came to me, the Port Authority, the New York, New Jersey Port Authority. But here's how we're going to do it.

People will plot in their location, plot in their destination. They'll climb into their cars. And we, the big computer in the sky, will drive them to their destination, drop them off. We'll go park the car in Queens. sky will drive them to their destination drop them off we'll go park the car in queens it'll come back to manhattan to pick them we can arrange it all but we can only do this if everyone submits to the new system right won't it take some form like that yeah but they'll also shame us i mean every single line that is used in favor of say gun control is eventually going to be used against people who choose to drive and all of the same emotional blackmail and they're going to say that the victim of a traffic accident had this bright future ahead of them and because this

sort of selfish anti-diluvian types who want to make up for their lack of manhood by driving their car themselves then it's just i could just see it coming. It's absolutely inevitable. And I have great faith in the American people to repel it, but I think they're going to have to be clever in the way they do it. Okay, more to come, or more already written in your piece in NR on this. Give me, is this

the last month or the last three years? Ten years ago, I think. Oh, really? Okay. We were talking about 15-Minute? Ten years ago, I think. Oh, really? Okay. We were talking about 15-Minute Cities a while ago. A couple of podcasts back, as a matter of fact. Charlie, you were there, I believe. I was. And there's somebody on Twitter

who said, yeah, it was interesting. They were saying Lytlex was talking about 15-Minute Cities, but then started going off into crazy talk about forbidding usage of cars during certain times and all that. No, it's not ridiculous conspiracy stuff at all. you know, forbidding usage of cars during certain times and all that. No, it's not ridiculous conspiracy stuff at all.

It's what's actually being advocated by people as a means, as Peter just said, of alleviating traffic congestion and the rest of it. And again, Charlie's right. The gun control arguments will be used. So you seriously think you should have the right to just get in your car and sit in tunnel traffic for an hour and a half? Is that really what you're defending, the right of you to just mulishly go there and sit in traffic? Cars are weapons. Yes.

It's a weapon. Yes, it is. I will defend that. Boy, that's a whole other podcast. Note to Perry, get somebody on here soon to talk about urban traffic management, because even though that sounds like a really boring thing, it's not. It ties into mass transit. And I mean, we have a mass transit system around here that people decline to use in great numbers because it has been overrun by vagrants and people who are using drugs and people who are

coming on with boom boxes and smoking odiferous weed and glaring at everybody. And because they didn't have the police or the will, or the police and the will, to send somebody through to sweep them out for nonpayment of tickets or just gross general behavior, it became untenable. And in the wintertime, of course, the people will say, well, you can't throw them off because they will freeze. And so they become rolling homeless shelters and nobody wants to use them. And we've spent billions and billions of dollars on this and will continue to do so. Speaking of transportation, though, before we leave, I understand that Peter has a question for Charlie about roller coasters.

Oh, yes, Charlie. Charlie, whom I file on X. I finally trained myself. Here we have this whole show. We've devoted an entire show to saying we spend too much time with the phone in our hands, and here I am in the closing segment saying, well, of course they follow Charlie on X. I do follow Charlie on X, and he just took a trip with a kid or all his children. I can't quite remember it, and it was a roller.

Charlie, just tell us what you were up to. It was, but no children. Luther Ray Abel, who's a fellow writer at National Review. He's only 10 years younger than me. He's not quite young enough to be my kid. I'm sorry. To me, that makes you both children. Yeah, I'd be proud of him if you were my kid.

But yeah, we took a road trip across America with the purpose of riding roller coasters. And maybe this actually is a good place to finish the podcast because we set certain rules for ourselves on this road trip. So these rules were as follows. First off, we did use only paper maps from AAA, no satellite navigation. Second, we weren't allowed to look up anywhere that we were going ahead of time.

We weren't allowed to book anywhere. We weren't allowed to book anywhere. We weren't allowed to reserve anything. Third, we weren't allowed to use any chains for lodging or food. You can't really do that with gas stations. It'd be very difficult. But we did do it with food and lodging. We were not allowed to stream anything.

So all playlists had to be compiled ahead of time or we used local radio. And in a moment of great genius from luther to add some eccentricity we wore hawaiian shirts the whole time we drove from well we were supposed to drive from new york but we ended up driving from richmond which was between where he was in new york and where i was in jacksonville because my flight got cancelled we went to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. We went up to Cedar Point, Sandusky, Ohio. Six Flags, Great America in Gurney, Illinois. Then to Chicago. Then we flew, unfortunately, because the drive was too long for

the time we had, to California. And we drove down the coast. We went to Magic Mountain in Santa Clarita. Ended up in Anaheim at Disneyland in Los Angeles, and then went home. And we rode roller coaster after roller coaster after roller coaster. It was a gonzo road trip, Peter. I loved it. How does Disneyland stand up to Disney World? Well, it's much, much, much smaller, but it still has the charm of the original 1955 park. So we had a great time. But Disney World is the size of San Francisco. I mean, it's just absolutely enormous. Favorite roller coaster? I would say either Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point.

Cedar Point is where? Give us a state. It's in Sandusky, Ohio on Lake Erie. Got it. Or Wildcats Revenge at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. Okay. And last question from me, because James is our pop culture maven, but I'm going to get this one in.

Did you feel, this is a very fast trip and you were going to theme parks, but were you still able to feel regional? What's the term everybody's using these days? Vibe shifts? Did the Midwest feel different from the East Coast? And did California still feel different from everywhere else in America? Hugely. And one of the reasons for that is that we weren't able to just stay on the freeway and go one mile east or west of it.

We had to go into towns because that's where independently owned motels and restaurants and bars and such are right and so you know you don't just feel like you're driving up 95 which is very boring you actually do see different architecture and people and cultures and hear different accents but you don't do if you just drive stop at a best western and eat at a ruby tuesdays fair enough you didn't wear animal skin prints during this whole thing i think you're no why why well it is sort of like the unfrozen caveman coming out i mean it's so archaic and it's wonderful i admire all of this and you i i wish you'd taken a 57 bel-air to do the trip i mean part of when you don't stream you have to rely on what the airways provide you when it comes to music and i'm old enough to remember driving around

and FM radio wasn't in your car yet, so you're completely dependent on what crackly AM radio station you could find. And it would mean, of course, that the hip, important music of your youth might be rare to find in the middle of a state somewhere. And so you would come across a station that was

doing the ag report at noon, hogs and barrows standing steady, followed by a swap meet. And then you might hear Whoopi John's Wilfarts polka band or something. And you hear that oompa oompa for a while until it finally faded away behind you, like you'd outrun the signal. And then you'd pick up something from the next town. And it was great. It was wonderful. And if you were on the road, you know, traveling, doing town-to-town jobs like I was back in

79 when I was an itinerant seed salesman for Northrop King, yes, you would try to find those little motels that you could get into cheap. And you realize the importance of the neon sign as an enticement. And you find, I mean, that much sign means it's probably out of my price range. This much sign means it fits in the per diem. You hope for the one where it says vacancy and that the no hasn't been illuminated. It's a whole different thing.

And the art of the motel sign is something gone, lost, abandoned. We just threw it away. And now it's nothing but a series of interchangeable corporate plates that even Holiday Inn, for God's sakes, Holiday Inn had one of the most recognizable, fantastic, googly pieces of abstract sculpture ever to dot the side of the country. The great sign of Holiday Inn.

When you look at it, it's absurd. It's got this arrow that points this way. It's got this chimney that comes up with a star at the top of it and this wonderful, unique script. And then a space for words, which is inevitably telling you that the elks are meeting there on tuesday morning it was beautiful the howard johnson uh iconography would would i mean this color this combination color of orange and turquoise which would go back to 38 39 to the world's fairs of the 30s brought into the 60s with some space-age styling and the rest of it.

The roadside architectural visual vernacular of America before the chains completely homogenized it was a thing of absolute chaotic, wonderful beauty. And we just got rid of it because the chains marched

over absolutely everything. And yes, Holiday Inn was a chain, but they still had some verve and panache when they did it. Charles, great idea. Holiday Inn was a chain, but they still had some verve and panache when they did it. Charles, great idea. This should be a movie, like Steve Coogan driving around the countryside arguing and doing impressions and the sort.

So can't wait to read that piece. Peter, can't wait to read what you are working on. What are you working on before we leave? I'm working on Digging Out. I was away. That trip to Europe lasted so long that i came back to a veritable everest of stuff i still have 30 emails to reply to i'll start working on something on monday you have 30 emails to reply to well no but 30 oh no i've weeded out the hundreds of

nonsense oh okay 30 serious 30 things i really need to think about and and maybe even draft my email box instead of having numbers just has a little infinity sign on it now. Oh, by the way, I have a correction too. Note from son Nico, who is in the Navy. And in the last podcast, I think I mouthed off about how the United States Navy has been running nuclear reactors safely for six decades. And Nico says, and why can't we study up on them when we need nuclear energy? Niko reminds me, overall valid argument, but on a naval vessel, it can move away from bad weather. Fine.

I take the correction. I salute Ensign Niko Robinson. Thank you for permitting me to correct the record. Go ahead, James. Wrap it up. Well, the number of tornado strikes in a nuclear reactor around here have been zero. Doesn't mean it's not going to happen, but I'm not particularly worried about our own one going up. I am, however, worried about the people who will listen to this podcast and not go to Apple and give us five stars. What's the matter with you? I would like

to thank everybody for listening and going to Ricochet and signing up saying, where's this place been all my life? Well, it's been waiting for you. And after 710 episodes, if you can't go and pony up and join the member side, I don't know what I can do except come back for number 711 and try it all again. It's been fun, gentlemen. Can't wait to do it next week. Have a great weekend, everybody, and we'll see you all in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, boys.