The Karol Markowicz Show: Navigating Media Criticism with Drew Holden

you take questions. My daughter is sixteen, a junior in high school, and while she has friends that she sees in school, her calendar is completely open. She never has plans on the weekends or after school. She's mostly in her room and she seems lonely. What's interesting is that when I talk to friends, they say their kids also never see their friends outside of school. Is this normal?

What do you suggest mean to say? These kids are having a completely different experience than I had as a teenager. I'd get home, spend five seconds doing my homework, and I'd be out the door to hang out with friends. It really has changed. I see that in the teenagers around me as well. I don't want to say the obvious social media destroyed our real life relationships, because while I think that plays a role, I don't think that's

the whole story. And as I've written before, and I think I talked about on here, these teenagers are barely using social media anymore. They're really just watching TV on their phones, like they're not socializing. They're not commenting in each other's walls, they're not posting pictures, they're watching little videos and it's the equivalent of coming home from school and just sitting in front of the TV. But I

also don't think that's the whole story. My mind also went to college prep for juniors, SATs and all that, but I very clearly remember hanging out with my friends in high school, even when we were studying for the SAT. So what has changed? I do think it's our phones again, in part, not social media specifically, but just the fact that our teens are in touch with their friends all the time and don't actually have to see them to

have a connection. That's a huge change from our childhoods Putting aside that we didn't have, you know, cell phones with us all the time. I couldn't spend the afternoon on the phone my best friend. It just I would be tying up the house phone line. Even when I got my own line, which was a big, big deal, It's hard to imagine that our phone calls wouldn't be

planned to see each other. My advice, more than anything else, and not just about this, but about a lot of problems that kids have, is to help your kids find community. That is really not easy to do, and I have struggled with this at different points in my life. You want to have kind of a built in people that you and your kids spend time with. Yes, that's not always the way it works out. Your kids could easily also hit their teens and not be interested in the

community you fostered. I've seen that happen, but I still think that step one, what are you doing on the weekends? Are you seeing friends? You get together with friends who have kids your kids age, and you do something together, and that fosters a connection you probably have to host. It will take effort. The other thing is to encourage your kids into activities where they will see their friends.

I am a free range parent, I really am, and I get the argument that not every minute of the kid's day needs to be planned and scheduled, and they should just hang out together and just do nothing and kick rocks around. I agree, but that's not what the other kids are doing. A few years ago, I wrote that at a certain age, my kids at the playground would be the only kids there that age, because everybody else would be in after school activities or doing sports

or something. It's also less awkward than making plans to have activities that they just go to. What do their friends do after school or on weekends? Motivate your kids towards that. I also think that every group of friends needs a cruise director who organizes them. Some group of friends don't have that, and I think that makes it a lot tougher to hang out. You can encourage your daughter to be the one to organize stuff a dinner, bowling,

really anything. I wrote about teenage loneliness and the jump and depression a few years ago for The Post, I wrote, the lives of our modern youth should be pretty good. They have all the information in the world on devices they carry in their pockets. They have plenty of opportunities to make friends instantaneously, something the older generation finds increasingly difficult, and notwithstanding with the insurgent Democratic socialists to keep telling

us this is a time of unparalleled prosperity. The unemployment rate is four percent. Most American families enjoy conveniences that would have been unthinkable to most human generations across across most of history. Life should be grand, but perhaps those very conveniences are the source of youth anguish. Well, the prosperity has decreased a bit since I wrote that, But the point stands, our kids have all these possibilities, but they don't always know how to capture them. We help

our kids with so many things. I think teaching them how to socialize, especially since they have a phone standing in the way, is something parents should just definitely do. We need to teach our kids how to make friends, how to make plans, all of that before we send them off into the world and have them do it for themselves. And yes, you might think that sixteen is a little old to be doing that, but if the alternative is your kids sitting home alone, maybe step in

and help. I'd love your questions and comments at Carol Maarkowitz Show at gmail dot com. That's ka rl mr kow Icz Show at gmail dot com. Coming up after the break my interview with Drew Holden, but first, with daylight savings behind us crime rates tend to rise. You've heard us talk about the Saber home defense launchers, the ultimate choice for protecting what matters. But did you know Saber also offers a full line of on the go pepper sprays, gels and stun guns backed by Saber's maximum

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comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team. He was a firebrand in general. But I always kind of thought, like, you know, when people died, they died, right, yeah, hould them up in kind of a charitable light, or at least not a not an overly critical light. And every single headline I went through just trash Iynus and thrashed Iynus. And I thought, man, who is who is someone who

we could both look at and say, this person is worse? Right, setting aside politics, setting aside, you know, all the issues of the day. Who could be worse? And so I went through and found a couple of terrorists, right, so how By Dottie was one of them, and then there were a couple others. Sky put yeah exactly, And so I put them side by side on Twitter. I was

using Twitter very rarely. I get into to kind of keep tabs on the news, and I put them side by side, same outlets, same headlines, and it for whatever I had like maybe twelve hundred followers or something, and

it just it blew up I had. I had all of this engagement, and all these people were really to me, I think there's something here, And I think what what kind of occurred to me is even in this kind of silly sort of example, it's very obvious to people when you put these things side by side that something doesn't have that's something here is a miss right. And I didn't think anyone was doing that, or at least wasn't. They didn't have as many screenshots in their phones as

I did. Right even before that, I would see these things. I'm just kind of I guess I'm I'm kind of a hoarder or maybe a clutter shot. I yeah, I have. I had to clear up some space before I joined this podcast actually because I just have too many screenshots.

I could do not have too many screenshots on my phone, and so I thought, I was like, I think there's something here, right, And this was you know, this is this was the you know, during Trump's time in office, right, the media I think was having a moment.

It's not just like a policy fight or something where I have a disagreement with someone the press, as much as I may malign them, you know, in terms of the way that they cover certain things, I think is a noble enough institution where the idea, in most cases, of getting in a shooting war with this random guy on Twitter probably doesn't appeal to the sensibilities of most people.

I did one time, the only time that sticks out to me when I actually faced like real meaningful pushback, was an editor at the Washington Post, and one of my threads that I did probably four years ago now commented and disputed the way I had categorized a piece because I called it news and she said it was actually analysis. And to me, all question does is highlight the problem with news analysis as built by places like

the Arty to Post. Right, If you're saying it is analysis as something distinct from news, why is analysis categorizing your news pieces? Right?

was going on. And you, my then girlfriend now fiance, had pushed me a lot to say, you should go see a neurologist, like it's it's not normal that you can't wake up without taking etc. Before you go to work to be able to get out of bed. Like this,

I get. You don't love doctors, you don't love hospitals, which admittedly I didn't, and so I just kind of bit the bullet and tried to be a man, be tough and YadA, YadA, YadA, and so I pushed it off I pushed it off, and then eventually, I, you know, the headaches got worse, the symptoms got worse, and I told her, you know, mostly to kind of like, you know, address her concerns and address my mother's concerns and plenty of other you know, people in my life I talked to.

I was like, okay, I'll go to the eye doctor. Right the eye dot. Maybe it's an issue in my contacts. We'll see, We'll see how it plays up. So I go to an eye doctor as a new one. God blessed me. He did a really excellent job, and I told him I've been having these headaches. So he took a look behind my eye and the are kind of lighthearted,

banter dropped. He gave me more specific instructions to look this way, look that way, and then eventually he flipped around the screen he was looking at, which is a picture, and he said, you're hemorrhaging around your own nerves. Said He's like, you need to go to see a doctor, like you need to go to the hospital yesterday about this. There's there's something very wrong. I didn't know anything about the healthcare system. I was like, can you write me a can you write me a script or referral so

I can go. He goes wait in the waiting room. This might be over dramatic, but I'm going to call you an ambulance and they're going to take you to Astor. And he's like, doctor, but you know that doesn't make sense. But it's like, here, I haven't paid enough attention to the people who probably know better on this than I do. Why didn't I just sit down and shut up for like the first time probably in my medical history. And so flash forward. I go to the doctor. They realized

that I was indeed emerging around my optic nerve. The reason was that I wasn't reabsorbing cerebro spinal fluid back into my brain, and so it was building up in the back of my head and putting pressure on my optic nerve. They recommended surgery, which went as well as you could have hoped. I had basically a burhole drilled in my brain to at least the pressure and thought that would be everything. That was in maybe May of twenty twenty two, and so I thought, Okay, we're set,

We're done. I had this brain surgery really weird, but you know I was I was back in the gym. I was getting ready to go back to work. I was running and I went in for my thirty follow out to that surgery and surgeon neurosurgeon who done surgery originally called me and he said, hey, we do and there's a ship. It turns out that shoto that was a brain tumor.

through what chemo would look like. I had a port put into my chest so I could have an IV line straight through there, and then I did probably four months of chemotherapy, which you know, thank god, it worked and my body was super responsive to the chemo. The tour was super responsive to the chemo, and my body actually handled it quite well relative to you know, the horror stories you hear about chemo and then I started radiation. I did that for about two months and that also

worked really well. By the end of it, I was declared cancer free. So as of now a year in a remission, uh those signs of tumor, no signs of cancer. I still get to go back and get check ups. You know, there's still a lot I'm working on. I had to go through physical therapy to kind of figure out how best to walk normally. Again, my extemporaneous ability to kind of speak off the cuff isn't what it

once was. But I'm I think I'm back around a year later to a point where most of my intellectual and balanced shortcomings are my own, as opposed to be induced by the cancer, which I'm fably fortunate to.

really responsive to chemo, and thankfully it was. But I I did find considering those things that it helped me a lot, and I think probably helped the people around me to be able to talk about it in a way that was a little more lighthearted. Right and particularly now that it's a little bit further in the rear view mirror. I'll never be out of the rear view mirror, but now that's a little bit further downfield. I kind of have an arsenal of new jokes that I use

because I want to. I don't want it to mean anyone else who's in similar circumstances. But I got to say, as someone who talks too much, the idea that I had a brain tumor maybe informing some of my terrible opinions is like really easy fodder, right like right, yeah, And this is why I don't want to say I'm

disappointed that I don't have more haters. But one of the things I always think about is one of these days, I'm going to say something really dumb and someone's going to use this as a cudgel, and I'd rather going to get try and get ahead of that. The Internet's a mean place. I might as well get ahead of that, and the best way I can.

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I'm Catholic, and so I look at it almost as like a physical penance that like you know, if I haven't been eating well during the week, I haven't been working out as often as I should, at least I can kind of grab my running cat of nine tails and go for it once a week and push myself to do it. And so I saw after, you know, after I finished treatment, I was like, okay, I want to get back to running a five k, right, I

want to get back to running a little bit. I want my one of my goals as I'm going through physical therapy to be I want to run a five k and do it out in public and be able to have the little metal at the end of it and say, look, I did this thing right. It's a little it's like a gold star on my refrigerator kind of thing. And so I did that and it went better than I expected. And so I ran another five k and then I ran a ten k, which is about six miles, probably three months ago or so. And

after the ten k, I felt really good. You know, I know I'm saying I want to breakfast and yeah, and I said to myself, I was like, you know what, you've been talking with this Army ten for eight years. Every year and new excuse, I tweaked the cav the first year, and obviously that the brain tumor.

be very grateful if you knew the future. And so I signed up for the Army ten mile or I got up to about nine miles before, so I had some degree of confidence I could do it. The race was a week and a half ago, and I did it. I ran the whole race. I ran it slowly, but I ran it faster than any ten mile run I've ever done. I beat my pre cancer time by fifteen

seconds a mile. It's amazing, which felt almost like exercising a demon A little bit right to be able to say like, Okay, I may never fully be back from this cancer experience, but I was able to do this thing and that feels really good. Yeah, And I think far more importantly what I did as part of the run was I raised some money. And so I'm familiar with a charity called Undue Medical Debts. Some of your

listeners may be familiar with it. They buy up medical debt that people have that is a burden over their heads that some studies put the amount of medical debt, which is money that people owe publicly or privately because of the care that they need. Something like forty percent of Americans based on some survey, have medical debt. Wow. I was really fortunate during my experience to have really

excellent insurance, and so I don't have medical debt. But I remember looking at the price tag on the original brain surgery, and I wouldn't have had six figures to shell out if I didn't have insurance, or if I didn't have really excellent insurance, right, And so it it struck me that there are millions and millions of people living under this burden, that it's them from making the financial decisions they want to, from owning a home, from

putting their kids through college, right from buying groceries for some people, and so undo medical debt what they do is they buy up that debt so that they can then privately forgive it rather than try and go through the government or anything, which I think is a super noble and super important effort.

find it. Or you can donate directly to undo medical Debt there at undomedical Debt dot com.

I've had a lot of people since I shared my story who have come who have called me or texted me or come up to me and said, hey, like, I'm having these dizzyness issues, like I have trouble with light, Like what do you think? And so I think trying to be more attenuated to those needs, both my own certainly, but in my friends and family and loved ones as well.

And I think this is probably because you know, the downstream implications of the metod the healthcare system in this country are deeply problematic in many ways, but I think the logistics stress me out in a way that they

didn't before. I think, like the you've got to be like for radiation, So I did radiation every morning at six thirty for like two months, and if I missed a slot of radiation like their books solid right, and it would be it would be a huge impediment to my ability to recover, and so I think they're like, I'm much more punctual on the backside of this thing. But I think as a thing that leads to the punctuality is that I worry a lot more about logistics

and time details. Some of that's healthy, maybe maybe some of it not so much.

symptoms that I had. I think there's obviously a lesson there about like listen to your body and more set particularly for men. I think there's also the reality for men that our desires to ourselves or to the world that were so tough that we don't need help, particularly help from loving and caring women, is often misguided and should be the sort of thing that we we don't entangle with a manliness because I just don't think that's right and it doesn't help anyone.

it right, and I think men are less likely. But again, it doesn't always work out that way because I am the absolute worst at it.

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your family, your friends, your spouse, your significant other. You know. I think it's It can feel a little bit trite, but when when you are presented with a kind of a moment of impending mortality, it's really easy to say, oh, I should have spent my time better. I get a little flash of that, I think from my experience, and I think one of the things that I try and do as someone who admittedly still spends way too much time online, right, one of the reasons I can have

these screenshots exactly. One of the reasons I have all these screenshots is I spend too much time reading things. But I think I would encourage folks to find a healthier balance, and particularly when you're spending time with that significant other, with your spouse, make that meaningful quality time. Don't make that Twitter time or Twitter time together. Yes, and what that means and what that looks like can be all sorts of different things, but prioritize that cherish that.