Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Gerba show Tear down this Wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C. W.
Cook.
I'm James Alex and today we talked 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 tell us that's a podcast.
My fellow New york Is 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 lives. I always knew that if I stood my ground all of.
You, that I would be a topic. Well, hi there, this is the Ricochet Podcast. And if you're wondering how many we've done, we've done seven hundred and ten. What up, No, we've done seven hundred to nine. When this is thank you, we will have done seven and there are protesting times.
Winger Cheriot is.
Peter Robinson with us again, Thank Evans and Charles A 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 are 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, to tell you there has been lightning.
Wow, to tell you there's lightning within five miles in case you're playing golf or tennis, or you're outside holding that I'm made of steel.
There's 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. We'll glad you're say, 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 and the sea.
And then she's looking at this and cooking and crocking an eyebrow, cocking an eyebrow at Well, if we followed your advice, of course we would be either a out of a house or you know, be paying Usurus insurance rates, which I understand is part of a problem. Ah difficult to ensure houses down there, and you can sort of kind of see why.
But yes, may I pile in on that very moment, at every point, I want to see what Charlie does to slap 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 eleven months a year stout conservative supporters of Rond descentis 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 objers the free market. 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, ish it. That is what we have a government for, yes,
going out and saving people in natural disasters. But now I think that the free market instinct should be universal, and there's no reason others should pay to ensure my house because I want to live near the beach. So I'm with you.
Well, right, all right, Sorry, James, that went nowhere. That was a conversational non starter. I thought I could get a rise.
Out of it.
Well, he is unflappable in English. There are some I mean in his origin story. He's an America now as much as any of us.
But so maybe like Batman.
Well, speaking of Gotham City, the mayor Eric Adams has been first mayor and one hundred and ten 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 is, 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, that's the spirit that will keep it going so that it matter know what, it doesn't matter what sort of idiot gets in, It will still continue to burn bright and throw off a bunch of money. Or is the problem that plays a lot of American city's 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 forties that we saw, that you've see in the old newsreels, the glory of I mean, I love New York.
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 reviewman, 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, where 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, 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 one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people in Manhattan who receive annual incomes every single year of well in excessive a million dollars and keep that whole town going. But for the 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 published. I visit did Scribner's Scripner's wonderful building on Fifth Avenue, which I think now is a is a Sephora makeup
shop or something of that nature. Charles Scribner the third 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 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 Boloney sandwich at lunch or something like that, and shoved them 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 at or Ken Griffin and Citadel, and you're hiring extremely braake 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 in the same way as London was the greatest city in the world one hundred
and fifty 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 thirteen fourteen 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 make 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 twenty eleven. My parents back in England still had a conception of New York as it was in the nineteen eighties and early
nineteen nineties. 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 Seapple or
San Francisco, but it's no longer true. When I lived there from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen, I worked there from twenty eleven to twenty seventeen, it was paradise and you could walk her out 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 two. Give the city safe streets and make sure as the subways run correct. That's all, that's all. And they 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 City, 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 sixty 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 nineteen twenties into the lobby of the Paramount Hotel, which has been updated since it was redone in the nineties.
It looks like there should be a copy of Madonna's sex books sitting in the lobby somewhere outside.
Take a left.
You instantly are hit by the sounds of the cacaphony, 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 Kababs, you pass the place the roama has come flowing up, the Sabarett's 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 ten blocks to the north and 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 of which I had never seen, and all of it was 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 is no better place to go.
Than New York City, which.
Brings us to our guest, Christine rot 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 our little glowing rectangles are portable.
Supercomputers are going to be able to do.
Was 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 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 the friends of friends, and we went to dinner with some europe 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 would all talk to each other and lo and behold. Even Europeans felt totally free and un self conscious 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 I don't twenty years ago that would have been unthink any place in America or Europe. I have the feeling that it has become common place. 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 life, 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 and 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 in 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 Paris. Is surprising, 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 the 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 from Christine Rosen, I could just about take it. So what 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.
Folks, have you done with your own kids? If I may, well, I listened 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, zero 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 untill they were in high school.
They were a lot.
I think they were the last kids, and again they complained bitterly about it. Now, however, they of 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 discas you serve the Nobel Prize for mother.
You know, the verdicts still out. They're only eighteen, 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 Christina, if I may, I just can't. I should remember, I just don't. Are your kids boys or you have one of each?
No, they're boys. So they're twin fraternal twin boys. And this is different than I probably would have been even more strict with social media if I had girls, honestly, because we know that it's social media, particularly in that tween in high school years.
It's much more risky for girls.
We just 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 propose?
And 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 you know, for someone to pick you up, or you have a minute between you know, the tasks at work, don't look at your phone. Let your mind wander.
Try that for twenty four hours, I think. And I forced 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. Like you might start worrying about your grocery list. That's what I did one time. But another time I had an idea for a peace 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 his facial expressions.
Yes, here's the last question. My last question. I recall reading ages and ages ago 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 twentieth 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.
Are still illiterate.
But could we're 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 addequate? Do you have the feeling that, although research is beginning to come in Abigail Schreyer's written a book, Jonathan Height'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 quantity 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, didn't we weren't raised with this stuff, but we embraced it as you know adults, and think that we have a little more savvy with it. It's the habits of mind and how quickly they formed that I think we need to think about. And the qualitative part there is really important we have. I have lots of good friends who 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 to 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 George extent, you're essentially playing anthropologists 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 said you don't necessarily know. We have this world in which the phone is at
the center. And if you look, if I pick up my phone right now, if I 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 ping ale the time, and I have Dropbox.
But what I also have is things like remote controls for the lights in my kitchen and from my Apple TV and for Sona, so 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 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 are 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. So 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 road 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 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. So 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 we couldn't put his belongings there. And he was very frustrated by this idea that the technology it's supposed to make his life easier has just made it more difficult. So in that sense, I think our overreliance 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, particular 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 so 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 could set
aside and go about our day. That 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 way 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.
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 the is the 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, oh I don't care what people here, I have nothing to hide. That attitude worries me. But there is a minority 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 turned 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 twenty four hours thinking about how often you mediate an experience, and how often you mediate experience is 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 Common. She is this woman of wonderful good will and could, but she's also a little bit of a nag, isn't it.
I am?
I am, I'm a total skold. 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 to judge Judy, that her tone of voice is actually.
A little bit more sharp and hectoring them. Then she may think it may be I would like to hear that, 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, 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 if you walked into a place and everybody was looking down at a book, you would think this is
the most literous 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 smoth. There's no communal aspect of 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. It's but it's just sort of it's like taking a leaf that may otherwise fall from the tree and disintegrate and and coding 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 would you have in your phone.
Nobody looks at them.
But you know what did they do before they would the father would take out the shimmering screen for the carousel projector the slides right, and everybody would yeah with that sort of the clicker and endures of.
Suicide would cross everyone else's mind.
Grainy coda, chromes of this or that, and it's a ship.
And oh, it's the ocean and the rest of it. And it was.
But at the same time, it was still a social, communal thing where everybody got together and participated in this projection of what 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 Swanson's and they're having a beer and it's you know, they're now 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 anti and strikes you as wrong on 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 e siderations of it fail? But yet the young men getting together in call of duty and great groups to wage cyber digital mayhem is so amazingly popular in such a bonding experience for them.
Well, the metaverse failed in part because the first avatars had no lower bodies. You remember that there were like these weird torsos that would 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 you know, 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.
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, and my needs. So what 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, mister Lylax 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 that.
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. Mark Dreesen 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 to 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 the people whose actual physical reality is nuts or bad. And so he says, Oh, I know people will 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 her. 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 a great noise, and all the rest of it news 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 we would take and we watch the other and we would participate in that. And it's better, I guess, when it's online a network, 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 believes and the rest of it. And it's real and it's the way guys are. But emotion outside of land parties, emotion on the mediator devices, on the social media is different. And your book talks about this, about how the reality of emotion that we have face to face is we have to wrap it back we or with others 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 is 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 weary, ashamed, cringey about actual emotion.
Right well there.
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. 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 furrow 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've been interesting studies of lying, for example, lying through video conferencing versus lying in person versus lying over phone conversation. And it's just much easier to fool people when you have the technological mediation going on.
And so again concerns for you. 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 in 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 be look have more look up experiences in public space, not look down experiences.
You to even go to a museum these.
Days, everybody's taking pictures of the art rather than just sitting there and looking at it for me nuts, See, I am a scoldin 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. This is 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 tele And Peter Teel is one of these people who's a great seer of technology and trends and 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 nineteen forty five is now being replicated and in public psyche in the following sense, technology was good, good, good, good good until we produce nuclear weapons and suddenly it became scary.
Add to that the prospects.
I think everyone on this podcast agrees that ninety percent 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 that we are at, 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 that no one's ever told me.
That that what we need in this moment is not Christine, cheerfully by your by your by your sheer, goodwill and cheerfulness. You imply that we make a few adjustments and we'll get through this.
We need we need.
The prophet Jeremiah. We need Jonah walking through nineveh saying repent. This is all that that we live in. It actually at 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 one of the factors that makes us frightened in some at some level.
All right, well, I would, I would say, and I might say it cheerfully, but I do mean it, and I and I do get into some trouble with my more libertarian economics.
Colleagues at AI.
But we have to actively defend the human things because right now it's a phone, but eventually it'll be a censor 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 they 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 these poles to allow it.
Brilliant, that's brilliant. No, defending the human things you can divide. 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 one hundred million dollars to put Christine in charge of the Human Things initiative. But I like this, But no, I truly, truly, I think you really that's beautifully put.
You're really onto something.
Well, that's the challenge is then, to people is not it's 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 well I just got a notification. It's uh from Norton, the publisher. It says Christine is under the weather, unable to make it. Can we are sending an AI version?
Riz up.
Oh it could be.
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 Kriswell, we are all interested in the future because the future.
Is where we will spend our time.
Never quoted Plan nine from Outer Space at the end of a podcast before Christine.
Thanks an awful lot.
Thank 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. We communicate primarily by text these days, 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 enter a commerce It's just like this, you know, fast paced snapping back and forth, meeting of the minds. And we wouldn't have had that. What what I would
have done twenty thirty years ago? Telegraph carry your pigeons anyway, So that yes, 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 technofile, but I spend a lot of time in bars with people, or at the beach bar with people, or in restaurants with people, or at various homes of our friends with people.
It really is missus cook who raises your children, isn't it, Charlie.
No, No, she's often there too often, and it's you know, it's a beach town. 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.
I do.
I don't drink crazy amount of wine, but 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 and place 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 going to the doctor and she says, how many glass of wine you have a week? And I tell her and then she says, well, it's too many. I'm going to say, ah, but 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 in the weekends and they are 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 cript down is unnerving
and seems to be the future. But then again, you go out into the real world and it's full full of people being people and doing wonderful people things.
So yeah, man, 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 because really, yeah, because I Charlie, I 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.
It's coming. Well, first off, the technology is coming. They are huge privacy implications because by definition, the car that can drive itself is a card that has to be connected to a satellite and tracked. You can't have a self driving car without having some form 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 the New.
York New Jersey Metropolitan Transportation 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 and New Jersey Port Authority. But here's how we're going to do it.
Yeah.
People will plot in their location or the 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. 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 that 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 black mail, and they're going to say that the victim of a traffic accident had this bright future ahead of them. And because there's sort of selfish, anti Deiluvian 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 a r on this, So give me is this than the last month of the last three years or Weland didn't I think?
Oh really, Okay, we were talking about fifteen minute cities a while ago, a couple of podcasts back. As a matter of fact, Charlie, you were there, I believe it was, And there's somebody on Twitter said, yeah, it was interesting. There were saying Loto was talking about fifteen minute cities, but then started going off into crazy talk about, you know, forbidding usage of cars during certain times and all that. I wanted to No, it's it's not ridiculous conspiracy stuff
at all. So it's actually being advocated by people as it 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 rights 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.
Cause of weapons?
Yes, weapon, Yes it is. I will defend that.
Boy.
That's a whole other note to Perry. Get somebody on here soon to talk about urban traffic management, because even
though that's not a really boring thing, it's fascinating. It ties into the 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 boomboxes and smoking odoriferous 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 non payment
of tickets or just gross general behavior. They became untenable, and in the winter time, 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 a closing segment saying, well, of course they followed 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 ten years younger than me. He's not quite young enough to be my kid.
Oh sorry to me. That makes you both children.
Yeah, i'd be proud of him if you're 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 far as First off, we did use only paper maps from TRIPAA, 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 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 Lutha, 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 canceled. We went to Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. We went up to see the 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 it was a gonzo road trip. Peter, I loved it.
How does disney Land stand up to disney World.
Well, it's much, much, much smaller, but it still has a charm of the original nineteen fifty five parks. So we had a great time. But disney World is the size of San Francisco. I mean, it's just absolutely enormous.
Is the favorite roller coaster?
I would say either Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point or give us a stage. It's in Sandusky, Ohio.
Got it, got it all 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?
Were you still able to feel regional? It'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 to 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
ninety five, 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 the best Western and eat It's ruby Tuesdays.
Fair enough.
You didn't wear animal skin prints during this whole thing any curve?
No?
Why?
Why?
Well, it's sort of like the underfrozen Caveman coming out. I mean, it's so archaic and it's wonderful. I admire all of this, and I wish you'd taken a fifty seven belair 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 not you know, FM radio wasn't in your car yet, so you're completely dependent on what correctly them radio station you can 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 the station that was doing the you know, the the agg report at noon, hogs and barrels standing steady, followed by a swap meet, and then you might hear woofy John's whoopy John's will Fard's polka band or something, and you hear that upa 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 totown jobs like I was back in seventy nine when I was an itinerant seed salesman for North of king Yes, you would try to find those little motels that you could get into cheap, and you realize the importance of the ne unsigned 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's his 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, bandoned.
We just threw it away and now it's nothing but a series of interchangeable corporate plates that even Holiday Inn, for God's sake, Holiday Inn had one of the most recognizable, fantastic googie 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 iconography. Would I mean this color of this combination color of orange and turquoise, which would go back to thirty eight, thirty nine, to the World's Fairs of the thirties, brought into the sixties 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. Andy s Holiday Inn was a chain, but they still had some verb and pash when they did it. Charles, great idea, This should be a movie, like you know, like Steve Coogan driving around the countryside, arguing and doing impressions in the sort. So you 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 thirty emails to reply to. I'll start working on something on Mondays. Thirty emails to reply to. Well, no but thirty, Oh no, no, I've weeded out the hundreds of nonsense.
Oh okay, thirty things I.
Really need to think about and maybe even drag it replies.
To for us.
My email box, instead of having numbers, just has a little infinity sign on it.
Now.
Oh, by the way, I have a correction to a note from Sun Nico, who is in the Navy, and in the last podcast, I think I'm 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? Nico 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 Nico Robinson, thank you
for permitting me to correct the record. Go ahead, James, wrap it up.
While the number of tornado strikes and a nuclear reactor around here at ben 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 up saying where's this place been all my life? Well, it's been waiting for you. And after seven hundred and ten episodes, if you can't go and phone me up and join the member side, I don't know what I can do except come.
Back for number seven eleven 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 four point zero next week. Boys,