Derek Thompson on "The Anti-Social Century" (08-06-2025--Hour2)

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