Dr. Sanjay Gupta (3:11)

This comment you just made, Bill, I think you said regret about giving your daughter that device. Yes, talk to me about that. How old was she? What was the regret?

Bill Weir (3:22)

Well, she was 10 and it was really sort of a peer pressure it felt at that time. The iPhone was still relatively novel. She had had an iPad, was sort of her gateway device. And we thought it'll keep us connected to her and she can keep her Taylor Swift songs on there. And in an emergency she's got this. And we didn't realize we were basically mainlining all the worst parts of middle school into her bedroom, you know, 24, seven. And when I interviewed Tony Fadell, the engineer who helped create the ipod and then the first few iPhones, he said they noticed it before the devices were even on shelves. They could see engineers pulling them out in meetings when they wouldn't have pulled out laptops. And the power of a handheld intern device. The siren song of that was immediately evident. And he could see it then with his kids. And you hear Steve Jobs famously wouldn't let his kids use an iPad at home. He said, I told him the story about my daughter. He says, yeah, would you put a fifth of whiskey next to her bed, you know, and say, have a good night? We didn't understand it at the time. And now I have a six year old son. There's 16 years between my kids and those years. It is a gulf of filled with new information, new worries, backlash against these devices. And so the way I parent my two children, drastically different given the time and knowledge we have.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (4:45)

Whiskey, I think universally agreed upon as a bad idea to put next to your kid's bed for sure. But do people feel that way when you were reporting on this? Do people feel the same way, I mean, that strongly about these devices?

Bill Weir (4:59)

His, you know, he might have been a bit hyperbolic, but I actually met some researchers and met a woman, Emma Durden, who's been studying the screen time effects on young brains for the last few years now. And it comes down just to the power of these things. I see it in my own kids, the addictive qualities in it At a very young age especially. And when that young brain, as you know better than most, is not equipped to process these things. There's a cost to this. And I honestly, I mean, my daughter, I love her dearly, but we wrestled with screen time and I wonder how much better she'd be set up in the world if we had gone in a different direction with the device early on.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (5:39)

Do you have any conclusions on that? Because I think we have kids around the same age as, you know, Bill, I have three girls who are almost 21, 19 and 17. So, you know, if it hadn't been these devices, if it hadn't been social media, would it have been something else?

Bill Weir (5:56)

So that's the big debate, right? Is it correlation? Is it causation? You see, more and more countries are banning social media now. You know, you see the backlash in phones, both in popular culture. Concerts, more and more restaurants are phone free. You can find these havens from it. I think they're realizing the device, it's the social media piece that is winding its way through the courts. You're getting verdicts on that now, but I think that's really the most insidious. And Tony Fadell, the Apple engineer I mentioned, he used the refrigerator metaphor, which is he thinks about his iPhone like a refrigerator.

Michael Ian Black (6:31)

When I look at the iPhone, it's a refrigerator. Do you put good stuff in it? How often do you open it? Do you put lots of bad stuff in it?

Bill Weir (6:38)

You stand there with the door open grazing.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (6:40)

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Bill Weir (6:41)

Mindlessly grazing. Doom scrolling. And I'm afraid when you're young, that's the easiest temptation. I'm a lot more aware of it. I had my own social media addiction problems, to be honest, that I had to face up to at a certain point. But I think we're going to be studying this period for a long time because we're all part of this. We're all guinea pigs in this digital revolution.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (7:04)

You know, I got to tell you, I had dinner at my house a few months ago and my parents were there, as were my kids. And I remember looking around the table at one point and everybody, my parents included, they're in their 80s, were on their devices. And it made me realize that it is that alluring to brains of any age. Are they designed, and I'm talking about the devices themselves. Leaving aside social media for a second, are the devices designed to be that way? I mean, when you talk to these early engineers, they knew it, did they plan it?

Bill Weir (7:41)

I think the evolution was slow enough. Like anything in life, that they didn't really recognize it. At a certain point, they'd wake up and go, oh, my goodness, what have I created? But in the early days, there wasn't the Internet that we have today. There wasn't the bandwidth, right? So it wasn't until the app star really started broadening its library and the connectivity just got better and better and better. And some of these researchers I talked to said, if you take a month away, do a digital detox, you can take years off your brain. There's early science on this, but I was intrigued enough, went to a bar in Washington called Hush harbor, the first phone free bar in D.C. and they had a meeting of the month offline club, which is just came up with a guy who, like, at your family dinner, looked around and said, how do we get people off their phones and making more eye contact? So he put some flyers around D.C. would you spend a month offline with me? They made a commitment to use dumb phones, flip phones, and just add some friction back in our lives. And I agreed to do half a month just to taste it and really just reassess my relationship with my device. My screen time was up around six hours a day. Kids average about eight hours. Now, most adults, it's four. And you know that screen time application on the phone didn't come until 2018 come years after people had been calling for it. So at least you could see what's in your fridge and what you're eating. So, you know, a calorie counter for your brain. You can see on days where I just spent way too much time getting lost in whatever. But this breaking up with it and going back in time to alphanumeric texting and to text I love you to my wife. It takes 27 keystrokes on the old Nokia.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (9:24)

I want to hear how it was for you those two weeks, by the way.

Bill Weir (9:27)

Yeah, yeah, it was super annoying at the beginning. You get used to it like anything else. But then you realize that trickles down into other decisions I'd make through the day. It's harder to now order an Uber on this clunky phone than it is to ride a city bike or walk or I can't hide from the world in my phone the way I would with a smartphone. And so it led to conversations like with the barber. I probably would have been in my phone getting a haircut. Instead, I had amazing conversation with somebody. And then we went back and did brain tests to sort of see the comparison. By every measure, my brain had improved on a dumb phone. Obviously, there's just you need a lot more data to make conclusions. But there's a lesson in there that reading a page is like exercise. You know, reading for fun, reading a novel, which I rarely allow myself to do. Looking at a map and navigating the world the old fashioned way instead of relying on Google Maps for the same repetitive route. So this is a really interesting experiment. Just to feel like I'm using the phone again instead of it using me.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (10:36)

Could you do it longer?

Bill Weir (10:38)

I could, yeah. I could do a phone.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (10:40)

Did you feel better? Did you feel psychologically better?

Bill Weir (10:42)

I did feel my focus shift. I did and I did. I was trying to journal it and I felt the pull of just that muscle memory reaching for it. You know, you can tell through the screen time program on your phone how many times you reach for a phone throughout the day. And on average, folks, you know, it becomes over 200 times a day. And not just being able to walk by it and not look at it, you know, and not reach for it felt like a win.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (11:09)

Wow. It's 200 times a day. So that's crazy. I mean, you're waking hours presumably, so waking hours. Although people wake up in the middle of the night and probably reach for it as well.

Bill Weir (11:18)

You know, our lives are now so entwined, dependent, these devices. Dependent, Exactly.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (11:25)

Because there's a difference between dependence and addiction, which is, I think, interesting here. Addiction means you're addicted to it and you don't feel well if you don't have it. Like addiction to substances, you physiologically may not feel well, your heart rate may increase, you start to sweat, all these types of things. But dependence, because that's what they've created, you need it to get on the subway, you need it to call your Uber to do all these things. You have to have that smartphone now to do that. These are two sort of variations on the same concept here of dependence and addiction.

Bill Weir (12:00)

Absolutely. Yeah. And the dependence with every upgrade of software takes a little less friction out of your life that you're just loathe to put back. Like I suppose, any inflection point with technology where the elites who are early adapters realize the cost. And now, like in the White Lotus episode, you pay extra to hand your phones over when you go to a retreat or you pay extra to have your kids tutored in a screen free environment. What was aspirational 20 years ago is now so commonplace that everybody's, you know, dealing with this.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (12:32)

But yeah, but I do think the whole ecosystem around Apple has made us dependent on it. I'm on A Macintosh computer. I'm using an iPhone. I use all the apps to conduct my life. Now I need that phone. I just think that's interesting. And that was an ecosystem that I can't imagine that they fully imagined at the time that they created this device. But here we are.

Bill Weir (12:57)

This is how societies evolve. And a lot of people have said these newfangled books are gonna make it hard for kids to memorize, you know, back in the days before the printing press or you know, when any new technology, the Internet, comic books, pinball machines are going to rot the children's brains. We've been afraid of things along the way. I think we're at an interesting point now with AI because that is unlike any other machine we've ever made. But what was also interesting is to look sort of into the future of Apple. What's in the pipeline and what are people thinking about and if they pivot to more of the glasses, what meta has with a little pop up display when you need it, or you're going to a screen with much more deliberation as opposed to scrolling through one in your hand. That could be the future in some ways which would get rid of the screen addiction. But then that opens up a whole nother Pandora's box of having an AI assistant that you wear in your ear. You know, Jony, I've, who was Apple's legendary designer who came up with the iPhone and a lot of their devices. The watch was the last device he designed. He now works at OpenAI trying to come up with what they call, I think the working title is called the Sweet Pea. And it looks like this little silver earring that you just clip in your ear. And then if I'm having a conversation with you is I'm about to go sit down with Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I want you to feed me interesting facts about him throughout our meeting. And the device could then listen to your conversation and help you interject or, or remind you of something. And who knows what kind of world that'll be in. Who knows what that'll do to our brains if that becomes the new iPhone.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (14:39)

I think you and I are around the same age. So what you just described, does that excite you or scare you?

Bill Weir (14:48)

I'm scared by what's happening now. Not to mention that, yeah, I don't know, I'm trying to catch up with the AI wave as much as anybody else and realize it's here and we have to figure out how to, how to use it as a tool productively and not be scared of it. So, you know, I try to ground myself. Maybe it's just a symptom of getting old, but try to ground myself in the real stuff but also not lose my capacity for the wonder of these tools, too, and how incredible they can be in terms of accessing knowledge, in terms of doing our work. I think it was a French philosopher said, he who invents the ship also invents the shipwreck. And, you know, I think we're all loving where these ships have taken us and just coming to grips with those who are hurt by them, you know?

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (15:42)

Coming up, Bill's going to share more on how these devices affect our brain and what can actually help us break that addiction. Stay with us.

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Evan Ross Katz (16:24)

I'm Evan Ross Katz, your host for the Comeback official podcast. Every week I'll be joined by co creator, executive producer, writer and star Lisa Kudrow. I love being Valerie. And co creator, executive producer, writer, director and showrunner Michael Patrick King.

Bill Weir (16:38)

Here's the real tea. Go ahead.

Evan Ross Katz (16:39)

Each episode, we'll be going behind the scenes and sharing our love for Valerie Cherish. As someone who has loved this show for years, it's wild to see just how much the world has changed, changed since we last saw her.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (16:57)

You know, I've always been a technophile, and I think part of it is because of being a neurosurgeon. We use these technologies in the operating room, and I get very excited when there's new technologies that we can use. And I think that they actually make a difference, you know, in terms of how we perform our operations or take care of patients. I'll tell you what surprises me a little bit, Bill. So you mentioned the metaglasses, and I got a pair of those metaglasses and I like them. I wear them. I think they look pretty cool. They're the sort of Ray Ban wafer looking. And I got the transitional lenses. They turn into sunglasses outside. My music is in there. My phone is in there. My wife says that the audio quality when I talk to her on that versus my AirPods is even better than the AirPods. And I'll do calls, I'll interact with my AI platform. I'll do all that. You know who doesn't like it are my kids. This is what's interesting to me because if I had to imagine the Future. I would imagine a future like you were describing, where people are not staring at one of these devices all the time. It feels more frictionless. You know, it's in my ear, but you're not. My attention is seemingly not diverted away from what's in front of me, all of that sort of stuff, and yet my kids don't like it. They think it's gimmicky. My youngest daughter, now, in addition to using an iPhone, which she does, she also carries a small digital camera. And she likes that digital camera. And I say, what is it about the digital camera? The iPhone seems so much better. I just like the authenticity. I like it a little bit grainy. It's got a different vibe, a different feel. And I don't know, it's interesting to me because I think you and I sort of sit here as guys in our 50s and think, this is where the world is going. They're gonna have a silver thing in your ear, you're gonna interact with AI all. But I'm not sure our kids, despite the fact that they've grown up in this world, are necessarily going to embrace it the way that we imagine they will.

Bill Weir (18:51)

Yeah, I think the advent and now the spread of these phone free experiences, you know, where a restaurateur makes a very sort of bold choice in an age when a lot of people think you need the Instagram post in order to pump up your place of business or whatever, but somebody who creates these places where you just put your phone in a bag and what they see is a huge, huge influx of first dates and young people. And if they add something at the end, well, there's a restaurant in Charlotte actually that's booming as a result of this idea. And they give you a Polaroid photo at the end of the, you know, a tangible memento of that time in real life that now is becoming novel. So I can see that my daughter's the same way with a camera. She got a dedicated camera and, you know, meanwhile, we all have. I think the average iPhone I saw has 1500 photos on it. That's low on mine, most of which you never see again. And I don't know how you would study this, the neurology of this sort of thing, what this effect, unlike the hippocampus, like for cab drivers or something, but that ease, that lack of effort over the long haul, how that may not be best for us, you know, in the end.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (20:08)

Do other people at Apple that you interviewed sort of share Wozniak's view that the car is a Good metaphor for this. The basic design has not really changed in a long time. Is that what you were hearing from other folks as well?

Bill Weir (20:22)

Yeah, I mean, they're very secretive about anything that they have in the pipeline. You know, that goes back to Steve Jobs. But Tim Cook is very much in that mentality. And they also very much hew to the philosophy it's all about the end user experience. Instead of saying, oh, we came up with a new way to store music on a chip, how do we sell that? You know, they think truly about how do we get it perfect by the time it hits shelves. It's the best on the market so far. So that has gotten in the way of a lot of their products. They had a car for 10 years they worked on a car and they couldn't pull it off. There's been speculation, you know, of as they bridge towards the world without screens. As I said, the ipods with cameras are a little, what would look like an airtag, but a little medallion that you would wear that would have AI and a camera that you talk to. But, you know, because the computing power, until they can get that down to the size of a device, they need the cloud. And so a big part of Apple's appeal is the privacy concerns. You have a dedicated cloud, like when you go online. Unlike other companies that scrape your data and then try to sell you stuff, Apple, Google doesn't do that. They're a hardware company, so they can promise you utter privacy every time you post something. But in the age of AI, when you're asking Siri to do all this other stuff, they don't have the bandwidth for that. So there's speculation they may partner with Google and Alphabet and use some of their AI infrastructure to back up Siri. And that brings all kinds of questions about privacy and those sorts of things. But it could be that these are just prototypes that they're working on, that things have leaked out that they will never see the light of day. And in the end, this phone, this iPhone, is the moneymaker. There's two and a half billion Apple users thanks in large part to the iPhone. And I can't imagine them cannibalizing it anytime soon.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (22:19)

You talked about Olivia and river, and river's six years old now.

Bill Weir (22:24)

Yes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (22:25)

Olivia's 22. I think you said 16.

Bill Weir (22:27)

Yep.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (22:28)

So if you had to do it all over again, you just made this documentary, everything you've learned, what would you have done differently with them?

Bill Weir (22:36)

Well, the great thing is I get a do over of my young son.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (22:41)

Does he have A device of any sort, River, a tablet or anything.

Bill Weir (22:46)

We have an iPad that he thinks only works on airplanes and we don't give him the passcode. He recently figured out how to turn on the television at home and now we have to start hiding the remote. But for my daughter and all of the guidance I've gotten from the experts I spoke to, it's all about delayed first use. And if you can keep them out of that refrigerator until their late teens. Late teens, yeah. That's what I would have tried to do. There's a place out in Scottsdale, Arizona called Not My Kid. It was set up as a center to help teenagers with substance abuse. But as they saw rates of alcohol and drug abuse go down for them, their client base became screen addiction. And so they counseled teenagers who spend every waking hour in front of video games or just can't do the phone thing. The woman who runs the place, she had her son on a dumb phone until 16. He didn't get an iPhone till 17 and it still drove him into a pit of depression, suicidal ideation. They needed professional help to deal with that, and he waited until 17. So again, it comes down to the personality of the child. What's their predisposition for these sorts of things. But what I see from just having a do over with river and just seeing how insidious it is and how quickly his personality changes if he doesn't get that dopamine hit, you know, and realizing not all screen time is created equal. Sitting around watching a 90 minute film with your family and discussing the lessons learned. Hugely valuable. Way better than 90 minutes of mindless scrolling and just sort of erasing your mind's whiteboard and rewriting something every 15 seconds. That is what I'm trying to avoid for him. And as a result of that, set up his choices, set up his world in a way that makes it easy to avoid that stuff.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (24:52)

It's challenging. Look, and I think for anybody who's listening, I think you and I probably would both agree. We're not trying to be dogmatic or certainly not preachy here. The data is kind of remarkable. 40%. I'm reading this. 40% of children have their own tablet by age two. 60% have their own tablet by age four.

Bill Weir (25:13)

You see it in schools, more parents making contracts of trying to keep their kids in some sort of a digital sanity as long as they can. But it's so hard. And I'm sure there's kids out there with burners that their parents don't know about.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (25:31)

You're still an Apple guy after you made this documentary, I mean, with everything that you learned, both in terms of the last 50 years, but also the future, you're sticking with these devices?

Bill Weir (25:44)

Yeah, I mean, I have a much more complicated attitude toward the company than I did in my youth. So right after Steve Jobs died. This is an interesting story that I was such a fan back then when I was at abc, I was sort of in the JV chart of anchors when it came to big bookings. And I knew Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer were trying to get Steve Jobs. So I said, you know what? I'm going to think different. I'm going to do an end around. This is even the days before phones had selfie cameras. So I used to walk around with a sort of Panasonic camera on a tripod and make selfie videos. And I filmed a pitch to Steve Jobs. I just directly appealed to him. I'm like, listen, I know it's probably everybody tells you how much they love your stuff and all this, but I have an idea. I want to talk to you about ideas. I want to talk to you about tools about the intersection between liberal arts and design. I want to meet you at this place in Nebraska where they have all of the tools of human progress in barns and we can look at designs. And I just kind of swung for the fences, put some Bob Dylan music on it, sent it to Apple. Thirty minutes later, the head of PR called me and said, we love this. This is amazing. We're showing this to Steve.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (26:55)

Wow.

Bill Weir (26:55)

And it opened up a relationship with Apple where I was covering them, but he was too sick at that point to do any interviews. I wouldn't get that interview, sadly. But I did cover the early iPhone launches, iPad launch.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (27:06)

Is there a thesis at the end of the documentary? Is there a big takeaway that you want to people to have when they watch this documentary?

Bill Weir (27:14)

It's mostly my own takeaway, which is, one day I woke up and realized I'm living in an ecosystem created by one company. And so what I want people is just sort of reevaluate their relationships both with their devices and the people in their lives, and exploit them to bring us closer. But if they're getting in the way, take that for what it is and take a look at the people who built this stuff and how wary they were of the perils that they can deliver. Steve Wozniak doesn't use social media. He says he tried Facebook for a month and it felt addictive. And he says, I don't like being Addicted to anything. And so maybe the most important step of my two week smartphone fast is part of it is you label a chair in your house as the Internet chair. So it kind of felt like the early days of dial up modems. You sit down, you do your work, you get up and you go on with your day as opposed to throughout the day getting. Sticking your nose back in the phone. You can do all that stuff in one allotted chunk of time and then free yourself up for the beauty of boredom. Who knew, Sanjay, that staring at raindrops on the window in the backseat of the car was mindfulness in the days before smartphones. But those little moments of friction, of boredom, of human connection, I have sort of a new appreciation for those as I took a break from the phone.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (28:41)

You know, I gotta just tell you a quick anecdote. My kids went to camp, sleep away camp over the summer. And as part of that, we probably paid extra for them to put their phones away. And tell you what, Bill, they never came back happier. Yeah, I mean, it just. This is why I have some optimism about this next generation. Dealing with the shipwreck part of the ship that you were describing from that philosopher earlier. This is their lives, and I think that they, they recognize the perils of it, much like some of those early founders did. I asked my daughter, I said, doesn't that mean something to you that you're so happy when you didn't. You weren't on your phone for two or three weeks. And she, she did say something profound to me, which was, look, dad, the reason I go on my phone is because of the social part of social media. When I was at this camp, I was just surrounded by a dozen other kids just like me. We were social all the time. I didn't need the social media part of it.

Bill Weir (29:43)

Yes, yes.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (29:44)

So I think there's a lesson in there, which you're alluding to over and over again. We can get what we're attracted to through these devices in social media in other ways if we try and actually spend time with other people.

Bill Weir (29:57)

Yeah. And it turns out you don't need a middleman or an app. You don't need to hit like or subscribe when you make a friend in real life.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (30:06)

Totally. I feel like you and I should get together more often. Not absolutely. I mean, that'd be a lot of fun, man. I guarantee you. Let's go out to dinner and I promise you I won't look at this thing even once.

Bill Weir (30:20)

Okay, That's a deal.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (30:21)

That's a deal.

Bill Weir (30:23)

There's a term for what I learned. I do this all the time on Instagram. You find something you think is funny or cute or whatever that is relatable, I send it to my daughter. Right. Or I send it to your family members. It's known as pebbling, which is what penguins do to show affection. They'll bring a pebble over and lay it down at the foot of the. You know, at their mate or something like that. And I thought, oh, isn't this. I hear. I'm actually pebbling this to my. But in order to make it work, I have now made a promise for every five pebbles I have to take her out to lunch. I love it in the flesh.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (30:57)

I love that I get a lot of pebbles and so many pebbles that I don't get to actually look at the pebbles. But I'm going to start creating a little ratio here. If you do that to me. If I do that to you. We got to see each other in person. That was my conversation with my colleague and friend Bill Weir. I think this documentary is going to be pretty awesome. 50 years of Apple. It's on the Whole Story with Anderson Cooper Saturday night at 10pm where you can stream it right now on CNN All Access. You know, I gotta tell you, every time I have these conversations about devices, about social media, they make me evaluate my own screen time. And I imagine the same is true for a lot of you who are listening. So this summer, I'm going to challenge you to do something. I want us all to do this together. In fact, a little bit of digital detoxing. We're going to come up with a plan and we're going to share the details. So make sure to keep an ear out for this. I think it's something that's really going to help you. Thanks so much for listening to Chasing Life. Apple declined to talk to CNN for this documentary.

Michael Ian Black (32:13)

Tab. I got news for your ears. The podcast. I am your host, Michael Ian Black. Big episode of have I Got News for your Ears. Fan favorite Anthony Aktaminik. We're gonna be talking about. What are we gonna be talking about? The war, obviously. A little bit of Cuba. And also a little bit of Cuba Gooding Jr. Not as much. Also the ballroom, the libery. Tony's going to break out as Robert De Niro, which is surprising. Have I got News for your ears. Check us out on Apple, Amazon Music, wherever you get your podcast. Even better, you can watch the Vodcast on Spotify.