A (2:25)

I knew the world had changed this summer when walking in Riverside park in New York, I came upon a vendor selling water. It was like 100 degrees out and there was this vendor selling water at a stand. And you paid him with Venmo. A vendor, a street vendor in a New York City park had that little thing you can take a picture of to open up your Venmo and pay them the $2 QR code.

C (2:58)

John. It's a QR code.

A (3:00)

A thingy. It's a thingy. It's a virtual thingy. Thingy thank you. Anyway, so that was like. So that's not even checks, right? That's not even that. That is literally the literal substitution of cash for everything going entirely symbolic.

D (3:20)

What am I. John has a really funny bit about how quickly it changed, though, because he talks about it having changed between the time that he went into rehab and got out of rehab. Because when he went into rehab, if you used Venmo, it wasn't for legitimate enterprises. And he said that when they, when he came out of rehab, it was like, why is everybody on our app?

C (3:46)

It has been laundered. Yes, exactly.

A (3:48)

But, you know, okay, but we're starting

C (3:50)

to sound like the Statler and Waldorf podcast. Like we.

A (3:53)

No, no, no, no. It's all better is my point. You know, one of my favorite books about American history, John Steel Gordon's An Empire of Wealth, describes the incredible transformation in the early 19th century when the society moved from being a kind of barter economy or a physical like entirely non symbolic to the idea of paper. And you know, this was one of the great populist, non populist divides that Andrew Jackson, the first populist, could not get his mind around the idea that a piece of paper could stand for value. He was, he was not, he was a very brilliant man in his own way and a very, you know, sophisticated politician. But that, this idea that you, that you could have a symbolic represent representation of value rather than giving somebody something actual for something actual was beyond the ken, in some ways of one of the leading figures on the planet Earth in 1820, whatever, and that, or 1829, whatever, and then. And that just seven or eight years later, you know, we had the modern economy fully in bloom and Venmo and all this stuff works because it's better, right? I mean, a fish into your pocket for $1.75, well,

C (5:27)

it's easier to survey as well. I mean, one argument for cash payments or barter payments is that there's no record. You can have an exchange of goods without any record. And so CA actually has become a suspicious form of currency in certain realms. You have to, you can't do transactions in cash in many cases. And I mean, I, I actually think the barter, the barter economy still exists, but it is much more trust based. I have sort of barter relationships with a few people I do business with and it's like I help them with something and they help me with something, and it's all. But it's all trust based relationships, which I think that's where Venmo Serves as the conduit for trust making now. And I think that's fine as far as it goes, but it also serves as a platform for much more heavy surveillance of everyone's transactions overall.

D (6:15)

Yeah, we, we have tipped Garage Parkers with Venmo.

A (6:19)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

D (6:23)

Just don't care a certain amount of cash on you. But the really helpful developments have also been in the fact that you can get what is essentially a sort of debit card for someone who doesn't have a bank account. And so I can, you know, my kids can go to the pizza shop on their own because they have these cards now where I transfer money to the card and it's just, it's just a debit card. I mean, it's almost like a gift card, except it's just not to a specific place. It's a debit card just like anything else. But it works, you know, like a gift card would, would work. And, you know, they could go and I, and I get notices, you know, when.

A (7:02)

Yeah. And gives you a full accounting of what they're like when we got $15 a week in, in, in, you know, an allowance. You could spend the entire thing the first day on candy or on baseball cards or something. And then you have like six days to go without any money. And now, you know, you put the money in, you actually can see every transaction for your kids. And if they start going, you know, a little crazy, you can say, sorry, you know, I'm not going to give you any more money until you promise not to do X, Y or Z. That hasn't happened with my kids, but I know it's happened with other people's kids. Anyway, I have no idea how we got on this, but yes, we are Stadler and Waldorf.

C (7:46)

You.

A (7:46)

You are not. I.

D (7:47)

Look, it was the 2025. 2026.

A (7:51)

Oh, that was. Yes. Anyway,

B (7:56)

can I just. I just have to say something. I remember savings account books.

A (8:02)

Oh, yeah.

B (8:02)

I mean that, I mean, no, I didn't. There's got to be the last one of those to have been issued. God knows when that was, but you know, I have a checkbook laying around.

A (8:14)

But that's an interesting part of the, of the transition over time. Stuff like there is this very interesting. If you think about it, it kind of breaks your heart. You never know when was the last time you picked up your child, you know, the kid that you've spent your years carrying around. And then there's some point at which you stop carrying your child, but there's no fixed point in Time. It's okay, it's your eighth birthday. I will never carry you again. Or you know, this is it. Just there's a moment at which you realize you stop picking your kid up and you will never pick your kid up again. And similarly with something like a bank book, like the bank book with the savings account, you went into the bank, you gave them money, they fed the thing into a little machine and spat out a little line where it added up or took out. If you took money out of your savings and then that went away. But God knows, I'm sure you can find it somewhere that some, that some bank stopped issuing the last bank stopped issuing the.

C (9:18)

You know. But it is that the ephemerality of the way currency works now. You know that it is all digital, super convenient as you say. But it, it's, I've noted noticed that financial advisors, people who try to teach people how to teach their children about the value of money are going old school in some cases. And I actually did this with my kids when they were young where they have you give them like envelopes or jars and you actually deal in cash with them and you're okay if your allowance is say 10 bucks a week. You have to, you could you have some to spend, some to save and some to give to charity. And you give them these three options and then they divvy it up based on their choices and they sort of learn what money because it's tangible, they have like dollar bills in their hands and they have to drop them in the envelope or the jar. And that, I mean if you look at the rising rates of consumer debt in the particularly credit card debt in this country, I, you, you can track it with the rise of the use of these non tangible ways of paying because it doesn't feel real. I mean I remember the first. I didn't get a credit card until I was a graduate student. I had to borrow some credit to afford the books that I had to buy one semester. And I remember walking around feeling like I'm in debt. I mean there was probably 300 bucks on that card that I had to carry from one month to the next before I could pay it off. But this burdensome feeling of debt and how unreal it felt to slap down a. I mean that was actually a new experience. And I think I do worry a little bit about younger generations not having that sense of tangible money leaving their body and being given to someone else, never to be returned again. Because it's all much more abstracted.

A (10:53)

There's no question that what you describe making something tangible is something that is very helpful to kids who then can very easily make the leap from the actual to the symbolic or the representational. However you want to describe money that doesn't really have physical form and simply exists in this nether region of, of, of transaction. But at the same time, when you live in a world in which I mean credit and debt, they're, they're, they're one of the horrors of the moment or the things that most frightening is not that ordinary people will like, fail to understand the value of something, but that people will not understand how easy it is to ruin their lives. I'm sort of thinking about like online gambling or that sort of thing. Like when one of my kids many years ago discovered that they were able, because of some reason or other, to buy tokens in an online game that I had failed to put the block in on. And that, you know, one day I get on my credit card like a 200 bill for subway surfers, $3,000. Kind of like, kind of like that. It was my fault in the sense that they just clicked on something and it went through because I hadn't put in a fail safe or I had neglected to pay attention to what it was that I was doing. And that to me is a sort of like an example of what can happen with people and, and the ways in which people whose purpose is to separate people from money through the dopamine game, through the, you know, the rush, the. The thoughtless rush game can do it in uniquely easy fashion for them. You know, the thing about the online gambling stuff that is so frightening and that Charles Fein Lehman writes about so well and all that is it used to be something you had to go to do physically. So at the very least, there were these moments. There was an hour, there were five out being on a plane to Vegas, whatever, you know, going to an otb, going to a horse track, something like that, where your conscience or something, or whatever tripwire is in you or your friends. Or your friends. Exactly.

D (13:32)

It was a. So there was a social activity as well that you were around. People who much like drinking too much or something like that. You had people who were often keeping an eye on each other.

A (13:42)

No, exactly. Obviously people have, you know, people were gambling addicts and lost fortunes and, you know, ruined their lives at horse tracks. I'm not saying that it's not like that didn't happen, but that there were these moments along the way that simply intruded because of the inconvenience or the, the fact that you had to go to physical lengths to get somewhere to do this. And now you can go on DraftKings and do X. And you know,

C (14:11)

I'm going to sound like a dark enlightenment person, which I'm not. But there, there's, this is the dark side of the extreme knowledge leaps we've made in, in recent generations about how the brain works and respond to incentives. Because there, there's a wonderful book written years ago called Addiction by Design by a sociologist named Natasha Dao Shul. She studied machine gambling, that first wave of machine when, when the slots actually became computerized and what that, how they were designed to really keep people focused. And we know before that obviously casinos themselves are designed without windows, without clocks to kind of keep you disoriented. But now the, the level of sophistication of some of these mobile gambling apps is another order higher of addictive design choices. So I think that's where we don't really have, you know, it takes us a while to evolve and adapt and we're still, we're still adapting to the casino world. If you walk into a casino, to say nothing of this kind of mobile, mobile betting, look, you know, you carry

A (15:09)

a lot of responsibility in your household. If something happens to you, there are real consequences, like a mortgage that needs to be paid, tuition that needs to be paid. Everyday bills don't just disappear. Thinking about that used to feel overwhelming for me, but taking steps to protect my family financially changed that. And that's why you should consider getting life insurance through Ethos, which makes getting life insurance fast and easy 100%. Online, you can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, get same day of coverage. There's no medical exam. You just answer a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage, some policies as low as $30 a month. As of March 2025, Business Insider named Ethos the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider with 4.8 out of 5 stars on Trustpilot and over 3,000 reviews. So protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Now by going to ethos.com commentary in as little as 10 minutes, you can get your free quote and up to $3,000,000 in coverage at ethos.com that is E T H O S.com commentary ethos.com commentary application times and rates may vary. Let's talk about aura frames. So I have an aura frame in the middle of my living room, and last night I glanced up at it and there I saw a photograph, actually two photographs split in half because Aura does that for you. It sort of seems to understand what photos are related to each other and will kind of edit them for you to put them together in the frame. And there was a picture of my late mother and my late sister Rachel, side by side. And I was of course, very moved and pleased and touched to have this memory placed right in front of me in my living room for me to experience almost unexpectedly. And that is one of the great gifts that Aura Frames can offer. This is a wonderful, beautiful piece of living room, bedroom, whatever. I wouldn't call it furniture, but it's literally a photo frame. And you download your photos through an app, as many as you want, in whatever order you want, in whatever way you want, and they can provide you with all kinds of unexpected joys and pleasures. There is free unlimited storage, so you can add as many photos and videos as you want. You can add them from anywhere, anytime using the app. If you want to give it as a gift, it comes in a gift box included. You can personalize the gift with a message before it arrives. And if you download the app yourself, you can text photos straight to the frame or to your, the person whose frame, whom you're giving it to as a, as a, as a present. So that's Aura Frames, the perfect gift anytime. Named number one by Wirecutter. You can save on this perfect gift by visiting auraframes.com for a limited time. Listeners can get $35 off their best selling Carver mat frame with code commentary. That's a U R A frames.com promo code commentary. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. I mean, we are, we are in the midst of this trial. Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are on trial because they didn't settle with this woman and her kid. She claimed her kid committed suicide because of the addictive qualities of social media that Meta knowingly knew.

C (18:55)

Well, the, the trial in California is, is someone who claim. Is claiming harm.

A (19:00)

Harm. I'm sorry, right. Yeah.

C (19:02)

The suicide was a character AI A sort of.

A (19:05)

Right, I'm sorry. Right. So. So it's a tort because the claim is harm. And the harm is that they, this person became a kind of dopamine robot controlled by Meta.

C (19:20)

Well, that the platform knowingly designed an addictive technology targeting children and knew it was harmful and yet continued to market it loud.

A (19:29)

We have this and, and you know, a bunch of other media, social media companies settled rather than have to go through discovery and go to trial and all that on this matter. But, but Zuckerberg decided that he was not going to do that, of course, testified last week. And it is a fiendishly difficult case in this sense, which is that A, clearly, it's true. It is clearly true that these. The purpose of being a social media company is to keep people on your platform as long as possible and that whatever means you can use to keep them on the platform as long as possible is a fair game in the sense that you're not, you know, you're not beating them. You're not, you're not, you're not supplying them with a, with a, with a, with a substance. You're not, you're not doing anything illicit or criminal. You didn't buy them the computer. You didn't give them access to the Internet. You didn't let them sign on to your program, whatever. You're just there and they're standing there. And the idea that you can get blamed for their behavior on your site flies in the face of our general understanding. A, of personal responsibility, B, of parental responsibility, since these are minors, allegedly, this is what's happening to minors and see proof of the harm. And a tort. You have to prove harm. And like feeling bad about yourself is a harm, but it's not what we would consider. You know, like, it cost me $5 million in income because I tripped and fell and then I could no longer do my job. Right. The harm is psychological. It's internal. It's. It makes you dysfunctional. And so I don't really knowing what I know about the case. You don't know what juries are going to do. But it doesn't feel like that argument crossed the threshold, at least based on the testimony that. But we all know that it's true. That's the other. Having said that, we all know that these programs, kids get addicted to these programs.

B (21:44)

Well, we know it's true because some of the memos from inside Meta are saying like, my God, this, this stuff is like crack.

A (21:55)

Right?

C (21:55)

And then why we. This is actually important because Zuckerberg has testified before Congress about this. He lied straight to their faces, claiming we don't. We don't let people under 13 on, on Instagram. That's crazy. He has lied repeatedly. And the reason this trial is important, even if it doesn't meet the standard that you, you accurately described there, John, is that it's forcing a response from the companies themselves. The reason the other places settles. They didn't want to go through the process of discovery here. These companies have kept all of this stuff under wraps, knowingly for decade. And the only way we know about any of it is through whistleblowers who reveal what, what, who were so sort of morally tormented by what they were creating and putting it out into the world that they blew the whistle on their own company. So I think that in that sense, you know, he's going to continue to try to hide behind section 230 and say we're just a platform, we're totally neutral. The design choices they have made over the years have clearly been in one direction and that's to get as many people at any age hooked for as long as possible on platform so that it makes it harder for them to leave and to keep time on platform as high as possible. And so the thing is that, you know, the law will look at this in lots of different ways, but that process of discovery is very useful even if the people who bring these cases lose because there's thousands of these cases out there.

A (23:11)

Look, I totally agree with you. And obviously the caution and hesitation, increasing caution, hesitation about the use of equipment in classrooms and with kids and all of that, not just because AI is going to do all their work for them that you know, basically Jonathan Hayton, Gene Twenge and these people like have been screaming about for more than a decade that, that this, this puts meat on the bones of their criticisms and gives more added weight to arguments in front of school boards and all of that, that, that they are contributing to something that is really bad for the developing brain, the developing consciousness of young people whom we are supposed to be training and educating and developing into, into real citizens. The problem is proving the harm. Meaning, okay, they've learned that they can addict kids to a website. So.

C (24:11)

Well, not every kids to a website.

A (24:13)

They're not.

C (24:13)

Okay, yeah, but the other, the other thing, the other shift that is being pushed here through these cases, which is also good because it's also having a social function and schools making decisions, parents making decisions, there's legislation, there's a whole, a lot of threads to pull on this. But there's also a mind shift sense about the design. So the whole argument about platforms is they're neutral because you're, you're not paying. Right. You're not a consumer, they're free. So there's no product liability. I think the shift now is actually if you design a product and even if you give it away for free or you make it this platform that people come to and you actively and knowingly allow very young children, the, the internal memo that was the most damning so Far was the one where an Instagram employee said, well, we want to hook the teenagers, so we've got to start when they're tweens, like when they're 9 and 10, we really need to get them on this platform. So they were doing this knowingly. But the idea is that a design choice, even if every single person who uses a product or a platform isn't harmed by it, that doesn't mean that they're not liable for the design choice you make. Like if you build a car that, you know, five out of 10 people drive and are injured in a car crash in it, you're probably going to have to recall that car. And so there's a product liability notion here that has thus far never been tried. And they're, they're trying that aspect. Like if you design something harmful knowingly and you leave it out there and you lie to Congress about its effects, you're, you might be held liable. The other point I would make is this for some of these people have been arguing for the last year or two that social media was bad. Others of us have been doing this for 20 years. And one of the things we were always told is, well, you have no proof. You have no proof. And when you present the proof, which we, you know, again, some of it's correlation, not totally causal, none of this stuff in science, social science research is going to be 100%. Then they say, well, it's not good enough proof. And we see this in all of these realms. So in ed tech, as you brought up earlier, you know, the argument that the big tech companies make is, well, you can't prove it's worse, so we might as well just inundate all the schools with Chromebooks and assume it'll be better. So the argument, that argument is also fading. I'm very happy to see that because there's a sensibility and then there's social science evidence. And we have to take all of these into consideration. We're thinking about social harm, not in the law. Look, they're very clear rules in trials, obviously, and they might very well lose this particular case. But the fact that Zuckerberg thought thinks he can win it by getting out there and describing what his company does is a serious mistake long term for Meta in my opinion.

A (26:40)

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C (31:42)

You can prove that they were already breaking the law which says you can't allow it, a 13 year old to sign onto your platform. And they knowingly allowed that.

A (31:50)

Okay, that's not a tort. That is literally violation of a law.

C (31:55)

Therapist, they're going to have these competing testimony. One of the therapists has already testified in this particular case that she said it was her, the social media use of this person was clearly a contributing factor to all of her mental health issues. She's not going to say it's the only thing that caused it. And yes, I do believe parental responsibility, family responsibility is the starting point of every one of these conversations. However, we have to acknowledge that it is not reasonable to expect parents to be able to. The parental controls. I've spent a lot of time talking to people from Meta and Instagram about their parental controls. For lack of a better term, those controls are bullshit. They're just window dressing to get them off the hook and claim they care about children. I can get around them in about two seconds.

A (32:40)

Yeah, well, it's like my favorite thing, which is the. Well, you know, you did agree to the terms of service when you use the X, Y and Z program because you get this screen that says we've updated our terms of service here. You can scroll through 3000 words of 5 point type and read it. And then we've all agreed to donate

C (32:58)

our kidneys to all of Zuckerberg's children in those terms of service.

A (33:00)

Nobody know. Exactly.

D (33:02)

And courts don't like those things. Courts are pretty suspicious of those of those also, like you. You can no longer use that as a defense, like even some waivers. You know, it's like you, the courts use a common sense, you know, position to, to look at what you know, whether a person was fooled into doing something against their own interest. So it's funny that those agreements are still, you know, the way they are,

A (33:28)

but swimming upstream against this culture is, is, is total. That's why, that's why Brandt saying Meta deserves to be held liable for Instagram or something like that is a little problematic. And here's what I mean by that. When I, my first child was born in 2004, the directive at the time of for upper middle class parents and everybody, but really for upper middle who, who were like, are also anxious and neurotic about being perfect parents in every possible way and so uptight about it was no screens. No screens till 2. Do not even let your child watch a television program. Forget there were no iPads yet. There were no. There were no iPhones yet. Like, don't let them watch. This is going to warp their brains. Make sure they have wooden toys, read to them, take them outside. Experientially they should have no screens. And then mystically, over time, suddenly it kind of started to change. And the weird change came not from the home, where of course you felt guilty if you, like, needed to take a break and you wanted to put your kid in front of Sesame street for an hour, but from schools. So you spent all this time keeping your kids off screens at home, then you took them to school. There were three, there were four, there were Five, suddenly they show them TV shows or they show them a little film or they let them play. Suddenly now we start to get tablets or small computers or stuff like that.

C (35:12)

We're now talking companies flood the schools with that stuff for free. And so everyone uses it, right? It's not a good. So

A (35:21)

the elites say to the elites, don't let your kids use screenshots. And then you're an elite person, just like you are an ordinary Send your kids to school and suddenly they're using screens. It is now 2026. Think about it. We are all nervous about how screens have affected kids, right? And now we're all freaked out about AI writing papers and making it so that no kid will ever have to learn anything. My kids, your kids, if you're not Seth and have homeschooled kids, their entire schooling is screen based. Their homework assignments are accessed through a program called Schoology or Google Classroom or something like that. They write papers on a computer, submit them, upload them. They don't write them by hand, they don't type them, they don't hand them in physically.

C (36:20)

I'm going to interrupt to say, actually that's not true. If you're. My kids had no screen. 0 to 5 I was pretty draconian, right? When they got to elementary school and upper elementary school that did that process of starting to use computers to do all the assignments was what was assigned. I went into the school along with a few other parents and said, no, we're not doing that as a public school, I'm a public school parent, I'm allowed to talk back to the administration about what's. So they had to accommodate my demand. And so for us, they were allowed to print stuff out and do things by hand and do it on paper. And I think that helped them. I delayed that as much as possible. I know. Now, interestingly, it was the private schools in D.C. that had gone completely paperless much, much earlier. And they are now all winding that back. They're back to teaching handwriting. They're back to trying to do this the old fashioned way, which I think is notable. And so you can push back because it was bad. It was actually a huge opportunity for these kids not to learn embodied cognitive skills by doing things themselves by hand and doing everything on a screen. It was easier for teachers, easier and cheaper for the public schools to take Microsoft's money in Chromebooks than it was to actually do things the old fashioned way. And that's the choice they made. And that becomes a path dependency. That's difficult.

D (37:30)

They're going to regret that when the teachers are AI.

A (37:33)

Well, they're not literally when teachers are, you know, that that's, that's the weird part is that really could be better. But I would just say, can you make an artisanal child? Anyone can make an artisanal child. You know, homeschooling is a form of making artisanal children. You, as a foremost thinker in this realm, had a sense of the danger that was posed and the kind of effort that you had to go to simply to swim a little upstream, simply to say, there needs to be an alternate way for us to apply the homework.

C (38:11)

But I didn't say it. I don't personally think of myself as a hero because it actually took me getting other parents. So these are social action problems now. So I think what, what, what I'm reacting to strongly is this idea when I hear it from my libertarian friends. Well, this is just a family problem. The parents should just prevent their kids from using this at this point because of its ubiquity. As you say, it's a social act. It's a collective action problem. And there are lots of ways to solve that. Some is through legislation, although I don't think that's the most useful path because I'm a conservative. It's definitely the community and family level and institutional level, like schools and civic organizations. But there is this other path, and that's what's being tested in this case. And I think it's important regardless of whether they win or lose it. And that is using the law as a tool to really force companies to some accountability. They have not had that accountability before with regard to children, and it's long overdue. So even if they lose, they've been put on notice, and there are thousands of these cases working their ways through the courts that they're going to have to do better than what they did before. And that's a victory, even if it's the small one.

B (39:15)

And if, even if they lose, even if Meta wins, the exposure of these cases and the research that keeps coming could go some way cumulatively to shifting the consensus in a way that actually changes things. I mean, it could be that 10 years from now it would be common knowledge that no kid should be anywhere near any of these platforms.

A (39:52)

Right, Right.

C (39:54)

Here's hoping.

A (39:55)

We've seen it happen. We've seen it happen in the United States. We went in three generations from 60% of people smoking to 15% of people smoking now. And the model here, Obviously, is this 17 front war on tobacco it wasn't just one. It wasn't one lawsuit. You know, where the state attorneys general got, you know, got together and made the tobacco companies settle with them. It was first the labeling. The surgeon generals weren't very difficult. Like that was a haul to get to that. And then the, and then the studies that proved that it wasn't just correlation, but that, but that smoking caused cancer. Then you start getting into junk sciency things. But once the door was opened, junk science, things like secondhand smoke causing cancer, which I think is not true. I don't believe that it has ever been proved that secondhand smoke causes cancer. I do think you can make the claim that secondhand smoke is disgusting and that therefore people shouldn't have to suffer through it. You don't have the right to. You don't have the right to poison somebody else's air in pursuit of your own habit. That is not.

C (41:13)

It was the children in the secondhand smoke.

A (41:16)

Children. That's right. Always goes to children. Children, right. And think of the children. But I still, but I mean, the science there is still bad. But because the Overton window had opened or because everybody, no one could know, there was no case to be made that this was any good for anybody. And therefore the idea of increasing restrictiveness, raising the age at which you could buy cigarettes, the age of 26, which if you think is actually insane, like this is America. Why is, why, why do you have to be 26 years old to buy a pack of cigarettes? The only way you should really do that is by banning cigarettes. Like. Right.

D (42:01)

I mean, anything, anything that you can't, anything that you can't trust to sell to a 25 year old is something that you're saying should be illegal. Right. I mean, like eight years, you know, seven years after they go off to war in the U.S. army, like they came back.

A (42:18)

It's comic. And of course there are reasons it happened. My point is, once there is social consensus, and that just doesn't mean just social consensus among, you know, people in Cambridge and Berkeley and on the Upper west side and in Georgetown, once there is consensus, then all kinds of things that were once unthinkable become thinkable. And that could be your pattern, Abe.

B (42:41)

But I think you need another element. Like, as with cigarettes, I think what, what turned everyone away is that people became scared out of their wits of, of the result of smoking. Yeah, it's like, you know, you, you knew people who died. You knew people had emphysema, you knew people had cancer. You saw 9 billion commercials of, of of people with voice boxes and all that. And it became a. You just, you were scared to death to smoke or to keep smoking. Take another consensus, whether or not I endorse it or not. Let's say climate change, right. How many people who walk around believing that they, that the earth is warming because of man made machines and, and you know, pollution and.

D (43:35)

Yeah.

B (43:36)

How many of them forego their car for a bicycle, don't take the plane, you know, you know, you mulch their garbage or whatever. You know, like if the, you can. The consensus alone is not enough to get you to actually change your lifestyle.

C (43:56)

I think you.

B (43:57)

So if there comes a point where parents are actually scared out of their wits.

C (44:02)

The chatbots. The chatbots are that way. The AI chatbots.

A (44:06)

Yes, they are. And also this is the problem that Christine taught like the scale. So the problem with making the climate change case for ordinary people is that the idea that one person can make a difference. If a plane is going to fly and there are 300 passengers on the plane and you refuse to fly, you are going to make no difference, discernible difference in the burning of the fuel on that plane. And so you are doing something entirely symbolic and it will have no practical effect. Similarly, if you are somebody who is not going to let your kids use screens and you do not have the wherewithal to be a homeschooler and you're sending them to a public school where the entire system of the school is based in screen learning or, you know, requiring the use of screens at least an hour or two a day. You can't, you can't scale it up yourself. I mean, Kristen, you're saying you can get a group of parents to opt out. Right.

C (45:13)

But, well, or to demand. Now, now I, now I encourage parents to demand evidence from the school that it's an improvement to use the computer program versus the.

A (45:21)

Yeah, right. Okay. So, but I'm just saying, like there are, you know, 75 million Americans under the age of 18, 65 million of them are in this, are in school systems. A couple hundred thousand parents yelling and screaming can't.

C (45:38)

But it has. With cell phones. It has, it has. We have, we are seeing all these cell phone bans now because enough people started to say, let's just take them out and see what happens.

A (45:49)

Public and private schools take out the cell phones.

C (45:52)

Yeah.

A (45:53)

And then they're still sitting in a classroom with a, with a, with a Chromebook.

C (45:57)

Some are, some are. But that's the next wave. Is there is some questioning of whether those way. Because of the miserable test scores we're seeing year over year from, from kids who are supposedly going to be made smarter by screens. I think that also has opened again. It's opened a conversation that was impossible to have even five years ago because I tried to have it many times if my kids have schools. And it's a difficult, it's a difficult effort to make until you see some results from lower order things like just removing those phones. Hugely popular with teachers now. They don't have competition for the attention of their students. Okay, well then what about when you're trying to talk to them about note taking, how to take good notes? We have evidence it's better to do that by hand than on a screen. So take the books away when you're teaching them about something and make them right by hand. I mean all these things are small but there is a cumulative effect as Abe said. I think think we're get. It's much, I'm really much more optimistic now than I was even a few years ago about some of these cultural shifts happening in my lifetime versus you know, when we're all being controlled by hal.

A (46:55)

So I mean there is also this larger question of the cultural shift over the last two generations. Americans over time seriatim have been impressed by, found role models in and tried to take all of their wisdom from the leading industrial technologists of whatever moment they were living in who seemed to have broken the code for how to do things right, how to advance life, how to create greater progress. You know like the most best selling American book for a very long time was Andrew Carnegie's how to Make Friends in Infinite Influence People. A book that was viewed as a, you know, as a tone, as a. It was like the original self help tome because he was this, you know, incredibly powerful successful steel magnate and he's like this is how I did it. I, you know, went around being nice to people or whatever. So that you know, there's one distinction

C (48:07)

I would say you say how to Make Friends. The book is actually how to Win Friends Win Friends. Deliberate word choice on Carnegie's part. It's an interesting history to that but

A (48:14)

yeah so, but my point is like you kind of worshiped. He was kind of worshiped Edison who was a. Thomas Edison who was a monster and was a monopolist. I mean everything we think about Zuckerberg, Edison was in spades. Like he had goons when, when he, he was one of the originators of the sort of motion picture industry and he, it was one of those things where he Patented film equipment. And like, he had, he would. They hired the Edison Film Company, hired goons to smash up other people's film equipment and, and like, take them out and stuff like that. Like. But who was a more, who was a more glorified figure in early 20th century America than Thomas Edison? You move on in time. Then you, then people learn things about monopolization and what terrible things Henry Ford did and what terrible things this guy did. What terrible things. And in our lifetime, the journey of the computer culture guys, the nerds in the garages in Silicon Valley building these machines out of nothing while they ate ramen and whatever. And, you know, because they were so fascinated by equipment and having no idea that this was going to turn into everything that it turned into and the, the lionization of them, the creation of entire media that were basically built on the celebration of them and learning how to exploit business using their models and all of this. That was the cultural flavor of the 1990s. I mean, who, who was a more glorified figure in some ways than Steve Jobs? He had had his company taken away from him. He, he took it back and he created these glorious tool. Like if you read Walter Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, it's like reading Parson Weems, you know, it's, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a kind of, you know, glorified lionization portrait of, you know, of a great man doing great things with his unique capacities. Now we know he crushed competition. He stole David Galernter's program. See, you know, David Galler invented the time machine system and Apple just stole it without buying it. He stole things all the time. He was a lunatic who, like, tried to cure his cancer with insane behavior. He also smelled really bad because he didn't believe in bathing. He mistreated his children, or at least his oldest daughter. He was a, he was a, he was a monster. And, and that was also kept from us in a weird way.

D (51:08)

We have, I mean, in this, in American mythology, it's very results oriented, right? I mean, yeah, you know, like Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. We are really happy with the light bulb right now. We're not so happy with Facebook, you know, let's say, or whatever. Like, it tends to, the hypocrisy tends to be. You can very easily line it up over, like, how do we view the product? And then, and then all. And then we're always like, well, you know, if you want to make an omelette, you got to break a Few eggs.

C (51:38)

But one other, one other point to that is also the ambitions of our tech leaders are no longer merely domestic. So Edison wanted to, you know, be the guy who ran all these industries in the United States at the time. Zuckerberg models himself after Roman emperors, reads about them, thinks he talks about global domination and he's not kidding. And actually there are more Facebook users outside of the US now than inside of it. So he sees himself as a new kind of, of imperial power that isn't, isn't governmental, isn't accountable to anyone but its shareholders, and is quite different, I think in ambition. The scope of the ambition is much larger. Which is why I, again generally, I mean, I'm a free market person, I'm, you know, a conservative. That's why I think it does occasionally require precision based efforts to reel that ambition in when it's starting to harm our citizens in our democracy, which it certainly has, but mainly when it harms. You start with the kids. Is it harming kids? Let's start there. And is he breaking the law, which he has been with no repercussions for, for quite some time.

B (52:46)

I just want to add global is small compared to the other Silicon Valley guys.

C (52:51)

I mean, that's your action.

B (52:53)

They're interplanetary, they're, they're, they're crossing from life to death and back. They're, they've got a hold other, other, you know, imperium in mind.

A (53:03)

So you know, when just before we started this podcast and, and Seth went off on the joke because I said 2025 instead of 2026 and then we went off on this 50 minute long tangent, we were going to talk about the Epstein case, which has weird dovetailing here. Not just because Bill Gates, who of course was the other great God of, of the technological, of our modern tech era, aside from Steve Jobs, arguably a larger figure, more important figure, certainly a more important figure as a capitalist because he, you know, it is he who made software more important than hardware and he who developed the largest fortunate. If he had continued to do what he had been doing rather than pulling out and doing something else, he would be worth $2 trillion and not, you know, and not musk or whatever. But he went in a different direction. But of course Gates is, is by far the, aside from Bill Clinton and the Clintons are about to testify on the Epstein matter before Congress. Gates is by far the largest and most important figure in the, in the Epstein scandal simply because he is the largest figure with the largest cultural, political, technological footprint. And also because there were real world, real world consequences for Gates in the fact that his relation with Epstein cost him his marriage. We know that from his wife, you know, one of the largest divorce settlements in history. We don't even know what it is. But, you know, like, obviously, I'm sure

C (54:44)

it was, whatever it was, she didn't get enough. That's my verdict on that.

A (54:49)

But we're going to talk about Epstein because I wanted to find that there's a piece that I, of course, have now lost my access to.

C (55:01)

Bill Gates recently had to face questions from people at his foundation about he had to sort of do a public mea culpa. I think it was this week, earlier this week. So I'll be interested to see what the fallout from that is. So far he's not faced wild repercussions for the revelations here.

A (55:20)

But so I, I was very struck by a blog post or a stubstack post by a writer, not a conservative, very heterodox far leftist, named Sam Khan called the Epstein Class, published last week. And of course, we had this whole conversation about Ro Khanna and others, John Ossoff and others, referring to the Epstein class, which is an interesting political game because what you can say is it's not really about who, who did you know, went to sex slave island or who was in the pedophile ring or who slept with prostitutes or whom he sex trafficked to. But. But was there basically like a group of people at the highest reaches of American and world society who were communing with this evil figure? And what does that say about the world in which we, we live? And so Sam Kahn, in this post he wrote, called the Epstein Class at his substack, which is samskahn.substack.com writes this. He says what comes through as you read about the world that Epstein was traveling in is the almost total absence of any kind of integrity. Many of these people are public servants or in some way custodians of the public trust. And on the evidence of the emails, their attention was entirely on their own mercantile self interest, which often meant very petty symbols of conspicuous consumption. The baroque effort of Brad Karp to get himself into Augusta National Golf Club, for instance, with Steve Bannon and Epstein organizing the campaign on his behalf. If we were to use a Rome analogy, what it feels like is the elite swanning around Capri in the age of Tiberius. The party is getting progressively out of hand. And what you want is for everybody to read their Cicero. In this context, the miseducation of Ehud Barak is particularly bracing with Barack, career soldier and public servant, being, under Epstein's tutelage, put through the paces of the strange new international order, selling surveillance equipment far and wide, and with Barack's reputation helping to bolster the deals. So this idea that. That the tech culture didn't just come in and make more money than anybody has ever made before in world history, which is true in this whole class of people who make money on a scale that doesn't, you know, can't even. You can't even sort of compare it to money that was made on a scale before at any other time, but that they all live together in some kind of odd area in the clouds, in which rather than having some idea, although Gates, of course, pretends to with his foundation, rather than having the idea that they are stewards of the public interest, their desire to fulfill their own sybaritic hungers, like petty hungers, like getting into Augusta where they play the Masters, seems to trump any sense that, oh, my God, like God has visited this bounty upon me. I should be doing good for the world. Gates thinks he is. He made the Gates Foundation. They do a lot about malaria. And it's a great thing, obviously, if the numbers are to be believed. I don't know if they're to be believed because he hires the world's best PR people, and they may be making crap up about how helpful they've been on malaria. But, you know, what, did he do it for malaria? Or is the Gates Foundation a cover for him sleeping with Russian prostitutes gotten for him by Jeffrey Epstein? You know, are the. And we don't know, there's no good answer to that question. And when you then think, these are the people who have taken over our education system who have paid for, you know, paid for the expansion of American higher learning with their unbelievably large grants and donations and gifts and all the stuff that's going to the schools and our education is getting worse. Our car, our universities are worse. Our grade schools and elementary schools and secondary schools are all worse. Kids are less educated. Everything is more politicized, and they're just getting richer and richer. This is a non, ideological, nonpartisan thing that everybody feels. And as somebody who has no problem with the idea that the rich, rich people who invent things should get as rich as humanly possible, I still do have some feeling in my own heart that they're supposed to be grateful to something for the fact that this happened and that they are supposed to do good with it. And they do. They pretend to effective altruism was a, was a gloss on Sam, all Sam Bankman Fried's behavior and all of this. But one does not trust that they have anybody's good wishes at heart. And now AI, the chatbots, all of that. This is where we're going. Not only is it, not only aren't they doing good, they may be on the verge of destroying the planet with,

C (61:02)

with the class issue. The fact that the word class is being used here is important I think because they do plenty of good for their own class and for their own children who are in many cases never allowed to use these products. But their attitude is that, you know, we're putting out into the world something and you can just decide. So here's, here's an example from the case, case that we were talking about where, where Zuckerberg when he was on, on trial was asked about how Meta allows for the use of these beauty filters which if you're familiar with these at all, they're, you know, they can filter you to look perfect. And so when they were assessing the filters for their own use, Meta had an internal review process and they had all these well being experts, you know, therapists, psychologists, you know, body image consultants come in and say these are the filters. What do you think about them? And every single one of their wellness experts said this raises a lot of concerns about what this might do to a young person's view of themselves and of their own body. Like, this is bad, like don't do this. So they did it, they did it anyway. I mean, now do you think Mark Zuckerberg lets his kids use these? No, of course not. Nine year old, which is the person in this case, this case In California was 9 years old when she started using Instagram and obviously came from a troubled background and probably already had some mental health issues. I get all that. But the point is this class of people is quite rigorous about policing its own classes, health and well being. It's why they're, a lot of these guys are building their own private city outside of San Francisco. They are really good at that and about understanding longevity and survival and bunker building and all this stuff we read about in these, in these stories, what they don't.

D (62:40)

Escaping the consequences.

C (62:41)

Exactly. Well, they lack. What they lack is what you're talking about, John, which is an older idea of, of civic responsibility because they also have contempt for how our government works because it's slow and you know, whatnot. So I wonder where, where they give their money or how they spend their money. Mark Zuckerberg has bought A path of Hawaii with his money. He does particular initiatives his through his wife's foundation. They do a lot of medical, good medical research and spending. So they do certain things. But if you look at how they choose to spend, they're not building Carnegie libraries, they're not doing the kind of sort of mass philanthropy that the old steel and oil tycoons did. And it's notable, I think it's interesting how they choose to target their wealth. Much of Gates's work goes overseas. It doesn't, doesn't. It's not here. He's spending in Africa. So I just. It's fascinating to contrast those sort of big 19th century tycoons with the ones we have today in the tech world.

B (63:36)

You know, I think part of the problem here is that when you talk about these tech titans at the start of their, when they launched their platforms and products, tech enthusiasm was such that they were treated as if they were doing God's work already. Everyone was so excited that they were. Look what they're doing.

D (64:00)

They're facilitating democracy.

B (64:02)

You'll be able to chat with someone on the other side of the world and everyone will be connected. This is a great thing. And I think that sense that they were early on encouraged to feel this sort of messianic Teflon around them. So they figured that's it, they're doing good. And it's interesting, Christine, when you say that they're very good at protecting their own from the consequences. They're also the only ones who have the early warnings about these things.

A (64:37)

Right.

B (64:39)

Regular mother doesn't have a group of scientists come into their home and say

C (64:44)

this filter, 10 year old use this Instagram filter.

B (64:48)

Yeah. So they just pocket the knowledge, don't let their kids use it and launch it on the world. Yeah.

A (64:54)

Right.

D (64:54)

And that also like that the beauty filter especially, it calls to mind what we've been talking about in other areas, which is the electronic reproduction of Vice that used to be done in person. That when it's done in person, you sort of recognize the downsides immediately. Or we have, you know, sometimes national conversations about them. Right. The filters remind me of how we talk about childhood beauty pageantry.

A (65:23)

Right.

D (65:23)

I mean it's. Right. It's all. Every this whole stage parenting thing with child beauty pageants has a certain reputation that it would, it will never escape. And also people have a certain, you know, kind of gut response to seeing, you know, makeup larded all over a nine year old.

C (65:45)

The honey Boo effect.

D (65:46)

Yes, the Honey Boo boo effect.

A (65:48)

Right.

D (65:48)

All this there's nobody watching this, is watching it. Because they're like, this seems like a really great way to live. And I'm not trying to be over judgmental on the people who participated, but just society. I'm saying society itself seems to have a fairly strong consensus about where this falls on the spectrum of, you know, public good or public no good. And the Instagram filters and the culture that it represents are really just digital reproductions of things that when we see them do it in the real world, when you see nine year olds in the real world taking on the, the, the, you know, all their makeup and putting on a, a dress and twirling around for adults to judge them, then we see them do it on Instagram and you go, why? This is what they're doing, putting on makeup or filters and twirling around for adults to, you know, look at them and that sort of thing. And the, the, the dangers of it seem obvious as long as you can see the parallels. And I think it really is there. Just like when we talk about, you know, you used to go gambling socially and it was seen gambling too much, was seen as a vice, and maybe it kept you from doing it, you know, socially, too much or whatever, drinking. There's, you know, all these limits, everything nowadays. You know, with COVID you could get alcohol deliver, all these local rules changed regulations about the delivery of alcohol, for example, curb, curbside pickup and curbside delivery of alcohol changed. Certain things were just made easier if you had a, you know, you had a phone and you had a button on your phone that said, give me vice. And I think that that's kind of the missing link here is that we, you know, we, we take all these things are reproductions of real world things that we've already discussed the dangers of for many, many years. And then it feels like we have to start from square one when it's online. Like we have to figure out as if they just reinvented the wheel, what is this? What are the Instagram filters? What do they do when instinctively we know.

C (67:57)

The argument the tech people want to make is one that many people have made over the years about any new technology, which is that the technology is neutral, it's just how we use it. But Daniel Boorstin in the Image had a great example of what happened to politics when the television was introduced into American homes. He said, you no longer had, you didn't have the television plus politics, you had a new kind of politics. And I think that's exactly right, Seth. You don't just have Instagram doesn't change beauty standards. You have a new standard of beauty. And some of these young women actually try to, in physical reality, look like what they see through the filter. And that's where I think we're coming to a new consensus about these things no longer really being neutral in every case.

A (68:39)

Look, the hope would be this, and it's a very sad way of putting this, but if this is a new industrial revolution that we are, we are, we are sort of in. And the AI now represents sort of like the, the real transformational moment. If we analogize this to the first industrial revolution, end of the 18th, early 19th century, you know, the first generation of. It was, was a, was a, was a horror show. You know, this massive shift of, of populations from rural places to cities to work in factories, and the horrible conditions and injuries and deaths from pollutants and all of this. And using the analogy again of children, the beginnings of rules about how people should be treated when they worked really coming as a result of the mistreatment of children who were working 12 to 18 hours a day in factories from the age of six. And that labor laws, as we now understand them, really were, get. Were. Were born out of an understanding that children en masse were being tortured and mistreated and being used as kind of like fodder for this new giant industrial machine. And then these. How. How these companies were supposed to behave and treat people, and all of that became part of a religious awakening, the third Great Awakening and, or the second Great Awakening and how we understood what children were as opposed to adults. Sort of the revolution in consciousness that said there are differences between children and adults that we see reflected in, say, the literature of Charles Dickens most prominently. All of this came as a result of the transformation which made things worse until they got better. And maybe we're in the stage at which the effect of this, this gigantic new machine and its parlous effect on people, even as all of these transformations are making life better and will make life better 200 years later with this massive increase in world wealth and productivity that has benefited everybody on the planet Earth. You know that famous Deidre McCloskey chart that shows that people lived on $3 a day from the, from the time of Christ to the year 1800. And that. That number never really changed for the, you know, mass of humanity. And then if you look at the chart, it just shoots up into the stratosphere over the 200 years that followed. So if you're techno optimistic in that sense, you say, well, we are on the Verge or we're in the middle of a transformation that is going to make life immensely better, and that all of this is the fact that we haven't dealt with the horrors of it or aren't dealing with it adequately, and that in the past that has happened, we have a history of it happening, of us taking in what's gone wrong and starting to fix it. And maybe optimistically, we're seeing the beginnings of that and what Christine has been talking about.

C (71:55)

Ah, but I would say that's true for the information revolution. Comparing it to the Industrial revolution is fine when you're talking about these platforms and sort of late 20th, early 21st century. I would argue that with AI, it's actually a Copernican level revolution because it forces us to suddenly not be at the humans no longer, to be at the center of a lot of the important conversations about purpose and meaning. And so, you know, when. When the Earth was no longer the thing everyone orbited around, and when humans are no longer making the majority of decisions and we have to then question again, what is our place here? Where do we fit?

A (72:32)

What is it?

C (72:33)

It's a. It's a larger shift that I think that's why I care so deeply about getting it right and fixing the problems that this most recent revolution created. Because if we don't get that right, there's really no hope for us getting this next, you know, massive shift. Correct. Because there are plenty of people who would love to replace humans with machines, machine intelligence, and as Abe said earlier, they have all kinds of schemes about colonizing space and uploading their consciousness, and who knows whether that's technically possible. But they. That's what they see as an improvement. That's their optimistic future. And I think there are a lot of regular people, and I assume I can count all you guys in on this too, who are like, actually, no, being human is a good thing. And augmenting our humanity in some ways might not be. Not might usher in human flourishing. And so I think that's why I care a lot about getting it right on the. On the first level of this new revolution, because there's a bigger one. We're already in the early stages of that's. That's going to be here at least in our lifetimes.

A (73:30)

I want to make a recommendation before we go. A writer whom I have recommended before, a writer who I always have to point out was a discovery, a college discovery, of Commentary magazine. Allegra Goodman, who has been, you know, basically one of America's foremost writers of fiction. Now going on four decades and was pulled off the slush pile by, by my predecessor editor Neil Kozadoy. Anyway, she has her latest book, which is a linked collection of short stories, which is called this Is not about us. 15 or 16 stories, all centering on a family with three. Three elderly sisters. Begins with the. With the decline and death of one of the elderly sisters and a breach that happens between the two surviving sisters at the Shiva and what happens to their children, their grandchildren, the spouses of their children and grandchildren. And it is spectacular. I don't know another word for it. I had recommended a couple of years ago this very unusual novel she wrote, Sam, which was about the life and times of a little girl from a broken family who discovers purpose in bouldering and finds her way out of dysfunction and poverty and sort of ruinous family problems through self, through her own commitment to physical activity and then to discovering herself as a naturalist. This book came out of nowhere because generally speaking, Allegra Goodman's earlier work is very intellectual about like academic families, Jewish academic families and religious Jews and all kinds of permutations therein. This is simply a collection of stories about an upper middle class family and their anxieties and their woes and their small problems and their general efforts to cope with simply being alive. And it is a beautiful, gorgeous book and I can't recommend it highly enough, so it's wonderful.

D (76:10)

And the opening section, by the way, John, that you mentioned about the opening chapter, because it is the death of a sort of one of the three matriarchs or whatever you want to call it, just so people know, it is one of the funniest chapter, book chapters or short stories you will read, you know, maybe in your lifetime. It is, it is Lego. Goodman has a, a very brilliant light touch with humor that can put you in the room and make you feel like you're he overhearing things that some people are saying and that other characters can't hear and it makes you feel like you're in on the joke. And I laughed so hard and I feel weird saying this, but I laughed so hard during the death chapter.

A (77:01)

Yes, well, so it's funny. It begins with a death chapter and it ends with a life chapter. I say it ends, it ends with the birth of a, of a baby and, and the goings on around the birth of another child in this family and the anxiety, the just overwhelming anxieties of this child's grandmother about the coming, about the birth, about what's going to happen at the Bris is there going to be enough food there's going to be a snowstorm and while that sounds anxiety pro it also is hilariously funny in its depiction large hearted depiction of these kinds of family dynamics that are both real and awful and yet everybody is just trying to do their best. There's even a chapter in the middle of this book largely written from the perspective of a dog named Sheba that is itself extraordinary is a remarkable feat of writerly imagination so that is this is not about us by Allegra Goodman and twice in a week Seth, you and I are like on the same pay we like Splitsville which is sort of like the polar opposite of this a slapstick comedy about about divorce and this is just a a sort of like a I don't know what to call it it's just sort of a portrait of an American family that is indelible so we'll be back tomorrow For Christine, Abe and Seth I'm John Pothorot's Keep the Candle Burning.