Chapter 1: What are the historical fears associated with new technology?
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I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, skeptic, and comedian Michael Regilio, who has, you have a brand new eye, kinda. You wanna give us a couple lines about that? Because that's not something you hear every day.
No, you don't. I was basically born blind in my right eye with a condition called keratoconus. The story gets even weirder because I had it severely from birth in my right eye and not at all in my left eye, which is...
So unheard of that when they finally diagnosed me when I was like 19 years old, because they didn't know what the heck it was when I was a kid, that when I went back to my eye doctor at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, there was a line of doctors down the hall leading to my doctor's office. And when I got into the office, he's like, can my colleagues take a look at you?
And one after another, all these doctors just lined up and were like, what the heck? And, yeah, after a lifetime of basically being blind in my right eye, I got a cataract in my left eye. The surgeon said, hey, once we get this all taken care of, give me a shot at the other eye. I think a cornea transplant can give you vision. And I said... You know what? Let's give it a shot.
Let's see what depth... This depth perception I've heard so much about.
Yeah, what is that called?
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Chapter 2: How has the U-shaped happiness curve changed for teenagers?
Like, let's see what this stereoscopic vision people keep raving about feels like.
Yeah. Wow. Give it a shot. So I got the surgery. Don't recommend. The first week was crazy. I had no white of my eye. It was blood red and...
nasty and but here we are uh five weeks out i think and everything seems to be healing and i am slowly it takes about six months but i have some vision wow in my right eye i'm starting to see things science is crazy man i mean this is just an amazing when you said by the way you said surgery i have the surgery don't recommend you just mean having someone cut your eye open sucks you don't mean actually i don't like because you can see out of your eye which is kind of a big deal like i think
Yeah, it's a huge deal. Okay, we'll see what the end result is. I may very well recommend the entire panoply of surgery and heal time, but the surgery itself was more than I was expecting.
It's a lot to have surgery on your eye. Yeah, it sounds crazy, and I'm so glad that this was able to be something you could take advantage of. Normally, again, we don't talk about a ton of personal stuff on Skeptical Sunday, but I just thought, especially when it's not relevant to the topic at hand, but I thought, okay, screen time. Now you can look at the screen with both eyes.
I guess that's the nexus we're going with here in the episode. Yeah, I wanted to give you a chance to share that because I just think it is quite incredible and amazing. what science can do and that you've done that and that's why you haven't been on the show for a while because you have been recovering from that. I'm excited to see where this goes.
It's really interesting that they can do that and kind of a miracle and just really, really happy for you. And I'm just excited to see. Yes, literally. By the way, you could drive before with one eye?
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Chapter 3: What psychological techniques do big tech companies use to keep users engaged?
That sounds dangerous, is it? I'm not the only one. It is technically legal to drive with one eye. Okay. Has that ever caused a problem? Because I just feel like if I closed one eye, I don't know. I don't want to try that experiment.
Yeah. But for you, it's different because you would be closing one eye and seeing half of what you normally see. Since birth, my brain has been learning to use one eye to create the full picture. Yeah.
Yeah, so eventually your brain maps the size of something that you would expect it to be with the distance it is, as opposed to using the stereoscopic part to measure it from two different points. Yeah, that makes some sense, but yeah, still maybe kind of a pain.
And I've seen when you're reading and stuff like that, I've seen you do that, and I did notice before that you tilted your head strange. I thought you just had glasses that needed updating. I didn't realize that you were actually blind in one eye for a really long time, like for the first...
couple years of knowing you i was like huh you need to have those bifocals redone bro because you are you look like a one of those professors that has to do that squint where your nose hair comes out in order to read you know i'm talking about oh yeah yeah well i've been told i look like a professor many times in fact it's funny i don't technically need glasses right now oh and uh several people on the comedy scene have been like dude but your image is
Yeah. My dad is 84 or something like that, 83. And he just had cataract surgery. So you're in good company. And he also had, I guess they implant a lens in there because they're like, well, we're already taking this thing out. Let's put this other thing in. So he doesn't have glasses anymore at age 83. And he's like, yeah, I don't miss those.
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Chapter 4: How do Meta and Alphabet's internal documents reveal their knowledge of harm?
You know, they're always getting gross. I mean, wearing something on your face all the time, they get gross and then you lose them and you sit on them and then you pick them up by the lenses and you're like, dang it, now I gotta clean, you know, it's a whole thing. It's maybe better not to have them. Your image, you know what, man?
Fine, go to Warby Parker and get some clear lenses or something like that and wear those on stage as a costume element of your personality. It's better not to need them, that's for sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, on the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. And our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker.
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It's not exactly a new concept for those of us old enough to remember when parents worried about how much television we were watching. Turn off the boob tube, a parent would shout from the other room. And you know, even back in the 80s, parents were concerned about how much time their kids spent staring at a screen, now that I think about it.
And then, just like now, there were studies that implied too much TV is gonna be bad for kids, too many cartoons are bad for kids, sitting too close to the TV is bad for kids. Now the scientific study, I think that part was actually true. Now the scientific studies and experts are warning parents about the real dangers of a new kind of screen time.
And it turns out it's not just the kids, it's us adults as well, being told that we spend way too much time staring at our devices. Now I get a screen time report every week on my smartphone, but honestly I'm not even sure what most of it means. It just tells me that I'm spending too much time on Instagram or usually Reddit.
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Chapter 5: What guidelines exist for screen time usage in children?
If I listen to a podcast like the one you're listening to right now, does that count as screen time even if I'm really not looking at the screen and I'm just walking around with the phone in my pocket using that app? I don't know. Which leads to the obvious question, what are we even talking about when we say screen time?
This week, comedian and skeptic Michael Regilio is here to cut through the glare and find out whether screens are draining our lives or just our batteries.
Man, he really brought me back with that line, turn off the boob tube. My parents were obsessed with turning off the boob tube. I eventually started to wonder why we even had a boob tube in the first place. It seemed like the only thing we ever did with it was turn it off. And that gets to something really important, and that is that the fear of technology is not new.
It did not start with television. In fact, many of the fears people have today about the smartphone are almost identical to the fears people once had about the phone phone. Or I guess now we'd have to call that the dumb phone.
Yes, okay. So people were worried that the phone, the regular phone, would destroy real human connection?
Yes, exactly. Critics argued that speaking to someone without physically being present was unnatural and would weaken social bonds. Many people believed that face-to-face conversation was morally and socially superior and that the telephone encouraged emotional laziness. There were also fears it would spread misinformation and gossip.
Newspapers and clergy warned that the telephone would accelerate rumors and lies, allowing falsehoods to travel faster than the truth. Maybe that sounds a little familiar.
Yeah, familiar. Wow. So the same hangups and maybe different devices in a slightly different scale.
Absolutely. So people were super freaked out about the telephone.
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Chapter 6: How do video games impact social skills and emotional development?
They thought it would collapse social hierarchies and destroy privacy. Do you know what a party line was?
Those 1-900 numbers that teenagers called in the 90s when your parents found the bill and kicked your ass because it was like $3.99 a minute. That's where you got dumped into a line with 10 other pimply faced kids. And somebody was like, I'm going swimming in my pool. And other person's like, yeah, I'm just playing Atari with my brother. What am I talking about right now?
For one, yes, that is exactly what a party line was back in the 90s. And I'm a little embarrassed to admit I called a few times.
Well, they were fun, but they again, you get in trouble because they're super expensive and they're kind of praying that you don't know that they're two bucks a minute.
Yeah, they're praying that you go behind your parents back and stick them with the bill. And it probably was a pretty good business model. But no, we both have the right idea. But party lines go back way further than the 1990s. And they were not for socializing. They were actually necessity.
See, in the early days of the telephone, people used party lines, meaning multiple households shared the same connection. And people would get freaked out. Critics were warning that eavesdropping would become normal, which I'm guessing it probably did if you could hear what the neighbors were talking about on the phone.
People claimed that the telephone would rot the brain and shorten attention spans. Some people argued that these new rapid disembodied conversations overstimulated the mind and made people impatient with slower forms of communication. There was even an etiquette manual in 1902 that warned that communication by telephone should not be considered private. People worried about constant surveillance.
It's funny that now that you mention this, my grandma had a party line. I remember my dad mentioned it because I picked up the phone once.
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of excessive screen time on mental health?
I can't remember why. And I heard talking and then I hung up and I heard talking and I hung up and I heard talking. I was like, Dad, I hear talking. The phone's not working. He's like, oh, hang up. That's the neighbor across the street or next door or whatever. They're using the phone. I'm like, what are you talking about?
It was like, you could just pick up the phone and you would hear your neighbor if they were using that line. So that's, I think, what people were saying, oh, critics warned that eavesdropping would become normal.
Not just your eavesdropping on whoever's on the phone in your own house, but that if you were bored or nosy, you could silently and quietly pick up the phone in your own home and listen to your neighbors making calls. So it was very weird, but it was cheaper than having your own phone line.
And then sometime during the 90s, my dad went, can you believe the phone company made my mom, my grandma, get rid of the party line and they just gave her her own landline for the exact same price because they were like, holy crap, these old people in Detroit are still using party lines. And it's a billing nightmare, right?
Because you got to split the bill, but then someone's like, yeah, my neighbor's using the phone constantly and I never do and I'm not paying. So it's just caused all kinds of annoying things. And I would imagine also it's tough for the government to like wiretap two people when one of them might be a criminal and the other person is totally innocent. It's like, how do you handle that?
So it's probably much easier for them technically, administratively, for all kinds of reasons to just give everybody their own phone line. So then she was like, I got my own phone line for $15 a month because it was literally like 15 bucks a month to share a phone. Wow.
I had no idea that party lines like that were still around in the 90s.
Really old Detroit neighborhood, right? Detroit West Side, you know, the street that has three 85 year old white people left on it and the rest of them are young families from wherever. And we're like, basically, it's Mexican town area now.
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Chapter 8: How can we find balance in technology usage for better well-being?
And it was just like, you know, old, old, super old white people. And they weren't going to, I don't need my own phone line, she would say. I don't make that many calls. Nobody calls me, which is kind of sad but true when you're an 85-year-old woman who knits all day. Like, you probably really don't need your own phone line necessarily.
Anyway, yeah, this whole communication by telephone should not be considered private, constant surveillance. I mean, this, it kind of all sounds like any TED Talk you listened to a decade ago about modern technology.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. And people were super freaked out by this telephone. Many religious leaders argued that the telephone encouraged idle chatter and temptation, especially between young men and women. One Boston clergyman warned that young women using the telephone would be exposed to unseen male voices.
He was close. It's more like unseen male breathing. So, yeah, the familiar fear that without rules, women would spiral into moral chaos. Meanwhile, yeah, men were definitely using the phone to call women and then just go like, what are you wearing? Right. That was one I got a few times. And I was like, mom, it's for you. You got mom. I think it's for you. Yeah.
Look, I don't know a single guy that just gets a random nude photo sent to his phone. But every woman I know has received unsolicited Richard pics. So, yeah, I'm not sure that. Women were ever the problem in this equation. No, no.
Yeah, I guess he, well, he had a point. Have you ever heard, of course you have, a rotary phone ring? You could hear that thing, and I guess this is the point, if it was upstairs or downstairs, you could hear it through the whole house. And you'd hear your neighbor's ringer if the window's open, you'd think it was your own, because they all sounded the same. They were loud.
Yeah, I know. I remember it well. Yeah, you could hear, I remember being out in the yard and you could hear the phone ringing. But another criticism, other than Mark Twain's that had a little merit, was the idea that disembodied voices strip conversation of empathy and nuance, which is actually pretty undeniable.
Language experts will tell you that body language and microexpressions are a huge part of communication. And that is exactly one of the criticisms experts now have about screens.
Wow. Yeah, I had no idea people's fears about the telephone would be echoed so closely by the smartphone. But here we are.
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