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Federal judge pauses legislation that limits social media use among minors · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

• 0:24
  Good afternoon, everybody.
• 0:25
  How's it going out there?
• 0:26
  I trust, I trust you're doing well.
• 0:29
  You guys doing well in here?
• 0:31
  Is everybody happy?
• 0:33
  That's the question.
• 0:34
  Because look, according to Aristotle, I mean, happiness is the thing.
• 0:38
  It's what we're all striving for.
• 0:41
  But also Aristotle wouldn't have defined happiness the way we are defining it today.
• 0:49
  I'm not talking about you guys here in the room or even the listening audience.
• 0:53
  No, I'm I'm I'm not talking about you.
• 0:57
  I'm talking about everybody else, everybody else who's not you, where happiness is defined as you know what they got for the day, or it's it is measured by how we feel.
• 1:12
  It's measured by an emotion.
• 1:15
  No, not to Aristotle.
• 1:17
  He believed happiness was a work of the soul.
• 1:21
  He believed happiness was measured by the amount of virtue that we that we were striving for.
• 1:28
  Benjamin Franklin believed this also in performing his experiments, his 13-week experiment, which just repeated every 13 weeks, where he would explore a different virtue every week.
• 1:44
  He would try to master it.
• 1:46
  He would try to get it down.
• 1:47
  That to him made him happy.
• 1:50
  And he believed that that was indeed the pursuit of happiness.
• 1:57
  And it really casts a different light on the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson says we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.
• 2:10
  And among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or what the founding fathers understood to mean the pursuit of virtue.
• 2:22
  Because this is the name of the game, friends.
• 2:25
  It is.
• 5:27
  We're still there.
• 5:29
  We are still, we are still in it.
• 5:32
  And a lot of a lot of the cave can be can be found on the internet.
• 5:42
  A lot of the cape can be found on social media.
• 5:54
  Especially for young people, the problems are huge.
• 6:00
  They're myriad because young people scroll the internet and they see what other young people are doing and what their friends are doing.
• 6:09
  And then they start feeling like uh that's reality.
• 6:17
  And I'm not, I don't have that.
• 6:19
  I'm not I'm not living in that.
• 6:21
  I I don't have I don't have all that.
• 6:24
  I'm not having that much fun.
• 6:26
  Look at all the fun they're having.
• 6:28
  Look at they're all smiling in this photo.
• 6:31
  As if those smiles are perpetual.
• 6:35
  I'm not smiling like that.
• 6:37
  I'm not having this much fun.
• 6:39
  And when that comparison sets in, and we we come to this conclusion, false as it may be, that we're not having as much fun as those guys are, then the result of that is sheer utter depression.
• 6:58
  Oh, woe is me.
• 7:00
  I am not as talented as they are.
• 7:04
  I'm not as good looking as they are.
• 7:06
  I'm not as fun as they are.
• 7:08
  I don't have as many friends as they have.
• 7:12
  And it becomes this doom cycle.
• 7:16
  It's called it's it's called dooms doom scrolling for a reason.
• 7:22
  Because the further you scroll, the further you fall into doom.
• 7:26
  The further you fall into despondency, the further you fall into depression, the further you fall into the depths of despair.
• 7:36
  Wow, the alliterations just keep coming.
• 7:38
  I don't even have this written down.
• 7:39
  It's just flowing out of me naturally, feeling very poetic.
• 7:46
  So what are we to do?
• 7:48
  What are we to do?
• 7:50
  We are to break the surface, allow our eyes to adjust to the light of the truth or the truth of the light, either way, and rush back down into the cave and rescue as many poor tired souls as humanly possible.
• 8:05
  Break from the the change of the chains of despondency as many human beings as possible, the chains of complacency, the chains of comfort, as it were, as many human souls as humanly possible.
• 8:25
  So that's where we're at.
• 8:28
  And this that there's an attempt at this, but a U.S.
• 8:34
  judge, a federal judge here, has blocked enforcement of the state of Virginia's measure to mandate age checks and time restrictions for miners on social media.
• 8:47
  Do you think this is a good thing?
• 8:49
  Do you think that we should have laws that would prohibit minors uh from accessing social media for a particular period of time?
• 9:05
  And I guess let me ask it this way.
• 9:09
  Should we put age limits on social media?
• 9:13
  In the same way that we have placed age limits on driving, in the same way we've placed age limits on drinking, in the same way we've placed age limits on purchasing a gun.
• 9:28
  Should we treat social media in that same fashion?
• 9:33
  There is a growing body of evidence that says yes, we should be treating social media in this same fashion because social media has proven to become detrimental to the soul.
• 9:48
  I think we have we've we've documented this.
• 9:53
  And there is this push, by the way, at least here in Virginia.
• 10:01
  That social media would be limited, that it would be limited by age and that it would be limited by time.
• 10:11
  But if but a federal judge here just last week barred the Virginia law, which of course was aimed at lowering rates of social media addiction among kids by requiring age verification for all users and permitting daily access for those under 16 for only one hour per platform.
• 10:34
  I know what you're thinking here.
• 10:36
  You're thinking, well, who's to stop the kid from fudging on the on the age uh requirement?
• 10:47
  Um okay, but that's a good question.
• 10:50
  Pause it, hold it.
• 10:53
  The this federal ruling here by this judge has put a pause on the state of Virginia's uh restrictions here on how citizens access social media.
• 11:07
  The case is net choice v Mieris.
• 11:10
  And while this case is moving to the courts, the judge has paused the restrictions.
• 11:20
  Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, maybe Giles, I don't know.
• 11:26
  Uh Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles is uh sits on the uh Eastern District of Virginia, the U.S.
• 11:35
  District Court.
• 11:37
  Uh she said that the measure likely violates the First Amendment free speech protections for minors and adults.
• 11:45
  So uh I think I don't know, this is interesting.
• 11:50
  This is uh does it violate the free speech right of minors.
• 11:58
  Do minors have a an ultimate right of free speech.
• 12:04
  I mean, the keyword is ultimate.
• 12:07
  Should there's free speech be uh controlled by by by parental authority?
• 12:16
  Governor Glenn Youncin here signed the law in May of 2025, last May, and then it went into effect January 1st of this year.
• 12:26
  NetChoice filed the lawsuit.
• 12:29
  It's a trade group representing technology companies such as Google, Meta, Netflix, Reddit, X, yada yada.
• 12:37
  Uh Giles said the law went too far by requiring everyone, including adults to verify their ages before accessing speech that is protected for everyone.
• 12:50
  She also said it didn't go far enough by exempting addictive interactive gaming from coverage.
• 12:59
  Uh here is her here's what she wrote here.
• 13:04
  The issues in this matter are not to be taken lightly.
• 13:07
  The court recognizes the commonwealth's compelling interest in protecting its youth from the harms associated with the addictive aspects of social media.
• 13:18
  However, it cannot infringe on First Amendment rights, including those of the same youth it aims to protect.
• 13:25
  She also said the law treats functionally equivalent speech differently as minors defined as those under 16 would be prohibited from watching history, science, religious service videos that are more than an hour long on YouTube, but they could access the same or similar content on streaming platforms.
• 13:47
  That's a good point.
• 13:50
  She raises a good point.
• 13:52
  Virginia in their defense argued that the measure was a reasonable response to youth mental health issues tied to the addictive features of social media.
• 14:03
  Paul Taskey is the co-director of Net Choice as Litigation Center.
• 14:08
  In a statement, Paul said that the ruling upholds parental authority over government mandates.
• 14:15
  He said fundamentally, parents must stay in the driver's seat when it comes to decisions about their families.
• 14:22
  This ruling reaffirms that the government cannot ration access to lawful speech, even if it has noble intentions.
• 14:31
  That is also a uh it's also a good point.
• 14:36
  Taske added that unconstitutional laws do not help anyone.
• 14:41
  He said, moreover, laws requiring age verification and other privacy invasive measures actually make everyone less safe and more prone to data breaches.
• 14:52
  We are seeing this in real time as countries around the world have started mandating similar privacy destroying age verification regimes.
• 15:01
  I guess this leads us back to the question you know, couldn't they just fudge the data?
• 15:07
  Why not just fudge the data?
• 15:08
  I don't know that.
• 15:10
  I don't know that having a law that places age restriction uh boundaries and and guide rails.
• 15:20
  I don't know.
• 15:21
  I don't know that that's the answer here.
• 15:23
  I get the purpose behind it.
• 15:26
  I understand the intent, but I'm undecided as to uh if this is a good approach, really.
• 15:36
  The injunction halts enforcement ahead of a full trial.
• 15:40
  Virginia could ultimately appeal the decision, of course, to the Fourth Circuit.
• 15:45
  Virginia's law was one of many state initiatives in the wake of the U.S.
• 15:49
  Supreme Court's 24 decision, affirming platforms' editorial rights.
• 15:55
  Uh, and also here we're in the throes of this ongoing case, wherein the charges are being leveled against social media companies that their product is addictive.
• 16:11
  They know it's addictive, they have known for a long time that it's addictive, and they've doubled down on that addiction.
• 16:21
  Uh so we're here, my friends.
• 16:23
  We are here.
• 16:24
  We are in the throes of the cave.
• 16:27
  And we are we are staring down that rabbit hole.
• 16:31
  We are chained to the wall, and we're looking at the shadows dancing through the flickering flame light on the wall in front of us, and we're mesmerized by what we think is reality.
• 16:44
  This is the ultimately, this is the effect of social media.
• 16:48
  Now, it's not all.
• 16:50
  It's not all the effect of so it's not 100% of social media.
• 16:55
  Just like what was happening in that cave is not 100% of the flame being flickered on the wall.
• 17:01
  I mean, there is some truth in social media.
• 17:06
  As the judge said, this law would restrict students from watching religious services on YouTube that are over an hour long, or watching educational videos, or watching uh scientific experiments.
• 17:19
  I mean, there is a ton of things happening on the internet that are truthful.
• 17:26
  But the dilemma comes in on the opposite side of things.
• 17:30
  And that's what I've previously explained.
• 17:34
  The doom scrolling, the comparing of young adolescent minds to others uh and the images that are that they are the images that are being portrayed on social media that is causing others to falter, causing others to deem it as reality when it's not so.
• 17:59
  So, what's the answer here?
• 18:00
  The answer ultimately, my friends, is for those of us that have escaped the surface of the cave to come back down, to come back down and to grab as many citizens as possible.
• 18:13
  Now, there's a couple different ways we could do this.
• 18:16
  We could tell them, hey, the internet isn't as it's a no good place, you should leave it at once.
• 18:23
  And that's probably not realistic, although I do have a piece here uh that I do want to get into that is talking about millions, millions are vacating social media in droves.
• 18:37
  It is a quiet exodus, and I am going to get into that on the other side of this break.
• 18:43
  But I think ultimately a better approach would be to educate them, to educate, especially young people, letting them know what is reality and what isn't.
• 18:55
  Look, the shadows being cast on the wall in front of you from a flickering flame behind you.
• 19:03
  That's not reality.
• 19:05
  That is that's the best message that we could possibly deliver to kids these days is let's decide, let's go after truth.
• 19:15
  Let's pursue reality, and let's pursue it through the filter of truth.
• 19:20
  Truth, goodness, and beauty.
• 19:22
  This is what we're after.
• 19:24
  And of course, this is the point of a classical education.
• 19:28
  An education that uh you're not going to find everywhere.
• 19:34
  You're only going to find it in a few places.
• 19:37
  And it's those places that you need to be looking for.
• 19:40
  Those places.
• 19:41
  If you want an education for your child, if you're not homeschooling, get them in a classical education.
• 19:47
  I'm telling you, it will be the absolute best for them.
• 19:52
  They won't, uh, they will not regret it.
• 19:55
  Speaking of not regretting, our friends at the wellness company.
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• 20:22
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• 20:34
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• 24:22
  All right, you know what else that uh that we like?
• 24:26
  We we like history.
• 24:27
  We do, we like it.
• 24:28
  We like history class around here.
• 24:31
  Before I get into this piece uh by uh I don't even know who who wrote this, but it's it's called the silent revolution.
• 24:40
  Why millions now look to leave social media before I get into that?
• 24:44
  I want to go to a little history class, just a little mini one, a little mini history class, you know.
• 24:50
  Uh our history classes around here are of varying lengths and degrees.
• 24:55
  This would just be classified as a mini, um, a mini history class.
• 25:01
  Today, my friends, is the anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln, the 16th, one of our favorites.
• 25:10
  Today's the day he made the fateful decision and fateful in a good way.
• 25:16
  He decided to promote one Ulysses S Grant to lead the Union armies.
• 25:24
  He needed a leader.
• 25:26
  He was tired of squander uh floundering and squandering and and just generally blowing it.
• 25:37
  He was tired of it.
• 25:38
  And he needed a man to come in and take this thing over.
• 25:42
  Today was the day he did it, the day he promoted Ulysses S.
• 25:47
  Grant.
• 25:47
  I read this little piece the other day on Grant.
• 25:53
  That uh, so the anniversary date here.
• 25:56
  Hang on, hang on, hang on, real quick.
• 25:58
  I just gotta I gotta make sure I get my gotta make sure my my dates are right.
• 26:03
  You cannot go into history class and and deliver wrong dates because that's that's paramount to abject failure.
• 26:12
  1864.
• 26:13
  Yeah, that's the date.
• 26:15
  That's the day that Abraham Lincoln, March 10th.
• 26:19
  He made Ulysses S.
• 26:20
  Grant commander of all the Union armies.
• 26:23
  1864.
• 26:24
  So I read this piece the other day.
• 26:27
  You know, just a little article, a little paragraph, actually, that in 1860, just four years earlier, a span of four years between being named commander of the Union armies and and living in abject failure.
• 26:46
  That was it, just four years.
• 26:49
  As a 38-year-old in 1860, Grant was struggling to sell firewood on a street corner in St.
• 26:58
  Louis just to keep his children from starving.
• 27:02
  Just four years earlier.
• 27:04
  Uh to his neighbors, he he wasn't anybody of prominence.
• 27:11
  His neighbors didn't didn't look at him as somebody who was a leader in any way, shape, form, or fashion.
• 27:21
  Matter of fact, they referred to him as a drunk.
• 27:24
  They referred to him as a washout, as a failure as a loser.
• 27:29
  Some of the some of the list here of the things that that Grant had failed at.
• 27:35
  Uh he failed as a farmer.
• 27:38
  He uh was horrible uh with the finances.
• 27:42
  At one point, he was so broke he had to pawn his gold watch to buy Christmas gifts.
• 27:48
  He lived in a log cabin.
• 27:50
  And I uh there's something that I I love about this time period and the revolutionary wartime period where they would name their houses.
• 28:01
  You know, you've got Mount Vernon, you've got Monticello, you've got these glorious, magnificent names.
• 28:08
  Uh here Grant lived in a log cabin, and he he gave it a name, but it wasn't something magnanimous.
• 28:16
  Uh, you know, Mount Vernon was named after this commander, Commander Vernon at Washington revered and respected.
• 28:27
  Uh but Grant named his log cabin hard scrabble.
• 28:32
  Hard scrabble.
• 28:34
  Uh, because that's how he viewed himself.
• 28:38
  That everything was just a hard scrabble.
• 28:41
  Life was tough.
• 28:42
  Life was hard.
• 28:42
  I'm out here trying to sell firewood to keep my family from starving.
• 28:47
  My my farm has failed.
• 28:49
  I mean, he had some success as a soldier during the Mexican-American War, but those days were done.
• 28:56
  And now what was he gonna do?
• 28:58
  He was just out here out here trying to make ends meet.
• 29:03
  But then the civil war erupted.
• 29:06
  And this soldier decided that you know he could make a go of it again.
• 29:15
  Uh and you know, while while others were fueled by fear, Grant Grant uh, or I'm sorry, while others were paralyzed by fear, Grant was fueled by it.
• 29:25
  It didn't get in his way.
• 29:29
  He didn't make excuses.
• 29:31
  Instead, he made moves.
• 29:34
  He didn't ask for permission.
• 29:36
  Instead, this is the man who demanded unconditional surrender on more than one occasion.
• 29:43
  He's the man who couldn't sell firewood to save his family, but he ended up saving his country.
• 29:52
  And then was rewarded by serving two terms as its president.
• 29:58
  So what do we what do we learn?
• 30:00
  About about Grant in just this little segment of time, this little window from 1860 to this date in 1864 when he's named the commander of the Union Armies.
• 30:14
  We learn that winners don't look at their past.
• 30:18
  They only look at the present and the next objective.
• 30:23
  They look forward, looking always forward, as it were.
• 30:30
  Looking always forward.
• 30:32
  Latin.
• 30:32
  The Latin term, by the way, for looking always forward.
• 30:37
  I pulled this up the other day.
• 30:40
  And nope, that's not it.
• 30:42
  Virtuse Vincent Omniet.
• 30:44
  No, that's Virtue Conquers all.
• 30:47
  That is not the Latin for looking always forward.
• 30:51
  And I uh I set myself to memorizing it.
• 30:56
  And obviously, you can see how successful that was.
• 31:00
  Because I don't remember it.
• 31:04
  But I just I just loved it.
• 31:06
  I loved the way it sounded.
• 31:08
  I fugit irreparable tempest.
• 31:11
  No, that wasn't it.
• 31:13
  Although this is a good one.
• 31:14
  This is fast flies the irreparable hour.
• 31:18
  I do love that one.
• 31:19
  That is not that is not looking always looking always forward.
• 31:24
  And so as I as I come across these phrases in Latin, I will um I'll save them and I'll put them in this folder.
• 31:32
  But I apparently, apparently I didn't save looking always forward.
• 31:37
  Well, somebody remind me to look that up, please, and then to save it.
• 31:41
  Uh, because this is the undisclosed motto here of General Grant is somebody who looks always forward.
• 31:53
  Uh Semper is in it.
• 31:55
  Semper because Semper is always Semper Fidelis, the this the model for the Marines is always faithful.
• 32:03
  Uh Semper, I think it's Semper Poro, looking always forward, but uh don't quote me.
• 32:09
  Do not because I didn't apparently I didn't save it.
• 32:12
  I will look it up though.
• 32:13
  Yes, I will look it up and I will tell you.
• 32:16
  And this is the beauty here of history class.
• 32:18
  Not only do we learn about American history, but we learn about character traits and values and what it takes to what it takes to move forward, what it takes to get out of the cave and open up our eyes to the glorious truth of the sunlight.
• 32:38
  And it takes something, by the way.
• 32:41
  It takes a particular individual.
• 32:44
  And by studying history, we we learn about those individuals, and we learn about their makeup, and we gain motivation to move forward.
• 32:53
  We gain inspiration to move forward.
• 32:55
  It's the most beautiful thing about history class is gaining the motivation and the inspiration to move forward and to accomplish something in your life.
• 33:05
  That should be the objective to spend your life accomplishing something, something for the good, something that's beautiful, something that's that's layered and founded in truth.
• 33:18
  This, my friends, this is the objective.
• 33:20
  This is what we're after here.
• 33:22
  And it's you know, people say, What's the purpose?
• 33:25
  Why am I alive?
• 33:27
  That is the purpose to go after truth and goodness and beauty, to live this life to your fullest to the fullest extent.
• 33:35
  And some people in doing that, they're they're they're coming to this conclusion that they're better served by leaving social media.
• 33:46
  They're better served by just cutting ties by just uh by just bailing.
• 33:52
  And it's happening slowly, it's happening quietly.
• 33:56
  There's no hashtag to it.
• 33:58
  There's no influencer out there promoting it.
• 34:01
  There's no algorithm that is um showing people, you know, when to post and what to post and when not to post, because the point is people aren't posting.
• 34:14
  It's we're watching a silent revolution.
• 34:17
  It's not being televised, it's not being live streamed, it's not being posted about.
• 34:22
  People are just quietly leaving social media.
• 34:27
  Now, the other day I talked about this 30-day experiment experiment that Lawrence William put out where he put his his smartphone down for 30 days.
• 34:37
  He just wanted to see if he could do without it, because in his opinion, his attention was no longer his own.
• 34:44
  He was just too distracted.
• 34:45
  He was checking several apps, checking several emails, checking several news sites and sources and YouTube and and whatnot.
• 34:54
  And he decided that it was too much.
• 34:57
  He wanted his attention back.
• 35:00
  He wanted to not be distracted as much.
• 35:03
  And so he went on this 30 days.
• 35:05
  At the end of the 30 days, he felt fantastic, but he came to the conclusion that he needed a smartphone in order to live and survive and work and commute and have a life, which is true because so much of our lives are tied to our smartphones.
• 35:23
  But several people are doing something similar where they're not putting their smartphones in a drawer and leaving them.
• 35:31
  They're just they're just leaving social media.
• 35:35
  They're just quietly running the exit.
• 35:39
  So in 2023, the U.S.
• 35:42
  Surgeon General issued an advisory, and the uh advisory declared a particular health crisis in the country.
• 35:50
  And it was one regarding loneliness, and that we were literally in a national health crisis surrounded by loneliness.
• 36:01
  The report said that almost half of American adults experienced measurable loneliness, not some measure or some degree, but but measurable loneliness, not sadness and not some kind of social inconvenience, but full blown loneliness.
• 36:34
  And increase your chance of stroke by 32%.
• 36:40
  Um between 2003 and 2020, uh, we added 24 hours per month to the average time that Americans spend by themselves.
• 36:55
  24 hours per month, an increase.
• 37:01
  Uh okay, so every month you're alone.
• 37:05
  You're in solitary confinement.
• 37:06
  Now, I mean, for me, when I think about that, I'm like, oh yeah, I would like 24 hours of just, you know, just being alone.
• 37:19
  Uh I would I would go for that.
• 37:23
  But at some point, that's gonna get old.
• 37:28
  At some point, I would think you wouldn't want some human interaction.
• 37:34
  Uh we are by every official measure that that's available to us, a nation of people who are deeply and structurally becoming more and more disconnected.
• 37:46
  And it's strange because it's a time where we've never been more connected in in human history, but yet we're disconnected, and something isn't adding up.
• 37:56
  And it's true that a growing number of us are starting to to see it, and we're gonna, and we're starting to act upon what we're seeing.
• 38:06
  And and the act is in the exodus every month, according to this report here, nearly two million American users on the internet are searching how to delete or deactivate their major social media accounts.
• 38:22
  You want to know what the number one account is, people are leaving.
• 38:25
  No, it's actually not X, it's it would be Instagram.
• 38:30
  Instagram is the number one searched account.
• 38:33
  How do I get rid of Instagram?
• 38:35
  Second is TikTok, and Facebook is number three, and X is number X is fourth.
• 38:41
  I know I I was surprised by that, just like you.
• 38:45
  Instagram is number one.
• 38:48
  Um X is the least social component of all of our social media.
• 38:54
  Uh, and you know, whereas the others have a profile and a very obvious front-facing social identity aspect.
• 39:01
  X really doesn't.
• 39:04
  But that the important thing is that all these digital departures aren't teenagers having a bad week.
• 39:12
  These are these are people, uh, many of them, while under the age of 25, are out of their teens.
• 39:22
  And they they've made this decision.
• 39:24
  They they've looked at the thing that was supposed to connect them, and they've quietly decided that uh this isn't doing what it's promised to do.
• 39:36
  There isn't a connection here.
• 39:37
  I'm I'm not connected to anybody or anything.
• 39:40
  I'm just I'm part of the world wide web, but yet I'm not connected.
• 39:47
  Uh, in this in this piece here, uh, Johan Harry uh in his book Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.
• 40:00
  This piece uh uh quotes from his book uh stating that it presents an extended investigation into what he calls a global attention crisis in it, he put the attention research plainly.
• 40:16
  College students in one study could focus on a single task for an average of 65 seconds before switching.
• 40:24
  Office workers managed about three minutes, and in a Carnegie Mellon experiment, students who received text messages or text message interruptions during a test performed roughly 20% worse than those whose phones were off.
• 40:43
  But we're not just distracted, we're being cognitive cognitively restructured.
• 40:48
  That sentence right there caused me to stop.
• 40:52
  We're not just distracted, we're being cognitive cognitively restructured.
• 40:57
  Now, distraction was the point of Lawrence Williams' 30-day sabbatical from the smartphone.
• 41:05
  He was tired of being distracted.
• 41:08
  He was tired of his attention being commandeered.
• 41:12
  But this piece is suggesting that it's not just mere distraction, it's a cognitive restructuring.
• 41:20
  And uh that caused me to pause.
• 41:23
  And so I'm gonna pause here because we're we're up against the break, but I want to pick up this idea of cognitive restructuring on on the other side when we come out of this out of this commercial break because I think I've got a I got a sneaky feeling you are as intrigued about it as I am.
• 41:41
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• 41:43
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• 45:01
  All right, my friends, let's let's get back to this uh this piece out of the epoch times.
• 45:09
  Uh the piece is called Silent Revolution, why millions now look to leave social media.
• 45:16
  And we ended that the end of the of the second segment there with this statement that people are leaving social media not just because it's distracting us, but we are being cognitively restructured.
• 45:32
  And it's true, and we we've talked about that here.
• 45:36
  We've talked about the cognitive restructuring that that's happening within us internally.
• 45:43
  And it's so um, it's so surreptitious, we don't even realize it's going on.
• 45:50
  Uh and this piece describes it this way that people aren't leaving social media uh because they're fleeing from something uh abstract.
• 46:01
  Instead, they're running towards something that they can feel with some type of urgency.
• 46:07
  Uh and that something is the need to be present.
• 46:11
  It's it's the need to think clearly.
• 46:15
  Umport called it digital minimalism.
• 46:20
  It's this idea that technology should serve our values, not the other way around.
• 46:25
  We shouldn't be servants to technology.
• 46:28
  It should serve us, but but it should serve our values, it should serve our virtues.
• 46:34
  Jenny Odell took it a step further in how to do nothing by arguing that reclaiming attention means turning toward local life, toward ecology, toward the people physically in front of you.
• 46:52
  Um, she says, I I had to Google what what ecology was.
• 46:57
  And she said, ecology is the scientific study of of how living organisms interact with each other and their environment.
• 47:05
  And it sounds like we need more of that, as our environment uh is becoming extremely digital, and we need more solutions to our our newfound situation.
• 47:20
  46% of Gen Z now say they are actively taking steps to limit their screen time.
• 47:27
  And it's not a trend, by the way.
• 47:29
  It's a generation that has that has come to a conclusion and they're making a choice.
• 47:35
  We are we are seeing the research.
• 47:37
  We are seeing uh the studies come out of this, and Gen Z or Gen Z is making this this conclusion here that it's time to go, but the exodus from screens is really only half of the story.
• 47:53
  The other half is geographic.
• 47:57
  Since 2020, two-thirds of all population growth among Americans, age 25 to 44, has occurred in in small towns and rural communities, which is reversing a decade-long pattern in which some 90% of that same demographic flowed into the larger cities.
• 48:19
  So, what's going on here?
• 48:21
  Not only are people exiting social media, but they're exiting the large downtowns.
• 48:30
  The University of Virginia's Cooper Center called it the highest rate of young adult migration to small towns in nearly a century.
• 48:39
  And the USDA can confirmed it.
• 48:52
  And here we are in 2026, and those numbers are holding.
• 49:02
  Near zero.
• 49:24
  And we're looking at a rural domestic migration.
• 49:28
  People are moving, and it's not happening in these enormous waves.
• 49:32
  It's it's happening quietly, deliberately, and they're moving towards smaller places with slower rhythms because they want more room to breathe.
• 49:42
  And many of them are homesteading.
• 49:45
  Listen to these numbers.
• 49:46
  Between 180,000 and 750,000 U.S.
• 49:51
  households, these the these numbers between 180 and 100 and 750,000, they're now living off.
• 50:00
  The grid to varying degrees.
• 50:02
  They're generating their own power.
• 50:04
  They're growing their own food.
• 50:05
  They're managing their own water.
• 50:08
  A poll conducted in 2023 found that nearly 4,000 members of homesteaders of America found that over a quarter had begun within the previous three years.
• 50:21
  So since 2020, a quarter of them, 25% of them have decided that, you know what, we're going to homestead.
• 50:29
  We're getting off the grid.
• 50:32
  These are not people who grew up on farms.
• 50:35
  They're millennials and their younger adults who looked at the system they inherited, the speed of it, the noise of it, the fact that everything is mediated by a screen.
• 50:47
  And they've chosen to build something different.
• 50:50
  They want something else.
• 50:51
  They want something, something more for their life.
• 50:57
  Um this piece, the author says that there's a word for it, but that word isn't necessarily rebellion.
• 51:04
  We're not in rebellion here.
• 51:07
  Rob Dreyer called it the Benedict option, named after Saint Benedict, who in the fifth century, as the Roman Empire fractured around him.
• 51:18
  He didn't fight the chaos.
• 51:20
  Instead, he built monasteries, monasteries of small intentional communities where people could live by their own slower paced rhythm and practice and presence.
• 51:34
  They were insulated enough from the surrounding disorder to actually function as living, breathing human beings again.
• 51:46
  We've heard dozens of millennial aged uh individuals share a vision for this same kind of thing, you know, living off the grid in a customized community.
• 51:55
  Uh Cindy and I have talked about it.
• 51:57
  You know, we've we've talked to our own kids and said, hey, why don't we just let's just go grab some land somewhere and let's homestead it.
• 52:05
  Uh and let's just, you know, let's just have a community.
• 52:09
  Uh it is a it's a tighter social net with with spiritual protocols.
• 52:16
  It's something that you can't find in the big city.
• 52:21
  The writer of this piece says, I don't think Dre's point to to calling it the Benedict option was that the world should be abandoned.
• 52:30
  It was more that the world cannot be saved from the outside until someone first builds the inside, meaning you can't pour from an empty vessel.
• 52:40
  You've got to have something on the inside before you can build the outside.
• 52:46
  You can't restore what you you haven't first preserved.
• 52:50
  This isn't a top-down approach, it's a ground up, or as the author of this piece calls it, a roots to clouds approach.
• 52:59
  Political scientist James C.
• 53:01
  Scott wrote about what he called weapons of the week.
• 53:05
  These would be the quiet, unglamorous ways that people throughout history have resisted systems that threaten to swallow them up, not through big ornate protests that demand attention, but rather through a subtle nuanced revolution that retracts from the large popular group herd pattern of the moment that that group herd mentality.
• 53:29
  And so through practice and through showing up and through doing small and visible things.
• 53:36
  These the the way of going about this is what's keeping the larger things alive and breathing.
• 53:44
  And we would refer to homesteading as one of these weapons, a weapon of the week.
• 53:50
  Deleting your Instagram account might be a weapon of the week.
• 53:56
  And by week, I'm not talking about a day of the week.
• 53:58
  I'm talking about strength.
• 54:00
  It's it's going against conventional wisdom.
• 54:03
  I mean, it's not weak, but it's what conventional wisdom would call the weapon of the week.
• 54:09
  Moving to a town of about 3,000 people and then starting a garden might be considered a weapon of the week.
• 54:17
  Choosing not to join in on an uh on an argument online might be considered a weapon of the week.
• 54:26
  None of it makes headlines, but all of it is working.
• 54:31
  So the next time you post something and someone comes at you and says, Oh, Rob, Rob, you're wrong, you're a racist, you're whatever.
• 54:39
  Uh just ignore and move on.
• 54:42
  Just ignore and move on.
• 54:43
  That's what I do.
• 54:44
  I don't personally, I don't engage.
• 54:47
  I and I I've had it's doesn't happen often, but I'll I'll post something on Substack in the Notes app and someone will get on and they'll just I just move on.
• 55:00
  I I'm not going to debate a buffoon, especially in public.
• 55:05
  It just isn't gonna happen.
• 55:07
  We're not gonna do it.
• 55:09
  Um there is there's so much more to this piece that I would love to get into, but time is not permitting me today.
• 55:16
  Man, I can't believe how fast time flies when you're out here having a blast.
• 55:22
  Look, the bottom line is that we want to be in positions where our eyes are open to truth, where our eyes are open to goodness and where they're open to beauty.
• 55:34
  And if if being part of the of the social media exodus is going to aid that cause, if it's gonna help get us out of the cave, then by all means, uh let's look at ways to do it.
• 55:47
  Let's let's look at ways that we can that we can make ourselves better.
• 55:52
  That is the objective here.
• 55:54
  That's the name of the game.
• 55:55
  How can we better ourselves and thereby bettering those that are around us?
• 56:01
  If if we are if we are making steps to better ourselves, then we're making steps to better the world.
• 56:10
  Then we're making steps to to better our communities and to better those around us and and to go back into the cave and pull as many out as we possibly can.
• 56:21
  All right, we're gonna end how we began today.
• 56:23
  Let's go down into the cave and let's bring as many to the surface to have their eyes exposed to the sunlight, as many as humanly possible.
• 56:33
  All right, my friends, that's the objective here.
• 56:35
  That's what we're after.
• 56:36
  And if it's your objective, feel free.
• 56:38
  Share the good news, share the the good news of this program, encourage your friends and family to get on the dean's list.
• 56:46
  Let's unite to renovate the age.