Shifting Culture
On Shifting Culture we have conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Hosted by Joshua Johnson, this podcast features long-form conversations with authors, theologians, artists, and cultural thinkers to trace how embodied love, courage, and creative faithfulness offer a culture of real healing and hope.
Shifting Culture
Ep. 434 Aaron Cline Hanbury - When Machines Can Do More, What Does it Mean to be Alive?
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In this episode with Aaron Cline Hanbury, we think through how we relate to technology and the things we make. We tackle the question underneath the whole AI moment: not just what it means to be human when machines can do more and more, but what it means to be alive. We get into whether any technology is really neutral, where our attention is going and who's buying it, raising kids in a screen-saturated world, and what it takes to stay awake to wonder.
Aaron Cline Hanbury is a writer and editor whose essays and profiles have appeared in various publications, including The Atlantic. He is the founding editor of the award-winning magazine Common Good, and a past editor of RELEVANT magazine. He lives in the metro Atlanta area with his wife, Hannah, and their daughters.
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You know, somebody brings up AI, and somebody says something about, you know, what it means to be human. I'm actually not.. I'm not totally sure that's the right question. Not that it's a bad question, but I'm not sure how many people think.. you know, I don't know. Chat GPT can tell me recipe instantaneously, maybe I'm not a human anymore. And so, you know, I think in some ways there can be like a knee-jerk reaction to that question, because it sounds so good, but in reality it's missing a little bit of what the question is, so I think I would actually frame it not quite, not quite what does it mean to be human, but a little more like what does it mean to be alive, I Hello,
Joshua Johnson:and welcome to the Shifting Culture Podcast, in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host, Joshua Johnson. You know, technology is everywhere, and it's not just in the screens that we use constantly, and they're, they're on your phone, you're constantly on your phone, right? It's really kind of ridiculous that we can't pay attention anywhere around us, because we have screens everywhere, but we also have tools and technology that has been been there for many years, the question, with the advent of AI and others, is how are we to relate to technology? How do we live in this world of technology? So that's why I wanted to talk with Aaron Klein Hanbury. He edits Common Good magazine, and he wrote a new book, Wired for Wonder. Aaron is a maker wrestling with the same tools that we are, and in this episode we're wrestling with the question, not just what it means to be human when AI can do more and more, but what it means to be alive. We get into whether technology is ever really neutral, where our attention is going, and who's buying it, how to raise kids in the middle of it, and what it takes to stay awake to wonder, so what would it take to actually live well in all of this instead of just being carried along by it. Join us here is my conversation with Aaron Klein Hanbury. Aaron, welcome to Shifting Culture. So excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks, Josh,
Unknown:glad to be here.
Joshua Johnson:You know, for millennia, I think we've been asking the question, what does it really mean to be human? Where do we stand in our relationship with the creator? What is our purpose on earth? With the advent of AI and the technological age that we live in, are we still asking the same questions, or are there different questions we're starting to wrestle with when it comes to being human.
Unknown:Yeah, that's a good question. No, I think in some ways we're asking the same questions. I'm reading a book right now on the history of agriculture, in which the author is taking really boring pains to make the case that modern agricultural and modern agricultural practices are inextricable from modern technological advances, so the idea of, in his main use case, having a plowed field with organized with corn in an organized way, with the corn being modified in such a way that it's not as protected from the elements as it once was, and it's more native form. These are all things that humans have done to try to improve whatever access to food or the work of harvesting, all these things, and you know, presumably somebody back when these sorts of Aztechian agricultural practices are coming about is probably asking the same question, like, what does it mean to be human? Now, on that question, though, I do have a bit of a bit of a riff, meaning I think I hear mainly in Christian spaces, but I think I hear that question a lot when it relates to AI. You know, somebody brings up AI and somebody says something about, you know, what it means to be human. I'm actually not, I'm not totally sure that's the right question, not that it's a bad question, but I'm not sure how many people think you know, I don't know, Chat GPT can tell me recipe instantaneously, maybe I'm not a human anymore, and so you know I think in some ways there can be like a knee-jerk reaction to that question, because it sounds so good, but in reality it's missing a little bit of what the question is, so I think I would actually frame it not quite, not quite what does it mean to be human, but a little more like what does it mean to be alive? I think is a better question, or if you take it a step further, what does it mean to live? Now, that doesn't go any further in providing an answer to the question, but I do think it frames it a little bit more in existential terms that I think match a bit of where the rub actually lies.
Joshua Johnson:So, why do you think that there is a distinction there to live well and to be human, like what's the distinction?
Unknown:So, I think in an industrialized economy the idea of a robot or an algorithm or some generative tool making widgets, doing things that feels. Is threatening, because for so many years, though not that many historically, but so many years in sort of our country's life into the life of many of our families, you know what you go and create on a day-to-day basis, create in kind of a broad sense of the word is intrinsic to who you are, and so that being threatened by an AI tool brings up certain questions, which gets to this idea of human or not. I think, though, it's a bit of an absurd point. I think the idea of these things threatening our humanity is simply just outside the historical context of understanding where the question comes from. I'm not sure how much we actually all feel that, however, I think the current state of, to use an overused term, mental health, some of the statistics and studies we're seeing around men. The most popular article that's come out in the last year was the article in Harper's about gooning. Feel free to Google it if you like. I'll not go further into what it was about, but we're learning more and more about these intense internet cultures that, in one sense, are thriving because they're growing, but in another sense, the whole point of them is that people aren't thriving. There are places where people are degraded across the spectrum. What that could mean. I think we even saw this in probably the early 2010s when Isis was all over the news, and the big thing was that Isis was using these propaganda videos on some version of YouTube to promote, so there's this idea that people are going online and they're spending their time and they're learning things, and they're maybe being radicalized in certain directions, or they're being encouraged in degrading habits, etc. all these things, and I think many of us know intrinsically that this is a bad way to live. I think you see this even with surveys that have shown us, and this is almost to this point so consistent, you don't need to cite the surveys. That Gen Z is probably our most tech skeptical, or at least internet skeptical generation. Now, they're also the most adept at the tools, but in terms of actually liking them and feeling the need to use them, or the desire to use them, they tend to be the least enthusiastic. So, I think that's telling us something. I think that's telling us that there's something about the sort of doom scrolling life, the all internet, all the time life. I mean, I would even add, you know, sometimes it's fun on whatever weekend night for my wife and I to watch a show and more or less binge several episodes of it, but you definitely have there's like a, there's like a certain level right where you cross, where all of a sudden you're like, oh my gosh, like what did what did we just do with our night, like that feels crazy. We finished a show not long ago, I wish I could remember the show, it was on Apple, I think, and we watched it, and we watched it maybe in two sittings, two or three sittings, so you know, a good two or three episodes of sitting, and it just wasn't that good, like there was no payoff at all, like the only upside is that we spent an evening together on the couch, but that could have easily been spent doing anything else, all that to say, that's sort of a rambly way to say, I think there's something about the idea of these tools and the way we are spending or using our lives that feels a lot more threatening to me. We could go any other direction with that, right? So, like, attention spans down, rates of suicide and depressive and suicidal tendencies is up, both with adults and teens. There's the whole Jonathan Haidt thing about girls and adolescents, that's been blowing up over the past 18 months or so. So, you go all these different directions. I almost feel, in some ways, like the question doesn't need to be spelled out, like it's almost axiomatic at this point, that there's something about these tools that makes our day-to-day lives in some way worse, even as we're intensely dependent on them, which is part of the irony.
Joshua Johnson:Are these tools then making our lives worse? Is it different than maybe tools that we've had in the past, tools of the industrial revolution, or so that maybe have made it a little better, or are we still trying to figure out how to use these tools, which will make us better.
Unknown:I think a couple things. One, I think in many ways, tangible ways, the internet has improved aspects of our lives, and in many ways, tangible ways, the internet has harmed the way we spend our lives. I think often of the, you know, omnivores dilemma, the Michael Pollan work, where he talks about the extent to which, you know, GMOs, so-called cash crops, etc. can have effectively eradicated starvation around the world. I mean, we've, we've basically solved starvation with what we can do with agriculture and food. We have made our food dramatically less nutritious, and we have foisted onto sort of the Western diet shelf stable food, which is to say something utterly different from fresh food, which has all these sort of effects, right? And I tend to think most of these technological innovations contain both of those things at once and always do, and I think uniquely. Say that the Christian faith has something to say about this, in that we both view the world as created as a good thing, and the caretakers of the world as those who are made in God's image, and yet we believe that we and the world along with us exist in this fallen state. There's some traditions that differ with how they would frame that, but that's generally, I think, the thrust of most Christian traditions, as it relates to humans, and so we have both of these things. We have fallenness and image in these things we do now. I don't think that it's a yin and yang that they balance, and I would even push a little further back, and I like the technological philosophy of Albert Boardman in the way he views technology, which is to say I do not necessarily view each individual technological thing as value or even morally neutral, like it's not just a tool that you can use for good or use for bad. There's it does things to us. There's a design that can be good or bad, you can use them. Things have a telos. There's all sort of that's all sort of like philosophical kind of babble to get to the point that I don't think it's as simple as, like, well, there's this thing that exists, and you could use it for good, cuz it for bad. I think that's a bit of a cop-out. I think there's some more layers to that conversation to get into, but to your question about whether this is different, I do think some of these things are different than, say, I don't know, the typewriter, though, and there's a, you know, a lot of us are familiar with Neil Postman's Amusing Art Thea Cells to Death. He also has a book that's a little less known, though I think gaining some traction, called Technopoly, and he has a really extended section on the invention of the clock and the way in which the clock has dramatically changed the Western experience for workers, I mean, the clock was invented, more or less. This is, this is a loose history, more or less invented, so that clergy could know when to pray and how much time to spend in vespers. They thought they would maximize their more or less meditation time, and instead, you know, you get all these things right with people living by the clock and dying by the clock, more or less, particularly in in upper middle class and upper class and middle class cultures in the West. So I think in some ways that's a tale as old as history, right? Like this whole, like, what's this doing to us that's good? What's this doing? Just bad. I think what is different about this current iteration is how pervasive and fast everything is moving, pervasive in that when you and I are speaking over a Zoom-related tool, many of us spend - I mean, I spend most of- not most, I spend a good portion of every working week on some sort of Zoom call, talking with people, writers, interview subjects, coworkers, that's a can be a good thing, that can be a bad thing, but it's also a thing that I have very little control over. I mean, for me to not participate in it would be to, what, I mean, dramatically change our whole socioeconomic calculus with some sort of job change, you made dramatic, which is to say this is just where we're at, we're with these things.
Joshua Johnson:Let's get into then the creation of things, so if we one, if we're, you know, made of the image of God, we are creators as well, like we can be sub creators, whatever you want to say to it, but we, we create, we make, and we are making these machines, and we're making these technological advances. What is our responsibility as makers, as creators in this world to make something that is maybe good, that is not just neutral, right? It's actually on the good side, not on the detrimental, the bad side.
Unknown:There is a quote from Wendell Berry, and this isn't a direct quote, it's more of a paraphrase, but Wendell Berry has said that when you approach a field, a piece of land, the thing to ask is not what you can do with it, but to ask what the land or the field needs. That doesn't go that far in terms of instructing us with what to do with our technological world. However, I do think it's, it's an interesting way to frame the work of individual creators. Certainly, you can see at a micro level what this would do for, say, your parenting or interactions with coworkers on small levels. It's instructive to think not what can I do here, but what is needed here. You can think of that with the food you'd put on the table, right. In some ways, this whole kind of RFK junior thing that's happening, which is in my mind crazy, or at least aspects of it are crazy, but a good part of it is at least people are asking, like, what, what should we be eating, not what can we be eating, but what should we be eating. So I really like that framing of what is needed here. Now that doesn't directly answer your question, but I think it's, it's a helpful one, and people need all kinds of different things, right? We need beauty, we need our intellects stimulated, we need certain problems solved, so you could see any sort of way, and I do think, you know, when it comes to some of the AI questions that are more front of mind, you know, singularity or some big thing coming. There, the big question I always come back to is, are there people who should have recognized or can recognize some of these things and stop, like they know I'm not doing this anymore. And then you get into this weird Oppenheimer thing, right, where somebody else might do it. If we don't do it, you know, somebody else might. I do think there's a great moment in Oppenheimer, which is a movie that I think was generally speaking overrated, but if you've seen it, there's this moment where they tell Oppenheimer that Hitler has died, which should mean, I mean, they've spent the whole movie saying if we don't create an atomic bomb, the Nazis will, and then he gets the news that maybe the bomb's not needed because Hitler's dead, and it's a small moment, but there's a moment where he sort of clicks into this other gear of what we're going to create it anyway, and you kind of see the shift from an altruism based around some sense of defense or world peace or saving people from genocide, you know, some sort of good thing in his mind to this other thing, which is either I'm going to create because I can, I'm going to create because of the fame, the power, whatever else is going on, and think about that a moment, a lot, like what do we do when we're faced with those moments when you're creating something, you're making something, now you know, I mean, I make a magazine and work with words, so the stakes are never as never as big as an atomic bomb, but you know, I was, so what are the stakes for me? It's hard to get beyond sometimes just rhetorical questions with that.
Joshua Johnson:I think it would be helpful for people then to not just go with the atomic bomb, but go with you as creating a magazine. What are your thought process of like how to create something good, or saying, hey, this article may not actually be good for the world, but it will be good for views and clicks to sell more magazines, and we're gonna make more money doing this or that. How do you go about making those types of decisions?
Unknown:Yeah, it's a really hard decision, and I think there's an old truism, I guess, in journalism, broadly taken, that you need to give some people some need to read articles, but to get them to read those, you have to give them some want to read articles, so you're always mixing this want to read and need to read, and by and large, I think that's fine, right? Like, I think you know, we turn in, tune in to say The Colbert Show or Jimmy Fallon to see whatever celebrity play some dumb game, and if he wants to with those eyebrow eyeballs, also bring in something that's important to him. Like, I think there's something there that's fine, right? When it comes to our work, that comes up quite a bit, and we hit it more, I think, on the technological side than we do on the content side, specifically, which is to say we could monetize things better if we created an app and sent push notifications, we could keep more people on the website by doing every third scroll, or whatever, putting more suggested readings. We do some of that, we don't do a lot of it, so we wrestle a lot with, can we create an environment that's the environment we want to create, which is something with a slower pace, something that we call is print first or print forward. So, even our whole digital life as a magazine, we are trying to leverage toward something that you would sit down and read in ink and paper, and so often we come up with things that we could do, and maybe should for business sense, but feel like they would hurt what we're trying to do overall. Another big one that I think we still wrestle with is SEO strategy. I think before AI and AI slop sort of broke some of these mechanisms, the way the internet economy worked was by optimizing stuff on the internet for SEO. Some of that is not necessarily that bad, right. Google has this thing, and they tell us more or less what the rules are of allowing your stuff to show up, and so you more or less play by those rules. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world. However, how it's ended up resulting for us is, you know, you search for something and you get a ton of hits that you've got no way of knowing if the information you're seeing is accurate or not. All you really know is those people knew how to play the strings of the Google system, they knew how to optimize for SEO, and so we all know, right? It's the thing that has the same question in the headline, that same question is repeated in the subtitle copy, it's repeated in the early thing, they'll ask, you know, you search like, what's the best computer for teens, and then there's like a whole paragraph in the article dedicated to like, what is a computer, and like, you know, just giving you all the hits, or the recipe is like, you know, 25 inches down to get you to scroll all the way through. I think all those things are bad for us, they're bad for our attention spans, the content is crap, and it has sort of, in some ways, I think, shown the underwear of the internet editorial world, and so I didn't want to do it. I didn't want us to do it as a magazine. I think optimizing our stuff, and so far as we like tag it correctly, is fine, but adding articles out into the world where we're just doing it to attract, not just attract readers. To attract readers who otherwise wouldn't have been coming to us, or even looking for the kind of thing we do, is just not something I wanted to do. Now we have an SEO consultant, and we end up doing it because there's a certain contingent on our business side that wants us to elevate a certain sort of viewership numbers, and it's been really effective for us to a certain degree, but I think that's one that internally there's, there's still a lot of wrestling with, not because SEO is like some moral issue or not, but because it is sort of this, like, are you going to jump into the system or not. I'll tell you another example here that's that's fresher, Paul Kingsnorth, the sort of contrarian agrarian technology writer, or whatever you would call him, just last week, I think, maybe the week before, sort of endorsed or proposed or suggested this thing of like writers against AI. Have you seen this, and it's like a bad thing that you can even like put on your website, and we don't use at our magazine any AI for on the publishing side, we wouldn't publish anything written by AI, however, it strikes me that to label the material with a badge that's whoever against whatever in some ways is a good sort of editorial policy stand, I guess, but it's also just playing by like the rules of polarized Twitter, like, like it's another way to virtue signal, and to say, this is my camp, and I'm over here, and if this is not, if you don't have my symbol, you're over there. I mean, we all know these, like, you know, remember Black Black Lives Matter movements, a different sort of natural tragedy. Tragedies have happened, and people wanted to put, like, a blank Black post on Instagram, or something like that. And it strikes me as odd that some people who would generally speaking be critical of that kind of thing would be excited to post, you know, a writers against AI badge, and I am entirely sympathetic with the writers against AI thing, but it's one of those ways in which I think internet culture has seeped in to everything, other things that we're making, and distorted it, so to get to that question of, like, you know, do we do things just to attract writers, you know, do we fight AI by participating in basically internet polarization culture? I don't know, that's what I actually had a phone call last week, late last week, with an editor whose magazine is all about it, to try and sort of work it out, because it grates at me a little bit.
Joshua Johnson:How do we as humans start to live in tension of like it's not just
Unknown:one against the other, but there's nuance in the midst of any of these conversations that we need to have, and if we just put it out and say you're on this side, I'm on this side. We're never gonna have any conversation and move forward. How do we show up in the world with nuance, living in the tension that may lead humanity to a better place than it is right now? Yeah, that's yeah, that's articulately said. I think the best thing we can do is have conversations in person, whenever and however possible. For a lot of context, that's not possible, but I think there is something that we're able to do. I mean, brain science tells us this. I think personal experience tells us this. I think doing things like theater tells you, tells you this. There is something about being face to face with another human, and the intonations you pick up, and the facial expressions, the body posture, that can communicate so much that we lose through a more mediated communication form. So, when it comes to something like, you know, you want to use AI for whatever, to write sermons, or an email campaign, or whatever people are coming up with, and I don't want to use it at all, because of these fears. We can certainly draw lines in the digital sand and never talk to each other, or if we do, it's just, you know, quote tweets with takedowns and personal effectiveness, or we could actually talk about why we think this certain way, or what the nuances would be, and I, I just tend to think that one of the things that we get in person that we don't get online is some of the level of, to say, humanity feels almost cheap, but yeah, there's there's other factors at play, like there's a little bit of, you know, I would be embarrassed to insult you to your face in a way I wouldn't online, and so I, I would hold a little bit, and I use some soft skills, and try to come to some ground, and I think that's partly what distinguishes us. This is where I think the question about what makes you human actually comes to play really well. There's a friend of mine, a scholar, who has given a talk on technology that kind of went a whole different direction from this, but one of the points she makes early on that I've used, I think I reference it in the book, is that computers, by default, operate in binary. That's why we have binary codes, years and ones, and humans have almost always operated in kind of the point five, the gray space, and to the extent we continue to lean into the. Black and the white world, we're participating in what you could call machine culture, or we're operating like computers. We are made in many ways to operate in those middle spaces. Andy Crouch just talked about this, that something that's always efficient all the time, that's machine, something that has some surprise, some nuance, some spontaneity. Those are human spaces, so you know, talking with people in person is, can sound a bit trite, but I do think there's a huge, a huge benefit to, as often as you can, talking with somebody in person. I think phone calls are often better than, you know, emails, or sometimes even, yeah, any other sort of mediated form, like if there's an actual tension about a practice. I think talking about those things now. I also think helping people. This is a different direction in answer to that same question. I think broadening the conversation a little bit also helps as it relates to these things. So, if you use the like you're the whatever writers for AI and I'm writers against AI, I think it's helpful at some point for somebody to say, what if we weren't talking just about, say, writers and the sort of creative economy, but what if we talked a bit about, I don't know, ecological effects for or against? You might land on the same side, but at least we've changed the conversation a little bit. It's a little less existential, maybe more so if you're particularly environmentally sensitive, but less related to me and my work, you know, and we can, we can maybe start to be like, oh, well, that's a good point, or that's something I need to go into my calculus, because I do think a lot of these questions, in some ways, the big takeaway from every book you read about them, essentially, is be more thoughtful, or like, actually think about what you're doing one way or the other, and they tend to invite us not to think about it. In fact, I mean, I do think it's insidious that not to use hyperbole. Maybe it's not insidious, but feels insidious to me. That line of commercials that iPhone, maybe somebody ran earlier, it was in football season, where it's like I forgot my spouse's birthday, so I leaned on my phone, I'm like, make a playlist or something, and it likes a playlist, or the guy's like, wife wants him to pay a bill or something, they forgot to pay, and he tells AI to do it. It's kind of like a"we got your back" commercial, and they were funny enough, you know, and that's fine. But it does feel like there's a bit of, you know, like, are you inviting laziness and thoughtlessness, and then we'll just let the machines take care of our loved ones? Like, I mean, I don't know, it would be a funny sketch bit, but to think of, to think of being married to someone for however many years and coming up to a special day on their, in their life, and you leaned on a voice command to your phone to pull it off, and then to present that as, like, some achievement with humanity, it's like, what, what on earth are we talking about?
Joshua Johnson:I think thoughtfulness conversations, talking to person or over the phone or something, requires us to slow down, and we don't like to do that in our culture. We like to be efficient, we like speed, we like more, we like more profit, more everything to do that right, we need to be more efficient, and we need to be faster.
Unknown:Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:can we get people to slow down today? Can we get people to shift their attention to something else?
Unknown:Yeah, so the question there, I think, is will workplaces allow us to get to a place where we can slow down. I think schools are already getting there. I think schools are already getting there. There's a wonderful piece in The Atlantic this morning, maybe over the weekend, about a teacher who was all in on the like all kids on all Chromebook all the time thing, and that he senses back off of that because of all these studies, again kind of the Jonathan Height piece that we were talking about, I also already referenced that Gen Z is wanting to be lower tech, sort of the rise of the dumb phone again phenomenon speaks to that politics and entertainment, I think, will follow us, meaning I don't think they set pace near as much as they follow culture, so I do think a lot of this comes down to workplaces will they allow us to do more offline work to will they allow us to be properly staffed up where people can get the things done they need to get done in a reasonable amount of time and go home. I think that would be the big thing that would, that would help, because I think the one of the worst aspects of the cell phone, the smartphone, and then COVID is the smartphone allowed us eventually, you know, within kind of 07 to 2010 or so, it allows us to work from anywhere in a large part, in terms of emails, mainly, but you know, emails, phone calls, updates from whatever Slack or whatnot, you can handle business on it for the most part. You can bank, and then COVID told us that, like, oh, we don't need to be in the same rooms at all to accomplish many of these on-screen tasks. Some of that is great, like I get the flexibility to go places with the family when they're in the school. Occasionally, if I forget something, I can, I can remedy. What I forgot, you know, in at a swim meet or something, and part of that's really good, but I think most of us recognize now that what it's also done is made the work day not eight hours but like 15 hours, you know, like 15 crappy hours of work where you're sort of like kind of always on, you know, you're like I could do that later, so you're also kind of off in the middle of the day, and it's just kind of made this really sloppy, so again, that just gets back to like I think it's incumbent on workplaces, so what does that mean, you know, employers, one employees who have some sort of agency speaking up, probably on some firms that need to do some studies and really look at like where we at in our productivity, I think this is one thing that return to the office may help if it really goes, starts going well in the areas that are really pressing workers to come back, but without that, I say all that to say one of the things I really don't like about a lot of technology and technology writing, particularly in the Christian space, but also in the mainstream space, is they tend to minimize everything down to like tips, right, so like you should get a brick for your phone, and then you would not have notifications, and all of that's great, but if, if, if my boss is still expecting me to have seen an email, whether or not I got the notification is kind of neither here nor there. Like, if I'm super stressed out the next day because I ignored a phone call, you know, like, that doesn't, that doesn't actually help me. It has to be more systemic than that, and it just occurs to me that schools are already getting there. I think they're already going there. I think the next generation, so to speak, is getting there. But it really feels to me like the work and work culture is where we would need to lean in, and there's some people doing some wonderful work. Oliver Berkman, author of 4000 Weeks, I think has done some really good work on this. The four day work week, I think, is a good step toward this, which some countries are dabbling with, and some companies stateside are dabbling with. So, there's definitely some hope that way, but I think that somebody will spend our time is doing our jobs, and so fixing that feels like the first step. The next step, you know, your book, Wired for Wonder, a lot of talk about, you know, digital space, and talk about then talk about attention and wonder, and cultivating that. I think wonder is really important for us, but we actually have to see it for us to be filled with wonder, right? We can't miss it. How do we start to see it, the everyday little miracles of life that are there that fill us with wonder. One of my favorite things about having kids, and there's lots of great things about having kids, but I loved the ways in which things that I'd almost forgotten about became really exciting, so you know, I probably went 1520 I don't know, I went a lot of years not caring at all about trains, but as soon as my oldest daughter turned like one or something, and there was a train going by, it's all this like, look, there's a train, it's on the tracks, and it does this, and it makes a noise, and you know, if you see the front and you do this motion, you might get a honk, and it was so exciting, and I think rhyming books was another one. So, like Sandra Boynton, I'd always been a Shel Silverstein fan, but I don't remember reading Boynton when I was a kid. I guess I'm too old for when her books came out, but then when my kids came along, or even these books, they were awesome. And so I had gone, you know, my adult life up to a point, forgetting how awesome trains were, which is not the same thing. It's just a flower. I mean, this is trains are an amazing feat of engineering and industry. He has all sorts of cool things there. The simple play of words back and forth hadn't thought about in the forever. I mean, I'd probably read some poetry and enjoyed it or not, whatever. The sun to get to the natural examples, the moon coming out when it's full, like there's all these things that having a child to sort of introduce into this world reopened up for me. Christian Wyman has commented, I think it was on a podcast, because I would like to go to cite it, but I've not been able to find it. But trust me, he had this comment about when he got married, I think it's when he got married, he had always pictured love as a narrowing, like a focusing in on that person, but it was actually for him a widening of the spectrum of love, and I find that resonant with having children, that it wasn't so much that all of my attention was honed in on this one, now two, now three individuals, though that also is true, but it also reintroduced me to the world in a way that was entirely surprising. How does that relate to how do we find those things? I mean, CS Lewis, I think, puts pretty bluntly that we should try to see the world like children, that maturity is an adding, not a taking away, and for too many of us in our culture, we've treated aging and maturity as a taking away of things rather than an adding to, so there's a wonderful world around us to see as it relates to technology. Like, just don't take your phone places. I've been not taking my phone places lately, whenever I can, and it's pretty awesome. Like, obviously, you got to be in, like, a city where you can navigate a bit without maps. You know, but if you can find your way back to the main interstate, like, you'll get home, like, what's gonna happen? Everybody around you has probably a phone and an Apple Watch on, like, the odds of you getting, you know, irreversibly lost in Metro Atlanta are so small, you definitely have to be looking up, right? I mean, this is, it's a quite obvious thing, but I think, think like you're having a kid for the first time, and don't be staring at your phone. Are two great ways to start re-enchanting. That language, I think, gets a little overplayed, but remembering at least widening the lens for how wonderful the world can be.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, last night we were sitting on our deck, we just got some new zero gravity chairs, so we were all just, you know, trying them out, my wife and my son and I. He's eight years old, since so we're just like laying there, just looking up at the sky. We have some bloom starting to blossom, like we have some things in the trees are starting to come out, the leaves, and there's birds, and cardinal was in the tree, and my son just looks at me and says, I'm bored. That's like, well, that's good. It's good for you to be bored, like you just, just take this in. This God created this for a reason, and then created us, so that we could enjoy this, and we could, you know, we're part of this, so just be bored. And
Unknown:yeah, I think the whole boredom resting brain dynamic that I think is thankfully getting some resurgent talk is super important.
Joshua Johnson:What does it look like for us, for parents to say we cultivate boredom, and we have so much technology, they have so much junk everywhere that we forgot how to be bored, like, and you know that, then will start to give us some creativity and some play, and all these things that are so good for us, and what makes us, you know, human. So, how do you do that as a parent?
Unknown:Yeah, well, we have one who will not allow us to be unstructured in any way, or she will. I don't know, like, knife through a wall or something insane. But for the whole, for the older two, we are big on unstructured play. We're not particularly good at it, because we're also pretty.. we keep their days pretty full with school and ballet and all this stuff. But a lot of evenings, two or three or four evenings a week, you know, they'll have two or three hours of being outside with the neighbors, doing something somewhere on the street, which is exactly how I remember growing up, right? Like, I don't know, school day ended and I was just gone, and I don't, I don't know that my parents ever even wondered where it was, like, I just, I would show up sometime about when, when it felt like dinner time was gonna happen, and
Joshua Johnson:that's crazy. Oh, yeah, putting myself in my parents' shoes, of like, what I've lived in a
Unknown:very suburban neighborhood that was always having like new houses coming up, and I remember spending hours like wandering around like mid-construction houses, you know, like, sort of, you know, and I thought, like, I could have been injured in so many different ways in some house on a side street that my parents probably didn't even know was developed yet, so yeah, I think unstructured play is big. I think resisting the TV is big. I mean, one of the things, there's a book that came out, this writer deserves some love, and I can't remember her, the title of her book. Either way, she says we've had the wrong metaphor for technology with kids, we've tended to treat it like sugar, so a little bit is good and fine, too much is bad for you. And she thinks rather it should be framed like something like fentanyl. And one of the use cases she uses, and this resonates with us entirely, for the way our home works, is that a little bit is never enough, like your kids are never going to watch like one episode of Daniel Tiger or Bluey, and be like, "Oh, good, got in a little my sweet tooth, I'm ready to go outside and play or read some literature or something. They always want more, like no matter what, you know. We have these, these switches on Saturday, basically Saturday mornings, the kids getting in on road trips can play with these Nintendo Switches, and they could play for hours and would still fuss about putting them down, like it's unreal, like it is truly a never enough proposition. So, resisting those has been big for us. Hopefully, it's effective. We also have.. we also don't allow the word "board. We had to eventually stop. Tell one of our daughters, "You just can't say that, because if we think you don't know what it means, like you're in a house full of like toys and junk in a neighborhood that you could run around, books you could read, things you could draw on, you could, we could clean a room if you wanted, like, there's so many things you could do, and I do think that I do, where it gets the question that I have for myself, and maybe you have insight on this, I'd be interested to know, is when I find myself freest to roam mentally, are obviously in the shower, which I think for everybody is like their big aha moment in time, and then like mowing grass or doing those kind of tasks that are too loud for me to have headphones or too distracting, at least for the way my brain works. I can't really do the something in the ears while I'm doing your hard work, and the show, so there's two areas, so I have I'm doing. Something it needs to get done, and that gives it some structure, right? But because of the geography and the nature of those spaces, I have to be, you know, nothing else coming in, right? So it's just being my thoughts, and I always find those times tremendously productive for ideas. I mean, sort of, you know, got the idea in the shower is sort of a cliche, but I think it's a cliche because for many of us it's the only times that we are alone with our thoughts, and so we find it inspiring, and we think it's the shower, but really it's just the fact that we've given ourselves space to listen and let our let our brains make connections. How to provide that for the kids, I think, is a question. Like, it's one thing to say go outside and do something, hopefully that works right, that gives you some of the unstructured play, but I do wonder if there's a way of structuring some and make them take like 30 minute showers. I don't know what the.. I don't know how to apply that. Is there anything you do with your son that that helps?
Joshua Johnson:One thing we do, I mean, we take a Sabbath on on Saturdays, and it's a no screen day for us, and that's really helpful for me and my wife, and it's helpful for my son to like, he's, he's, he knows it, he's used to it, he doesn't complain about any of it anymore, and he's like, okay, it's time for me to figure something out, and actually engage, and you know, be playful, creative, read, build something, go play, man. It's just a huge, huge difference during that day, and our like even our attention with each other. Of I could pay attention, like when I'm asking him a question, we could actually have a conversation that's been really amazing. We were in Seattle last week, and you know, my mom, we have woods out by my parents' house, and so we go for walks all the time, and you know, my son on walks, he's very communicative, having deep conversations. He's eight years old, and he could do this, but he doesn't do it at home, he doesn't do it, you know, when he's on his tablet or playing his Switch, you know, doing those things, he doesn't want to have any of those conversations. So that was really beneficial, and you know, I was thinking, you know, I think for the same, I'm the same as you, like when I'm doing yard work, mowing the lawn, I have those thoughts, I could be creative, I could, you know, have those when I'm taking a shower, and also when I'm on a walk, I was thinking, like, when I'm on a walk and I don't listen to a podcast when I'm on a walk, like I like listening to podcasts, so it's hard for me not to, but when I don't, like that's when all my creative ideas start to come, like, because I'm moving, this is what I'm getting done, and then everything's flooding in, and it's amazing. It's good. I mean, that's what I used to do when I started, you know, I was writing about movies, watch a movie, I'd go for an hour long walk, I'd have like all my thoughts together, I could create. It was, it was great, you know. Did my first draft of whatever I was working on in my head on a walk, and that's that was really helpful. So, hopefully I could do that with my son, right? Help him
Unknown:right
Joshua Johnson:go for these walks, and, and you know, have those quiet times, those moments. How long did
Unknown:it take him to adjust to the Sabbath thing? Like, how long before you didn't fight that? That's a
Joshua Johnson:couple of weeks. I mean, we've been doing it for about three years now, so it was five.
Unknown:Yeah, I mean, I think that's the, that's going to be the key for us with, with kids, because I do think, though, though I anticipate their world being a little less tech than ours, maybe it'll be our grandkids, but I do think we're going to see a reversal, not maybe not total reversal, but I think we'll see a resetting of sort of digital expectations. I often think about you're in Kansas, right? So maybe, maybe Kansas was like this. Certainly, you know, Oklahoma, you read about the Wild West, and like somebody goes to Oklahoma and just like kills whoever was there, and it's like, nope, this is my land now. And we go back and look at that history, and we're like, what, how, and I do wonder if, like, you know, a couple generations on, to look back and be like, yeah, we just were like, hey kids, there's a bunch of like child pornography and fake news, and like a bunch of stuff that we know is bad for your brains, and you should probably have this in your pockets at all times, right? Obviously, because it's free, and we love you, so like, I like, I do, I do think we'll look back at some point and be like, oh yeah, that was a weird wild west, hopefully not as bad as you know, going to Oklahoma and killing somebody to take their land, but there's some pretty dark stuff,
Joshua Johnson:I think. I think so. I mean, we're, I think there's always a transition period when new technology comes to figure out how we use it, and usually the beginnings of it is kind of detrimental to us, and we like, okay, now we're going to learn how to do it, though. The only thing for me, like going into the future, right now it seems like. AI, and what's happening in the future. These tech billionaires, there's like five guys, like five white guys running the show and deciding where we're going, and it just feels gross because we don't have a say in like where we're going, like you know, you're like, I mean, you made a point before, like, I think anthropic is like, hey, we want a really good use for AI, we want ethical AI, but we're still gonna just, just plow forward, because if we're not first, then you know, and so we're gonna get to something that they, we don't know where we're gonna get to, and
Unknown:that's right. I don't know. Well, it's no, I mean, I think your industry or your past industry, depending on how you see it, I think is a great example of this. I mean, we're, I think we're in a really dark period right now, for movies. The movies are really stupid. There have been a few that have come out that are fine, but by and large, we're in this, like, everything's franchise, everything's megastar, and everything is.. if it's not, I guess you'd still call it franchise, but you know, like another twister or something, like all the stuff that went on last year, and I think there's no way to explain that other than what it is, which is many of those studios now are owned by tech entrepreneurs at some level, tech billionaires, you know, Amazon, whatever, Apple, and they're running film studios like they would run anything else. Like, what do people want? They like Star Wars. Let's give them more Star Wars. What do they pay money for? Harrison Ford movies. Let's pay Harrison Ford whatever he wants to be in this movie. Or, and then, like, you just see this thing rolling on, and I think we're already seeing, yeah, just a bunch of sucky movies, like movies that are uninteresting, and obviously there's a couple exceptions, but they're exceptions, you know. I think a lot about sort of that, like late 70s through early 90s period, where it felt like movies were just incredible, and people pushing boundaries and doing really interesting things, strong acting, and now it's like it's just not that, and I do, I do wonder if the more power we endow upon sort of our tech moguls, we'll see that applied to other industries.
Joshua Johnson:Well, this has been fantastic. A couple quick questions, Aaron, at the end for you. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Unknown:Oh, I'll tell you the easy one. This is, this might be, this might not be the direction you want to go. I would go to law school. I would go to law school, and I might still be doing the same thing I'm doing currently, but I am always struck by the fact that you meet people with law degrees who are practicing law and doing really well at it. Who are, say, running nonprofits who are in journalism, so they seem to have, like, a debt to future job flexibility that doctors don't get, you know? Once you've finished med school, you got to be a doctor to pay off that huge medical school bill. Lawyers don't have that, but they also need lawyers in every city in the country, it's almost like a nurse, you can, you can go where you need to go, and it feels like every time I meet somebody who's got a law degree, they like can be stable, like they can be doing what they want to be doing, but also have this like fallback and level of expertise, and you know, it's humanities and all this. Yeah, that's what I would tell myself. Go to law school, regardless if you're interested.
Joshua Johnson:Great, anything you've been reading or watching that you could recommend?
Unknown:Well, watching, I guess. I just dumped on the watching the watching thing. So I'm reading right now a book called The Science of Storytelling. Maybe it's a relatively famous book. You may have read it, but it's.. I'm in the early chapters now on your neuroscience and stories, and it's kind of blowing my mind. It's super fascinating. My wife and I are also trying, with several other people, to read Moby Dick this year, so I'm plotting through Moby Dick. In no small part as an exercise in boredom, you know, to work through something that has this takes as much work to get through. It's also very funny. I never remember reading it before. I don't remember how funny it was, but it's, yeah, it's funny. So, I would definitely recommend that. What else am I reading? Oh, that history of food is also boring, but so far really fruitful and interesting.
Joshua Johnson:Wired for Wonder will be available may 12, give us, give us your, your hope for this book. What do you want your readers to get from this? What do you hope it gives to the world?
Unknown:So, if someone goes to the book hoping for, like, tips or guides, they will be dramatically disappointed, and on the same side, I think if we go to it expecting, you know some like feat of like intellectualism that helps them understand the technological world better, they'll also be disappointed. So, the sweet spot of non-disappointment is I hope that people feel like they're not alone in a world in which we're barraged by technology, both at work, as we talked about, or. Our kids' schools with our own schools, if we're still in school, you know, our church votes on things via QR code. Now, like everywhere you go, you're just, you know, everything is screen-based, and I think a lot of people, if not most people, don't necessarily have strong opinions about that one way or the other that are formed in any sort of, like, what's your philosophy of technology, but it can be overwhelming, and then you know, a working title for the book that I really liked was I Know You Feel It Too, and I think in many ways that encapsulates kind of the hope I have for the book, that there's this this idea of like kind of working it all out together.
Joshua Johnson:Well, people could get that anywhere books are sold. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to after they connect with you and what you're doing.
Unknown:Yeah, that's a good question. So, I edit Common Good magazine, and everything there I'm connected to in some ways. I am. I have a an Instagram to which I don't post. I have a Substack to which I don't really post, but you can find me at both of those. You can find me at both of those places, and certainly my magazine work, I really like when people buy books on bookshop.org because of the money that they're able to provide to local bookshops.
Joshua Johnson:Well, Aaron, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for wrestling with technology with me, with us to figure out how do we live, how do we live well in this world in relation to the machines and the stuff that we have and figure out what attention looks like these days and how to cultivate some of that in our lives, so it was fantastic. Love our comments. Thank you. Yeah, it was fun.
Unknown:Thank
