Scrolling and Eating Our Lives Away
My latest podcast interview and another podcast that everyone should listen to.
Hello good people! This week I want to highlight a podcast interview I did recently. But before pushing you to my interview, I wanted to suggest another one. On her podcast, Honestly, Bari Weiss interviewed Dr. Casey Means about “… why America is so fat, what our food has to do with it, and what we can do to reverse it.” This was one of the most fascinating and important interviews I’ve heard in a long time. Check it out:
Fixing a Culture that Sets Kids Up to Fail
“If you are going to put people into an environment of endless temptation and infinite information, you’ve got to give them the tools to navigate it.”
A little over a month ago, I was interviewed by Steve Cosio, a radio veteran who runs a podcast called About Mansfield. It is a local news show, but the questions and content of our interview were focused on the broader American culture, specifically in regards to parenting and education. Our conversation was split over two podcast episodes. Since the episodes are front-loaded with news, I’ll timestamp the major topics covered:
“If you look at the skyrocketing rates of mental health disorders in the last ten years… if you look at the rates of obesity, of drug overdose… it’s really alarming. And every adult needs to be looking in the mirror and saying, What is going on? Every culture and every community needs to be stopping and saying, How do we address these issues?”
29:51 Interview segment begins
31:10 Are our kids entitled?
31:40 The most important goal of childhood
32:50 The problem with old metrics and a lost sense of the mission
36:25 Questioning the college model
37:50 When do you become an adult? How do you define adulthood?
39:25 How the paradigm of overproviding and overprotecting children became dominant
41:50 How do we create change and what’s the change we want to create?
Cultural norms, advertising, and an “itch cream” environment
45:27 How Facebook and Twitter became infinitely more powerful in 2009
47:25 We are living through a dramatic social revolution… it’s never been harder to parent
47:50 The problem with giving children smartphones and what should be done…
50:59 The power of schools, how they’ve failed to meet the moment, and what they should do
“We must prepare future generations for the very novel world they are going to inherit…”
40:02 Interview segment begins
41:00 The safetyism movement
45:00 What caused overprotection, fragile kids, and collapse of our communities?
47:20 How to adapt better to the inevitable transitions caused by technology
50:25 The power of clear standards, norms, and values—of culture—to make us capable of handling our current environment
52:47 Is the Wall-E dystopia our current trajectory?
55:40 How schools should lead communities in how to handle the smartphone
56:40 Could the legal age to be on social media be changed to 16
58:20 Hypothetical couple asks, “How should I raise my kids to be healthy, well-adjusted, etc.?”
Thanks for checking this out. I have a couple more podcast interviews currently in the hopper, so let me know if you like this format. If interested in my past podcast interviews, you can always find the whole library here: https://trottershane.com/podcasts
As always, life is too short to be normal.
Shane