The Dr. John Delony Show
The Scary Truth of How Screens Are Rotting Our Brains (With Carlos Whittaker)
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
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Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
What's going on? What's going on? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. Hope you are doing so great. Hey, on today's show, we have a special episode. All things social media, screens, the internets, all of it. If you're like me... You know that this, and you're reading, you read Jonathan Hyatt's book, The Anxious Generation.
You are paying attention to what's out in the world with the TikTok bans and the social media stuff and the insane rise in mental health challenges, especially with young teen girls. But I think it's actually in boys too. It just manifests itself differently. Everybody's concerned about it, social media, and they've gamified human connection. it is hard to get off.
It's hard to even, like, it's just, the whole thing's chaotic. And if you pull your kids off of it, then they're crying in their bedrooms that they're missing out on friendships and birthday parties. It's just, the whole thing's a mess. So, I've got a buddy here in Nashville. His name is Carlos Whitaker. And Carlos wrote a book. He is an author and a speaker. He's here in Nashville, Tennessee.
And I invited him. We went and had lunch. And I was like, man, you need to come on the show. And I want to talk about your new book. But more importantly, I want to talk about your experience as you unwound this thing. And this is one of the most important conversations I think I've had on this show. And I hope you will not just scroll past it. because this isn't us talking about the science.
You can hear about the neuroscience of social media and the dopamine, all that stuff. And it's not a couple of guys just complaining and ranting and raving. I think this is the most honest conversation I've had on this particular topic about all of us and screens and real life and meals and family time and friends and what we can actually do about it.
So I'm super excited to have this conversation with my friend, Carlos Whitaker. Check it out. Pass this episode along to your friends. I think it's a really important conversation. And it's one that the moment it was over, I changed my life. My life's different now. So I hope yours will be too. Check it out. My conversation with Carlos Whitaker. I'm super grateful that you're here.
You have tapped into something that's haunted me for a decade. And... I often, I don't say this lightly, and I'm super selective about who's here. Yes. And it's always somebody that has a direct impact on how I'm seeing the world or experiencing or somebody, I'm going to do something different in my life because.
And so to paint you a picture, in 2009 or 10, I was working at a university that was a beta campus for this new little product called Gmail. And they were also a beta campus for this new little thing called, hey, we got this new thing, we're gonna call it an iPhone.
And so they shipped them to the university and overnight they passed them out to every student and said, we're gonna follow it and see what happens. And we think this is gonna change everything. And so I was working in student affairs, which is like student mental health, student crisis care, drug use, where they live, all that kind of stuff.
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Chapter 2: How can a technology detox change your brain?
um absolutely and then your book shows up and so i'm like who's this guy so i called about a mutual friend of ours he's like no carlos is a real deal and so um and then you spoke this morning and i i mean i literally walked out of the the event this morning and and talked to my wife and i was like hey i you hit the final domino piece for me yeah wow and so uh i'd love just to kind of start here yeah
Walk me through. It's Sunday afternoon, and that little tag comes across your phone.
You know, Sunday afternoon, we all get it, unless you've turned it off, whether you're an Android user, an iPhone user, or iOS user. And the screen time notification comes across, and it says you have averaged so many hours and minutes a day on your phone, which, honestly, it's not a very impactful thing. moment for any of us.
We swipe it away or we see the number, which mine happened to be seven hours and 23 minutes a day. And I would see that for weeks on end or eight hours or nine hours or six hours. And I just swipe it away. Okay, cool. Whatever. But for some reason, this one particular Sunday, I decided to do the math. I don't know why. I was like, let me just do the math.
So the math told me that I spend 49 hours a week on my phone. So I was like, okay, hold on. That's two entire cycles of the sun. But awake time, that's like four days, right? So I'm not counting sleeping. No one's on the phone when they're asleep. So just being awake 49 hours of awake time, that's actually four days.
That's work plus overtime.
Yes, that's crazy, right?
That is a full-time job plus overtime.
Yes, that I'm staring at six inches of LCD in my hand. So then I was like, well, that's kind of crazy. So then I kept doing the math. And that math showed 100 days a year. So over three months a year, I'm looking at my phone and I'm like, oh my gosh. I know why the notification doesn't say this.
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Chapter 3: What did Carlos experience during his detox?
Yes.
I was like, okay, all these people, these PhDs, all these people are telling me what it's doing to me, but no one's done it. So I couldn't find the book. So I was like, well, then I'm going to be the guy. I'm the perfect lab rat. Seven and a half hours a day on my phone, TikTok, Instagram, all the things.
I'm making videos every day, talking to the little camera that's staring at me, getting my identity based on what people think about what I post and likes and shares. And I'm the perfect guinea pig. So let me remove my identity. Let me remove everything. and live it, and then that's why I'm sitting in front of you right now.
Well, and you offer the most compelling what's next. Yeah. And I like you, man. I've watched this in real time. I've lived it. I've had my own haunting experience with – just, just golf clapping. Sure. The, the tech guys, plus the neuroscientists, plus the, um, the guys that created like digital heroin. Like they beat me. Yeah. They have beat me. They won.
And they, they beat my wife who is a Luddite, right? She's from the wrong century. They, um, they, they, they beat us. She, I mean, she is. Yeah. It's so good. And I remember my two year old son, like we were, we dude, we were crazy. Yeah. No screens, no TV, nothing. And I'll never, like, I remember he was two and, And they slid a... It was like at a burger joint in Nowhere, Texas.
And they slid a laminated menu. And his two little non-functioning fingers, he was trying to like... And I remember going... But I told my wife, I said, it's in the water. It's in the water. iPads were barely out. But he was trying to make it bigger. And I was like, oh, this is in the air. And... I always, I go to two things that are compelling to me.
Number one, when they discovered penicillin, partridge in a pear tree, do this, death from infection fell off a map. They solved that problem, right? And the other one is, and I always forget, one of the famous psychology godfathers said, I thought if I took away my client's depression, anxiety, I would heal them. And what I did was I made them empty. Wow.
The anxiety and depression were serving a role.
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How do screens affect our memory and relationships?
Wow.
It's all been here's five steps. Here's the room. And so you give such a compelling vision. I want to start here. Tell me what happened with your brain.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
And this, to me, takes it out of the woo-woo.
Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, totally. Which is why I'm glad I did it. Now, to be fair to everybody that's listening, this wasn't a scientific experiment, right?
No, no, no. It's a picture. It's a snapshot. So R equals one. I mean, it equals one.
Yeah, yeah. So it was just me, the only lab rat. But let me tell you what happened to the lab rat. My cerebellum healed, he said, years in a period of seven weeks. Now, he's like, I see traumatic brain injuries, I see healing, so I can see a lot of healing. He's like, it's significant. But the kicker was my cognitive memory score. This is mind-blowing.
When I did not look at a screen for seven and a half weeks... Now, the cognitive memory testing, I felt like I was in Stranger Things. Like I walked into this office with fluorescent lights. It looked like a hospital room with a 1987 IBM computer. And it would just flash faces on the screen. And so it flashed different black and white portraits at me. And I'd watch it for like two minutes.
Then it would stop for a minute. This is one of the tests. And then it would flash more faces. And every time I remembered a face, I'd have to hit the space bar. So those are the kind of tests that I was doing. remembering numbers, numerals, all those things. My memory went from the 50th percentile of adult men in America to the 99th percentile.
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Chapter 5: What lessons can we learn from the Amish about community?
Everything. Everything. We've outsourced sex to pornography. We've outsourced discomfort to... Yes. Yes. And it was this... And I knew this. Yeah. But you saying, no, no, no, man. It took eight weeks and the brain's like, oh, I get to... Yes. We get to use humanity. Yes. Cool.
And I spent eight weeks... And I no longer could outsource any of this anymore.
No, you have to.
So I legitimately detoxed. My body and my brain wasn't used to actually living the way it was created to live. You talk about brain... health and memory. And there's a study done. I feel like the study was like 2016. So this was almost a decade ago that showed London cab drivers.
Yeah. Their brains are astounding.
The ones that use GPS versus the ones that don't, the ones that use GPS versus the ones that use landmarks, the ones that use GPS develop a gray dense matter on their brain that the ones that were using landmarks didn't. So it's literally like we are atrophied. I mean, you're right. Like when you don't use it, it's slowly,
Your brain's like, sweet, I'm going to go work on something else. Yeah. And it just lets it ride. Yeah. All right, so I've done some soul searching recently, and I've come to the realization that I actually love the internet. Just kidding. It's the worst. I mean, it is amazing, but it's also the worst.
And it doesn't matter if I don't like it, because everything in my life and your life takes place on the internet. Our work, our personal messages, our communications, we buy most of our things on the internet now. It's where we live.
And because so much of our lives take place on the internet now, it's become normal to just give away our email addresses to random companies who then turn around and sell them to other companies. It's become normal to create all sorts of different accounts for banking and shopping and social media. It's become normal to even order our food and schedule our garbage pickup with our phones. Listen.
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Chapter 6: How can families improve their meal times?
Yeah. That's amazing.
And I said, you're gonna hear some language I don't approve of. Right, right, right. But I want you to know the high school. I want you to meet a high school dad. Yeah. And he walked in in two or three minutes and he just like, he goes, dad, these are your people. And I was like, you're correct. That's awesome. Um, But there was a sliver of a night when there was an alternative reality.
Like, let's go do a thing. And we laughed. My son, we got out of the car and the show had already started and you could hear the band from outside this little club. And he was like, where are we? And we had wonder and laughter and crazy and dad, this is nuts. And I look over halfway through and he's like trying to play along. He listens to country music. Yeah, I know, totally. Yeah.
And dude, the allure is to go home and look at this thing. Yes, yes.
And so tell me, am I wrong? No, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. And not only are you not wrong, but this black box, whatever we're calling it, right? This thing. You talked about wonder. You talked about the allure. You were able to savor this moment with yourself. Like all of these things. I want us to... But everybody at the show... We're like this.
Oh, totally.
Through the screen. Absolutely.
These are legends.
Absolutely, right? And you've seen the videos or the photos of... There's this one famous photo that shows the juxtaposition between Michael Jordan hitting a game-winning shot in like 1992 versus somebody hitting a game-winning shot in like 2022. Every single person... in the Michael Jordan, it's just standing there with their mouths hanging open and their hands out like this.
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Chapter 7: What are practical steps to reduce screen time?
No, it really is. And it's easy to make to, honestly, I mean, I say easy. It's not complicated to make that life again. You don't have to move to monastery. I did it for you. You don't have to go to Amish farm. I did it for you. But I have laid out probably 17 to 20 things in my book that I think give people handlebars on what they can do to live this life, right? To, to get back to, um,
being truly human again without our phones. I was joking this morning to the staff how we trust Yelp now more than we... It's taken our ability away to go to a restaurant that we actually just want to go try. It's like, well, I checked Yelp and there's a one-star review. I'm never going there again. I'm not going there again.
Some dude named Bob with taste buds that aren't like yours made that decision for you. You didn't. And so for me, I just think I have created... through writing this book, I've given people handlebars on like how to wonder again, like let wonder happen.
You know, I think when I was, I think I'm a little older than you, but like when I was in high school, I'd go to like the CD store to go listen to like music. And so I'd go to the CD store, I'd knock on my phone, I'd go and I'd walk up and down the aisles. And back in the day, like you'd have to like take the demo CD, put it in CD player, put the headphones on.
And I'll never forget walking down the aisle once, and seeing the most beautiful woman cut out that I've ever seen, like by this new CD. And I was like, who is that with her golden locks? You know, I was like 17, 18. And I walked up closer and it said Mariah Carey. And I was like, who's this Mariah Carey goddess? And like, I put the CD on and I listened to it. I was like, Who is this?
Yeah, she's an angel.
Listen to her voice. And I didn't know who it was. Then I took the CD to the person at the front. And I was like, hey, do you know who this is? No, we just got it in. So they couldn't tell me. So then I bought the CD. I went home. And I just listened to it for weeks. And I'm just listening. And I'm like, I don't know who this is.
And then on MTV, like three weeks later, there was like a three-minute interview with her. And I got three more minutes. That's so uniquely human. I mean, just figuring things out, like all of that is gone now. And I got to do it again with the monks and with the Amish. I got to literally live the purest existence.
When I got back, my daughter said, because they got to live with me for three weeks without a phone. At the end, so I had a Sony camera with me. I was kind of self-documenting the whole thing. I asked my daughter, I said, so how's it been? And I'll never forget, she was 17 at the time. She said, this is the purest version of you I've ever experienced.
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