Ryan Vet on Cowboy State Daily: Screen Time, Cognitive Erosion, and the Friction Kids Need

Well, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

You're absolutely right, Jake. There's so much that goes into it. When you talk about a futurist, they talk about economics and every aspect of life, but I do it kind of looking through the rearview mirror. The rearview mirror only takes up about 8 to 10 percent of your whole windshield, but you always need to know what happened before you go forward. And one of the patterns is your favorite word, the pendulum. If you have teenagers you know this even more acutely: you want to fix or overcorrect whatever you didn't like growing up. That's what we see every single time in every generational flip-flop since we've been measuring generations. And technology and screen time have accelerated that so fast that we're no longer overcorrecting a previous generation. We're all living inside this at the same time, experiencing it for the first time.

Great question. That's the argument we've always made, and I was part of that argument for a long time. Having been in venture-backed startups for the early part of my career, including AI startups over a decade and a half ago, I was all for, hey, we need screen time in classrooms, we need to teach children how to use screens and technology. But as I've learned and researched, we don't need to teach kids how to use technology. We don't need to teach them how to use those devices. We need to teach them how to interact with other humans. Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, does a great job painting the picture of a generation that's anxious, and in large part he pins it directly to screen time. Because they're on social media, we live lives that are removed from reality. Other people talk about the importance of kids just getting outside and getting dirty and playing again, and screen time has removed them from that reality, which is the human experience.

You're exactly correct. We blame the quick scrolling, and that is a huge factor. But part of it is that 10-year-old, that 12-year-old: when was the last time they went to a fast food place and didn't order it on their phone sitting at the table, instead of going up and ordering it from the cashier, looking them in the eyes? Now you have self-checkout at the grocery store, so you're not interacting. We've removed the basic human experiences. I remember when I was four or five, my dad would be talking with another adult, and he would make me look at that adult in the eye. I didn't have a screen at the time. Now a lot of kids are cowering behind their screen, not even behind their parents' legs, and it gives them an excuse to be detached from reality and that human connection.

You're exactly correct. Those are two of my favorite examples of cognitive erosion, and we've been doing it since the '60s and '70s. This isn't something we've done since AI came out publicly four or five years ago, or even since smartphones a decade and a half ago. Cognitive erosion is that slow erosion, like soil on the side of a hill: if you don't have grass holding it together, it falls apart. Another example is cooking in the kitchen. So many people have a smart device sitting on the counter, and if you ask how many cups are in a pint, most people couldn't answer that question you learn in second grade. It's not a huge life skill, but it's proof that we start outsourcing these little decisions. It's no longer going to AAA and watching the person get out their highlighters to show you where there might be construction on the map.

I think there's a ton of real danger. Jared Cooney Horvath has a reprint of his book, The Digital Delusion, coming out in just a couple weeks. He writes something interesting, basically saying Gen Z is less capable than previous generations cognitively, and he looks at very specific test scores. For the first time, we've seen not just a slight decline but a major decline with this generation. As parents, we always try to provide, we try to overcorrect and provide a better life for our kids than we had growing up. That's natural instinct. But the question is, at what cost? When we start removing that friction, that friction is what forms us. When I started playing guitar, you get calluses and blisters on your fingers and it hurts, but at some point you have those calluses and you can play guitar. That doesn't happen overnight. There's a little bit of pain that comes from all that gain.

I do have some high hopes. You do see this pendulum swing back and forth. Now that millennials and earlier-born Gen Z are parents of Gen Alpha, and Gen Beta starts in 2026 and onward, I start to see it coming back. You're seeing more outdoor play, the removal of screen time, parents who grew up with the screen saying, something wasn't right about the way I was raised, let's fix it. Now the issue we're facing, which has never happened before, I liken to a tsunami. If you get the best swimmer, Michael Phelps, and put him next to a kid who's never swum before, and a tsunami comes, it's pretty much an equal playing field. Neither one is going to win. That's the world we're in right now with artificial intelligence, because it's moving faster than we as humans can even understand the implications. Think about seat belts in cars: it took us decades to realize we needed seat belts to keep people safe. Same with cigarettes, it took decades for the surgeon general to issue a warning. These things take a long time, and that's what I call the velocity gap. At some point you have technology and society moving so fast that we haven't slowed down enough to think about the implications. Social media was the great example: it promised to connect us all closer to one another and make us feel like we were in community, and yet people who spend more time on social media feel more isolated than anyone else.

Absolutely. I'm a living paradox. I've got my smartwatch on, I drive a smart car that can drive itself, and I'm a techie guy, I spent my early years in venture-backed startups. And yet our kids don't have any screen time. They don't have access to phones or tablets. We watch some TV very occasionally, and it's very limited, but we force them to go outside and play. And even so, if you want me to go raw here, my son who's in first grade doesn't ride a bike yet. I was riding a bike when I was three or four, and he's still learning with training wheels on. So even though we take away screens, that's not the only thing in culture and society that has distracted kids from the childhood that Gen X and even early-born millennials had.

You too. Thank you.